Apex dev promises fixes to ranked Arenas
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Ranked Arenas grinders, rejoice. Fixes are coming to your beloved bastion of combat.
With the introduction of Seer, changes to World’s Edge, and new ranked splits in the battle royale version of Apex Legends, season 10 also brought the ranked version of Arenas, the competitive three-vs-three mode initially launched to much fanfare in season nine. The ranked Arenas experience hasn’t gone quite as well as many would have hoped, however. Respawn had to push a hotfix out only a couple of hours after season 10 was released to address issues with partying in ranked Arenas. Still, there are even more things that don’t feel great about the system, as one Twitter user pointed out.
Exactly why Arena Ranked ain't worth anyone's time to grind. Lvl 26 newbie was on my team in this match too and was definitely not a diamond lvl player. Arena Ranked just a waste of time. I also spent 2 hours farming 68 AP just to lose 60 in one game. @RoboB0b_ @Respawn pic.twitter.com/2aAuUJwV5F
— Leo_the_Lion25 (@LeotheLion25) October 7, 2021Losing 60 Arena Points in one go is a massive blow. Luckily, Apex dev and Arenas mastermind Robert West agrees. In a Twitter thread responding to the critique of Arenas, West promised players that changes are coming to the ranked Arenas system and massive AP losses such as this one should be more or less eliminated in future updates.
We're working on making the Ranked Arenas experience better! We have some matchmaking and AP improvements in the pipe and will of course keep updating as we go. I know of 1 bug at least that we're investigating and will hopefully have a fix for soon. More in 🧵
— Robert West (@RoboB0b_) October 8, 2021These big AP losses are uh… not great. It’s MMR based (Matchmaking Rating) and there are really only 2 ways to lose more than 12. First is if you’ve somehow climbed AP way higher than your relative MMR. This shouldn’t really ever happen and we’ll fix it if we see it happening
— Robert West (@RoboB0b_) October 8, 2021Second is if you lose to a lower rated team. Thankfully, we have some updates coming that I think will make this much better.
Lower ranked teammates usually just means their MMR is close to yours but they haven’t grinded as much AP. This should also be better after the update
With ranked Arenas, it’s important to remember that there are two systems in play: Arena Points, which players earn from winning matches of Arenas, and MMR, a hidden statistic that determines how a player performed in their wins or losses. MMR takes several things into account outside of a pure win-loss record and accordingly adjusts the AP a player wins or loses to be more in line with the player’s MMR.
As West said, a loss of 60 AP just shouldn’t happen at all in ranked Arenas. He offered up a few theories on how that might happen, including a player winning a ton of AP without performing well, so their MMR doesn’t climb along with their actual rank, resulting in the system harshly punishing a loss to bring the player’s AP back down toward their MMR. There’s also the possibility that the opposing team had a far lower rating, resulting in massive AP loss.
Fortunately, these issues should be few and far between after a few more updates with West promising improvements to both the Arena Points system and the matchmaking system in ranked Arenas coming soon. If you’re someone who loves Arenas but felt the AP system unfairly prevented you from climbing in ranked Arenas, don’t be afraid to give the mode another try.
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