Apex Legends patch causes headaches for players and developers

Fariha Bhatti Published 05/04/2019

A number of big changes were mistakenly introduced into popular battle royale Apex Legends with the 1.1 patch launch.

Players were shocked to find that they had lost progress after the new update, punished for leaving games, and finding new loot for items not yet in the game.

When eager players logged into the game after the update, many were surprised to find that all of their progress with various legends had seemingly been erased. Players flocked to Reddit to share the severity of the situation, with one user pointing out that “the update wiped my stats, level, battle pass levels, unlocked legends, skins, crafting metals, legend tokens, and refunded my coins for buying the battle pass.”

In response to a series of similar reports, Respawn Entertainment developers advised that players not make any purchases while the matter was being investigated. Four hours later, it was revealed by community manager Jay “Jayfresh” Frechette that all player data was in fact safe, and players had simply been connected to the wrong servers following the update. During this time, servers were shut down and player accounts were restored.

In addition to the server problems, players were also surprised by a newly added leaving penalty system that had not been documented in the game’s official patch notes. After the community reached out to Respawn for an answer, the new feature was quickly reverted. According to Jayfresh on reddit, the team had been playtesting the game leaving penalty internally and a rogue piece of script had accidentally turned on the feature on live servers.

This confirms that the leaving penalties are one of the features that Respawn are currently working on for Apex Legends, though Jayfresh did not explicitly say that the feature would be introduced into the game in the future.

Along with that reveal, some players discovered that a new weapon would soon be arriving to the game. When opening loot after the update, weapon skins for the L-Star were sometimes being rewarded to scavenging players.

References to the new light machine gun were first discovered during a series of datamines last February, but the weapon is not yet available in the game. Many fans are speculating that the appearance of L-Star weapon skins means a new content update featuring the weapon might be just around the corner.

Fariha Bhatti

About Fariha Bhatti

Fariha Bhatti is a long-time gaming writer who loves competitive FPS games and slots with particularly fun themes. She got her start playing classic games developed by SNK, from legendary fighting game series The King of Fighters to challenging platform franchise Metal Slug. She now spends most of her time playing Valorant and Counter-Strike 2 while working her way through new slot releases to find her next favorite. Fariha has been published at PCGamesN, TalkEsport and ONE Esports.

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