"Dead game" - Twitter
“Season 12 has been the most popular season ever on Steam, averaging over 200,000 concurrent players and had a peak 370,000 concurrent players.” Reported by AlphaIntel
I’m not really at awe with these record breaking numbers anymore since little is invested back into the game. The only good thing that happened where Apex felt fresh again was Control.
With these player numbers, did you notice anything like the matchmaking was better or worse? Did the servers improve or not? With next week’s event announced already, there’s nothing left for the season other than the LTM that comes with the thematic event (skins are not content). Overall did you love this season? Here's a quick highlight of what happened in S12 of apex.
New content and things that I liked this season
- New LTM: Control (biggest thing in apex since arenas was introduced in S9)
- New legend: Maggie
- Massive Olympus changes. 2 new POIs, the Phase Driver and Terminal. Extended Solar Array a bit and added QOL changes across the map. Overall, I love the new Olympus.
- New hop-up: Kinetic Feeder (meh)
- 3 maps in the rotation. Even though I miss WE, this 3 map rotation is way better than last season. Now if only they can remove those 1.5-2hr map rotations. 1 hour should be the max!
- New arenas map: Drop off. I have no opinions on this map since I haven't played on it yet. In the 5 games of arenas I played this season, it always has been overflow or habitat. I heard bad things about this map though.
- Next gen version. A very small upgrade with a promise of 120fps to come in a future patch.
- Communication. I'm very updated to what the devs say about the game. After having the new game director, the communication has been improved. The official Respawn twitter account is very proactive in updating changes/fixes compared to the past management. Updating and bringing back the Trello tracker for apex was a good step ( https://trello.com/b/ZVrHV38P/apex-tracker ). Love the new wave of behind the scenes tweets from the different teams of Respawn working on the game. In the whole season, I think there were only 2 instances where a dev was a bit unprofessional to the community.
Things that I or the community didn't like
- Biggest leak in apex history. While I personally enjoyed the contents of the leak, this has something to say about Respawn's security since someone hacked into the early builds. I can tell he's gonna do it again just before S13 starts or at the start of S13.
- A whole month of nothing. The whole month of March had no content. New skins or store events are not content. A season only has 3 months and 1 of them had absolutely nothing. They could have extended Control or introduced another LTM in this month.
- MYTHIC SKINS. $160 for a pair of gloves. Not only that, you have to work in order to get all 3 skins and the finisher. If you payed for that amount for a virtual item, you shouldn't be asked to deal 100k damage. Could have been better if it was a reactive skin where it evolves everytime you kill someone. The next mythic skin also looks disappointing.
- Anniversary Collection Event. Not sure if I just expected too much but the anniversary collection event really disappointed me. Comparing from last year's generous anniversary collection event, this just turned out to be another eye-rolling effort to gain more money. For reference, last year's anniversary event featured a 50% off discount on all the skins and if you bought them all, you'll get heirloom shards so that you can pick whichever heirloom you want making it the cheapest way to earn/buy an heirloom.
- Bugs. A lot of small things were bugged this season. Non-game-breaking stuff but still small annoyances like some people cannot drop from the dropship, you cannot move while ADSing after the Bangalore mission, people not receiving their treasure pack rewards, event tracker not progressing during the anniv event, Octane skin doesn't have arm textures and etc. *Not sure if it's just me, but no audio footsteps were worse than before.
- The usual cheater problem. While I personally, don't see or notice them, the amount of threads in this website about it says that it's still a problem. I know that Hideouts has a team now but hire more people. The cheats are evolving from dual wielding pistols to the newest invisible cheats.
- Didn't like the decision of exclusively placing the flatline and longbow in the crafter. We didn't have to do that and it resolved nothing to be honest.
Did I miss anything? If you were to rate Apex from 1-10, 10 being the best season ever, what rating would you give? Other than the usual server and cheater problem, what other types of content do you want added or issues to be fixed? Ironically this has been one of my least played seasons ever (Didn't play 90% of S4 due to the pandemic) even with the record number of players. My rating would be a 7 just because of Control and 5 excluding Control.
