Respawn has revealed plans to ban Apex Legends players who intentionally don’t participate in matches, but instead “piggyback” onto the efforts of their teammates just to farm rewards and XP.
Updating players on Reddit, Respawn community manager “Jayfresh_Respawn” detailed what progress the team has made so far on the Update to Apex Legends blog post EA shared last month. Amongst the bugs and gitch information, Jayfresh noted Respawn had received feedback from players about the piggyback practices, and was exploring how best to mitigate it.
“We had been seeing some feedback from players around this and have been doing some internal investigations looking at game data to understand how many of the matches being played are affected by this behaviour,” Jayfresh said.
“After looking at the data and internal discussions, we’ve decided that in the future we’ll start instituting temp bans for players that exhibit piggy-backing behaviour and extreme cases could lead to a permanent ban. This change will not be immediate but wanted to give a heads up to players so you can adjust that behaviour.”
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While Jayfresh didn’t specify when the patch might roll out, they did clarify that work was ongoing to resolve the hitbox issue, as well as the “slow-mo” glitch that occasionally makes playing Apex feel like you’re wading through treacle.
“We know that it affects some datacenters more than others, it happens on many different server configurations, and it doesn’t seem to hit multiple server instances running on the same machine,” the community manager explained. “In other words, it’s not that a machine is overloaded and everything on it is running too slow – it’s that one instance on the same machine seems to be doing more work than the others, and we’re trying to nail down what work it’s doing and work backwards to understand the root cause.”