Do you have any knowledge of whether Respawn might be manipulating the statistics on Steam Charts?
This season, there's been an increase of about 16,000 people, but I still play with the same people in the lobby day after day. So what's going on here?
I actually reached out to them, here is reply to your question:
Which I guess makes sense = people actually might not be playing Apex actively or like at all, but if you launch Steam and game is in your game list as active = you register.
So rough math would be like if there are shown to be 200k players => usually just half play ranked 100k => out of that 30-40% are in <Plat = Plat+ is at most 50k world wide => divide by regions approx 10 = 10k per region -> remove bots and smurfs probably some 10% at least if not more = 9k... eventually I guess we would be lucky if at any point in time per region in Plat+ ranked there would be like 1000-2000 active players...but I don't even feel there are that much and if you take out Plat and go from Diamond+ then it matches my experience over the years = same few hundred people active, 3-5 simultaneous lobbies running per region.
This explains why I play with the same people day in and day out. This makes SBMM even more important to remove or modify.
For players who play the game "the right way" - yes.
Unfortunately as we all have seen over the years there is a very big group of people (at least 5 squads per game in some cases even more) that want to hotdrop in ranked and just go for all-or-nothing and for them requeue time is the most important so they can do this bs 100 times per hour at least. Which Respawn tailored towards clearly.
I still remember when I had a 3 stack around season 9-12 and we were D4s it actually took us like on regular basis 3 min+ to get back into game. We regularly managed to discuss in detail previous game errors before getting into new game.
Now even at D4 matchmaking is instant pretty much and maybe goes close to 3 min only when you play odd hours - late night / early morning.
And to finalize - not goona lie even I sometimes get into this weird mode of "reactive behavior" where I am tilted from previous game (even if we won but that win was more luck than execution) -> press requeue automatically -> get into the next game before I reset mentally -> more often than not I make some stupid decision early in game because I am still mentally not there.
If queue times would be "normal" and balance lobbies better this would not happen, would give me and others time to restart our brain, focus. But that's bad for business I guess and probably as with any emotional issues some might even get so tilted that they go and by Heirloom after say 5 game loosing streak :D
p.s. in this regard I feel like Valorant's matchmaking that sometimes does that 3-5 min even on low Elo lobbies (<gold) does a better job. I in many cases even notice that it balances teams out even when hackers are online by putting one hacker in one team and other in other. Not fun overall but at least balancing works :)
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