[2021] Locked and Loaded was the best takeover this game had. It will be hard to play the base game without it, but I hope that Respawn considers this being the norm for casual play!

We are... considering. Carefully. No conclusion has been reached yet. I'm personally a little worried about shortening the loot loop by removing grey loot... other than that tho it seems like all upside

This is one of those things that may not even be a problem at all, but us game designers tend to get all wrapped up in anticipating it.

Basically, there's a reason loot exists in Apex. There's actually many reasons. Some of those reasons are that the journey from low level loot to high level loot gives you things to do that aren't just "find and kill the enemy", it makes teams organically spread out, it adds RNG to soften skill differentials (sometimes you run into a better player but you have a better loadout, and that's good), etc.

We soften the impact of all of these good things by shortening the journey from low level to high level loot. Now you could say "but it was fine" during the three weeks the takeover was up (and I agree! It was fine!), but we wouldn't expect these negative effects to manifest on that time scale. One way this could manifest is, say we remove a lot of loot tiers, and a year into playing with this new loot game suddenly for no reason anyone can specifically point to, Apex feels a lot sweatier, there's a lot more fighting and less downtime all the time, maybe late game circles feel dead because so much fighting happened in the early game--or maybe the opposite happens! Because teams need to spend less time looting they can set up defensively in a competitive environment much sooner and maybe now there's even less action in the ALGS?

I'm not saying all or even any of these things will definitely happen if we just remove white gear. They probably won't! But because this is a change that feels so good in the moment ("hell yeah, I get blue everything on the ground and I start with white everything") it will be extremely hard, if not impossible, to undo if it turns out one of those negative things happens. That's why we've got to be very careful and deliberate about this.

(Current thinking, and this is all still in flux, is that landing with white body armor, helmet, and incap shield is probably fine; white backpack probably not; removing white helmets and incap shields from the loot pool is good; removing white body shields isn't because this leads to too many blue and purple body shields and white body shields are an important source of shield swaps in the early game; etc)

We wanna hit the right balance between putting obviously good things into the game in a timely manner and making sure the game is healthy for many, many years to come. We firmly believe Apex will still be played in a decade from now. Unless we f*ck it up. So we try not to f*ck it up ;P

Yup, it would! But maybe that's okay because helmets are so plentiful anyway, that was never a real balance point?

I don't have time to go into the weeds now, but we basically had a balance spectrum from 0% gear effect to 100% gear effect that was separated into 1/3rd steps: 0/33/66/100. (I'm not counting gold here) By starting everyone with white we're turning it into 33/66/100. Maybe the correct way would be 0/50/100? Maybe that means white items don't exist, or the absence of an item in a slot is themed as white rather than grey? That's one of the many considerations we need to make here.