Apex Legends Dev Tracker

Player perception is absolutely considered, and real.
A community's perception can mold trends and influence behaviours on mass. Seer is a prime example of this.
We made a balance update early in Season 10 after his launch, and the community perceived him dead to rights, he fell off the map, and his power went unnoticed for three seasons.
We consider this perceived impact/power when making decisions around balance changes, and have to weigh the impact of perception constantly against the healthy changes needed for the game formed by design insights, discussion, playtesting and analytical data.
As for tenants or philosophies specifically around Legends, we try to ensure that our Legends own their own unique gameplay spaces and that their abilities have clear patterns and counterplay surrounding them. This is to ensure that players understand what the Legend is about, how to use them, and how they might deal with the threats they bring. Their gameplay should be re...

As far as weapons and loot goes we get an absolute wealth of data from our Analytics team that provides us a view into what's happening on the battlefield. We break that data down in various ways (rank/unranked, playtime, mode, time of day, favourite colour, preferred ice cream flavour, etc..) and spend time each season discussing peaks and valleys in the data and trying to understand specifically what they mean. It's never enough to look at one single stat, even if it's win rate. There's a lot of data science that goes on behind the scenes that help us understand and articulate what the data represents. But data is just one tool in the toolbox for making balance changes. We also listen. We try and understand the conversations that are happening around these pieces of content so we can better understand the picture the data paints. Then we play, both the live game and in playtests. We play as much as we can to validate these balance changes before we roll them out to the public. Th...

There is always a chance.
Especially if a Legend is under-performing or the competitive balance of the game could be positively impacted.

While we can't speak to or spoil any future content, many of these bugs are known and logged.
They are odd interactions with the terrain that are difficult to track down, but hopefully we can make improvements here in future seasons.
We did recently fix a speed issue when a Mirage Decoy is launched, but we know there are still plenty of areas to improve.

Yes. They've had some tweaks since the removal of Low Profile, but they are still relatively smaller in stature and thus their hitboxes are as well since they are built to closely match the shape of the model.

The Softball is an interesting one and we've definitely considered bringing more Titanfall weapons into Apex. Truth be told, it's an Anti-Armor grenade launcher designed specifically for Titan combat and we just don't have those sorts of challenges and enemies in a typical match of Apex. I know what you'll say, "But Eric, what about the Charge Rifle! That's an anti-titan weapon too!". We feel the precision on the Charge Rifle translates a bit better to Apex's boots on the ground gameplay and fits nicely into our sniper category. For the Softball we'd need to look at a new weapon category or making it specifically a care package weapon, and in a ...

It's not completely off the table, and we've definitely prototyped some care package only weapons- but ultimately with the amount of work it takes to build new and exciting weapons, limiting them to the care package feels underwhelming. I'm not saying we won't ever do it, but when evaluating how we want to spend our dev time weapons that can be cycled onto the floor are valued much higher because they can impact the meta in a more meaningful way as we continue to refine and balance the game.

There is a competing reality in a Live Service game like Apex where developers have to prioritize their work efforts between feature development for future seasons, and balance changes to the existing game.
Sometimes minor balance changes are simple to make, and just require tuning numbers.
Other times, they require rewriting abilities or pulling in new animations, visual effects or audio that must be added to development schedules on top of current release timelines.
However, none of these changes can go out without testing - both for bugs, and to validate that the impact of that change actually works to solve the problem, and doesn't create new ones.
Because of this, it can take time to see balance changes make it into the game.

Absolutely, the Wingman is incredibly lethal in the right hands and the sniper ammo changes have allowed it to keep its lethality but tamp down how easy it can be run. We're really happy with the ammo economy this season and the Wingman feels like it's in a healthy spot. It was a medium risk/high reward weapon, we've steepened the risk on it but wanted to retain the reward.

Will there EVER be a wraith tweak? - Absolutely.

I can't speak to future changes at this point.
However we're aware of the concerns surrounding scan abilities in the game.

