[2020] We’re the team who brought you Horizon, Olympus, and the rest of Apex Legends Season 7 (yes, including the Battle Pass). Ask us anything!

EDIT: 2:07PM PT - THE AMA HAS OFFICIALLY ENDED

I know the Battle Pass is the big topic right now on Reddit.

I'm hoping to get questions on all things season 7 so all the devs I invited can participate, so if y'all can do me a favor, aim your BP-related questions in response to this comment and I promise we'll get responses in from our top dudes. Would also point to the thread from last night, which includes some answers to top questions we've seen. But feel free to post new ones here.

His LinkedIn doesn't say anything about season 7, but refers to changes he shipped about six months ago. It's old. And "purchase rate" refers to popularity and sales of the Battle Pass (which, yes, of course we want more people to buy it, there's nothing to hide there).

I actually reached out to him and asked him to clarify on his LinkedIn that it's in reference to a past season.

I love this idea.

One of my big focuses for the short term future of Clubs is more integration into matches themselves. That includes things like including club tags into the kill feed and finding places to put club logos. This idea is a perfect fit for what I'm looking to do and I'm adding it to my list.

Absolutely, our plan is to continue to give players more options for customizing their club logos. I can't give an ETA on when those new logo elements are coming, though. =)

Thank you! The team is very excited to have just launched such a big season!

Waiting. I'd follow that comic if I were you.

Before I get into the reason for the battlepass change, I'll start by saying that the team has the player's best interests in mind, and we are not trying to play negotiation games with our players. Respawn is made up of passionate gamers just like yourself. We also aren't trying to secretly force you all into buying more battlepass levels. I promise you everyone here on the team are good people, passionate gamers, and just want whats best for the game.

There were really 2 changes to the battle pass, each had its own reason. First, we streamlined the challenge system to reward stars, and 10 stars is a battlepass level. We implemented this change with the intent to simplify how the battlepass works and more clearly indicate what a challenge is worth. The second change was to the difficulty or time investment needed on the challenges. We've seen in our data that most players were completing the battlepass about 2/3 through the season and then not having much left do to in the season. We believed that players would enjoy playing the game if they always had something to progress and earn, so we adjusted our challenges to hopefully give players something to accomplish in that final month of a season. This change had the players intest in mind, and was calculated in a manner that would still allow the majority of our players to finish leveling without purchasing additional levels.

The battlepass is about keeping players engaged throughout the season, so we're not trying to do you wrong here. Obviously when these changes went live we heard your feedback loud and clear, and quickly put in a change that makes the challenges roughly 50% easier to complete, and we have more changes planned in the future to give players more agency on challenge completion. We appriciate your feedback on this change, but also please keep in mind that Respawn always has your interests in mind, so please assume positive intent!

The website I think you're referring to is not made by Respawn or EA. There are a few websites out there that are made by third party companies, or in some cases individuals with engineering experience who are fans of the game. Because they are developed by third parties Respawn has no control over those websites or any bugs they may have.

In season 6, we added a batch of brand new VO variations to existing lines for Bangalore, which reflected her character change from the events of Season 5's Broken Ghost story. She's slowly warmed up to the other Legends and become more comfortable with them as colleagues and friends. As we saw in the Season 6 Rampart Lore trailer, Bangalore has developed a friendship with Rampart and Gibraltar. This may be subtle, but character development like that is a big deal for us. Anita is the first character we have put this focus on and to receive this permanent change. As always, we will continue to do more and find more ways to tell and grow our characters' stories in the future. Bangalore was one of the first characters I was lucky enough to write and I'm very excited for more of her story to be told - it just takes time. Thank you, friend!

Yeah, Chad has talked about this before and we don't necessarily have a lot more to share right now, but I'd like to talk quickly about our philosophy around this. TLDR: We think our Legends and guns are super fun to play with and we'd like to give you more ways of playing with them, but there's some really valuable stuff in BRs that'll be hard to replicate elsewhere.

Okay, so why are BRs good, from a gameplay perspective? I think the number one and two reasons are what I'd call variance and narratives. Variance just means no game you play is just like another game you've already played: there's different plane paths, you may make different jump choices, you'll play as a different legend, with different legends, against different legends, you'll find or not find different weapons, you'll fight enemies in different places, and so on. Every game is fresh and has the potential to surprise. This gives BRs a LOT of longevity that other MP modes don't necessarily have. If we don't do our jobs as game designers right, other multiplayer modes can quickly feel like you're doing the same thing over and over. So that's variance; as for narratives, good BRs allow you to tell yourself a story: "We landed Estates and had a crazy close fight with another squad, barely survived, then while looting a third squad rolled in, so we ran, found an unlooted POI, looted up and ambushed the squad following us out of Estates, took their Trident, drove to Hammond Labs because we heard gunfire coming from the direction, got into a crazy big fight with 3 other squads and got killed." That's a story. No other game is likely to have the exact same story, and importantly that story had a throughline (from barely hanging on, to running away, to turning the tables, to looking for trouble, to sudden and inevitable doom) and peaks (high intensity moments where you fought) and valleys (low intensity moments of looting or traveling). We think it's really healthy for a multiplayer game to behave like this. The pacing gives you time to catch your breath, think about what's happening, build anticipation, etc.

So if we take our Legends and guns and whatnot and use them for something that's not BR, how do we go about making sure that it also has game-to-game variance and peaks and valleys of pacing? This is not an easy question to answer and that's why don't yet have more to share. Hope this helps!

Nice question! Expectations when creating any new map is to challenge players in a different way. We want every map to feel and play differently. With Olympus, we wanted to challenge players’ awareness and reward those who plan their routes ahead of time. The Trident and Phase Runner are to encourage players to land further away, knowing they have the choice to use these tools to move into the zone at their own pace. I think these expectations are being met, but it’s only been a few days since the map’s been out! Like with any new map, there is a learning curve to learning where the loot is, where fights can happen, which places are safe, how to counter the Trident…etc.

Favorite locations? Ooof. I loved designing Bonsai Plaza. Especially the Reverie Lounge. With that space, it was cool to build something so simple that sat above the entire area and with tons of glass. I wanted players to gain an edge of what was happening below, but with the risk that there are only a few ways out.

Some of the original goals of Olympus were providing map-wide rotations. We've always been pretty liberal with rotation options (big long slides, jump towers) and we think a lot of the fun of Apex is in the ability to move through the level in a quick and fun way.

Vehicles and the Phase Runner give you options to get past some of the sticky parts of the map, like certain chokepoints, but they also help people find fights.

