[S29] Squadmates crash 100% when I become a deathbox — PC/Steam Ranked

My friends/random teammates are crashing to desktop when I get fully killed in Apex Legends.

It only happens when I turn into a death box — not when I get knocked.It happens in every mode.

Looking for feedback of possible solutions or problems that would cause this please.

**Update — workaround found, likely root cause: special characters in display name**

I was able to fully resolve this on my side by changing my in-game display name.

Old name pattern: `[name] || [suffix]` (contained spaces and double pipe characters)

New name pattern: `[name]_[suffix]` (alphanumerics and underscore only)

After the rename, squadmates no longer crash when I become a deathbox. Confirmed across multiple Ranked matches.

This strongly suggests the bug is a string-parsing / serialization issue triggered when other clients render a deathbox owned by a player whose display name contains certain special characters (likely `|` and/or spaces, possibly other punctuation). It would also explain the self-crash cases I mentioned earlier: when my deathbox was rendered in the same frame as another teammate's deathbox (e.g. in the squad status UI on a full wipe), my own client also had to parse my name string and failed for the same reason.

Posting this in case it helps other players hitting the same issue — try renaming to alphanumerics + underscore only as a temporary workaround.

Leaving the original report up for engineering reference.

My ign has been IIIIIIIIIIIII for a 3 years now and I have this bug atm. I changed it to a normal name on steam and you're right none of my teammates game crashed. I use capital i for that name so it might not be just special characters thats bugged

After I die the entire team crashes, this only happened after the most recent season update.
Please fix this it is so infuriating.

xIIZeDxyIIx​ & Vapid999​ Are you playing on Steam, (and if so, what is your username?)

I'm asking because players had reported that it was their username on Steam that was causing the crash:

• [S29] Squadmates crash 100% when I become a deathbox — PC/Steam Ranked | EA Forums

Thanks for confirming — this is really useful data. Your case actually expands the trigger pattern: your name was just repeating capital "I" characters, no actual punctuation or spaces, yet it still triggered the same crash on teammates. So the bug isn't strictly about special characters / punctuation — it likely involves a wider category of strings (possibly repeating characters, or characters visually similar to delimiters like `|`, or some other pattern in the name-parsing logic).

Glad the rename worked for you too. Two independent accounts with very different name structures (mine had `||` + spaces, yours was repeating `I`) both fixed by renaming — that should give engineering a clear enough signal to track this down.

Same bug here — there's a likely workaround. I posted a more detailed report at [S29] Squadmates crash 100% when I become a deathbox — PC/Steam Ranked | EA Forums - 13414736 with another user (CritcalCondtion) confirming the same fix.

Short version: the crash appears to be triggered by your in-game display name. If your name contains special characters, spaces, or repeating characters (e.g. `|`, `&`, multiple capital `I`s, etc.), try renaming it to plain alphanumerics + underscore only. In both confirmed cases so far, the crash stopped immediately after renaming.

Worth trying while we wait for Respawn to look into it.