In games of Apex Legends , I’ve found myself matched with profile names that are blatantly racist (they used workarounds to pass spam filters). Once, the first thing someone said was a sexual comment. I’ve been told I was trash for losing a fight by missing a shotgun shot. Random players frequently separate from their teammates, go AFK in the middle of a fight with no explanation and can be toxic in any number of other w

Video games should be fun. But issues with random players detract from the experience. It’s time for Respawn to step in and develop a strategy for dealing with players who can’t play with basic respect and dece

Skull Town and Thunderdome have been demolished and a new POI, Salvage, has been added. Salvage is a high-tier loot location with only a couple points of entry, so it is well protected, even though it's relatively small. Players also have access to a portion of the lab the Loba destroyed in Season 5 trai

As applied to randoms, this optional metric would be a terrific way to incentivize good behavior. Perhaps the result of numerous positive endorsements could be a guaranteed legendary item, a unique skydive emote or a special profile ba

Recently, one-time offer I was matched with someone whose name was a play on the coronavirus. Perhaps merely evidence of a juvenile sense of humor, it hits different when 23,000 people in your city have died of the vi

A video recently emerged on Reddit showing exactly how toxic random players can be. A player downs two enemies only to get knocked before a teammate kills the third. The teammates then refuse to revive the downed player. To see it and know there are few consequences for these actions is frustrating, to say the le

Let's take Apex Legends as an example. EA released a statement saying, " We’re contributing $1 million to organizations dedicated to the fight for racial justice in the U.S. and against discrimination around the world." They go on to say, "Beginning with the Equal Justice Initiative, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and with more partners to come, we are deepening our support of organizations working to stop systemic racial injustice, fight discrimination and protect human rights in the U.S. and beyo

The same goes for Riot Games, Ubisoft, and most other publishers. They've all released statements claiming to support black people and end racism, yet Africa isn't part of their plans and isn't worthy of their services. They may bring up the old argument about a lack of players and lack of infrastructure, but that's simply untrue. Africa has a large, vibrant gaming community who have to suffer from constant connectivity issues to follow their passion. Both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Service also have functioning data centers in Africa to facilitate gaming serv

The lack of servers creates a vicious cycle. Publishers don't have African servers because they think there aren't enough players, but without servers, how is the player base expected to grow? The impact of this policy has had a truly detrimental effect on the African gaming community. Many games have "World" Cups or "World" Championships, and it's evident that Africa isn't part of their "World." No matter how good African players are, there's no way of getting involved in many of the sanctioned leagues without moving to another contin

The easiest fix would be to play only with players one trusts. However, one key issue is that my friends range from far better to me to far worse than me, which poses challenges with skill-based matchmaking. Even though my K/D is below one and I have a win rate of 5 percent, squadding up with my higher-skill friends means there will almost certainly be Apex Predators in our lo

In a world that's somewhat grounded, the introduction of an ability that resurrects people is quite head-scratching. Tom Casiello, a writer for the game, was asked to provide a canonical explanation for the ability, but couldn't due to the explanation being tied to a future leg

Throughout the entertainment medium, you'll often find that artists and animators love to reference their favorite influences and inspirations via direct examples, or even sometimes as hidden easter eggs. Revenant happens to have a rarely occurring animation when summoning his Ultimate ability called Death Totem. He will do a series of hand signs that are directly from the famous manga and anime series Naruto . This makes perfect sense considering the Naruto franchise focuses on ninjas, which were a direct inspiration for Revenant's charac

In the past few weeks, I've twice watched someone back out of a game because I chose the character they wanted to play. Both times, it was because my game defaulted to the character because I didn't make a selection. In one instance, I even apologized after noticing the other player had wanted to be the character I had chosen, but the player backed out anyway. It's important to note that in Apex Legends , selection order is randomized. In both cases, my name popped up first on the selection menu, meaning I had every right to choose whichever character I wanted to play. Regardless, backing out for something so mundane is problematic because my team is forced to play the game as a squad of two up against squads of three, which makes the game much more diffic