It's a tough balance that we are mindful of. I think part of playing Apex is knowing when to fight, and when not to fight. In pubs, you get a lot of w-key warriors, which is a fun way to play, but it's not the way to necessarily win.

Sheila isn't a programmed robot, but if she was? I defer to our amazing fans who create beautiful art to explore that friendship.

Hi! I'll make the assumption that by CDR you mean the cool down rate.

For her tactical (15s), we intentionally wanted to keep the cooldown low to encourage players to use it often for repositioning or use it offensively or however else players found useful ways to use it without trying to save it for "the perfect" scenario.

For her ultimate (120s), the cooldown currently sits on the low side of other similar ults (Rampart 120s, Caustic 150s, Gibraltar 180s, Bloodhound 180s) and we are excited to see players use it and see how effective it is in the live game at all skill levels.

That said, we are always watching the game and the data generated by players to make sure its a fun and fair experience for everyone.

Thanks for the comment!

All things are possible.

I hear ya. We have an improvement for this on our todo list!

I wouldn't put anything off the table. We're planning more changes, but would probably give the most recent changes at least a little time to breathe to see what kind of impact they have.

FWIW, there's two main questions we're asking when we think about this stuff:

1) Are people going to finish their battle pass super early because of the changes we just shipped? This is something we're debating because dailies give more now. This might be something we decide doesn't actually matter! But it's something we're thinking about.

2) Even if "the numbers make sense" and WE think the system is good, are players still saying it FEELS bad, after they've had a couple weeks with it? If so, we probably have work to do.

Hope this makes sense. I know it doesn't fully answer your question but it should give you a better sense of where our heads are at.

Hahah thanks! The art team killed it when on this map.

Olympus was the result of some f*cking awesome concept art we had from the Titanfall series. We wanted this map to feel and look way different than Kings Canyon and World’s Edge. Goals we had in mind was to really lean into the sci fi fantasy of this universe. We have Legends that can create portals, are sentient robots, and our newest Legend, Horizon, that can create miniature black holes. With all of that awesome, sci fi goodness, we thought “Let’s go big and make something different and special”. The Phase Runner is an example of leaning into that big, sci fi universe we built and also introducing a way to shake up gameplay with large rotations around the map.

When you think of a city, it’s usually dense areas with concrete and large skyscrapers. We’ve done that before on World’s Edge. On Olympus, we wanted to subvert expectations and think of something no one has seen before. If someone were to build a city in the sky, what would that look like? Would the rocks be made of marble? Would the terrain be normal or be angled to sell the artificial nature of the city? There were so many ways we wanted to craft a map that felt and played unique, and I think we nailed it.

This is definitely on the list of things we want to do, but yeah, there's a technical hurdle or two in our way. We're working on it!

Time travel was already introduced in Titanfall 2, so it's not a new concept. As for Pathfinder, I think he will find his answers, but I'm not sure what Time Travel has to do with it.

Cross-progression is something I am really passionate about adding to the game, and we're discussing our options and potential solutions. It's a complex problem, especially post launch when people have multiple accounts already made on different platforms but we have some really smart people thinking about it as we speak. Hopefully sometime in the future we can support it, but it's still early development.

We hate this too!

Clubs design is meant to tackle this exact problem, but I think it needs to be tackled from many angles.

The question we need to ask is - why are people doing this behavior?

Does the challenge system reward queueing back into games more than trying to win?

Do these people even really want to play a BR to win, or do they just like our combat and play solely for that?

Do these people have any intention of playing a team game at all?

We are always talking about ways to combat the leavers without being overly punishing to people who are just playing the game the way they want to play.
We want to look into providing those people with ways to play the game the way they want. We have some ideas. Some stuff is in the works.
It won't be solos, as I've explained in the past! (we are a team game. flag planted)

For now, if you're a team player, try joining a club that prioritizes teamwork. You don't need to add randoms to your friends list in order to party up with people that have a social contract to the club to play the same way you want to play.

Thank you! I do think that in the future you'll see some other permanent modes. We're very passionate about Apex Legends, the legends themselves, and the gameplay possibilities outside of Battle Royale. I don't have anything to announce at this time, but there are certainly no shortage of ideas and prototypes here at Respawn!

This is a great question, and something we are asking ourselves as well. We definitely have a bit of a blindspot when it comes to testing that we're trying to resolve, but I'll explain why it exists and what we're doing going forward.

When it comes to testing, our internal playtests are quite different than playing the live game for many reason. For one, we're playtesting with only about 200 players in a single queue, versus the millions of players in the live game. This means 2 things. First, it means that our queue times are longer between matches, so we inadvertintly play the game a bit differently knowing that we can't just jump right into another match when we die. Second, it means we have all skill levels in the same match, from highly skilled to not so skilled. This also has an impact as to how the game is played, and can change our thoughts on the difficulty of a particular challenge. That said, we absolutely do have data from the live game that we can use, so let me get to my second point regarding development.

While working on season 7 our playtests and development was focused on the big ticket items like Horizon, Olympus, Trident, Clubs, etc. The battlepass content and challenges are actually created very late in the process, so this gives us a condensed timeframe to get actual testing on the final challenges. I know you're screaming at your monitor right now, thinking something like "WHY WOULD YOU NOT TEST THIS MORE". I get it, and it's the same thing we screamed at ourselves earlier this week.

Our data from prior seasons was used to aide in challenge balancing, and our analytics team beleives that the new values would still earn you the 100 battlepass levels by playing the same number of hours you played last season to earn 100 levels, but it was in a different pace. The newer design is going to be slower at the start of a week and faster at the end of a week, previous seasons were opposite allowing you to complete the weeklies relatively quickly and have less progression later that week. From a math perspective we believe the numbers add up the same in the end, but I agree this does not feel as good to a player, and that's hard to know until you play it.

Making games is hard, it always feels like when you put focus in one area you have issues arise somewhere else. We have some new processes in place now to make sure we're getting more progression testing going forward and I'm hopeful we can avoid things like this in the future.

It's true and totally makes sense.

The beauty of BR is that you can avoid that area if you don't like the gameplay there (most of the time). Unlike balloons, people can't just land on you from nowhere - they're gonna come out at a very predictable location.

From Ashley Reed (Senior Writer): Olympus can actually shift and transform thanks to its advanced computer systems, so some structures might not be there that were before. However, it's possible that some areas folks thought were on Olympus are actually somewhere else . . . As for Loba, she has lived all over! When she was a child, her parents traveled a lot to avoid anyone who took issue with their business, and she kept at it as she grew up. She's been to Olympus, Psamathe, and a lot of other planets, but she doesn't stay in any one place for long.

Hi! I can take a stab at answering part 2) of this question. Devin's already tackled the first part.

