RobotHavGunz

i've flagged to anti-cheat team.

Yes. Let me see if I can find out when that was/is. I'm not on the rendering team.

you can check DX12 in the EA app or Steam - updated May 2024. https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/16mwzaz/dev_team_update_directx_12_rhi/

Hard to give any feedback on "smoothness." Could even be related to your own network/ISP behavior.

I'm so sorry this happened. *if* you encounter this type of behavior and are able to get a recording of any of it, we can take action. In general, it's hard for voice chat to take action absent evidence (unlike text chat), though if you do report them it is followed up on; if there's a lot of reports for the same player(s), I think that makes a difference. But if you are able to get a recording of it, the CS team can take action on that. I know that's not necessarily the first thing on your mind when going through this.

fixed internally. should be going out soon.

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.

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...

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....

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...

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.

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 ot...

We have a fix coming in the 23.1 release.

The back story on this bug is actually quite funny. I'm one of the primary engineers on weapon cosmetics. During some random testing that required like super slo-mo playback, I noticed that when you do a dry reload, there's still a cartridge in the magazine, which of course there shouldn't be. Turns out this was universally true. There was just one model for the mags, and they all had cartridges in them, so we could use the same mag model for the ejected mag as well as for the new one. But that's just ... wrong. So we started fixing this, so a dry reload has a fully empty mag and a wet reload will have a cartridge in the mag. We're still fixing all the guns and not sure of final ETA. So if you dry reload and still see a cartridge in the ejected mag, that's why. Might also be some animation work on some guns needed as well. But we're getting there. But it is something we're fixing. Anyway, in the process of fixing this and setting u...

So I'll share a movement story that goes way back to TF. Hilariously, it's actually captured in the MSFT support threads - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox/forum/all/the-dead-zone/389fd425-1184-4b27-b7c3-157ed72762c0

Here are examples of the dead zones on the controller. The dead zone is on EVERY game on the Xbox one, besides Titanfall.

This is absolutely true. Microsoft actually had some real problems with the outer sections of the thumb sticks on the Xbox One. In the most notable example, the input map was a square rather than a circle, so the very outer edges of the sticks just got lost. It was actually Respawn devs who discovered this, because they kept running in...

Thank you so much for this. These posts mean so much. I've shared it a bunch internally because this is just such a wonderful sentiment.

Devs do actually want players to feel rewarded

Yes! Yes we do!!

Katar - three customizations in total across all legends:

For example:

• Set 1 - Wraith, Horizon, Caustic
• Set 2 - Lifeline, Gibby
• Set 3 - Maggy, Seer

if you update set 1, those changes will apply to ALL legends that have set 1 equipped.

Karambit - any legend can equip any one of the colors you own. No swapping required.

For example:

• Lifeline - green
• Wraith, Bangalore - red
• Maggy - blue
• Caustic, Catalyst - grey
• Seer, Bloodhound - yellow

Changes you make to one legend will have no effect on other legends.

Customizable weapons are definitely on the table. See the Serpent's Sting with the kill counter. Will we do another Katar-esque weapon? I really don't know. We're experimenting a lot right now and seeing what player's actually seem to want. I certainly hope we do another weapon like the Katar where you can mix-and-match - and I definitely built the system expecting we would. But it's really up to players to help guide us there.

Color customization is super interesting. I wouldn't be allowed to say if it's something we're actively exploring, but I doubt it would surprise anyone if I said it's something that we've discussed. I know that's a sh*tty non-answer. But also hope you can understand why I couldn't just say yes/no.

I knew a response like was coming, but I nevertheless want to take some time to answer this. As I said, the overwhelming majority of those 18 months was creative work - concept art, 3d models, vfx, animation, sound fx, etc. These are not the folks who work on any of what players rightly pinpoint as core issues. An animator isn't going to work on anti-cheat. A VFX artist isn't going to dive into the nuances of matchmaking. A concept artist isn't going to unravel why footstep audio sometimes doesn't play.

Even among technical folks, there's specialization. Most of my expertise within Apex is on meta-game systems - challenges, cosmetics, stats, progression systems, etc. I would like to believe I'm capable enough to contribute in other areas - and I certainly have, but most of my expertise is in these systems. I've done work across a lot of different parts of the game - I was part of the team that made core changes to Ranked to make it easier for us to flag and revok...

Just to give some context on the Karambit vs the Katar from a development standpoint. The Katar was a close to 18mo project that necessitated building a lot of entirely new systems from the ground up. But most of the work in that time was creative work, making all the unique variants. I was the technical lead on that project, and it was arguably one of the most interesting things I've worked on in my four years on Apex. But it was also resource intensive enough - especially in terms of things that don't automatically scale like modeling, vfx, animation, etc - that it wasn't clearly worth it to you the players to do again versus putting those resources elsewhere.

The tech is there to have made the Karambit customizable like the Katar. But the actual humans who do the creative work of making those intricate designs do not scale in the same way as the code. A lot of the tech we built for the Katar is being reused by some of these newer Legend-agnostic heirlooms. But a lot of i...

all the time. this community is invaluable in so many ways. Speaking for myself, there have been numerous times when folks here have helped me rapidly debug an issue, allowing me to fix it much faster than I might have otherwise. Again speaking just personally, the hardest part is when I'm asked a question that I know the person asking knows I can't really answer. Absolutely I understand the frustration with certain things. I don't know what a question like, "are you going to fix [insert really big and complex issue here]?" is meant to achieve. But I also feel bad not addressing those questions, because I don't think we should shy away from those discussions. Those are hard conversations that require a lot of grace and empathy from both sides, and that is just really hard on the internet.

Yes. That's what I was referring to here:

The bug I remember was the BR win streak badge counted arenas by accident

That's the only big I remember with any of the streak badges