Hero image: Apex Legends screenshot. Image: Respawn Entertainment
I’ll say it straight away, because I think it matters more than the numbers do: Respawn was right to bin its solo queue experiment for the top of the Apex Legends ladder, and I’m glad it said so out loud instead of quietly letting it fade. If you’ve ever been the third player in a squad of strangers lined up against three friends on voice chat, you probably cheered when the test was announced. I get it. It sounds like the fairest thing in the world.
The idea was simple enough. For a stretch of last season, Diamond, Master and Predator players couldn’t queue together at all, and a second test only let premade squads form within one tier of each other. Respawn’s own write-up says the tier restriction changed very little, so that one’s gone. The solo queue result is the interesting one, and I don’t think it’s the one most of us would have bet on. It didn’t change who won.
Here’s the part I keep coming back to. When the best players couldn’t squad up, they didn’t leave. They got spread out, one per squad, across more matches. So if you were a Diamond player, you saw more Masters and Predators in your lobbies, not fewer. And because the pre-match screen shows a squad with one Masters player and a squad with three Predators exactly the same way, it looked even worse than it was. I mean, imagine fixing a problem and having the fix show up as more red on the screen. Would you call that a win?
Then there’s the thing Respawn says it cannot accept, and honestly, neither could I. The people who stopped coming back to Ranked during the test were the high-ranked players who play in duos and trios. Not people drifting off, but some of the most engaged players the game has. Respawn’s line on it is blunt: “That is a bad trade.” Another line in that post, I think, should be printed on every matchmaking designer’s wall: “Ranked matchmaking gets better when there are more players at every skill level in the queue.”
That’s the argument for me. A ranked mode is a crowd. When you push part of the crowd out, everyone left behind waits longer and gets wider, messier matches, and you’ve made the thing you were trying to fix a little bit worse for everyone. I’d rather lose to a coordinated trio now and then than play in a queue that’s quietly emptying out. Wouldn’t you?
What I like most is that Respawn isn’t pretending the original complaint was wrong. Running into a stacked squad of the best players in the game still doesn’t feel good, and the post says so. It just admits “this version was too broad”, and that the aim now is to cut down how often you meet a full top-tier stack “without taking away your ability to play with your friends”. The real changes are meant to land across the next two seasons, with details promised this month.
I’ll be honest, I went into that post expecting a defence of the experiment, and I came out of it respecting the studio a bit more. Admitting a test didn’t work, showing why, and keeping the friends part of a friends’ game is exactly what I want from the people running a ranked ladder. If the price is the occasional terrifying trio, I think that’s a price I’d happily pay.
Source: Respawn on Steam – Apex Legends: Matchmaking Test Results, EA – Apex Legends Matchmaking Test Results