Why Apex Needs to Fix Ranked

Apex Legends has been an extremely popular game for the past couple of years with a current player base of around 100 million players. It has lots of maps, weapons, and legends that lets the player almost completely personalize their gameplay, but in the past year or so there have been an overwhelming amount of complaints about their ranked game mode.

The Beginning

I have played Apex since its release in 2019 and I have loved it. It's fast paced, competitive, and has great backstory/lore, but when it comes to the developer's responding to community feedback, sometimes it can be a little bit lacking. In my opinion this was definitely the case in the new ranked system. In the initial ranked system the burden was almost completely on you to earn yourself ranked points, you had to get the kills and then you had to survive. But that left out a very important aspect of the game that the developers wanted to fix. It lacked the need for teamwork. If you really wanted ranked points the easiest way was to either run off and do your own thing, or just to steal kills from your teammates, which not only ruined their attempts to earn ranked points but also how fun their match would be. Now I'm not perfect I've definitely stolen kills from my teammates before (More than I'd like to admit), but with this problem occurring more and more frequently in games, the community reached out to the devs for to balance it.

The Developer's response

To attempt to fix the issue of bad teammates Respawn decided to split the burden of earning ranked points over the whole team not just the individual player. Like the old system the player who got the kill benefits with the most ranked points from it, but in the new updated version the rest of the team get a little as well. They also removed the kill cap so you can benefit from ALL your kills no matter how many you got. Now this seems like a pretty good deal, it's just more ranked points for everyone, but that's not completely true. While each kill does end up giving the whole team more ranked points, the value of each kill is less. So instead of one person getting 25 points they get 10 points and their teammates get 3 points as well. So now each kill benefits the player that got it less than before. As well as decreasing the amount of ranked points per kill they also increased the fee to play a match, and increased the time you have to survive to get a ranked point multiplier. Now this did increase the dependency on teamwork but it also slowed down the earning of ranked points exponentially. You had to get around 3-4 kills spread across your team and survive until the top 10 squads to get a ranked gain. The ranked grind was already quite slow but now it is even slower.

A Possible Fix

Now I'm no game developer or software engineer but I had a couple ideas that I thought might improve ranked gameplay in Apex Legends. First off they should lower the entry cost per match. This will give players a chance if they just have one off match and they won't get set back 50 ranked points. They should also add a kill cap at around 8 or 10 as well as lowering the multiplier for placement. This will give players an incentive to try to get kills and not just camp but also not encourage blindly rushing into fights to try to squeeze out the little ranked points you can get.

Community Minds

Now Apex devs don't have it easy in any sense, and we really can't blame them for trying to help. With such a large player base it's impossible to please everyone. But there are a lot of great ideas in the community and a lot of them could really improve the flow of ranked gameplay. Hopefully we will see some changes and balances in the next season, but until then peace out.

Thanks so much for reading! Hope you enjoyed and saw something new and interesting. Enjoy the rest of your reading and stay safe out there Legends.