Respawn will serve temporary bans to piggy-backing Apex Legends players

By Aaron Mamiit Updated May 12, 2019

Respawn Entertainment, in its mission to maintaining a positive gameplay experience for Battle Royale shooter Apex Legends, will serve temporary bans to players who “piggy-back” on their teammates.

In a developer update on the game’s official sub-Reddit, Respawn defined piggy-backing as a player relying on teammates “to carry them to a good position and level up faster but doesn’t actually participate in the match.” Signs of a piggy-backing include not collecting a weapon, never firing a shot, and refusing to deal damage to opponents.

According to Respawn, it investigated how piggy-backing affects matches after receiving feedback from players regarding the incidents. After looking at the data and internal discussions, the developer decided that in the future, it will serve temporary bans to players who show such behavior, and in some extreme cases, may even dish out permanent bans.

The new policy will not take effect right away, so Respawn is giving players who regularly piggy-back some time to change their ways. Some players believe that the underlying issue is that more experience points are rewarded for surviving instead of personal performance, with suggestions such as increasing XP gained from kills and wins and decreasing XP for surviving.

However, in a Battle Royale game, the goal is to survive to the end, so decreasing the incentive for doing so and increasing XP for kills and wins may lead to more players charging into firefights instead of working out a strategy to become the last team standing.

Properly addressing the piggy-backing issue may not happen with just one step, but as Respawn has proven, it will work to keep the Apex Legends community happy. One major example of this is the developer’s continued crackdown on cheaters, with 770,000 players banned on the game’s PC version alone.

In the same developer update, Respawn also noted that the PlayStation 4 crashes caused by the Pick Me Up banner of Lifeline will be fixed in the next patch. Other problems that will be addressed in the next update include the hit registration bug, the Fortified bug for Gibraltar and Caustic, game quality issues such as slow motion at the start of a match, and audio issues such as distorted sounds.

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