The reason Loba is so slow while her tactical is in the air is that we're really scared of what we call "get out of jail free" abilities. Positioning in Apex has to matter, or else it becomes a game that's all about in the moment reaction and hand eye coordination. So for positioning to matter, you have to pay a prize for being caught out. This is the reason we added additional activation time to Wraith's tactical, and this is the reason why Loba can't sprint while her tactical is deploying. Imagine this: Loba throws her tactical one direction and keeps sprinting behind cover the other direction. You now have the choice of either trying to follow her and knocking her down before her tactical activates, or running to where she threw the tactical. Well, the latter is going to fail because that ring travels way faster than you, and the former is going to fail because if she's in trouble, she can always activate her tactical early. You're now in a lose-lose situation. That's why the state where Loba waits for her tac to land must be a state of vulnerability for her. Make sure you break sightlines and are far enough away from the enemy before you attempt to escape with the bracelet.

Higher level, we track two types of performance stats: encounter win rate and trios win rate. Encounter win rate is "how often does this Legend kill vs how often are they killed"; it tracks what we think of as mostly selfish power. Trios win rate tracks "how highly do squads with this legend on them place on average" and tracks selfless, team-wide power. Loba is set up to help her TEAM succeed, and yet her selfish power is much higher than her team-wide power. This suggests that buffs to her bracelet would be misplaced; we'd be adding power where she is already doing well but ignoring the main point of the Legend, which is to help her team succeed.

For question 1 - we're always trying to make sure weapons have a place in the meta in some way. We want to make sure players have a variety of guns that appeal to them. But depending on player preference, platform, skill level, etc., some guns will be better than others for that particular player. SMGs and ARs tend to be the most used guns because of their flexibility. Our sniper rifles tend to be good for poking at long range, but we intentionally don't want them to be easy at knocking people across the map. LMGs, shotguns, and pistols each have their own areas they excel in as well. Overall, every gun should be useful in the right situation. But we don't want any of our guns to be the best gun to use in every situation.

Good catch! It's a slow build, but we'll get there. There's much more for both characters to learn and when they do, it's very possible to experience a moment between them, but patience is important. We want to tell these stories just as much, if not more than our fans want to learn them—it just takes time. We're always looking for more ways to grow our characters and more ways to tell their stories. Thank you!

Like most things, was a huge team effort to arrive at the Horizon we know and love today! I did the original prototyping in script for her, based a lot off of Octavia's energy of awesome female scientist with some devious intentions... but of course we had our design team work with our writing team right from the very beginning in an effort to make her entirely her own. One of our writers locked in that her very essence was Scottish, and we named her after Mary Somerville (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Somerville). Everyone on the writing team had a blast with her and Elle gave her such warmth and personality - it all came together so awesomely! Thanks for the high five! :D

Not really, I just answered another similar question in more detail!

We read a lot of comments like "Fix the game", "Fix your servers!", or "This game is broken". We really do want to help, but generic questions like these are not very useful. We fix hundreds of bugs a month, constantly look at crash info on our backend, and watch videos and listen to issues posted online, but when someone simply says "Fix your game" it would be more effective to speak to your specific issue in detail.

Sometimes issues could be specific to your platform, your datacenter, your PC specs, and we also need to know what you're referring to! I promise you we are listening and trying to help, but generic "fix the game!" don't help as much as the more detailed threads we get.

You just may get some more...

Parking a comment here. It's absolutely a fair question.

I don't actually know our policy, so I'm going to go ask and then report back here with what the policy actually is, regardless of whether the answer is popular or not. (may take a few hours)

5:46PM UPDATE: It’s Friday evening and I haven’t gotten a clear answer. For now, whatever EA support agents are telling you is the policy. I’ve heard that they’ll refund coins bought but not passes. I’m going to update this comment again by EOD Monday (72 hours from now) and will confirm whether I’ve heard differently.

9:25AM MONDAY UPDATE: I was able to get confirmation on the above: we can refund coins but not passes or battle pass content.

Nice question! As with every new map, our goal is to challenge players in a very different way. Large rotations are the foundation of Olympus’s design and that personality can be found with the Phase Runner and Tridents. We understand that players have pain points on our previous two maps, so when building Olympus we tried to find the pain points that felt global to Apex and address those as best as we can while retaining the personality of the map. That balance is hard to hit but we think we created something great and like with any map, we can update the map overtime to address any feedback you have.

Never stop giving feedback - it's the lifeblood that feeds this design team. :)

Interesting, huh? Time will tell I guess...

We are not aware of any problems with matchmaking on Asian servers, but we do see fluxations of player counts on certain playlists for each region. Currently, Trios is our number one played mode, followed by ranked, so that does mean that you may see fewer people playing Duos in off-peak hours and queue times could go up. You can try changing to another datacenter thought!

As soon as we can share information on Nintendo Switch we surely will. There are a lot of people excited to bring the game to Switch and would love to tell you all about it, but we're not allowed to release any details just yet. I'll just mention that it's important that we have a quality product that performs well, feels smooth, and looks good.

Sure! When you exit Horizon's Gravity Lift you are given a little extra "boost" upwards and outwards to help you get to where you want to be. Without it you would just drop down more significantly when exiting the lift.

It's possible the wording implies a bigger jump in velocity but we feel its in a good place.

We don't have any plans to release Quads. We needed to decide this early on in testing. Trios is the magic number for us. That's when the legend composition really shines and the X-Men vs Avengers fantasy starts to shine through. When you play Quads, which we tested early on, the combat becomes nearly untrackable. It's chaotic in a negative way.

This wouldn't be a total deterrent for a limited time mode if the rest of the game wasn't designed around Trios. Our lobby, for example, is designed for 3 people. Our loot distribution is designed for 3 people per squad. Even something like the banners placed around the map don't have room for a 4th. These are all technically solvable problems with enough effort, but because we feel that Trios is the sweet spot we aren't pursuing Quads currently.

Aaah, giant stompy death robots who love you! I love Titans; I started working at Respawn only in January 2020, so I've not been around for the development of either of the Titanfalls, but I'm a huge fan. BT is best boy. However, as you can probably guess, this is a difficult game design question, so let's strap in.

In Titanfall, you have two layers of two different multiplayer games being played in the same space: the Titan game and the Pilot game. They're very different, require very different types of skills, map design, reaction times, etc. Frankly I think it's a miracle this team even made the Titanfall MP work at all. From a pure game design craft perspective, I marvel at it and realize I'm standing on the shoulders of giants.

