sweet · @sweetdreams
28th Jun 2021 from TwitLonger
Empty Promises and False Hope. #SaveApexRanked before it's too late.
Hello @PlayApex community and it's developers.
I'm going to be writing this twitlonger in an effort to portray what the last few seasons have been like for the majority of the Diamond ranked or higher community when playing apex ranked. We are going into about the 8th or 9th consecutive month of cheating and ddosing being the principle issue facing the ranked ladder and its integrity. Streamers ability to consistently make content while playing ranked, and the general quality of life of anyone who plays ranked at a high level across any region has been declining and fast. Let me start with a bit of back story, roughly 7 months ago the servers located in Japan/Taiwan/Singapore and other related areas were absolutely overrun with cheaters, averaging 8-12 cheaters a game. Because this region does not see a lot of help from twitch streamers who play every day to report cheaters, they are able to play daily without the risk of getting banned. This started the first wave of legitimate players in these regions to switch to NA and play here exclusively in hopes of evading the cheating epidemic in their own region. After about a month of this occurring, cheaters migrated to early morning NA queues because of the fast lobby times and almost 0 exposure to getting live banned due to hideouts sleep schedule (on average, hideouts would stay awake and help streamers in the late night, and the 6 am - noon PT time had 0 coverage and cheaters ran free) This made it almost impossible for anyone playing in the mornings to have a experience that did not involve getting blatantly cheated on. I play almost every morning and back this statement up wholeheartedly. As of late, Hideouts has taken some extremely deserving time off to deal with personal matters, and to put it frankly, the game has spiraled out of control to the point where the term unplayable has never had more validity. This is NOT hideouts fault, and anyone who blames the man who has spent hundreds of hours in effort to make the game playable across every region of the world for the last few seasons, is delusional and should be treated as such. This issue stems from Apex Legend's general lack of enthusiasm when it comes to hiring or acquiring more people who can serve to ban cheaters either real time (preferred) or after the fact (still decent). It is completely unknown to me why Apex let's the one game mode that sets them apart from competitors (Warzone) hit absolute rock bottom when it comes to competitive integrity and just the ability to have fun. Myself and almost every NA/EU streamers or public competitive figure have come together because we literally can't see the game spiral further out of control. Ranked is the backbone of apex and we can't take it much longer. We have been offered empty promises of focus on the issue which from a results standpoint have been complete lies. This issue is not only a NA/EU one, which all times of day you can almost 100% get a cheater in your lobby who even IF killed, will IMMEDIATLY DDOS the server and take it down so nobody can continue to play, and you then queue into the next game with them again. There are entire regions who are unable to play the game due to this, its sad. I sparingly use the word pathetic, but in this case it really has been pathetic to watch cheaters all but control the ranked ladder for the better part of 7 months. myself and other daily ranked grinders know this fact almost every stream, you turn the stream on and just cross your fingers and hope that it wont be as bad as it was the day prior in terms of cheaters. It really feels like this is the standpoint from apex when it comes to taking hands on action against the issue, there obviously things happening behind the scenes we don't know about, but a somewhat band aid fix for the issue that has seen success is hiring people like hideouts, yet we go month after month with nobody else helping. Hideouts needs help, he should not have the weight of the entire game (ranked) on his shoulders to the point where if he needs time off the game becomes unplayable. Public figures who are able to receive clips or work real time need to be hired for multiple regions before this spirals to a further low point. Myself and others have asked THOUSANDS of people in daily streams how they feel about it from a viewer perspective, almost everyone has said that they often find themselves not even tuning into apex streams anymore knowing how miserable they will find the streamer. Peak viewership for individual streamers is down to support this. An idea that's been floating around for a long time is giving the ability to suspend cheaters or ddosers to high profile reputable streamers, which would work in a way like a free hideouts. The details of this idea are obviously up for debate, but if you are willing to trust the roadmap for the next 3 seasons in the hands of certain streamers, you should be able to trust they will make the right decision to keep the game clean and fun. All in all, something needs to be done. We are so done with it, its to the point where we literally DO NOT know what to do, we just sit around month over month and nothing changes and its demoralizing. Please take initiative and #SaveApexRanked, before its too late.
post script - don't let respawns tweet about intentions to help ranked fool you, we have heard these thanks multiple times in the past with NO results. Let this tweet serve as a way to hold them accountable for what they say is going to happen.