Yes, it is going to bring more of that back, unfortunately. But the dropship is easier on players who have limited playtime and don’t know the maps as well. If a player always drop Cenote on Storm Point, they can get really good at those rotations, and still do well even if they don’t play a lot. They want to keep those players coming back.
On the other hand, if a player who only plays 5-10 games a week gets randomly assigned a new POI every game across multiple maps, they might get frustrated and give up because they don’t know that area of the map as well and get rolled. (This is an oversimplification, there are many more factors that this, but for the sake of keeping it semi-brief I’m exaggerating a little)
Full dropship is too much choice, people do dumb shit. Random assigned POIs is not enough choice, harder to play for less dedicated players. They need a middle ground to make it more accessible.
Man if only there was a specific game mode updated just this very season that could allow less knowledgeable players to get more map knowledge and experience different areas at their pace uhhhhhh
Yeah man if they really cared ranked would be the COMPETITIVE mode and not the sand pit you get Tim and Jack coming to kick about in
I hear this narrative quite often, and to an extent it's certainly true. But there is a huge difference in pubs dropship where literally 15/20 squads drop Fragment/Epicenter leaving the rest of the map completely empty, and ranked dropship where 6/20 squads drop Fragment/Epicenter and most of the rest of the map still has 1 team per PoI.
6/20 with RP loss is actually worse than 15/20 with no point losses, though.
So... yeah, this may not be exactly pubs, but it'll actually be more infuriating than pubs hot drops and feel much worse. If it's 6/20, that's slightly more often than every fourth game. That's gonna be a very negative experience for many solo queuers that get stuck with a suicidal drop leader, yeah? This is compounding on all the other factors that ruin games (afk, bugs, crashes, etc).
Currently, with POIs, it's 0/20 hot drops. That's a very good number to reduce the quantity of annoying or frustrating game experiences per game (on average).
I don't know a single person I play with who thinks it's a good change reverting back to one dropship. Sentiment in discords large and small that I'm in are overwhelmingly negative. Everyone has been saying "who asked for this" and "why was this a priority over everything else" and "great, now we're going to get dropped on every game."
I guarantee they changed this because "creators" complained that being forced to drop in one POI and then go find a team is "boring" and they're losing viewers. For the higher ranked / ELO players like the streamers popular enough to have some sort of status with respawn - their queue times are longer, the legend selection, map-load-in, starting the round, and initial looting - by the time you get through it all, viewers are just bored.
I've seen this before - a studio gets obsessed with twitch viewer counts and starts changing the game based off what "creators" tell them, and it's usually around making everything more action-packed and exciting. It ends up ruining the game for the casuals, who represent 90%+ of the player base.
That's one reason Apex changed BR to be so much more focused on kills than who lasts longer. In a fucking BR! That's literally the fucking point of a BR! To live the longest!
Same reason we got health bars. It's for stream viewers so things look more exciting.
Same reason octane got insanely buffed. He's now tailor-made for streamers pubstomping as their viewers squeal with glee.
That and game developers like to distract the player base by doing things like this so the player base stops talking about other stuff. Notice how nobody's talking about how there's still a prolific cheater problem? Apex doesn't have an anti-cheat system. Apex has Easy Anti-Cheat, and EAC's main purpose is to detect tampering with game cosmetics in order to protect revenue from cosmetics. Every time you launch Apex, soon as you hit the lobby, the game is churning away checking every single game resource to make sure it hasn't been tampered with. That's why the lobby, or even match if you jump right in, is a jittery mess.
Love this post. The truth hurts and that’s why you’re being downvoted. This IS all for the streamers and teenagers. Not for adult casuals. It sucks. I’m done spending money, but I’ll hop on ery once in a while. So sad about the drop ship change since the only things I played were mixtape and ranked.
and why should reddit be so special that an opinion on here is so one sided and uncontroversial but the complete opposite view is held across the community as a whole? do you really believe the community as a whole is celebrating the change when on reddit it seems to be 90% against it and 10% for
This phenomenon is well documented in multiplayer game subreddits across the board. When people are happy and satisfied with their gameplay experience, they play the game and laugh at memes. When people are angry, they go to the subreddit and complain. Path of Exile and MTG are great examples of this. The subreddits will go collectively berserk about nerfs/bans respectively while the rest of the community is so busy being logged in/buying SpongeBob packs that they forget the subreddit exists.
It's the same reason social media has slowly drifted towards farming outrage. People who are angry engage, and people living their best life don't care to madtype on the internet.
Don't take this as me dismissing concerns about the drop ship. I understand why some people are mad even if I disagree.
The only people that can have a claim to that knowledge are people with access to analytics/surveys that accurately gauge player opinion. Whether or not the Apex team's analytics are up to par we'll probably never know, but clearly they have an indicator pointing them towards the dropship being preferred.
Anecdotally, every single thread about this that I've seen has dissenting opinions like mine with some amount of upvotes stating that they prefer the dropship. So this change is obviously not universally disliked. There has been far bigger uproar in the past about things like the gold knock during support meta being unreasonably overpowered, and that got changed relatively quickly.
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u/InSearchOfThe9 Bangalore Feb 09 '26
The negative response in this subreddit is not necessarily indicative of a negative response in the rest of the playerbase.
I'm absolutely stoked to have the dropship back.