However, for the two games (pilot and titan) to be able to coexist, you have to do a lot of heavy lifting and you have to set up your game fundamentally to support this. For instance, wallrunning and doublejumping are a lot more okay and stomachable in a game where one individual life doesn't really matter and a giant machine may step on you and murder you. Pilots suddenly become these annoying flies for titans to swat at (and sometimes they rodeo them). That's awesome, but your weapon design, your skill design, and your map design must all account for this. In a game where you want pilots to have even a small chance of taking out a titan, you have to have a weapons ecosystem that gives them that fighting chance and a movement system that allows them to avoid titans when cornered. You have to have a numerical asymmetry that becomes harder to scrounge up when you're talking 20 squads of 3 rather than two teams of 5-8 pilots, not all of whom are likely to have titans out at any time. And also, yes, you must set your game up such that either side can realistically and reliably get titans, which precludes them being a character skill (otherwise the character would become mandatory). If they become a map item, something that's called in like an airdrop for instance, well the RNG inherent in a BR means that sometimes you just won't get them and that means they'll have to be balanced such that they aren't just trump cards that win you any encounter. At that point are they still titans? There's a real problem in game design where sometimes your gameplay fantasy writes a check that your healthy multiplayer gameplay reality can't cash, and when they clash like that it tends to feel extremely disappointing. You wouldn't want to see one of your beloved titans only to have it barely hit anything and die to like two charged Sentinel shots that oh btw are impossible to miss because it's so big.

So I wouldn't hold my breath for titans in Apex. I mean, never say never; we're all huge fans of the giant stompy death robots here.

I mean, the Rift has a pretty neat hook. Bonsai Plaza has some pretty significantly different layout designs than previous maps.

Some of your examples came later, in the form of town takeovers or map updates. We usually use those to inject new gameplay in the form of PoIs.

Some cool stuff coming to Olympus soon. :)

All I can say is stay tuned. :)

Brilliant idea mate! I can't confirm or deny that we have an Austrailian legend in the future.

Good question! Yes the gravity star was definitely an inspiration for Horizon's ult. We even had an early implementation which was very similar.

The short answer is that the gravity star as a Legend ultimate in Apex presented two problems.

The first is that it was just too strong. When hitting someone with it, pulling and holding them in one place was devastating in playtests and in Apex, you don't just respawn when you die.

Second is that for an ability like that with a smaller radius and duration, missing with it feels horrible as the Horizon. These things led us to Horizon's current ult which has a lasting duration and a weaker force. We spent a lot of time trying to find that balance between frustrating and fair for victims and fun and effective for Horizon.

We're excited to see it out in players's hands and will be keeping an eye on it.

Hi friend. I've been working on the lore of our Apex/Titanfall universe for over 8 years... As for a large worn notebook? No, I have MULTIPLE large worn notebooks. Every little detail and story beat we come up with fits in, is inspired by, or is a result of our current lore. There are rules we follow and many discussions are had before new elements of lore find itself into our world. Key is building up and not out and always exploring the lore through the lens of our characters.

Of course - it's the same universe.

Why indeed? Time will tell.

Aw! Thanks so much, friend! I love working on those videos and our team does an amazing at making them. That said, the process to make those longer videos takes over 8 months from the start - that's not including the work put into developing the stories. As expected, this year has changed things with the schedule but we are doing more and you will laugh, cry, and cheer when they arrive. I know you're excited for more, but keep in mind, we've been sitting on these stories for a LONG time, so just imagine how eager we are to share them with you. It's a slow process, but that's what makes them great. As for my favorite Legend, IMPOSSIBLE - I love my family equally!

Haha we're a team focused game, so we want to emphasize squad tactics.

Perhaps in the future we can try solving a team based forklift. Triple seater forklift? No, that’s dumb. Nevermind.

Yeah! I said this in a dev stream and we are still following up on it.

One solution we want to implement is No Fill. We think this will give lone wolves the ability to get in there and complete challenges, get some kills and generally show off their skills without disrupting other people's games.

There are some more creative solutions we're exploring that I don't want to say just yet, but it won't be Solos. We are a team game.

We hope so! We spent a lot of time in internal playtests trying to get it into a good spot. It was easy to swing too far one way or another. We spent time on both sides where it was oppressive and unfun for victims and where it felt completely weak for Horizon. We think it's in a good place and will be keeping an eye on it as players get better with Horizon.

This is not the answer you're looking for - but probably not.

They are require a lot of dev time and we've seen people don't use them much.

Now take this compared to skydive emotes... we think that design space has gone pretty well and the data shows that people want them and use them, so we make more!

First, I'm delighted you're enjoying clubs, and I'm happy to hear you have a full community to play with!

Now, to respond to your questions:

- The Y Control issue is a bug I'm fixing soon. =)

- I went back and forth on allowing people to rename their club, and ultimately decided against it. Allowing users to rename their club opens the potential to certain forms of abuse. Abuse aside, it's important to encourage club owners to commit to the identity of their club, which for other users is best expressed by the club's name.

Now, all that said? Club tags are something we'd like to be more flexible on, and we're looking into making tags editable in a future update.

- Pro tip, you can click the ready button if the shortcut on your controller is being borrowed by something else. ;)

But yeah, I hear you. I think a better answer than limiting the space in which club party invites appear is changing how they appear such that they're less disruptive. That might be an improvement to crossplay invites as well. It's something we need to consider the best approach to, but absolutely worth fixing.

We do not plan on making any club content exclusive to the battle pass. It doesn't really make sense to restrict content meant for the community you participate in to a reward track that is more meant for you as a player.

Horizon has a strong motivation to find ANY way back to her son. She is highly intelligent and capable so even finding a way through time feels possible for her. She's in the Apex games to continue her most important research yet.

Thanks for the feedback!

Good question! Horizon's tactical is interesting because it provides mobility for her and her team but in a specific limited dimension. We actually had early feedback that it felt too limiting because it only goes straight up, is limited in height and doesn't have the flexibility of the other two abilities you mentioned. We think that the flexibility to move in and out of it at any height, any direction and deploy it to move with limited ability to follow is what helps differentiate it.

There is more Mama Witt, I'll say that.

There will be more developments with those two.

We're always trying to iterate, learn, and improve. In this year's Halloween event we tried to provide some value bundles to our players to purchase many legendary skins at a discounted price. We saw a lot of people engaging with that discounted bundle but also heard feedback that some players wanted to purchase a skin a-la-carte. We had planned a similar structure for an upcoming event that we have since changed based on your feedback.

