Am I doing as poorly as I think?

@LLcraigJ0302 In my opinion, Arena would probably be the best place to simply work on gunfights/aim and whatnot. It is similar to a deathmatch mode, but it is round-based, and you choose/"buy" your load out at the start of each round. It is a great way to familiarize yourself with the weapons and movement mechanics and whatnot. The firing range might be better for playing with sensitivity settings, as you aren't being shot at while doing so.

I would recommend this first, since you said you don't have much of a background with FPS games in general. There are a LOT of additional factors that effect how Battle Royale modes play (map rotation, drop location, 3rd party attacks etc), so getting more familiar and building up muscle memory for the shooting/movement mechanics is a great first step. I would stay away from ranked, but I personally like to use Arena to warm up, or just to practice gunfights, and I've been playing FPS games since the 90's.

If it makes you feel any better, I had a similar feeling when I first started playing Apex. While I have been playing FPS games my whole life, this was the first BR game that I really got in to, and there was (still is) a definite learning curve for me. Also, the movement mechanics on Apex are amazing, but are quite different from most games I play.

I remember when Apex came out and I started playing (solo), I felt like I was so far behind everyone else. Getting killed seemingly instantly. Struggling to log much damage or any kills. It was pretty frustrating for someone that has been playing this genre as long as I have. I was used to carrying teams on Halo/CoD, and then came to Apex where I was the one holding the team back. Now that I have been playing for 3+ years, I will be the first to admit, that I still have at least 1 match each day with 0 damage and 0 kills, Lmao!! Battle Royale loot RNG is wildly unpredictable, so sometimes I land and can't find a single weapon and just get killed right off the bat.

@LLcraigJ0302 I am new too, I was having the same issues about incredibly long queues with PUGs and without. The game auto selects St. Louis, MO server on the start for me. It runs on average about 33 ms on the ping rate. When I tried other servers, I noticed picking one from the slightly higher ping rate of 40 to 45 ms had me waiting about 2 minutes.

My theory is the St. Louis server is crowded but gets lower ping so the game tosses everyone on it. It auto sorts you to the lowest ping, but if everyone is sent there, you will get long lines. Avoid servers with ping rates of of 80 ms or higher or you will feel the lag (latency) and you will start to feel like you are playing the game at 15 frames per second.

@LLcraigJ0302 When I started playing my kd was .3 and damage was maybe 150 or 200 a game. I didn't use a headset and wasn't really an fps player. Being able to hear makes a huge difference. If you aren't using one do it.

@LLcraigJ0302 Let me give you a little perspective here. I came out of almost twenty years of Halo, so I was plenty familiar with shooters... to no avail whatsoever.

For the first three seasons of this game I did not pick up a weapon. THREE SEASONS - NO WEAPON. Why, recon, why would you even bother playing if you're not going to shoot at anyone? Because that's how I learn. I needed that time to learn one single legend, one single map, basic movement, basic player behavior.

The weapon sandbox came later, and only very slowly. I still consider myself a terrible shot. The weapons in this game conform to the current shooter standard, which is to say that developers design them to be virtually unusable so that only a small percentage of players can use them competently. The rest of us struggle through endless amounts of firing range practice and in-game practice, and the truth is that some players improve a little and many will never improve at all.

I'm somewhere lower down on the improvement scale and have most definitely stopped trying to be a better shot. Why, recon, why aren't you trying to be a better shot??? Because in battle royale being a good shot is about 30% of the game. The rest is understanding why other players do the things they do, and setting yourself up for victory. That's how you win. Not by out-shooting the human aimbots, but by being smarter than them. A lot of people find that to be a boring way to play - they believe shooters are all about shooting. I don't give a tinker's damn what other people find boring. I find losing boring. So I win. And I didn't need a Cronus to do it. I needed patience.

I don't know if this is a viable path for you, but it's something to think about. Whatever you do, don't give up. Just plug away. You may never get to predator, but you'll get somewhere. Best of luck.

Oh, and I'm gonna contradict dSKyNafinchin on one point: do NOT use arenas for practice. That's what I would call "trial by fire," and a really good way to discourage you even more. Battle royale may have a huge learning curve, but at least it allows you some control over your pace-of-play. Arenas is just a frenzied bloodbath. No. Fun. At. All.