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One Thing I Really Wish 'Apex Legends' Would Change

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Credit: Respawn

Apex Legends is a great game with a few glaring flaws. I've written about some of these already.

For instance, I think the game needs more weapon spawns, fewer of which happen to be Mozambique.

I wish the game had a solo mode also, and one reason for that has to do with the subject of this post.

Before each match, when you're teamed up with (hopefully) two other players, each players' kills and some other boast-worthy stats are displayed for everyone in your squad to see. The game also shows off the squad with the "Champion"---the player with the best score in their previous game.

This means that new players or players who simply don't spend every waking hour in the game will have pretty dismal stats. So what happens is you get teamed up with one guy who has 350 kills (later it will be 45,000 kills) with Bangalore, they're already level 30, and the other two people in the squad have 1 or 2 kills and are level 5.

What this telegraphs to the high-kill player is that they're teamed up with amateurs who will bring them down and lose the match (even though it could be these players are just new to the game but very skilled nonetheless.) So the guy with the high kill count bails, hoping to roll a better squad next time and now you're down to two players. Maybe the other guy sees this happen and they bail also and now you're playing solo against 19 other three-person squads. Fun.

Credit: Respawn

If we're going to be randomly teamed up with people, we shouldn't have this information displayed so prominently before a match for exactly this reason. It's fine when you're playing with friends, but not squads. I can see this getting worse over time, too, as the game gets more competitive and the community more toxic (the almost-inevitable trajectory for games like these; see, for example, Overwatch.)

Am I wrong? Is this information useful and valuable to a degree that outweighs my concerns? I don't play a ton of Apex Legends partly because I'm kind of sick of having to team up with randoms with no option to solo, and I've encountered this very thing before on multiple occasions. Maybe it's not because the high-stat player sees the lower stat players and bails, but I feel like it is. Certainly when the game first launched and everyone was low level with few kills I didn't encounter this as much.

But I definitely see this game in six months---with a bunch of players with hundreds or thousands of kills on really high levels---and it becoming kind of daunting for new players. If you're the guy with zero kills and the other two people in your squad have hundreds a piece, I guess that could be motivating, but it could also lead to the other two people in the squad leaving or just not playing as a team with the newbie who they might justifiably see as a hindrance rather than a help. It's one thing with a game like Call of Duty, when the newer or more inexperienced players are in teams of six or more and dying just means you respawn. It's another in squads of three in a battle royale game.

Maybe there's no way around all that. I guess time will tell. Adding a solo mode would certainly make this less of a problem, so maybe Respawn can kill two birds with one proverbial stone.

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