We're always trying to provide multiple avenues to content, some avenues being free, some paid, some craftable, and some bundled. That doesn't mean that all content will always be available by all means, but the goal is to provide all of our players with a stream of content. Of course, we need to sell some things, or this entire team doesn't get to keep working on a game we love, but it's important for us to make sure we feel our monetization strategies are fair and not predatory. You've seen examples of this with our collection events where we offer items a-la-carte via apex coins or crafting metals, but offer event apex packs at a discount for those who aren't as specific about which item they're seeking. Iterate, learn, improve!

The two questions I think we discussed the most in the earliest days of clubs was "How big should clubs be allowed to get?" and "How many clubs can one user join?"

Ultimately where I settled on the question of how many clubs a person can participate in, is in answering the question "Can players feel like they're emotionally invested in the success and growth of their club if their attention is split between multiple clubs?" The goal for clubs long term is that players feel personally connected to them. Our plans for the future of clubs revolves around that, in fact. It's hard to imagine that if a player divides their time between multiple clubs how capable are they of really feeling like they're invested in any of them? To look at it another way, logically users in multiple clubs likely consider or treat one club as their "primary" club, and then others as "secondary" or "tertiary" or beyond. Rather than split the value of a user's time between clubs, its better to encourage players to be "all in" on the club that would be their "primary" focus anyways.

In Clubs' current incarnation I totally understand that this sounds like I'm thinking about things too hard. But as I mentioned, we've got a Plan™, and I hope some of the decisions we've established now will make more sense in the future.

Thanks!! The team is feeling really good and I’ll be sure to pass on the praise. Woot!

Creating a POI is about giving enough space for multiple squads to land but also making the space easy to understand from the dropship so you know what kind of gameplay you might experience. I play a lot of Rainbow Six, Call of Duty, and Doom, so some of the spaces may feel like extensions of those games since I like that style of predictable combat in a wide, linear space. Of course, this is Apex, so the design approach to these spaces needs to be made in the context of our game. There needs to be a healthy balance of Apex common assumptions and how creative we can get in making each POI feel different and fun.

Fully custom search tags, like fully custom logos, will not be an option. This opens clubs to abuse and moderating clubs at this scale would be extremely difficult, even with profanity filters and the human team that processes club reports right now.

However, we are open to considering adding tags if the interest and value is subtantial enough. We'll also likely remove search tags that are under utilized. We intend on continuing to curate search tags to meet the needs of the players. That includes adding more "social" search tags for women, POC, and yeah definitely religious beliefs as well. =)

Playtesting a 60 player game is HARD. Playtesting a 60 player mode during a pandemic where everyone works from home is even HARDER. I'm impressed the teams have been doing as well as they have, because man this is a unique challenge.

So we have a daily playtest window in which we usually playtest two things; let's say at any given time in September we may have had a Shadow Royale playtest followed by an Olympus playtest; Horizon would have been available in both, and we would have been trying to also collect feedback on a motley collection of other in-dev things. In order to populate these playtests, we leverage our QA teams that jump in and help us test and then also report bugs and other feedback based on these tests. I try to make as many playtests as I can; I think iterative game design, that is game design where you build a thing based on a theory, try it out to test the theory, and adjust based on the playtest, is the best way to make multiplayer content. I'm also an Apex superfan, so there's something really thrilling about seeing new stuff come together. Seeing a new champion go from a weirdly colored dummy model to an early proxy model all the way to final polish in game is just amazing and never gets old for me.

In playtests, we will often focus on getting what we call "feels" feedback first; what does it feel like to use this, what does it feel to have it used against you, does everything make sense, do things work like you expect them to etc. It's only toward the end of a Legend's dev cycle that we get serious about playing competitive games and trying to get a read on balance. This has been especially challenging with work from home. I'm surprised and delighted that Horizon seems to have shipped in a well balanced state because frankly I would have loved to see a lot more playtesting than we ended up getting. Speaks to the calibre of the team that made her.

As for who the best person in the office is, I believe that honor goes to Eric "GH057ayame" Hewitt from the Competitive Team. Eric is a former Halo pro who definitely hit predator in Apex once or twice. When I play against him I get this distinct "stop hitting yourself" experience where he's clearly just toying with me. (I'm like a solid mid to high silver ;P). Here you can already see one of the big challenges we have: we can fill a playtest or two and when we do we get crazy skill deltas. It's very hard to get a good read on balance like that. We do our best though!

Hah, have I! I think of nothing else, day and night. ;P

Let's talk about terminology first, then patch cycles, and then I'll actually answer your questions.

So people use the word "remake" very lightly. I come from a studio that had a much more stringent definition (I was at Riot Games before Respawn) and I think it's an important distinction to make. A remake, in my view, is anything that meaningfully changes the play pattern of a character. For instance, previously Mirage could only send Decoys in a straight line and when he ulted they'd just stand in this weird summoning circle, doing nothing while he tried to somehow make use of his invisibility. After the rework, he gained the ability to have decoys mirror his actions: suddenly Mirage players have to do very different actions from what they had to do before. The ult now becomes about overwhelming the enemy with movement and visuals and making them spend their bullets on the fake Mirages; and the invisibility, which in a best case situation for Mirage felt very unfair to the enemy, doesn't exist anymore. So that's a rework. Pathfinder, however, still uses grapple mostly in the same way. He has some additional incentives for using shorter grapples now, but that's about it. He still does mostly the same things. So that's not a rework.

We try to avoid reworks whenever we can because they invalidate previous player learnings. You've learned how to use Mirage ult invisibility, and we take it away. That sucks, and all your skill in using this mechanic is now worthless. So reworks are a last resort for us: when it seems that there really is no other way to make the Legend either fun for the player or healthy for the rest of the game. In some rare occasions we consider reworks also when we merely think that a character isn't living up to their potential. For instance, Lifeline was the battle medic, but for a while Gibby was much better at reviving allies due to his dome shield, and her old passive was entirely selfish, which is the opposite of what a medic should be. Old Lifeline was fun and not unhealthy for the game, but she didn't live up to her gameplay fantasy, hence the rework.

Okay, next up: patch cycles. Surely you've noticed we have major patches that coincide with seasons (such as Season 7) and smaller patches that happen halfway through a season and are sometimes, but not always, connected to a collection event (the Season 6 Aftermarket, or 6.1 patch, for instance). We try to keep major changes to the game contained in the big season patches; a new season is the time when we're introducing a new legend and other new stuff, so it's already the time when we ask everyone to relearn parts of the game. So that's when we'd put in pattern-breaking reworks or major rebalances. For the minor patches, we try to keep it light and mostly be reactive to what we've seen happen in the season so far. Sometimes smaller patches also contain content we'd aimed to release in the season but didn't get done in time.

