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Apex Legends players want to boycott the upcoming Halloween event which is scheduled to drop later today. Players on multiple social media platforms are asking for a server health update and want Respawn Entertainment to focus on improving the health of the game instead. Following the launch of the latest ranked split in September, players ran into issues when queuing for matches and there were instances of servers crashing.
This is not the first time that players have asked Respawn to cancel events or other content in favor of addressing the game’s issues, and developers have shut down such demands in the past. It remains to be seen if a patch similar to Rainbow Six’s “Operation Health” shall become a reality for Apex Legends players.
Why do Apex Legends players want to boycott Apex Legends’ Halloween event?
A post was made on the Apex Legends subreddit asking others to not purchase any skins in the upcoming Apex Legends Halloween event. The post gained a lot of traction and players seem to be interested in getting Respawn/EA’s attention to focus on server issues and bugs instead of focusing on skins and cosmetics. The post claims “You aren't missing out on anything if you aren't spending money for a week or two. It won't hurt you, but missing out on two weeks of revenue might be enough for EA/Respawn to finally do something.”
The post brought up the 90-100% GPU usage issue which has been plaguing players for multiple seasons. Earlier this year, explosive holds had to be disabled due to server crashes. Each major update leads to server issues for the first few days as the game’s servers are seemingly unable to keep up with the high influx of players.
An “Operation Health” for Apex Legends seems unlikely
While a lot of players feel that the Apex Legends devs should focus on fixing the game’s servers instead of pushing out new content, it does not look like such demands can be met. Respawn Entertainment’s director of communications Ryan K. Rigney responded to fan concerns last month stating that “game developers are not villagers from Age of Empires that can be moved from content creation to bug fixing”.
He used Rainbow Six Siege’s "Operation Health" and the “Fix PUBG” projects as examples and claimed that they were marketing stunts. Rigney was a part of the Fix PUBG program and worked at PUBG Corp in 2018 before moving to Riot Games and eventually Respawn Entertainment.
