@RayleenKovacs No, I'm not a Respawn authorised voice saying that they won't fix it. I'm a game dev that knows a thing or two about how stuff works behind, telling people to set their expectations realistically and maybe not throw money thinking magic will happen.
The assumption that destruction effects are heavy on the netcode is wrong. It is basically a set of coordinates and an action id and damage output where it's the case, which are sent once or in a few updates. The animations of a destruction are often scripted, so that the server doesn't have to send the information for each small piece that gets blown off to all the clients. When destruction makes use of the game physics engine, there are only a few large chunks . An AI such as a Prowler in Apex can be heavier on the netcode than a destruction effect, as its data contains coordinates, animation states, etc., which is sent each update until the AI is disabled. This is why Respawn didn't let Prowlers to get loose everywhere in World's Edge.
At this point, I believe the heaviest thing on the netcode and servers are the projectiles. First of all, because the TTK is high, there's a significantly higher amount of projectiles to be checked than in most other games. Then, it's about their effective distance, also much higher than in many other games (a Kraber can down someone at 700m away), which means that they have to be checked for their whole duration of their flight, against all potential targets in that direction. Also, the fall off the projectiles add more parameters to the hit calculation formulas. In the end, the data required for Apex projectiles is probably many times bigger than the data needed for hitscan shots in most competitors.
