Apex Legends new Team Deathmatch mode already has a huge problem

Apex Legends Season 16 brought the long-awaited Team Deathmatch mode to the battle royale, but there’s already a huge issue.

Update: Respawn have since issued a hotfix changing the mode to one round instead of three, and have raised the required kills to 50 instead of 30. However, many of the complaints from players listed in the article below haven’t yet been fixed.

Season 16 of Apex Legends removed Arenas in favor of Team Deathmatch, a 6v6 mode that will likely be familiar to players with a gaming history in FPS titles. 

The mode splits matches up into rounds, with each team needing a total of 30 kills to take that round. The first team to win two rounds wins the match.

After a few weeks, TDM will be replaced by a Mixtape playlist, which will cycle through past LTMs to offer variety to the Apex experience. For now, though, players can drop into some respawn action in the vein of other FPS titles. 

However, just hours after TDM and Season 16 dropped, a pretty major issue with the new mode was discovered. 

Apex Legends TDM mode suffers leaver issue

Highlighting the problem in a Reddit post, one player asked: “Who the hell came up with the idea of round-based TDM? The mode is barely out and people are already quitting en masse once they start losing.”

Attached was an image of a TDM match scoreboard, showing an enemy team being outplayed with only three players remaining. 

In short, if enemy teams lose early rounds of TDM and look set to lose the match, it looks like many players are just backing out to avoid the loss. 

Who the hell came up with the idea of round based TDM? The mode is barely out and people are already quitting en masse once they start losing. from apexlegends

The issue has been compounded by the fact that TDM matches do not end if the entire enemy team loses.

Players who have forced all opponents into quitting are thus left in an empty lobby with time winding down or are forced to quit, lose their progress and start a new match. 

So… maybe a slight problem with TDM at the moment – if the whole enemy team leaves, you kinda have nothing to do… and the game doesn’t end 😅

— Apex Legends News (@alphaINTEL) February 15, 2023

As of the publication of this article, Respawn have not responded to the problems but, given the way in which they threaten to affect every TDM match, we do expect a hasty patch.

Arenas had a similar problem at launch, before a leavers penalty was added, so a penalty of sorts could work here too.

It will also presumably need to end matches if all enemy players quit or make it possible for players to be added to ongoing matches.