Apex Legends Server Routing & Regional Request (Player Feedback)
Dear Apex Legends Development Team,
As a dedicated player from the Middle East, I’d like to raise an important issue that affects our gameplay experience deeply — server routing and matchmaking availability. Currently, our connections are often routed to Frankfurt, despite being geographically distant. This not only introduces unnecessary latency but also undermines the potential of more responsive, lower-latency experiences for players in the Gulf and surrounding regions. A closer routing path, ideally towards servers like Abu Dhabi or Bahrain, could dramatically enhance our performance and reduce input lag, especially in a high-precision game like Apex Legends.
Another critical issue is matchmaking availability on the regional servers that do exist. Servers like Bahrain and Abu Dhabi show up occasionally in server lists but remain inactive or underused due to a mismatch in how players are pooled. These servers should not remain isolated — they could be integrated with African regions (such as South Africa or Egypt) or Middle Eastern regions in a way that creates a merged or hybrid matchmaking pool. Doing this would enable players in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, and other surrounding nations to reliably find matches on local servers without needing to connect to Europe.
A practical example is this: Bahrain is significantly closer to Saudi Arabia and the UAE than Frankfurt, yet we are rarely matched on it because matchmaking groups appear fragmented. If Respawn enabled a “Mixed-Match Pool” between the Bahrain/Abu Dhabi servers and African servers, while adjusting skill-based matchmaking ranges slightly, players could consistently find matches without sacrificing ping. This would make underused servers viable and greatly improve the community experience.
Moreover, Apex Legends is one of the few major FPS games with such strong support worldwide, and it’s because of this that I believe you can lead the way in fixing this infrastructure issue for underserved regions. Many of us play on high ping not by choice but by technical limitation, and a simple routing change or matchmaking update could increase engagement, satisfaction, and even retention for your active base in this part of the world.
Thank you for your continued development efforts. I truly hope the network and server engineering team can take a look at this. We as a community are ready to test and give feedback if needed. Apex is a game we love, and with just a bit of extra care toward routing and server logic, you can make the Middle East feel like it’s truly part of the Apex experience — not an afterthought.
Kind regards,
[ fps_salem ]
