Respawn will serve temporary bans to piggy-backing Apex Legends players

By Aaron Mamiit Published May 12, 2019

Respawn Entertainment, in its mission to maintaining a positive gameplay experience for Battle Royale shooter Apex Legends, will serve temporary bans to players who “piggy-back” on their teammates.

In a developer update on the game’s official sub-Reddit, Respawn defined piggy-backing as a player relying on teammates “to carry them to a good position and level up faster but doesn’t actually participate in the match.” Signs of a piggy-backing include not collecting a weapon, never firing a shot, and refusing to deal damage to opponents.

Recommended Videos

According to Respawn, it investigated how piggy-backing affects matches after receiving feedback from players regarding the incidents. After looking at the data and internal discussions, the developer decided that in the future, it will serve temporary bans to players who show such behavior, and in some extreme cases, may even dish out permanent bans.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

The new policy will not take effect right away, so Respawn is giving players who regularly piggy-back some time to change their ways. Some players believe that the underlying issue is that more experience points are rewarded for surviving instead of personal performance, with suggestions such as increasing XP gained from kills and wins and decreasing XP for surviving.

However, in a Battle Royale game, the goal is to survive to the end, so decreasing the incentive for doing so and increasing XP for kills and wins may lead to more players charging into firefights instead of working out a strategy to become the last team standing.

Properly addressing the piggy-backing issue may not happen with just one step, but as Respawn has proven, it will work to keep the Apex Legends community happy. One major example of this is the developer’s continued crackdown on cheaters, with 770,000 players banned on the game’s PC version alone.

In the same developer update, Respawn also noted that the PlayStation 4 crashes caused by the Pick Me Up banner of Lifeline will be fixed in the next patch. Other problems that will be addressed in the next update include the hit registration bug, the Fortified bug for Gibraltar and Caustic, game quality issues such as slow motion at the start of a match, and audio issues such as distorted sounds.

Topics

Contributor

Aaron received an NES and a copy of Super Mario Bros. for Christmas when he was four years old, and he has been fascinated…

Gaming

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor brings balance back to an unstable universe

Jedi Cal Kestis.

It’s funny to think about how much has changed about Star Wars since EA released Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in 2019. The action-adventure game would launch just weeks before The Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, a polarizing conclusion to its sequel trilogy that would create a disturbance in the force. In the years since, Disney has entirely changed its approach to the series by expanding the cinematic universe with a mixed bag of content, from the critically acclaimed Andor to more middling projects like The Book of Boba Fett. More than ever, the series is in desperate need of stability. It’s somewhat fitting, then, that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor could be the project that gets Star Wars back on track.

During a demo event ahead of the sequel’s April 28 release, I got to play a sizable chunk of the game – spanning over three hours of playtime. What stood out most during that session wasn’t its visual glow-up or fleshed-out combat. Rather, it was how tightly packaged it all is, both as a AAA video game and as a piece of Star Wars media. It’s an almost classic Jedi adventure, filled with dramatic lightsaber battles and some lighthearted comedy in-between the galactic melodrama. It’s hard to imagine anyone being upset over it (though the fan base always finds a way, doesn’t it?).

Gaming

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor will now release in April following delay

EA and Respawn Entertainment need a bit more time to create Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, so the game has been delayed until April 28.
Originally set to release on March 17 at The Game Awards 2022, this delay pushes the highly anticipated Star Wars game back by more than a month. In a tweet explaining the delay, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor director Stig Asmussen explains that the game is "content complete," but needs more time to "enhance performance, stability, polish, and most importantly, the player experience." Ultimately, he believes this six-week delay will allow the development team "to hit the Respawn quality bar, provide the team the time they need, and achieve the level of polish our fans deserve." You can read the full message in the tweet below:
https://twitter.com/eastarwars/status/1620527593580806145
Thankfully, a six-week delay isn't that lengthy in the video game industry, so Star Wars fans will only have to wait a little while longer to experience Cal Kestis' next adventure. Today hasn't been the best for Respawn Entertainment fans, though, as the developer also announced it would shut down the mobile version of Apex Legends.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is the sequel to 2019's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a single-player action-adventure game that followed the journey of former Padawan Cal Kestis between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. This sequel takes place five years after that game, with Cal Kestis actor Cameron Monaghan telling Digital Trends that the narrative has an "emotionally complicated center where we’re exploring some challenging questions." Hopefully, that all makes this game worth the wait.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor now releases for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on April 28.

Gaming

Apex Legends’ newest character is a deadly sniper with an adorable bat pal

Vantage stands with her sniper rifle in Apex Legends.

Ahead of the start of Apex Legends Season 14: Hunted on August 9, EA and Respawn Entertainment went into more detail about the new Legend coming to the game at the start of the season. Her name is Vantage, and she's shaping up to be a deadly sniper with an adorable bat companion.
Vantage's backstory, which we got to see a bit of in July, consists of her growing up alone with her mother on the ice planet of Pagos. Her mother is secretly an escaped prisoner, and when Vantage almost dies exploring an abandoned ship, her mother has to turn herself in so she can get medical help for her daughter. Following this, Vantage enters the Apex Games in order to spread awareness about her mother's capture and eventually free her one day.
Vantage's passive ability is called Spotter's Lens. With that, she can scan an enemy's Legend name, team size, range, and shield rarity from a distance. Her Tactical Ability is called Echo Relocation, and she can use it to send Echo to a spot on the map before jetpacking to it. Thankfully, Respawn developers confirmed that players can't kill Echo, so players don't have to worry about putting this cute companion in danger.Her Ultimate ability is called Sniper's Mark, and it's one of the most unique ones in the game. Vantage summons her custom sniper rifle with Sniper's Mark. It has five bullets, and if she hits an enemy with it, Vantage will highlight their squad for ten seconds. Damage from her sniper rifle and allies scales up with consecutive hits, and all the shots don't need to be made at once, so Vantage can be quite deadly if a player knows how to use her properly. Apex Legends is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch. Season 14: Hunted begins August 9.