While the latest Apex Legends updates have had some temporary issues, they also gave a hint at an upcoming policy change for the game. Since Apex Legends is a squad-based game, you can end up immensely screwed if a player on your squad abandons the game and leaves you short, but there’s currently no method of punishing people who do that. That might soon change, says Respawn.
In the most recent patch, players were noticing there was a five-minute cooldown between matches if they quit mid-match three times. This turned out to be a feature that went live too early, but is currently in Respawn’s pipeline. In the future, players who quit games early will get escalating cooldowns after certain thresholds. It’s not a thing you would notice unless you’re quitting constantly, but if you are, Respawn seemingly wants you to stop eventually.
“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,” Respawn’s community manager posted in the game’s subreddit. “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.
This doesn’t mean there’s no room for grey area here. If your squad isn’t full and you abandon the game, you’re fine to quit and try to matchmake into a different set of circumstances. If you have already bled out and died, you can also just quit without repercussions. Under a normal match ruleset, though, it’s encouraged to stay and stick it out on the regular.
Respawn doesn’t commit to this feature making it into the final game and they don’t have an ETA if it eventually does, but it is apparent that they’re testing it. For right now, it has been removed from the game for going live too early, but it could make it in somewhere down the road.
