Respawn is taking the integrity of their battle royale game Apex Legends very seriously, and that much can be seen by the massive wave of bans in the past month for those that cheat the system by using hacks to “git gud” without actually being any good. Now the studio is tackling another kind of problematic player: The Piggybacker.
For those that don’t know what the “Piggybacker” is, it’s the type of player that jumps into a match but doesn’t actually do anything. This could mean they hide somewhere while they go AFK, or they could actually be doing something to intentionally negatively impact the team, but the whole point is they get the XP for each match without actually putting in the work. Since Apex requires teams of 3, this can be very frustrating and it’s because of that frustration that Respawn is taking action.
When addressing this issue, Respawn took to Reddit to reveal their latest targets for some in-game tweaks. According to the studio, “Piggy-backing is when a player drafts off other players in the squad to carry them to a good position and level up faster but doesn’t actually participate in the match [meaning they never collect a weapon, fire a shot, don’t deal any damage, etc].
“We had been seeing some feedback from players around this and have been doing some internal investigations looking at game data to understand how many of the matches being played are affected by this behavior.”
They added, “After looking at the data and internal discussions, we’ve decided that in the future we’ll start instituting temp bans for players that exhibit piggy-backing behavior and extreme cases could lead to a permanent ban. This change will not be immediate but wanted to give a heads up to players so you can adjust that behavior.”
Hopefully, this will help make the gameplay experience more balanced and authentic, though unfortunately, these issues seem to be a staple for PC gaming.
As for the game itself, Apex Legends is available now for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.
