The matchmaking is unfair.
WoW. I think my APEX LEGENDS experience ends here.
I thought I have found a really good game to play online since I'm basically a single player campaign user, but I was wrong.
Don't misunderstand me, the game is fantastic and the gameplay is the state of the art but the matchmaking is the most unfair thing I ever experienced. I'm a middle-aged man, with a life, a family, a job, bills and home loan to pay, so I really don't have much time to play. On the other hand, I've been also a gamer for 40 years and I feel the need for gaming, sometimes.
Finishing a single player campaign in a videogame is difficult to me, cause I can't play it for days long and usually, is hard to remember what's happened in the story and the game controls, when you approach again the same videogame after 2-3 weeks. That's why I was happy to find a game like APEX LEGENDS, with immediate gameplay, some really good ideas and free to play randomly when I have a few time.
So where's the problem? The problem is the total unfair system of matchmaking. I'm an old gamer but I have to admit that, apart from the lack of time, I'm also a not so good player. Maybe it's cause of slow reflexes or I just suck to play games exactly as I do in playing soccer or every other kind of sports that includes the skill to play with a ball. I also don't have time to make teams and play with friends, so, mostly, I play with a random team that is dropped in the arena to fight against 20 years old guys who play this game together, for 6-8 hours ( and also more ) every day.
The result is that is totally impossible to make a single move against pro gamers who can apply military tactics, that have long experience and the right tools. It's like to put the parish soccer team playing against the Brazilian national team.
I know that you only get better playing against a better opponent but this principle doesn't work when the opponent is a kind of monster. You can't learn soccer if the other opponent not even leaves you to touch the ball.
EA simply can't permit to drop in the same arena, randomly, level 1 and level 1000 people. Gaming in this way is just unfair and the playing experience, for random people like me, is just boring and frustrating. This kind of gaming is anti-gaming. APEX LEGENDS is an exclusive game in the real meaning of the word, in the sense that is just for a chosen few. This videogame excludes some kind of players and this is not in the spirit of gaming.
Videogames should be usable by everybody, that's why, in the campaigns, you can choose the difficulty level.
I hope EA would wake up, before losing all the random players and also part of the average ones. Until that moment APEX LEGENDS will be history for me. I'm done.
There are games with good skill based match maker, like Overwatch for example.
I know many people like to complaint that Overwatch matchmaker is "bad" but I have played 3000 hours of it, I have friend from Bronze to Master. And I can assure you it does provide a gameplay experience miles ahead of "random match maker"
It wouldn't be very hard either to implement some kind of skill based matchmaker Apex. Implementation is key here to the experience.
Here is a simple algorithm suggestion: just wait for 300 players instead of 60 (with max timeout of, say, 30 seconds), sort player by newbie (less than level 20) then average weapon accuracy. And thnen split them evenly. Bang! much better player experience at almost no cost.
Also they should definitely improve the social experience. This is a huge retention factor for me with Overwatch how easy it is to make friends and group up with friends using BattleNet. Origin social features (or lack of thereof) is really keeping Apex back...And this include, but is not limited too, the horrible voice chat implementation. I can hardly understand my team mate and I group up with friend using discord instead of in game comms.
