Please Change it Back!
There are some great new features in season 24. I especially love the POI labels as this solves so much confusion in team communication. There are many great improvements but the reduced time to kill is not one of them! In all FPS shooters, aim will always be one of the most important skills in a player’s arsenal. Apex came along and suddenly this fresh new shooter challenged that notion by amping the importance of good game sense and positioning as well. If you didn’t have cracked aim, you could use strategy and abilities to take the high ground and still get the win. Good game sense is also knowing that helmets saves lives and prioritizing a helmet upgrade over a backpack upgrade in the black market.
Apex is the ultimate think on your feet strategy shooter and for 23 seasons before this the devs had worked hard to balance it. I know this new season the reduced time to kill is to reduce 3rd parties, but 3rd parties is an important strategy element of any good Battle Royal. Having good game sense is knowing that a fight is taking a little too long and changing positioning so that the team becomes the bread, not the meat of the sandwich. If 3rd parties are the problem then I suggest the ones that take issue play a game or mode that’s not BR line team death match (maybe those were the players that were playing arenas). 3rd parties are one of the most interesting element in BRs and what makes hot dropping so much fun! Reducing the time to kill punishes the casual players, you know, the ones that are the after work/weekend players that don’t have time to spend countless hours on their aim. It’s why we stop playing COD/BF after a while. Yeah their cool, but far less interesting after a while when getting smoked over again by sweats with cracked aim. Apex is the only game in my 47 years that I’ve played for more than a year. I’ve been playing since season 7, and my friends who talked me into playing started at season one. Sure the cracked aim players exist, but it’s far worse now being extra squishy. Reduced time to kill just makes it more punishing and less balanced to other skill sets. It’s a shame that most of us are already moving on now that this feels like those other shooters we lost interest on. I hope the Devs recognize this and get a chance to see it from that point of view. I hate to see them discard all the balancing work they’ve put into the game till now.
