Apex Legends dev responds to “broken” Ranked matchmaking issues

Alex Garton
Apex Legends Pathfinder Season 11

An Apex Legends dev has addressed the issues players are having in Ranked when it comes to consistently finding balanced matches.

While a lot of the community enjoy playing Apex Legends casually and stick to normal matches, others prefer to head into the Ranked mode for a more competitive experience.

Depending on their overall performance in a game, competitors will either lose or gain points, moving them up and down the various Ranked tiers on the ladder.

Although this system in theory should place players of a similar skill level in the same matches, a lot of the higher tiers have significantly fewer players, meaning they’re often placed in lower-tier matches to fill spots.

This has led to a lot of criticism from players towards Respawn about the Ranked matchmaking system and luckily, a dev has finally addressed the issue.

Apex Legends Seer Caustic
Apex Legends Season 11 went live on November 2.

Apex dev explains why Ranked matches are hard to balance

Despite changes coming to Ranked in Season 11 update, a lot of the community are frustrated with the teammates they’re being matched with in their Ranked games.

According to them, they’re either being placed with top-tier players way above their skill level or squadmates that are inexperienced and clearly new to the game.

In response, a dev took to Twitter to explain that MMR and a player’s rank are completely separate, with MMR being hidden in the background and difficult for players to track. This means that although an opponent may be Ranked higher, their MMR may have dropped after playing poorly for a long period of time.

Not only that, they outlined that matching top-tier players with each other is incredibly difficult, as there just aren’t enough competitors at those ranks to consistently fill matches. So, that’s where the MMR system comes into play, delegating high-rank players with a low MMR into lower-tier games.

This response was posted to the Apex Legends subreddit, with some users suggesting that a solo and premade queue should be added to help balance matches: “Good reason to have a separate rank and lobbies for solo and premade.”

While this suggestion received a lot of upvotes, some players were concerned that separating the community even further may make matchmaking even worse, particularly at higher ranks.

Either way, the fact that a Respawn dev responded to the problem shows they’re aware that Ranked matchmaking may need tweaking, but as showcased by the response, it’s not going to be easy to find a solution.

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About The Author

Alex Garton is a former writer for Dexerto. He has a BA in English Literature and has been a Games Writer for over four years. He has previously written for Gfinity and TOP10Esports. Specializing in Call of Duty and Apex Legends, he also enjoys diving into new releases to create informative guides.