Apex Legends is testing out punishment for players leaving matches early

Last week’s rollout of the Apex Legends 1.1 update introduced a sneaky new feature, albeit only for a little while: players leaving early are going to be punished for their actions.

Several players noticed a “leaving early” penalty for leaving one of the battle royale shooter’s matches too quickly, seeking no doubt to punish people for causing the serious imbalance that can result from early departures.

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It’s a fair change because your squad is basically dead on arrival if you land seperate or someone angrily disconnects before you touch the ground.

The feature was canned because it wasn’t actually supposed to be in the game yet. Speaking on Reddit, Respawn’s community manager Jayfresh wrote on Reddit:

“So internally, we have been working on and testing this feature but it wasn’t our intention or plan to have it go live with the update that went out today. There was a piece of script that was missing and caused the leaving match early penalty to be turned on when it shouldn’t be. That’s why it wasn’t in the patch notes.”

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“We updated the script, tested with QA and it’s now disabled for all platforms. We don’t have an ETA for if or when this would come out for real. Apologies for the confusion.”

This penalty isn’t planned to be applied for players who are actually dead, or players who don’t have a full team. This should mean that teams who already have an early leaver won’t be penalised if they just scurry back to the lobby.

As JayFresh says, there’s no word on when or even if this feature will make it to full release, but it shows the continued commitment to making the game a bit nicer to play.

Playing Apex Legends? Would you want a system to punish early leavers? Let us know on Twitter at @TrustedReviews