Okay, so: the next time we expect to patch the game will be during Season 7. I'd expect no major changes to Legends (hell, I've still got to figure out what even I want to do, and I'm coming up on time already. No rest for game devs). Season 8 is... at some point in the misty distant lands of 2021 (imagine not living in 2020 anymore). I haven't even started thinking about this yet.

Here's my (maybe) final point: we don't change/rework Legends for the hell of it. We don't consider Legend meta updates "content", the way we'd consider new Legends / maps / map toys content. We change what needs changing to make the game healthier and more fun for everyone. I've barely had a day to look at Season 7, so I don't even know yet who the problem child will be, much less what the exact problem will be. Ask me again in a few months.

It will come out of Beta this season now that the backend issues are fixed and the feature has received large scale testing. We are talking internally about KBM support and the pros and cons of doing so.

Someone else reported this to me yesterday! I didn't touch jumppad at all this patch and I honestly can't tell the difference from playing around with it, but something is definitely going on with multiple reports. It definitely wasn't an intended change! We'll figure out what happened and fix it.

Hey! Unfortunately, "frustrating" is the main reason why we nerf legends. Win rates and pick rates are good proxies for how dominating characters are in the game, but the goal of nerfs and buffs isn't to move win rates closer to 50% for some abstract philosophical reason. The ultimate goal of buffs and nerfs is to make the game more fun for everyone. In this case, as Spock would put it, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

Before we go too deep down this rabbit hole, let's talk about what the nerf does and doesn't do. The nerf makes it so that things that were previously blurry are no longer blurry while in the gas. That is literally it. You still can't see through the gas, vision blocking gas still lingers on your screen after you leave the gas, you're still slowed and unable to sprint while in the gas, and you take MORE damage now than you did before. The time to kill a full health legend went from 13 seconds to 10 seconds. Also further increasing damage and slow is absolutely on the table if necessary. So saying that "they can now run through the gas with almost no damage" is a bit of an overstatement: they are still just as slow as they were before, Caustic still sees their highlight, and they take MORE damage from the gas now than they did before.

But it IS a nerf, make no mistake. We don't know how big yet (it takes a few days to get good data), but I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being 1%-2% nerf, which is a very bitter pill to swallow on a Legend that was already at 47% trios win rate before this nerf. Caustic is the number one legend on my list for a buff; but I've got to find a good buff that doesn't reintroduce the level of frustration that trying to fight inside the gas was.

So let's talk about power vs frustration. Some game mechanics are extremely powerful. Some are very frustrating to fight. (As a game designer, I use the technical meaning of frustrating: you're attempting to achieve a thing but the game won't let you; that thing could be offensive or defensive in nature) (also as an additional note, frustration is the core of PvP design; frustration is the friction you must overcome to win; with no friction, wins are meaningless and arbitrary) Not all powerful mechanics are frustrating, and not all frustrating mechanics are powerful. This makes game balance so hard to do. Take for instance Octane's passive heal. It's a very powerful mechanic, and yet I buffed it this patch. Why did I feel I had the leeway to do so? Well on the one hand Octane has a high encounter win rate with a low trios winrate combined with a high pick rate. My analysis is he's a super fun run in and kill/eventually die character, creating a lot of Good Chaos. I saw his pickrate fall off toward higher skill and figured that while this change wouldn't turn that trend line around, it would extend the skill range to which he's picked. That's the data side. But more importantly? Experientially, Octane's passive heal is not a FRUSTRATING mechanic at all. It's almost pure upside. Octane gets to feel super good about it and feel unlocked about using his tactical, while to the enemy the mechanic is entirely invisible and doesn't enter into the equation in the middle of a fight. This is the dream.

Fighting in gas on the other hand may not be a mechanic that is particularly powerful for Caustic (if the player in the gas is close enough to the edge and better at using guns, they will still tend to win) but it is incredibly frustrating for the other player. You know Caustic has an information advantage (he sees you better, you see him worse), you're slowed and so dodging is out of the question, and you slowly take damage, which ramps up if you don't leave the gas, putting you in Zugzwang (a term from chess which means you are forced to act and your enemy can capitalize on your action). All of these things are immediate and feel incredibly stressful (you have to move NOW! And the cards are stacked AGAINST YOU!), even if as I said before, if you have better gun skill and if you're playing a character with a smaller hitbox than Caustic, you're likely to win anyway. That's what I mean by not every frustrating mechanic is powerful.

So all the things I mentioned above are STILL TRUE today after the nerf. If anything, they're more true with damage starting higher and ramping higher; you have a whole 3s less to get out of the gas before it straight up murders you, and every second you do spend in it makes you a lot more vulnerable. The only thing that's changed is that previously in order to express your better gun skill, you had to overcome blurry outlines and a blurred sight. This made it incredibly hard to know what you were aiming at and was just downright unpleasant. It almost would have been better to say "you just can't shoot", because from my experience even if you did turn it around and kill Caustic, it was an awful experience. Seeing everything blurred just feels bad and there isn't a way to get better at it.

All this to say: we hear you and it feels unfair, especially if you assume that all our balancing decisions are made based on data. It makes sense that you would think that: I personally bring up our data a LOT when I talk about why I buff or nerf characters. But in the end data is just one of many signals that goes into the buff/nerf decision, and the only reason we care about this data is because we believe it describes underlying trends that can end up making the game less fun in the long run. The goal of balance is a fun game, not win rates at 50%.

There have been changes to Olympus since Horizon left - this may not be something she's aware of, but maybe soon she'll get some answers.

Great question! I can't speak to everyone on the team but I can give you my own personal background of how I got into the industry and some advice for you.

I got my start in the industry just after highschool when I was making mods for popular games. Just like many of those in this reddit community I was a passionate gamer playing Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and making mods. At one point the MoH:AA team started a new studio called Infinity Ward and moved to California, where I'm based, and posted a job opening. I had a large portfolio of maps and game modes I had created for their previous game that impressed them enough to give this guy a shot, dispite no professional experience. Since then I've went on to create 3 AAA franchises!

So, my advice to you is to do what I did, and what many others do. You work on personal projects, or school projects, whatever you can. Hone your skills, post your work online, learn how to take in the feedback and improve your craft. Someday a time may come when someone asks to see your 'work' and you'll have things to show them. This industry is more about what you can do, and less about where you're from or what college you went to, althrough there are many great colleges for games now that didn't exist when I was younger.

This one comes up a lot and I don't hate it! The reason I haven't done it yet is because I first want to see how much power we can get out of the black market with its intended purpose: LOOT. I'm not opposed to having another quick pickup mechanic next to Crypto's drone, but I also want to make sure picking up ally banners doesn't become too cheap and easy.

