The Apex Honour Code & Why It's Bad
This post is based on my experiences in casual trios.
What is an honour code?
An honour code is basically where people make up their own rules in the absence or rejection of a centralised authority such as a government and/or legal system. Cowboys, Knights, tribes etc. all use a code of honour. It's also called 'retaliation', because violence erupts when honour is deemed to have been violated with, for example, an insult.
I think that a code of honour has become entrenched in the Apex player-base due to ever narrowing gameplay, where you either hot-drop or incur the wrath of teammates, but also due to rejection by the player-base of the gameplay design and avoidance of rules enforcement by creating new accounts.
Although I can see that some game design has been adapted to counter this on at least one map and also in the design of one or two Legends, I believe a general intolerance of other ways of playing has developed amongst the player-base. This intolerance has always been around in Apex but not enough has been done to tackle it, and because of that the problem has spread throughout the community. I can recall the mass hot-drop at Skull Town and how players would leave if they couldn't play their favourite Legend or didn't like the mix in their team. But it's worse now by far.
Even on a map like Broken Moon where you can use the zip lines to quickly travel around the map and rejoin your team, players may still shun you or verbally abuse you for not going along with their hot-drop style of play. But because so many players hot-drop, it has now become the prevalent culture. It creates a logical circle of poor behaviour and rubbish gameplay.
Anyone who plays Apex these days knows about this problem and I suspect many just go along with it. Particular maps make it worse but it has become an undeniable part of the game to hot-drop, die and leave possibly with some verbal abuse in chat or voice. And these players demand your compliance. If you don't do what they do, they retaliate.
Where is the push-back from the developer? What is being done? Can the experience not be improved for players? Do people want this to go on forever?
Surely people would prefer to have longer games with more developed gameplay than merely dropping in the same spots every time?
The actual games are now completely awful almost every time.
Perhaps the new TDM mode will take hot-drop type players away from trios. Or new matchmaking could fix it. But I seriously doubt it. And in any case the hostility amongst the player-base towards players who don't conform to their expectations should be addressed.
Also, if players are making new accounts to do this while protecting their main accounts from a terrible K/D, then surely it has an impact on in-game sales when they're spending all their time smurfing, so why tolerate it?
TLDR: Players who hot-drop and die are like "why didn't you hot-drop with us? What's your problem *******?" almost every game, even when you drop not far away. It's become the Apex culture and if you don't comply you get shunned or abused. Or both.
