Respawn considering adding Apex Legends region lock to solve server issues

Apex Legends’ servers have been struggling, especially for players in smaller regions. In an attempt to “guarantee competitive integrity”, Respawn are considering adding a region lock to ranked play, but players are concerned the changes won’t address other issues like cheating.

Apex Legends’ server issues have been a hot topic across recent seasons. General server instability and outages have combined with players an abundance of high-ping players ‘ruining’ ranked, making it hard to queue up at times.

This issue is especially prevalent as you climb the ranks of the Apex Games. However, Respawn are eyeing fixes to Apex Legends’ server issues ⁠— focusing primarily on keeping all players at low ping.

“We are investigating ways of guaranteeing competitive integrity at the highest rank of Apex Legends, including work to improve the netcode when you fight a player with a bad connection to the server,” Respawn said in a December 22 tweet.

We are investigating ways of guaranteeing competitive integrity at the highest rank of Apex Legends, including work to improve the netcode when you fight a player with a bad connection to the server. We also recently tested a soft region lock for Masters and Predators…

— Respawn (@Respawn) December 21, 2021

High ping does give some players an advantage in Apex Legends, which may seem counter-intuitive. However, it can make you harder to hit in gunfights, so as long as you compensate for the lag you can make it work.

One of the solutions the Apex Legends developers are considering is adding a “soft region lock” to high-level players. This would force players onto their closest server, rather than picking and choosing which region they queue up on.

A two-week experiment of the region lock for players ranked in Master and Predator saw “most regions regaining a portion of their native players” rather than playing on a higher ping server.

However, players are concerned about the number of cheaters on smaller servers. Apex Legends pros have voiced their concerns on playing on the lower population servers because of the amount of cheaters, which in turn pushes them to play on high ping.

Respawn have acknowledged pushing players off certain servers like USA and European ones onto smaller ones like Brazil and Japan ⁠could have an effect on this, as well as queue times, but the ultimate goal is to improve the experience for everyone.

“We understand that many of you prefer to play on servers outside your region for various reasons, including a concern for cheaters but please know we are continuing to work on addressing these concerns with our game security team and we will continue to evaluate ways to improve the quality of competitive matches in the coming months.”

We will update you once Respawn confirms Apex Legends server changes down the line.

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