Happy Thanksgiving! Thank You For Four Awesome Years! Looking Forward To (At Least) Another Four More!

What I will say is that I certainly don't take Apex's success - or even its existence - for granted. And will reiterate that what matters to players is what matters to me. And while I'd never speak for them, I believe that everyone I work with feels the same way. I know that's a bit of a non-answer. But hopefully also not.

Yes, and that was a big part of why we wanted to move to an MMR-based system. But in practice, player sentiment just wasn't there. I think some of it has to do with the natural arc that players had come to expect:

• Ranked is relatively easy at the start
• Ranked then becomes appropriately difficult through the middle as you settle into your skill band
• Ranked then becomes very difficult at the end if you push up into a higher tier that's likely at the upper limit of your skill.

One problem with an MMR-based system is that you lose this. And I think this is what people really didn't like. You could be in Bronze and facing Masters, because that was your skill level. So Ranked was never easy. And for a lot of players, that felt bad.

Now, you can certainly flex a bit on this. Like, you can do a hybrid system where rank is prioritized early and skill is prioritized late, but then you basically wreck the MMR experience for low skill players. And, in general, MMR systems are quite confusing, because actually seeing "skill" is hard. Everyone wants to win. But of course in a BR, only 1 out of 20 teams can win. So most players will be somewhat disappointed.

Now, a proposed solution to this is something like, "well, then show people their MMR and the MMR of other players." And that's one of those things that seems like a good idea. But there's a lot of actual UX research and evidence that shows that this is disastrous, because the MMR number doesn't really have context. And so gamifying it becomes a thing. And then basically it ceases to work.

Certainly there were things about the MMR system that I believe were fundamentally better. That's why we put it in place. But the feedback was generally pretty negative on the changes. Which was hard. Because we saw a lot of signs that the data said should make players happier. For example, in the MMR-based system, individual players on average got more kills. Like you had a much more even distribution of kills within a match. More players had one-or-more kills. And that should be something that makes players happier. But it didn't. Or, at least, it didn't make them happy enough to offset other perceptions about how the system was/wasn't fair.

It was a bit like Ranked Trials. We introduced that specifically in response to feedback that you could basically "rat your way to Masters" and we should require some sort of skill-based test to progress. Feedback in playtest was generally positive for this exact reason. But again, the feedback just wasn't good from the larger community when it went live.

It's always a challenge to parse out what players say they want to determine what they actually want. And, of course, to do this across a massive diverse player base in terms of both skill and expectation.

We wouldn't have tried the MMR system if we didn't think it was going to be better. But ultimately, it's up to the players to tell us what they enjoy. We can say that y'all should enjoy something, but if you don't, you're the ones who are ultimately correct. It doesn't matter what I think you should enjoy. It only matters what you actually do enjoy.

I was working at a smallish fit-tech/game company called Zwift. The story of how I came to work at Zwift is quite random, but that's a bit of a tangent. Zwift raised a bunch of money in the time that I was there from VC/Private Equity and just changed a lot culturally, such that I thought I wanted to try working somewhere else.

Because of what I had done prior to working at Zwift, I was connected with the then Art Director on Apex on LinkedIn. And so I reached out to him and was like, "hey, you don't really know me, but you might remember my name. Anyway, I'd like to talk to you about working at Respawn." He was nice enough to respond. I found a couple roles that I thought might be a fit. I interviewed for one role. Got rejected. Applied for another role. The then Game Director Chad Grenier interviewed me and was, essentially, "convince me to hire you." I have a pretty non-traditional background, even for game development. I guess I did okay because I got the job. That was four years ago...

So, a mix of luck, random connections, a willingness to take a pay and responsibility cut in the short term because of confidence in myself, and just a fundamental desire to want to work at a studio that I thought - and continue to think - is somewhere special.

The artifact system. I've posted about this a bit in some other threads, but that project was massive undertaking. There's no other system in the game that that allows for modular customization in that way* (*Gladiator Cards are also modular, but they have no gameplay element, so they aren't really comparable). Getting that all to work in a scalable and "efficient" (from an engineering perspective) way was a huge task. We had to build a ton of new tech - most/all of which is reusable, but still, it required a lot of new tech. And fixing some OG tech that should have worked but it turned out had been bugged (though not meaningfully so) from the outset. It worked... until we tried to get it to work with Artifacts.

There are 250ish different variants of the Katar itself - blade, power source, and handle - each of which as unique VFX and SFX. Like, getting those all to work - especially in a networked game - was a lot. Plus actually building the customization system. Networking it. Doing the networking without adding additional overhead (which we managed to do). It was a huge feature.

Our creatives - VFX, SFX, hard surface artists - all did so much work to make the different variants unique. And then it was on engineering (that's me) to actually bring that work to life. So I had a huge weight of wanting players to experience fully all the work that our creative folks did. And there was just a lot where it wasn't necessarily harder than I thought it would be. More just that I had no idea how hard it would be. But I was like, we need to figure out how to do this. And we did. And I think it's pretty awesome.

There are still some things that I wish we'd done with it. But ultimately, knowing the state of the project when I came on board, the timeline we had to deliver against, and see what we delivered, I could not be more proud of the work the team did.

I did ask about this specifically when the Tracker system went live. Good reminder to bump this. I am pretty sure we'll add these. I just have no idea when. But I have pointed out that this is missing for all new Legends and for anyone that didn't already have it. I'll ask again.