Apex Legends is changing how kills & deaths work for ranked quitters

Respawn is changing how Apex Legends kills, assists, and deaths work for early lobby quitters after three years of player demands, with ambitions to ship the change in the battle royale’s Season 12 update.

The Apex Legends developers are constantly looking for ways to improve their flagship battle royale, especially when it comes to the game’s ranked lobbies.

This season, Escape, the devs have taken the needle to Kill Points and Ranked Points, which sit at the core of their competitive ladders. Starting from the November 2 update, Apex Legends players will no longer have to score high kills to max out RP gains and rake in meaningful progress.

The devs have more plans to improve the system too, and have another big issue in their targets ⁠— as Season 12 arrives on the horizon, Respawn reveals they’re looking into changing how rage quitting will affect kills, assists, and deaths.

For the battle royale’s first ten seasons, quitting an Apex Legends lobby after you’ve been downed by not yet killed would mean you aren’t marked as “dead.”

That would mean two things. One, it would save players getting a death marked on their service records, keeping their KDAs high. It would also deny kills and assists to the players that had beaten them, meaning if an opponent disconnected before you could finish them off, you were denied Ranked Points.

This issue has been a major sticking point for years.

All that should be in the past by the time Season 12 rolls around, however, Apex tech designer ‘Exgeniar’ told players on Reddit on November 2. Starting from the next season, these downs will still count as kills and deaths.

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Respawn Exgeniar confirmed: “I have a change [in the works] that makes quitting Apex Legends lobbies count as a death [and] kill or assist next season.”

⁠They revealed Respawn has also been considering another change too: adding in more Ranked Points for any “knocks” players may pull off before they die.

The Apex Legends developers have major concerns around how that slight change would work if added into the current system though, especially relating to the fact that points would then be obtainable post-death.

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“The RP system with that implemented would encourage degenerative cases,” Exgeniar explained, “which we would need to solve [to] consider that.”