March 2019 - last edited March 2019
Should start by just saying that I appreciate that this game is for free, I enjoy it but it needs a lot of changes if this game should be enough to satisfied me for a longer period of time.
EA as publisher give me more doubt but you can prove me wrong <3
Cheats - Overwatch & Ranked VS Unranked.
Anti-cheats will never be enough to get rid of cheaters in any FPS game. I think devs in general spend way to little resource, time and strategy to build up a cheating free enviorment.
Overwatch system
Valve developed a pretty effective report system, Overwatch.
Similar system would also help Apex Legends to report more precise.
Since I'm not a developer myself I therefor don't know how complicated it would be, I just realise that much data will be needed.
It should basically work < You're in a firefight < You get hit by player 1, 2, 3 < player 4 kills you < You can now watch the last firefight from the enemies perspective < Report avalible for player 1, 2,3 or 4.
What would this system do? Well.. It would first of all save time for devs because of fake reports. Players tend to get mad and report enemies out of rage.
If you however are able to see HOW you died. It could ease your frustration and actually give you a time to re-think your report complain.
Ranked and Unranked games
There're many reasons why a ranked and unranked game option is neccessary.
First of all, unranked game should be avalible to everyone of course. This game mode should be seen as a more casual way to play and enjoy the game.
Ranked mode should be avalible to players who've played X amount of hours, games or kills.
The important part here is to make sure that people need to play the casual game to that extend that they would count as an avarage player.
This system, to lock ranked game until you've reached certain qualifications could also in some extend try to avoid cheaters farming new accounts.
To be actually forced to play casual for a longer period before enter ranked can maybe bore them enough to leave. (just a speculation)
Ranked game
- Restricted until you've accomplished enough hours, games and kills in unranked to be considered as an avarage player.
- Force you to stay at least 5 minutes after a teammate has picked up your banner (some trolls can theoretically run around with your banner and troll)
- In the best of 2 worlds, pre-select 2 characters before you queue. This to avoid another toxic setup. Yes it's a common issue in many other AAA games.
- The final question, in how the rank system itself should be developed is nothing I've been thinking too much of. Some key issue would be leave a fair rank in various situations.
For i.e. being aggressive will lead to more risk, kills and deaths. Camping around the edge of the map will lead to less risk, less action but maybe higher survival.
How you judge who's the best team out of those 2 and how the rank is based is something I leave for the future.
What's important here is that a rank system in this structure is not just a desire from the community but an important aspect in the market competition in BR-games.
Free to play - Microtransactions and EA the money maker.
This game is free to play. That's lovely. Honestly it's not free to play because developers are trying to be nice. It's simple.
More players tend to try and play the game. The game gets more publicity, bigger playerbase and in the outcome is that X % buy for X $ which generate sometimes even more money than the game would get by selling it for 60 $.
But to encourge people to buy things in-game, a strive of something is needed. Not always, because gamers in general don't hesitate to open their wallet for anything.
Especially when it comes to gamble.
This lootbox system, which is the only method to unlock skins & collect mats is systematically developed to force addicted gamblers, streamers, celebrities to throw in SH loads of money.
A common argument would be - Don't buy if you don't want to. Which I totally accept.
However.. Not even common skins, which are basically copy & paste colors made by a 8 yo kid can't even be bought separately. In order to buy that, you have to farm mats.
Which you can only do by level up, and even that is just based on the fact that you are lucky to unlock mats from lootbox that you MIGHT get from levling up.
Look at it this way. The game has recently been launched and in total, there're around 1962 unique items you can unlock from one lootbox.
To summary all of this text. Lootbox system is understandable, risk for reward. This lootbox system is not just a risk for reward, It's a complete scam and they want you to accept it.
Solutions to all this would be to at least sell common (useless) and rare (at least decent) skins for apex coins. While the lootbox system should be limited to a specific class.
Unlock lootbox for Wraith, Lifeline etc. At least that way you might get an item that you might want.
Server issues
Haven't actually been looking into this in more details but there're plenty of lagg in-game.
Without going into any further details about this, it needs to be one of the top priorities at this moment.
It's probably budget servers so decrease the amount of servers per server computre and add more locations.
There're much more to be discussed but I come-back with more feedback another time.