Respawn is not having a good week. The Iron Crown event kicked off causing immediate backlash to the ridiculous pricing of the new loot, and now players are taking to reddit to complain about “teaming” – finding groups of players teaming up to take out the rest of the solos in a match.
In all fairness, it’s a new event and game mode for Apex, and as such it should be expected for there to be minor issues here and there until they iron out all the kinks. But from what we’ve found with the teaming problem, it’s really not a minor issue.
army of coordinated pathfinders rekt everyone in solo — KaviK7-TTV from r/apexlegends
At first the teaming could just be seen as a couple of random players messing around who actually don’t know each other; this happens all the time in games like Overwatch, but Apex has no kind of emote system, so it makes it difficult to make friends when people are trying to shoot you on sight.
The next logical assumption is players are queue sniping; readying up at the same time to attempt to get in the same match. But surely it can’t be that easy, can it?
Playing on PC, myself and Emma Kent jumped into a few not-so-solo matches to test it, and yes, it really is that easy. Below is a video of both of our captures, in which we ready up at the same time and get put straight into the same match.
The video only shows one match as an example, but we managed this four out of the five times we tried (yes I died immediately, but that’s really what should happen to people who team up in solos).
Teaming isn’t a new problem in battle royale games, but it certainly shouldn’t be a problem players run into as much as they have in Apex. PUBG allowed people to report those they saw making groups larger than intended in matches, which seems like the logical next move for Respawn.
While it might be difficult to police the matchmaking itself, new rules or a reporting system for the practice would go a long way in improving the game. The developer has already been pretty hot on banning or suspending cheaters in Apex, and as teaming is technically cheating, it hopefully won’t be long until it’s cracked down on.
We’ve contacted Respawn for comment.
