Scriptacus

Post history pre June 2020 if you want verification.

I can't give you a link, but I can say as a former dev: As of season 4 the chance was the same as it was at launch, and it was significantly less than 1 in 500.

It's technically possible they've changed it since then, but if they did I can't imagine them making it more likely.

Respawn wasn't your regular set of game developers and resignations, especially from the core team, were far from normal up until the last few years; the core design and engineering teams had been together for various lengths going all the way back to the studio '2015', working on Metal of Honor (for EA ironically), Call of Duty through Modern Warfare 2, and both Titanfall and Titanfall 2. I'd encourage you to look at the credits for those games to get an idea of just how much talent was lost in just a few short years.

Everyone had their own reasons for leaving, and the aquisition by EA was certainly a factor for some.

Source: 5 years at IW, 10 years at Respawn

Just to clarify it was never post-launch content for TF2; it was part of the new idea exploration that took place while TF2 post launch content was wrapping up. There were numerous small groups of devs working on many such experiments simultaneously, but all were in the context of possible content for TF3.

Regarding TF3; I think what people don't realize is that the team that made TF/TF2 (and COD through MW2) is all but gone from Respawn at this point. (it would be interesting to see a comparison of credits vs. "where are they now?") If Respawn were (or are) making it, it would almost certainly be a new take by a new group of developers. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be good, but it definitely wouldn't be the same.

Re the turnover, you're correct. The Titanfall/Apex team didn't have high turnover, with most of the MoH and COD (up through MW2) team working together all the way through Apex. That said, the reasons for the departures vary from dev to dev and can't really be attributed to any one thing. They're also not as recent/clustered as folks here seem to think, it's been a slow burn for the past year or two.

What likely happened here is that, from the server's perspective, you took damage from the other player before your shot was fired.

The issue is that taking damage has secondary effects including tagging (movement slowdown) and view punch, both of which can potentially affect your aim. Clients basically run in the future, where you're predicting your own aim and shots, but you can't predict damage that you take since that happens in real time on the server, and the effects from it are sent to the client after the fact.

Example; you fired your weapon on frame 650, but the server is still only on frame 645 (your prediction has you running 5 frames in the future in this example). The server gets a weapon firing message from your opponent on frame 648 and verifies (via reconciliation) that the shot did indeed hit you on frame 648. The server then applies the secondary effects from the damage, which include things that affect your aim. The server receives the mess...

The point of scalable design is to have a system that is flexible enough to allow you to scale up your system beyond what was previously needed.

It literally does that. As stated earlier the design scales vertically (not ideal for visuals, but perfectly functional) to handle up to 12 players (which is still 6 more than would ever be required), which is the same number you've used above to deem the V formation as scalable.

It was as scalable as it needed to be, given that to date more than 4 indicators have never been needed. When you examine the purpose of the indicators, which is to convey intent in a "one legend per squad" environment, the range of up to 4 covers 2/3rd's of the possibilities; players start with only 6 legends unlocked and you need to handle the case of a full squad in that state. Any more players than that and the "one legend per squad" restriction no longer works.
Spending effort to support 5 and 6 man squads wouldn't have been worthwhile.

Your assumptions about "basic UI element scaling" aren't correct; there are quirks and intricacies to RUI (the proprietary system used to make most widgets in Apex) that you're not aware of. For better or worse, systems like RUI are designed to functional and extremely performant before being unified and easy to work with like most web standards. Even something as simple as passing in an additional integer might push a complex...

But you already did :)

TLDR: /u/Sniper0087 is correct about scalability. Also, Apex was 3 players by design from the start.

Mate, why would they leave a space specifically for 4 people?

The UI indicators are the size they are for a few reasons; the less of the character portrait that is covered by the number the better, and the remaining space covered the most likely case for an LTM or special mode before requiring an additional row or a redesign.

What if they decide to make a mode with 6 people then?

Go vertical, or redesign.

This isn't scalable design, the only thing it could possibly used for is having a single extra person. It's literally just likely to be a leftover from the game having 4 man squads in the testing phases....

That's super weird. That said, you'll need to ping one of the other devs (I've moved to a new opportunity elsewhere)

When exactly was this match played?

The way it works is that you send an input to the game to "fire". That input is processed on both your client, and the server (also known as prediction. The processing on the server is slightly delayed due to ping, which is where lag compensation comes in, but that's another topic)

The client runs all of the same logic that the server runs for your position, the angle you fired at, projectile velocity, enemy location, etc... and determines that you hit your target. The client then plays blood effects, hit sounds, etc... Meanwhile, the server is running the same logic with the same parameters, and it's expected that it will get the same result. Except with this bug, one of the variables used by the server and the client for the calculations was different, meaning the server was getting a different result, leading to no-regs. In APEX (and a lot of other games) certain parts of a hit are client side, (blood, audio) and certain parts are server side (crosshair "X" and dam...

That's your connection, not the server. The spam of text and the drop from 20 to 18 squads left when your connection comes back is because everyone else on the server was not affected. It's also why your teammate was already in the process of responding to the fact that you were downed.

What region are you in? You might consider dropping to the main menu and trying a different, more populated data center. Your ping won't be as good, but you'll be more likely to find matches to help get out of the newbie pool.

How long has the queue been taking for you?

What about the the one at the top? (90 Days Remaining) :)

Thanks for the report, I believe there is a known desync issue in the update causing this that is currently in the process of being fixed.

Thanks for your feedback!

> But at the end of the day most players still seem to come back to the same 3-4 out of 23 guns.

Agreed that this is how things end up playing out. Ultimately I don't know that it's possible get people using a significantly larger portion of the available weapons; the top-tier players tend to home in on whats the best, and all of the other players end up taking cues from them. We do try to move the meta around each season with different hopups and various balance tweaks of course. It's difficult to push on skills too much, especially when a high skill ceiling is involved. I think the Charge Rifle is a illustrative of that... it was actually fairly trash in low/mid skilled players hands, but a player who "got it" was just completely oppressive. We could look more at "kiss/curse" style mechanics, such as your Skull Piercer suggestion, but the same problem mentioned above tends to rear it's head there too. In the hands of most players ...

> But isn't that exactly what's still happening with guns in Apex?

Not really. Instead of a small base pitch/yaw offset with high randomness, Apex has hand tuned recoil patterns where each bullet applies a specific pitch and yaw offset amount from it's part of the pattern, with a small variance. In the editor it looks like a squiggly connect the dots with little boxes around the dots (where the box represents the variance).

> Back in S0-S1 it was possible to laser people at long range with the R-301 if you knew how to control it, but then its recoil randomness was increased in a patch in order to "nerf" it, meaning that it's now very dependant on pure RNG.

"Recoil randomness" is such a broad term and one that is often incorrectly translated to "random recoil". The randomness that you're talking about applies slightly around each point in the overall pattern, but we tune the weapons to have minimal to no overlap between those points, meaning the overall...