Pros Fed Up With the State of Apex Legends
Professional players are starting to reach a tipping point on how they feel about the current state of Apex Legends, Respawn Entertainment’s free-to-play battle royale. Currently in their third year of competitive, professional play with the Apex Legends Global Series, the ALGS Pro League has only a few weeks left until their next big LAN event in London. They’ve had no shortage of issues in the ALGS, Challengers Circuit, and the normal Ranked Mode in Apex Legends.
ALGS Crashing Issues
Though this particular issue seems to have been solved, the early weeks of the ALGS Apex Pro League were plagued with server crashes that caused games to be completely restarted from scratch. Apex Legends and the ALGS have no way to recreate the environment of a lost game, so when instances of server crashes happen they have no choice but to start games over. Teams lose whatever positioning they had, any kill points and all loot.
This issue happened multiple times in a single day in those early early weeks of the ALGS Pro League. Despite this issue being fixed, there are still several others that continue to plague the competitive integrity of the professional scene.
Jane "Janey" Newstead, of TSM, who has been competing in the Apex Legends Challenger Circuit posted to Twitter how her team missed qualifications for quarter finals by a single point. That’s not unheard of, but what makes it a tough pill to swallow is that her team was down a squad member for three out of the four matches. Apex Streamer, Lutziana, failed to load into the lobby and Janey’s squad was forced to play with only two players instead of three.
According to Janey on Twitter, three people have to be disconnected in order for them to consider a restart in the match.
A Host of Other Issues in Apex Legends
While game crashes in a professional setting are a major concern, they were eventually fixed. But those also affected a very small section of the player base. According to other pro players and streamers, their overall state of the game is still suffering from countless bugs and errors. Apex Legends has also been notorious for having terrible and frustrating sound design.
Jordan "Reps" Wolfe of TSM, posted his thoughts on Twitter saying that just playing the game is depressing. He laments the state of the game and the lack of transparency from the developers. His teammate, Phillip "ImperialHal" Dosen, affectionately referred to by fans as the CEO of Apex, chimed in by mentioning he’s in a special NDA Discord server and whenever the issue is brought up they keep asking for proof.
Popular Apex Legends content creator, Thordan Smash, released a video today that was focused on the start of the Veiled Collection event, but also talked about a host of issues still in the game. Among those he mentions is a bug with Crafting Replicators that will trap players, the ongoing issue in Control LTM where players can’t spawn on zones they control, a persistent issue with the Prowler when you spam crouch while aiming down sights and a game crashing bug in the firing range with the Scout of Action challenge.
All of this is on top of issues like players begging for an answer to the cheating issues and the sudden influx of Collection Events.
More Complaints of Competitive
Francisco "k4shera" Alves of Team Ascend also posted a scathing indictment of the state of the game to his Twitter. He calls out EA and the ALGS for all the things they missed with competitive Apex Legends this year saying whoever is in charge has no idea what a real competitive environment is.
Among his reasons he names the prize pool split at the London LANs, pointing out that teams will lose money if they place in the top 20. While this is a normal concern for any team, the ALGS is often composed of both professional back teams like TSM, FaZe Clan and DarkZero Esports, a number of teams are also orgless and have no funding from sponsors or parent companies.
Other issues mentioned by K4shera include holding all three LANs in London instead of spreading them out over other regions, no crowdfunding for Major Events that could be split between teams for additional support, and the cosmetics deal from last year that would’ve seen Team Themed Skins put in the game and revenue shared, but fell apart due to a breakdown in terms and negotiations.
K4shera also brings up the issue of the sound design as well and his thread as of this article has garnered 224k views on Twitters, 2,500+ likes and over 350 retweets. The comments section is filled with other professionals and streamers echoing his sentiments.
Update April 26th. The Apex Legends Twitter account posted that a fix has been deployed for major audio and VFX drops seen since the launch of season 16.
