Apex Legends Gets Quit Penalty, Commuity Split
FOREWORD: I would like to preface this by saying this new feature has been removed. It seems this was not meant to go live just yet, and as such has been removed from the game.
Yesterday saw the release of patch 1.1 for Apex Legends which, among other things, had the unfortunate side effect of erasing players account progress. Respawn very quickly remedied the situation and reinstated any affected players’ level and unlocks.
One other feature which nobody was expecting was a new Leave Early Penalty. This came as a surprise as it did not appear in the patch notes, and it was never mentioned it was in development. Respawn Community Manager took to Reddit to address the confusion:
So internally, we have been working on and testing this feature but it wasn't our intention or plan to have it go live with the update that went out today. There was a piece of script that was missing and caused the leaving match early penalty to be turned on when it shouldn't be. That's why it wasn't in the patch notes.
We updated the script, tested with QA and it's now disabled for all platforms. We don't have an ETA for if or when this would come out for real. Apologies for the confusion.
A Leave Early Penalty is something the community has been requesting for a while. It's an understandable ask. If your teammates go down and you survive the fight, it can be frustrating when your teammates leave the game just as you make your way to a Respawn beacon. Perhaps putting in place a small penalty could help keep teams together.
Contrarywise, some players think it would be too much to penalize a player who doesn't want to stick around spectating after they go down, especially those whose teammates seem to have no intention of respawning them. While the feature was live, players would incur a five-minute timeout per every three matches left early. This included those who quit a match before their Banner card timed out.
Currently, the only penalty for quitting early is that players won't receive XP for that match, which some players say is penalty enough. Clearly, much of the community doesn't agree. Perhaps there are plans in the works to implement this feature sometime in the future, but for now, that remains to be seen.