Bangalore's smoke hard countering scan abilities has come up before, but we are more keen to find a way to address the frustrations with scans on whole rather than enforce a her to be the answer to the problem, especially if the result would take away from Bangalore's personal play potential off her own smokes.

Another way to think of it, is that you get free time back for less effective grapples.
Pathfinder's original cooldown was very short and brought very overpowered and unreadable mobility to his plays.
With his low cooldown, a good Pathfinder could fling into a fight wildly, and use it to immediately escape making him incredibly difficult to track and punish for more selfish and reckless plays.
However, when this was changed to a higher cooldown in order to balance those behaviours ...a faulty/short grapple was now punished severely and Pathfinder was forced to wait over half a minute to recover.
The current version was made to ensure the more balanced cooldown stayed in play to combat those exploitative and unreadable situations, but allow shorter/failed grapples to refund sooner.
You get to make your skilled play to dive or escape, but if you mess it up - you can likely get it back in time to make another play soon.
The idea of a tactical lowering its...

You'll have to wait to see what each new season holds I'm afraid, but Support Legends are one of the more difficult roles to bring to Apex without over-indexing in healing and resets that make fights drag on and upset the already high TTK of the game.

That being said, we do want to bring a more balanced roster of class roles to the table in the future at some point.

The weapon-focused passives exist to encourage their use, and make them feel like an interesting choice while playing as a character with an affinity for them.

There's never a penalty for not picking one up - but the act of playing that character seeds that option for a minor gain so that when you come across that weapon type, you make a consideration you might not as a different Legend, and encourages the idea of playing more towards the style/identity of the Legend.

With Rampart, it can make spotting an LMGs a more attractive option to play into the spray.
With Maggie, the shotgun bonus encourages you to think up-close and personal.
With Vantage, the passive encourages the idea of long-range to gain the intel and bullet drop.

So, in short, the character's passive promotes the identity of that Legend, without shackling you to that choice.
They're meant to be a boon for players who like that playstyle. Will we alter how they work in the future...

We are actively looking into the frustration that can come from these abilities and finding ways to reduce it without crippling the identity of the Legends who wield them.

Rampart's identity is built around LMGs, and her passive was meant to reflect that synergy and provide incentive when opting into that style.

This topic has been discussed before, especially back when we were looking at ways to empower Rampart (when her effective pick and win rates were low).
But the passive was never the aspect holding her back so we opted to invest more in the core parts of her kit to bring meaningful change.

In the end, appending the passive to other weapon types meant that it took away meaningful choice from the player.
If you just get it on ALL the good weapons, it doesn't carry the same meaning - you're just always better, and you still always pick up your favourite R-301 like you do with other Legends.
If it's tied to LMGs... they are special. And you make an active decision to wield a Rampart-special - We felt that choice/feeling was important to maintain.
Could this passive be extended in other ways in the future to prov...

When we release a new Legend, the designer creates the unique trackers for that Legend, and "Bullets Fired" was chosen for Sheila.
It's possible we could add this tracker in the future, but it might not retro-actively count your Sheila kills to-date.
Glad you're enjoying her!

Early in Seer's development we actually prototyped giving enemies feedback when the heartbeat locked on - however, given that it was tied to Seer's camera movement and actions it became an irritation to have any notification propagate to other clients and clouded other audio/scan combat information that actively affected the player. It also angered Seer teammates to have enemies jump on them because the Seer was just "looking around" and proc'd the intel to the opponents.

We even had the heartbeat play in the enemy player's head at one point that told them they were being tracked - it was terrifying, and induced panic in players to feel constantly haunted by this presence, so we backed away from it.

Given that the information was limited to Seer himself and not shared intel with the team, we opted for more subtle feedback (audio cue, eye glow), which worked well and played into his fantasy of Ambush Artist - seeking out opponents for his team and then using his abi...

We understand the frustrations around Legend abilities that scan and their tactical dominance at higher levels of play.
Some of these abilities, however, are core to the play patterns and identities of the Legends themselves so it's not a simple task to address.
We are actively looking into it, and playtesting potential iterations, but we want to be comfortable with changes that reduce the frustration without reducing the value of these Legends in the squad before any release.