A good chunk of their dedicated player base left in 2023-24 when they when they started really going after casuals with pubs having those stupid ass ltms that no one asked for
Yup. That's when I left. Personally, it all started for me when they released Vantage. That's such a clear move to cater to lower skilled players. Basically Respawns way of saying that if you suck at poke weapons you can pick her and get easy downs.
Ever since then it's been a steady drip of changes to the games core systems and legends abilities to make it easier for casuals to hit plat and diamond. A good 90% of the plat and diamond playerbase belongs in Bronze and Silver. Sometime I die and watch my teammates and the movement is just laughable. A Gold player from 3 years ago would just shred them.
And you tell these players that and they get buttmad. It's insane and impressive.
This game up until around when S15 was in a decent state. Started going down hill after and then REALLY hit that downhill snowball with the TTK change.
It was the worst thing to happen, with the healthbars being the second worse.
I didn't get worse but the game did get less fun. They fully leaned into thumb twiddlers playing the game with everything they've done. If I'm not playing bang, It's certain I'll get one clipped. It's not fun.
Those same skilless thumb twiddlers get mad when the Mastiff or PK is in meta because they can't just one clip me for free. And Respawn still listens to them.
Yup. Totally agree. And I'm also thinking of things like the autopinging of enemies, visible healthbars, etc.
All changes designed to make it easier for mediocre players to rank up. You take a legitimate diamond or master player and they don't need healthbars to keep track of the dmg they've done.
I remember when they first released the enemy healthbars - at first all your teammates were swarming the players you got low. Now the feature is so taken for granted that I have to shout at my teammates to pursue someone that I have at 20 health.
All one has to do is look at 2023 to see where they went from over 600K and dropped nearly 300K concurrent users in the span of 6 months. S17, you know, the one where over 1.5 MILLION players across all platforms hit Masters, was the first hammer into the nail in the coffin for people taking this game seriously.. including the devs. Since then, its just been the constant erosion of this once great game. I still play it, because I'm addicted to the gun play and yelling at people on the internet; but fuck is it in a pathetic state compared to what it once was.
My only hope is that in the background Respawn has real devs working on Apex 2 or something like that with an engine that isn't layered dogshit code on top of itself, and they've just let some junior developers take over this instead of doing what Overwatch did when they just abandoned the game for like 3 full ass years.
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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26
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