@solenol4 wrote:Six seasons ago the smurf-nation slowly and steadily infiltrated the ranks. In the current season, the game is ruled by them.
It's been ages since I've been able to enjoy this game. Half of every lobby I'm in is filled with smurfs. This is (next to bad matchmaking) the main problem with Apex right now. Is there truly nothing that can be done about it?
If every rank is over taken by smurfs, then are they really smurfs still? If from top to bottom there is mostly smurfs filling up the lobbies, then they're just your average Apex player?
The skill gap in Apex has gotten a lot smaller since I started playing, but that's because it's been out for several years now. So the average player has been playing this game on and off for years. We all want to win our fights, but as the gap shrinks, the harder it is to just jump out in the open and win some 1v1. Assume your opponents are at the same level as you, and play smart. Use cover, try to take control of the high ground, bad positioning requires you to MOVE (bad players love just eating damage in an inferior position for some reason), use the meta weapons, and etc.
Then we still have the issue of cheaters. They get banned on one account, turn their cheats down a notch, last a little longer, and dial them in. I see people all the time that are almost believable, but they just hit shots that are absurd too many times in a row to be human.
Finally, the game is trying to be competitive. If your satisfaction has to come from winning your fights, then the casuals are going to leave, people are going to go full sweat mode and no life it, and of course the cheaters. I keep saying this, and it's an industry wide issue, we need to start moving the F away from esports. I love just walking around in Apex because the game looks so fantastic. I personally think it's the best looking multiplayer FPS game out right now. If there was more to exploration, if there was some sort of extraction mode, missions to accomplish with a squad in a multiplayer environment, if we move away from everything being about ONLY winning fights, Apex could be the biggest game ever.
If you keep chasing the "smurf issue", I promise you won't find a good solution. It's a symptom, not the core issue. There's a reason why everyone smurfs in this game, it's a game design issue.
Super easy solution to the smurf problem... EA doesn't have the guts to do it. It's called MFA and the rest of the industry adopted it years ago. Look at COD, if I want to play on my friends xbox I need to use a pin on my cell or one that I had previously setup. Doing that ties the EA account to your personal identity. That is how the world works now. I work in enterprise IT and most online SaaS apps and games alike now leverage multi-factor authentication (text, phone app, email a code, etc.). Once you put MFA in place no more multiple accounts for the same game and smurf issue is solved for good.
@c0ld1 wrote:Super easy solution to the smurf problem... EA doesn't have the guts to do it. It's called MFA and the rest of the industry adopted it years ago...
I think every F2P game has the exact issue, and they're usually competitive titles as well. So I don't think the industry has adopted anything.
I've never heard of MFA before, what is that?
When I hear people complaining about smurfs, I think the issue is that they want easier opponents. There's a couple solutions to that. One, you gotta make the game more casual friendly, and it seems like they've been trying to do that. I think the recent updates have been pretty good, not perfect, but a lot of good changes have come in the last year.
The second thing is what I keep going on about, game design. Give us more to do than just try to kill each other. Let us loot some stuff in order to be prepared for next round or something. Make interesting spots to explore again. Add more PvE elements. The extraction genre has so much potential that hasn't been realized yet. Apex would be the perfect game to show others how to do it right.
Yup there are ways. It's more effort and the chearters will always cheat. Fortnite does it too. Pretty sure more and more games are going to go to it. EA will likely figure it out at some point, hopefully not too late.
