Respawn Entertainment recently rolled out the version 1.1 patch for Apex Legends — and accidentally included a feature that will likely be added to the multiplayer Battle Royale shooter in the future.
Starting with the arrival of the game’s latest patch, players received penalties for leaving their matches early. Specifically, for every three matches that they left early, they were forced into a 5-minute timeout before they were able to play again. This included knocked-out players who returned to the lobby before their banner expired, but players who were in incomplete squads were not penalized.
The penalty is among the most popular but polarizing features that have been requested for Apex Legends. It can be frustrating for squads to suddenly be handicapped if a teammate leaves early when there is still a chance for that player to be revived. On the other hand, some players would rather immediately look for their next game after being knocked out, instead of having to wait on whether their teammates will go through the effort of taking their banner to the Respawn Beacon.
In any case, the addition of the penalty for leaving early was not intended to be added to Apex Legends, or at least not yet. In a post on the game’s official subReddit, Respawn admitted that it has been testing the feature internally, but a missing piece of script mistakenly activated the penalty. The feature has since been deactivated, and it remains to be seen whether it will be tweaked before returning.
The accidental inclusion of the leaving early penalty, however, was not the only issue with Apex Legends version 1.1. The update caused certain players to lose all their progress in the game, including resetting their accounts to level 1 and deleting all the cosmetic items that they have accumulated. Respawn immediately got to work though, and rolled out a fix to the problem within a few hours of the patch’s release.
Apex Legends version 1.1 also added an option for players to invite their teammates from the previous game to another match as a squad, as well as the ability to mute other players. Respawn also added more anti-cheating measures, while expanding the Report Player option on the PC version of the Battle Royale shooter.
