Apex Legends

A new feature is in the works for Apex Legends that aims to penalize those players that leave a game prematurely. Last week's 1.1 update for the game briefly introduced a penalty system for those that left a game before their team was eliminated. This feature was quickly pulled for reasons unknown but some additional details on this new mechanic were shared today from Respawn.

Community manager Jayfresh shared some details about what they're working on via Reddit.

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. 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.

We updated the script, tested with QA and it's now disabled for all platforms. We don't have an ETA for if or when this would come out for real. Apologies for the confusion.
Subsequent responses in the thread cleared up a few of the major questions fans of the insanely popular battle royale game had about this new system. Respawn noted that they will not apply the penalty if your team isn't full or for players that were actually dead. Being "actually dead" in this case means that your respawn timer hit zero and you have no chance of getting a respawn from teammates.

This new system should go nicely with the recent hardware ID (HWID) bans that Respawn just dished out this past week to combat a number of pathetic cheaters. These bans are in addition to the over 355,000 bans they issued through March.


Apex Legends cheater bans