Apex Legends players are reverse-boosting in Ranked Arenas & it’s ruining matchmaking

Apex Legends players have been trying to skew the numbers in their favor for Ranked Arenas, and it’s been ruining matchmaking in more ways than one.

Predator lobbies, where the very best in Apex are meant to play, have been seeing a rise in ‘reverse-boosting,’ where players intentionally lose multiple games to lower their MMR — giving them a much bigger payout when they eventually try and win.

In the ‘give-and-take’ structure of matchmaking ratings, the goal of reverse-boosting is to trick the system to give you more Apex Points for an Arena victory after convincing it that your previous performance was terrible by comparison.

Since your MMR was lowered in the losing streak, the game will be more charitable, shortly after, per win since it’s registering that you’re playing well above your MMR. The effects of this are more pronounced in Predator lobbies where people are fighting for placement rather than rank.

Reddit user ‘dbattlefront’ saw this happen in their game where they were getting an easy win, since the other team had resigned themselves to exploit the system.

“The sad state of Apex Arena Ranked,” dbattlefront said. “They are purposely killing themselves in order to lower their MMR which will give you a net positive of points once you win. Great competitive integrity.”

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The user went in-depth about why the practice is so damaging to matchmaking, noting just how much cheaters have to gain from throwing their Arenas games.

“What they are doing is purposely losing in order to trick the system into giving them more points,” they explained. “Typically if you win in Pred you should gain anywhere from +12 to +50-ish, but they will now gain 100-150 points for winning because they lost on purpose beforehand.”

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More players believe they saw this happening in lower ranks too, where it’s equally as damaging but cheaters won’t get rewarded as much.

Other than the report function, it’s unclear how Respawn would be able to stop this. But players think something should be done to keep the competitive integrity in Apex Legends’ ranked modes intact.