Show Apex some love... what do you love?

Oh, how I want to say something nice. And I'm not even saying that by way of an introduction to some anti-Respawn rant. Though that would be easy enough to do.

But the long and short is that no matter the developer's shortcomings, or the game's shortcomings, or the player-base's shortcomings (and they are innumerable on every count), the thing that leaves me most disappointed in the game... is me. I don't love multiplayer games. So why am I here? I don't love team-based anything. So why am I here? I don't love the core mechanics of modern shooters. So why am I here? In every case it's because I came to gaming through shooters and I can't let go of them despite the fact that 25 years of familiarity has bred an astonishing amount of contempt. I don't belong here, but I don't know where else there is to be. So here I stay. And the contempt grows with each passing day. And it's all justified. We all know the litany of problems. If I know the problems this well and I still choose to stay then that's pretty much a "me" problem, not a Respawn problem. They keep asking me after matches, "Did you enjoy this match?" And the answer is always, "No." But I know well enough that they're not really interested in whether or how often people say yes or no. They're interested in how often the people who say no immediately re-queue or log off. And I'm sad to say that my incoherent response to an unsatisfactory experience is to continue doing the exact same thing in the exact same way and hoping for a completely different outcome. I always re-queue. Yes, there's a word for people who behave this way. No, it isn't a flattering word.

I guess that's the real deal right there. The game isn't bad or good, or successful or failing, or even sometimes fun and sometimes not fun. It's a mirror. Hold it up and you're gonna see something. Maybe you'll like what you see, maybe not. But in the end what you're seeing is mostly just you. And what I see is somebody who's dug in like a tick with a grim determination to get something back out of the game I've put so much into. Tenacity or compulsion? Maybe they're just two different words for the same thing.

And there it is. There's the nice thing I can say about the game in its current state: it's made me tenacious. Yeah, I'll go with that.