Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment has detailed some of the changes coming with the game’s next update, including new anti-piggybacking measures. In the context of team shooters like Apex Legends, piggybackers are players who don’t participate meaningfully in the game, collecting XP and rewards for their teammates' hard work. According to Respawn, they’ll soon be handing out temporary bans for piggybacking behavior and may even issue permanent bans in “extreme cases.”

　　Unsurprisingly, the proposed rules are causing some controversy, as a lot of players end up piggybacking without really intending to. Personally, I’m not great at multiplayer shooters – I’ll admit, the couple times my team came out on top in Apex Legends, I didn’t rack up a lot of kills, although I tried to contribute by pinging stuff and reviving teammates. It seems like there should be a more nuanced solution here than just handing out bans.

　　Respawn is also working on a variety of other tweaks, including a fix to a vexing hit registration bug, online performance improvements, and more. Get the full rundown, below.

　　Hit Registration

　　While searching for possible explanations for this bug, we have been able to reproduce and locally fix many cases of incorrect hit registration, mostly related to mismatches between the way the game client and server pose characters in their animations, but also caused by various other factors. The next patch will address these issues. However, we don’t believe that we are out of the woods yet. There is still more work to be done, but we believe that the fixes coming next patch will be a good improvement.

　　Fortified Bug

　　This is an issue that came up in the balance changes we made to Gibraltar and Caustic. We have a fix that will be deployed in the next patch.

　　Slow Mo At Start Of Match

　　By adding additional tracking and telemetry to our dedicated servers we have identified a number of machines that were passing our health checks but actually had faulty hardware. We have removed these from our server pool, and match quality should be noticeably improved in all datacenters. We are continuing to profile our servers to catch hitches, persistent slow-mo, and other game quality issues. We have a few server optimizations rolling out but there are many more areas of work left and as we identify these, we will be rolling out optimizations and fixes and keeping players updated.

　　Audio

　　Two areas we can confirm will be addressed in the next patch:

　　Overall audio performance [addressing sounds dropping out / stuttering / distortion]Footsteps audioPiggybacking

　　We had been seeing some feedback from players around this and have been doing some internal investigations looking at game data to understand how many of the matches being played are affected by this behavior. After looking at the data and internal discussions, we’ve decided that in the future we’ll start instituting temp bans for players that exhibit piggy-backing behavior and extreme cases could lead to a permanent ban. This change will not be immediate but wanted to give a heads up to players so you can adjust that behavior.

　　Apex Legends is available now on PC, Xbox One, and PS4. A release date hasn’t been set for the game’s next update (ver. 5.10), but you can expect it soon.