This has been on my todo list but it's surprisingly hard or I'm surprisingly bad... or BOTH! I'll get to it eventually, no promises on when, but I absolutely want her to be able to do this.

That's a long shot, for sure! Don't let me get in the way of your good time, though! :)

Actually, the first thing I prototyped for clubs was a more robust logo editor. You could manipulate primitive shapes (circles, squares, triangles, etc) by rotating, scaling, translating and scaling them.

And the first thing everyone drew with it was… Well, something inappropriate.

Ultimately, we have to balance our desire to give players more expression against the reality of how people can misuse expression and the age rating of our game. Reporting helps clean up inappropriate content after its been made, but how many users are subjected to that content before it can be moderated? At least with profanity in club names we have the ability to filter out a lot of inappropriate content before its submitted. In the end, we want to ensure that Clubs don't become a way to for bad actors in the community make others feel uncomfortable or unwelcome.

Thanks! It’s been a long road to making Olympus shine internally, so we’re happy it’s doing well out in the wild.

1. We started Olympus around Spring 2019. A few months after the game shipped. It takes a long time to build, test, iterate, art and polish a map for release. Similar time to KC and WE.

2. Oh yes. So much time taken to get the Trident right in Olympus. A few designers here would poke fun at the tasks I had for the Trident that were very similar to the tasks they had with Titans in Titanfall maps. A lot of work to get these beasts to work well in almost all spaces. I say almost, because those barrier AR walls that the driver can see were for spaces we knew were problematic for the Trident that we didn’t have time to solve before release.

3. No comment. It’s safe to assume our design team is very busy on some cool stuff :)

4. That would be very, very cool but I have nothing to announce at this time. Hopefully in the future!

5. Stay tuned as Olympus has more surprises in store

My big tip for writing is to do it. There's no other answer - just write it down. You can fix things later, but if you don't do it - if you don't finish it - then you can't move forward.

I missed the second question, but we've answered this before. Story and gameplay have a dissonance - our focus will always be our characters stories and exploring the world through their lens.

Good question. Enemies who are caught in Horizons ult are currently revealed to Horizon and her team if they have line of sight to the enemy. Damage is something we played with but ultimately moved away from as we wanted to keep the focus on the pull and differentiate it from Caustic's gas which fits into that "area damage" space.

We are well aware that we have some audio issues, so hear you loud and clear. We have several developers dedicated at this point to solving our audio bugs and we're doing everything we can to get those improvements into the game ASAP. It's been very helpful to get more detailed information on these issues, like video clips. The "fix your audio" comments are really more of a distraction to us solving the problem than useful, so please continue to provide more detailed information that will ultimately help us track all issues down.

I'll also quickly mention some of the work we're doing right now to improve audio throughout the game:

* Adding falling/flying sounds to legends. There are many times where enemies can be silent as they drop off a cliff and land right near you.
* Retuning thousands of footstep audio events.
* Moved footstep audio to permanently reside in memory instead of streaming in as needed, due to us finding that in some cases footsteps would not play due to I/O bottlenecks on certain hardware.
* Increase volume and falloff of jumps and land events
* Dynamic mixing of enemy footsteps vs other sound events
* Occlusion improvements to help with enemy location awareness.

We also see that non-footstep events fail to play occasionaly. To be honest, we have no idea why. We have some theories but no smoking gun. Debugging is very difficult as it's a complex system. There are hardware reasons a sound can fail, it could be a bug in our sound event triggering logic, it could be a network code issue, or an audio priority system bug. Our audio engineering team has spent the last few months building a new tool that we're about to roll out, that will be invisible to our users, but allow us to collect the debugging data we need when these sound bugs occur so that we can get concrete evidence of what's failing.

Fixing live game issues like this is important, and we have some very smart people working very hard on it.

As a game that requires 60 people to play, we prioritize making matches quickly over creating "the perfect match." This is mostly noticeable in small regions or late night sessions. (this is why I don't really identify our system as "SBMM") This is why you'll see some variance in who is in your match. We assume you'd rather play a match than sit in a queue for 10 minutes. This goes for Ranked, too. We wait longer to make more fair matches here, but eventually we want all our players to actually play, so will merge ranks to start a game. To be fair, I don't think this system is flawless and we are discussing improvements.

I don't believe it's any secret that I won't share with you exactly how our matchmaking system works.

For a few reasons! It's probably exploitable if you tried hard enough. Even if it's not exploitable in any meaningful way, it doesn't mean players wouldn't try weird stuff to try to exploit it.

It also changes often! We can make tweaks on the back end relatively quickly and we don't broadcast those tweaks. Some times we are running a test to see if a particular tweak to the math makes players play longer, or lowers queue times, etc. We don't broadcast changes so that our tests can be untainted. Typical experiment guidelines. Caustic approved.

We also believe that the game is best when you are trying to play "for real", even in pubs. We've seen real data that shows people who lose OR WIN too much have a much higher chance to stop playing forever. The game feels best when the pacing of wins comes more earned against players of similar skill.

A common comment I see is that players don't want to sweat in pubs, but they also don't want to get steamrolled in pubs. You can't have both. If you have VERY tight skill based matchmaking, you'll have sweaty matches because it's like a mirror match fight-yourself boss fight. If you have no skill based matchmaking, you might get some free kills, but someone is going to be MUCH better than you in that lobby and you will get steamrolled swifty.

So, yeah - complicated question gets complicated answer. I hope it at least answers why you might get the less than perfect match every time, and that we are always working on trying to improve match quality and queue times.

Do you plan on allowing for customized Club Logos? If so, what would the restrictions be?

I mentioned this in a couple other places, but just to unify the answers: We do plan on adding more logo elements for players to use to allow for more options in customization. We are not considering making a more robust logo editor out of concern of misuse.

Will there be a way to turn on or turn off language filters ("bad language" allowed/not allowed) in the Clubs Chat?

Not likely, much as how you cannot turn off profanity filtering in match. Club chat uses the same process and the chat is filtered after its submitted, as opposed to a filtering system that handles when the user receives messages.

No problem! I'll get our QA to take a look at this issue and get a bug submitted so someone can take a look at it. Cheers!

With providing new server regions, we have to be concerned with balancing population (filling matches in an acceptable time), competitiveness (or non-competitive ways to play), and latency. In May, we expanded server availability into the Middle East. This should be a better latency offering for SA, and we are measuring populations and queue times. We knew of and confirmed population disparities between our console and PC platforms, and our next course of action was expanding our platforms (eg. Steam) and adding crossplay (merging platform-populations). We'll be watching what benefits those additions have earned us to expand server availability into other global regions.

We're also learning a lot from our ALGS Super Regional and Online competitions.

