- Apex Legend’s much-anticipated Season 14 is finally here
- The game comes with some significant changes to the scoring in ranked multiplayer
- Many pro players and content creators are unhappy with the changes
Apex Legends pros say the new changes to Season 14 would make the games shorter and less interesting.
Pros Are Unhappy with the Changes
The 14th season of Apex Legends just dropped and players are eager to jump right into the action. The popular battle royal’s next season was much anticipated, with rumors about new characters being flung left and right. However, now that it’s finally here with its many changes, many pro players say Respawn Entertainment has ruined the game’s Ranked mode.
After multiple updates to the multiplayer last season, pro players and content creators alike were hoping that this Season 14 will return to how ranked played out at the beginning of last time. Games lasted longer and teams were more cautious, resulting in more intense and interesting games.
However, with the newest changes, kills provide diminishing returns. Many pros fear that this will simply lead for rank to return to the kill race it had become before last season. One such pro is 100 Thieves content creator NiceWigg who exclaimed “I hope we’re all misunderstanding that,” while reiterating how bad he thought that return to “full KP” would be for the game.
What Do These Changes Actually Mean?
Apex pros say that rewarding full points for kills diminishes the importance of actually placing well and winning games. This means that players can rank up by simply fighting other players, instead of going after objectives and winning games.
Apex Legend’s focus is normally more on the grand strategic field and being the last team standing, rather than having as many kills as possible, albeit at the cost of being killed yourself. However, players are now incentivized to forego good plans and tactical teamplay to just get more kills faster. Pro players fear that this will drastically shorten games and make them less interesting, because participants will no longer be incentivized to play cautiously, seeking the smallest possible pieces of cover in the final zones in the hopes of winning a match.
Many other players, for example, FURIA’s HisWattson, seem to agree with these worries:
The fear is that the new changes and incentivizing players to focus on several kills, rather than the objectives, would make Apex feel less like a battle royal, and more like a standard team-deathmatch FPS. More about these changes, as well as information about rebalancing and map changes, can be read on the EA Games website.