Apex Legends is getting the largest content release in quite some time with the release of Season 24.
Respawn is tweaking a ton within the game, and its best if we run over the patch notes for players aiming to dive in.
Here's what we know,
Apex Legends Season 24 Patch Notes: Weapon Changes, Map and More
The new season of Apex Legends is once again going to shake up the game, especially some of these patch notes.
They've posted an early look at what will be coming to the game, and we've noted this below.
SEEDING SKILL VALUES
How players start with new modes and LTMs has varied in the past, but it’ll soon have a more consistent approach and result: your starting skill value when playing a new mode for the first time will be influenced by your skill value in other modes. Modes that you’ve played before (including returning LTMs) will already have your match history to work with.
Your starting skill value will be more elastic than your other skill values, meaning that it can change more quickly and with a larger swing based on your performance. It will stabilize over a number of matches and your matches will get more consistent. TLDR: the launch of a new game mode will be less chaotic in terms of skill mixing. Now all players will have a starting skill value to match from and they should start to be paired with like-skilled players from their very first match.
This will be coming to unranked matches first, but will quickly be followed by a solution that allows matchmaking to seed players into their correct Rank Tier based on their performance in other modes.
LESSENING RANKED RESETS
On the topic of skill mixing, this happens the most at the start of each Ranked season and each split. We’ve also seen a good amount of chatter about the dislike of both seasonal RP and split resets, and this is an active conversation for us.
For the near future, we will be tuning the reset values and reset placements to reduce start-of-season skill mixing even more. This should help reduce skill mixing for players that participated in the previous season, but doesn’t prevent new Ranked players from climbing. This is just one step we’re taking to reduce skill mixing and more are on the way.
TESTING
These next items are either in testing or will be soon and we’ll aim to share some results and decisions for future in-game changes in a future dev blog. Note: the dates of these tests haven’t and won’t be published to avoid outside influence, but we’ll circle back and share after our internal analysis is done.
APEX BOTS (NPC)
Bot Royale created an approachable way to build your skills and onboard with a squad, but when you’re ready for Unranked pubs you’re thrown into the thick of it. It’s clear that you’re looking for tighter and fairer matches, especially those who are newer and early-tier players. We’ve started testing something that we think will not only help developing players, but also deliver on the lobbies you’ve been looking for.
We’ve slowly been introducing a small and deliberate amount of npc bots, “Apex Bots,” into lower-tier public lobbies. These bots only deploy as opponents and will be a full squad; your squad will not be filled. We want players to have fun playing Apex, and we see this as a potential path to deliver more of that, but we didn’t want to just drop them on you.
Enemy bots don’t always create the best in-game experience, so it’s worth repeating that this is a test. We’ll be monitoring and measuring for impact in a few areas: decreasing skill width, decreasing overall queue wait times, and whether or not this helps players increase their game sense and combat effectiveness. We hope to have enough data for next steps by mid-season, so that we can report back and share updates and if we can leverage these Apex bots for increased game health in the future.
PREFERENTIAL MM: SOLOS VS PREMADES
A desire for premades to play only against premades and solos to only play against solos is something we’ve frequently heard, but a full splitting of the queues isn’t a possibility that we’re going to pursue in the near future. We need to keep premade squads and solo queueing players together to maintain healthy queue populations and ensure that matchmaking quality isn’t compromised. It’s worth calling out that there would be a significant impact to queue times in order for this change to be felt by players and reach the level of desired impact.
With that in mind, we’re going to run a lot of testing to understand the impact of adding preferential matchmaking criteria based on premade vs. solo. The goal of this is for the matchmaking system to take into consideration premade vs. solo queuers, and attempt to match them together as much as possible within the acceptable level of impact to queue times and skill width. We’re looking forward to digging into what is possible and feasible with this as it’s one of the most requested matchmaking changes.
QUEUE TIME ADJUSTMENTS
At the start of From the Rift, we adjusted how much time CWMM takes to expand the search for differently-skilled players in both Unranked and Ranked BR matches. While this increased wait times, it had the desired positive effect of making matches tighter overall, meaning more encounters with like-skilled players. This also led to more damage output and kills per player, and we believe that these combat-focused measurements roughly translate to both “fun” and “fairness” for the majority of players.
While this has had some success, we’ll be continuing to experiment and optimize maximum wait times for various skill bands in order to increase match tightness. We’ve not yet found the sweet spot for this—more work needs to be done.
ONGOING CONVERSATIONS
These next topics we’re going to cover are ones that are hot both internally and externally. We’re just starting to formulate tests to help us validate our ideas on each and we’ll hopefully have more to share once they’re out of the investigating phase.
RANKED PREMADE RESTRICTIONS
With the Ranked Skill Display showing that yes, sometimes a Silver can be in the same lobby as a Master, it’s less clear that this is partially due to premade squads allowing players within 2 Tiers of each other. A Silver can pair with a Platinum, and they can then get pulled into a Diamond lobby which also allows Masters (including Preds). Too many ranks for one lobby.
We could further restrict premades to reduce the width of matches caused by premade squads, but this would limit who could play together in its current form. We’re not a big fan of that route as this is a team game and forming squads with your friends to compete is something we’d like to see more of. This one needs the most cooking time, and we are going to keep talking about other solutions to this specific problem.
RETURN OF RANKED PLACEMENT MATCHES
We want players having fun as quickly as possible and one aspect of that is playing against players of similar skill. Previously, we had implemented placement matches where players would play 10 matches and then be placed into their starting Division and Tier for that Ranked season. We’re looking to return to a version of this system as it’s both easy to understand, and effective at detecting and properly placing players even before their first official Ranked match. This system will leverage skill seeding to assist in each player’s placement based on past performance in other modes, and will also rely on Ranked Placement Match performance to influence their starting position.
SKILL DIFFERENCE AND SCORING
This is a fairly new topic of discussion for us and it’s an interesting one: how can we leverage scoring outcomes to make the match more fair when there’s wider skill mixing in a lobby. One broad example would be if the least skilled player in the lobby got killed by the highest skilled player in the lobby, would they lose less RP? And vice versa, would they get a major bonus to RP (or XP if unranked) if the opposite occurred?
Scoring and balance is a super delicate topic and requires a lot of work even before being ready for testing. Right now, the feedback we’re hearing is that it is very much not worth the risk of being in matches with higher-skilled players. While we are doing many things to actively reduce skill mixing, there will always need to be some level of mixing and want to explore options to make it more fair.
SEE YOU ON THE DROPSHIP
We’re committed to continuing the conversation with you, our community, and we’re reiterating that promise now in 2025. Apex Legends should be fun and competitive without any loss to the integrity of the game, and this is just the beginning of how we’ll be focusing on the issues that are impacting your experience in-game.