There's been a few requests in this thread to turn off club tags in game! It seems worth doing, so I'll look into adding it to the list.

Understood! And improving recruiting from in match is something I'm definitely looking into as well. Currently you can send invites to the randoms you had on your squad from back in the lobby, or if you wanted to recruit your killer you could look up their name using the search menu in your club lobby.

But what if their name was something weird, like, I dunno, u/HkySk8r187? Who's going to remember that? ^{Haha just kidding boss}

Giving users way to both advertise and recruit for their club in match is definitely an area of improvement that I want to spend more time on.

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If you haven't played Titanfall or Titanfall 2, I'd suggest giving them a play or enjoying videos online. It's not a requirement, but it's part of the experience and....most of all....it's fun!

We almost shipped Olympus with a much lower dropship path, and raised it right before shipping Season 7 based on internal feedback. So, we like that you can't get everywhere easily from the drop, but we'll listen to feedback and look at heatmaps, etc. to see if it needs to change in any way. Thanks for the feedback!

It's something we haven't totally settled on, to be super honest.

Sometimes "hours to complete" IS set as a target for daily challenges (aiming for around 1.5 for most of those currently, although debating whether we're hitting that mark) and for weeklies (they tend to be targeted at something between 2-10).

If playing makes it feel like you're making no progress, that's a sign we've got more to do, imho. Will push to get it right.

/u/danielzklein Hey 👋 so first I’d like to thank you for all your hard work apex really is amazing I play it everyday! So my question for you Daniel is about fortified and low profile, so the low profile legends take an extra 5% damage while fortified legends get a reduction of 15%. I’m wondering why that is, what I mean by that is: to me it feels like 15% is a huge amount but then again I’m not looking at the data that goes into making this decision there’s got to be a reason it’s 15 and not 10 for instance. Thanks again for all you do Daniel!!

Thank you for your kind words!

If I had a time machine, I'd go back to when we started working on Apex and yell at everyone: DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT DIFFERENT HITBOX SIZES! DON'T DO IT! YOU'LL CURSE US FOREVER!

However, I do not have a time machine and frankly there are probably better uses I could put it to. We are stuck with legends with very different hitboxes, and it truly is a curse. It's very very hard to quantify how much of an advantage/disadvantage these hitboxes give you. It's huge, and in most cases WAY more important than their kit. Let's put it this way: Caustic with Wraith's hitboxes would have a higher win rate than Wraith with Caustic's hitboxes. Like no question. (And I would love to see the catgirl skin on Caustic). This means we had to find something that directly acted on the level of success/failure that hitboxes work on; and a damage multiplier was the best solution. These numbers were arrived at I assume through experimentation and then once they went live, they became pretty set in stone. See it's really hard to relearn breakpoints for how quickly can I be killed by what gun, and changing these multipliers makes people on small/large rigs have to relearn those breakpoints; additionally, these multipliers make weapon balance incredibly hard and unwieldy. You can't just add a point of damage here or take one away there, because instead of having to worry about one set of breakpoints (how many bullets/mags does it take to murder someone with white/blue/purple/red armor?) you now have to balance around three sets of breakpoints, and if I went in and changed the low profile multiplier, suddenly our friends working on weapon balance have to throw out all of their work and start over to make sure Wraith's doesn't I don't know get headshot killed from full purple with a charged sentinel or whatever.

Low profile / fortified are chewing gum and duct tape holding the game together, but they're load-bearing chewing gum and duct tape. Mess with them and the whole house will come down on you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53LTdZ7dIho

We always want to tell more stories, but everything we do takes time and resources. We're always looking for new ways to tell our stories, but I truly believe what makes our stories so amazing is the passion and care that our team has for our characters and lore. It's always going to be quality over quanity for me.

I'll say that internally we play and test all characters on all of the available maps. We don't intentionally design certain legends to better on certain maps or design maps to favor specific legends.

However, we know that certain legends can have an advantage in certain maps or more specifically in certain parts of certain maps.

In general, we use a combination of player sentiment and actual player data across all skill levels when considering tuning changes to characters.

I think we agree on a lot? We miscalculated some challenge numbers, but we both want the same thing. Players to get value out of the battle pass and feel good with the progression rate.

I'll ignore the part where you call me a liar, I actually take offense to it, but I'll reply anyway because that's what kind of guy I am. We do a lot of LTMs, so we're definitely not scared! We also see that LTMs are popular for a couple of days and have severe falloff to the point where people can't find matches, so doing 2 weeks LTMs is not necessarily the right format. We also refuse to crunch the team, so we'll probably be slower at making content than if we worked 15 hour days but that's just not something we're willing to do. We have nearly doubled our team size since launch to accommodate the content demands, so we're really trying to bring you quality content at a healthy pace.

That sounds fun to me, but I'm not a level designer! You'd have to ask one of them; there's a chance there's game design / technical limitations I can't think of right now. It may also just be a whole lot of effort for not as much value; if the effort of setting this up for one map is comparable to 50% of the effort of making a new map, is it still worth it?

Yeah but the fix for that is to have it not bug out on surfaces where it should work.

To be clear, picking up teammate banners is easy to do. It's the other suggestion: having the ult open airdrops. Essentially, loot inside airdrops doesn't exist until you open the airdrop (even though we decide what it will be on airdrop spawn time). So in order to make you able to see the loot and access it with your ult, we need to conditionally spawn/despawn it in specific locations so it doesn't clip through the airdrop. It's doable, but it's hard work.

We'll patch it out. But maybe there's an LTM there? Who knows!

These aren't bad ideas at all, but I feel they're a little heavy handed. As in I'm bribing you quite a lot to stay with your team. The correct play, staying with your team, should be self-evident just from the fire support that your team provides. Additionally these are pretty invisible; it's unlikely players will really feel them (or if they're tuned aggressively enough that players will feel them, they'll be too strong). Invisible power is bad.

That said, we strive to make ACTIVE parts of your allies' kits obviously helpful to you whenever possible. You should feel good about hanging around a Lifeline because she can drone res you; you should feel good about hanging around a Wattson because her ult can heal your shield and protect you from grenades etc. These are highly visible and noticeable forms of power and should achieve broadly the same thing your pitches try to achieve. This of course makes it harder for us because we have to find answers to the "what does this teammate do for me" question for all of our characters, and as you can tell this is often quite hard.

Thanks for your thoughts!

You know I think I could enjoy teaching game design if I ever got to that part of my career. For now I'll focus on getting better at it ;)

Trust me, finding ideas isn't the hard part. Executing on them where you end up with a mode that doesn't just burn you out after 10 hours is.