12 days ago - /u/RobotHavGunz - Direct link

Saturday marks my four year Anniversary at Respawn and on Apex. I get up every day excited to work on this game. And, over time, that excitement has only grown. One special thing about working on a game with a proprietary engine is that you can do literally anything. The more you understand about what your tech does and how it works (or could work), the more interesting things you can build. Every year, this game just gets more fun and more interesting to work on.

But the best part of working on this game is the players. For two reasons. It's a lifetime opportunity to work on a game of this scale. There just are not that many games with a player base this size. And that causes a lot of really maddening and fascinating problems. I've lost track of the number of cases of, "well, this should never happen, but I think there's a chance it could, so I'll defend against it and add some logging to see if it actually does happen." Spoiler: the thing happened.

The other reason is that players just care a lot about this game. And that's also just super rare and super special. The Legends, the lore, all of it. The Respawn office in LA is covered with fan art. And it's amazing. Every time I see it, it just blows me away. People love Apex's characters. And I try to be mindful of my role as a steward of those characters that mean so much.

In the time that I've been here, I've gotten to work on a ton of interesting stuff. Some of which players liked. Others stuff, not so much:

  • My first big project, in Season 8, was the categorization of badges. Something inspired by this very sub!
  • Either/Or (Multi-Game Mode) Challenges in (I think) Season 14 (maybe...)
  • The move of Ranked to an MMR-based system in Season 17
  • Ranked Trials in Season 19
  • Deathbox Customization in Season 19
  • Undoing the Ranked MMR system in Season 20 because y'all didn't like it very much
  • The Customization System for the Katar in S21
  • Art-only Trackers in S22

Those are the big things I remember anyway. I've introduced a bunch of bugs. Fixed a bunch of bugs. And just, in general, had an awesome time. I know the game is not perfect. But I also know that the things that matter to the players also matter to me. And I believe that to be true of everyone I work with.

I hope that Apex continues to thrive for at least another four years. And I hope I get to be a part of it.

As a quick PS, I won't respond to specific questions about bugs or features just because it becomes overwhelming to try to do so. To the extent that folks have questions I can answer or want to have a discussion about working on the game, I'll try to do so.

External link →
12 days ago - /u/RobotHavGunz - Direct link

Saturday marks my four year Anniversary at Respawn and on Apex. I get up every day excited to work on this game. And, over time, that excitement has only grown. One special thing about working on a game with a proprietary engine is that you can do literally anything. The more you understand about what your tech does and how it works (or could work), the more interesting things you can build. Every year, this game just gets more fun and more interesting to work on.

But the best part of working on this game is the players. For two reasons. It's a lifetime opportunity to work on a game of this scale. There just are not that many games with a player base this size. And that causes a lot of really maddening and fascinating problems. I've lost track of the number of cases of, "well, this should never happen, but I think there's a chance it could, so I'll defend against it and add some logging to see if it actually does happen." Spoiler: the thing happened.

The other reason is that players just care a lot about this game. And that's also just super rare and super special. The Legends, the lore, all of it. The Respawn office in LA is covered with fan art. And it's amazing. Every time I see it, it just blows me away. People love Apex's characters. And I try to be mindful of my role as a steward of those characters that mean so much.

In the time that I've been here, I've gotten to work on a ton of interesting stuff. Some of which players liked. Others stuff, not so much:

  • My first big project, in Season 8, was the categorization of badges. Something inspired by this very sub!
  • Either/Or (Multi-Game Mode) Challenges in (I think) Season 14 (maybe...)
  • The move of Ranked to an MMR-based system in Season 17
  • Ranked Trials in Season 19
  • Deathbox Customization in Season 19
  • Undoing the Ranked MMR system in Season 20 because y'all didn't like it very much
  • The Customization System for the Katar in S21
  • Art-only Trackers in S22

Those are the big things I remember anyway. I've introduced a bunch of bugs. Fixed a bunch of bugs. And just, in general, had an awesome time. I know the game is not perfect. But I also know that the things that matter to the players also matter to me. And I believe that to be true of everyone I work with.

I hope that Apex continues to thrive for at least another four years. And I hope I get to be a part of it.

As a quick PS, I won't respond to specific questions about bugs or features just because it becomes overwhelming to try to do so. To the extent that folks have questions I can answer or want to have a discussion about working on the game, I'll try to do so.

External link →
12 days ago - /u/RobotHavGunz - Direct link

Originally posted by allforthedillydilly

Honestly, this game is the best one out there but how do you feel about the player base declining? I'm writing this hoping there will be a change or this game won't last long.

One of the main reasons being matchmaking and the lack of any response. I'm a seasoned player, mostly soloq, and it's unbearable now. In high elo soloq you end up having enemies your skill but teammates are new players anywhere from 1-400lvl who have no idea what's going on. Forcing to carry every single match isn't playing, it's torture. I know a lot of people that have already moved on to other games because of this. Unless you're stacking it's just not fun anymore.

Mixtape is somewhat playable if you don't mind the AI bots in your team during off peak hours.

Thanks!

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.

12 days ago - /u/RobotHavGunz - Direct link

Originally posted by Marmelado_

Why did you introduce MMR into ranked and remove it after 3 seasons? MMR could at least protect low ranks from smurfs.

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.

12 days ago - /u/RobotHavGunz - Direct link

Originally posted by AnApexPlayer

How did you come to work at respawn?

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.

12 days ago - /u/RobotHavGunz - Direct link

Originally posted by Aeif

Thank you for your work on Apex Legends. Despite the hardships and the playerbase butting heads with you guys, we really do love the game, and we love that you are just as passionate about working on it.

Would you mind talking about a project that was much more challenging than you initially anticipated, but that ended up being very rewarding to work through?

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.

12 days ago - /u/RobotHavGunz - Direct link

Originally posted by StaticShatter

Thank you so much for everything you do. It's my birthday today and Apex has been one of the greatest gifts I've ever received in my life. Looking forward to more exciting things ahead. :)

Are we getting legend specific win trackers anytime soon? :P

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.

Originally posted by CepbIuQ

Hello, i know its maybe the wrong place to ask, but i never saw another developer and dont know where to report this bug. Its a minor so i doubt apex will notice, but if its possible, could you please pass up the message to reactive skins responsible team? For years now, reactive PK is bugged, at least in Mixtape. If you make killz with it, and then swap gun, it goes back to level 0, untill you make another kill. Its really bothers me because i play exclusively mixtape and love both PK and its reactive. Thank you in advance!

fixed internally. should be going out soon.