Fighting on the Apex Legends ranked ladder is probably how most players play Respawn’s battle royale, but the experience varies greatly. Ranked is plagued by cheaters, especially at higher levels, matchmaking can be iffy, and there’s nothing worse than a long queue before you can even play. The ranked rules also change greatly from season to season, as the devs tinker with the formula to try to craft the perfect competitive mode.

For many players, myself included, Ranked Reloaded was a highlight, as it placed an emphasis on placement rather than just kills, meaning that matches were more tactical and random teammates were a little less aggressive. Respawn’s design director Evan Nikolich disagrees, and feels that those changes were “not healthy” for the game, so Season 17’s ranked mode is an iteration on the simplification that followed Ranked Reloaded, and “the first of many changes that are coming this year.”

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The biggest focus this time around is on matchmaking, and ensuring that lobbies are as balanced and fair as possible. There’s a new MMR system, the biggest change to which is that it takes into account pre-made squads “to balance for competitive advantages”. So if you’re three-stacking with friends, expect to be fighting other teams, not just groups of solos with poor comms and worse synergy. Nikolich hopes this will make the solo queue experience much better, but reiterates that if you really want to try for Predator, there’s only so much the MMR can do, and you might be best off finding some teammates at the highest level. Respawn’s challenge will be keeping queue times low while sticking to this plan.

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This will be aided by provisional matches at the start of each season, which will help to place players at a rank approximate to their skill level early doors. There are no more splits, so there won’t be the frantic climb midway through the season, either. While World’s Edge will dominate public matches in Season 17 thanks to its new makeover, ranked will rotate between Kings Canyon, World’s Edge, and Olympus, and will change mid-season despite the lack of a split.

There’s a stronger focus on winning matches than in the current season, but not to the extent of Ranked Reloaded. Entry cost is now static no matter your rank level, and placement points are consistent at each level. You’ll get bonus Ladder Points (LP, the new name for RP) for kills, assists, MMR performance in relation to your ladder level, and how challenging of a match you were in.

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The change from RP to LP changes little, but it’s also been decoupled from MMR. Your skill is no longer tied to your rank, it’s now a hidden stat, which experience design director Aaron Rutledge believes will not only make for fairer matches, but also help combat cheaters.

“The matchmaker will build games based on skill, not purely on your ladder placement,” Rutledge explains. “So cheaters can no longer sandbag their points to go stomp on lower skill players.”

The team has also been working on new detection methods and will ensure repeated ban waves to keep on top of the cheating problem. A few other changes will help Respawn here, such as increasing the level requirement to play ranked from 25 to 50. This will slow down cheaters, give the detection team more time to find them, and also make it more difficult for smurfs to ruin low ranked games.

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The ranked changes also eliminate collusion, otherwise known as kill farming. You now only score KP for unique kills, so those squads holed up deep in the zone surrounded by Wattson fences will have an impossible task cheating the system.

Rutledge also explains that recent DDOS attacks in high level games were actually the result of an exploit, rather than an attack, which let bad actors ruin matches for their opponents. The hotfix to address this issue has already gone live, as has a patch to improve game audio, which seems to have deployed successfully and improved things.

An image of Valkyrie's Heirloom from Apex Legends, a silver and golden spear with clouds etched onto the tip of the blade.

Rutledge emphasises that the team is “always actively working to address and improve these issues,” but they can’t always explain every element of their anti-cheat tactics. “We always investigate reports of any kind of collusion that impacts the competitive integrity at the high end of the game.”

As Nikolich points out, this is just the start of Respawn’s ranked changes, and the developer will continue tinkering for seasons to come. Some changes seem minor, like changing RP to LP and forgoing the mid-season split, whereas others seem pretty major. The hidden MMR stat could turn matchmaking on its head, and it remains to be seen how well the developer will balance solo players and pre-made squads off the bat. However, the most welcome change in Apex Legends Season 17 is a more robust anti-cheat system that stamps down on aimbotters and colluders.

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