Apex Legends Will Eventually Penalize People Who Leave Early

There wasn’t a whole lot in Apex Legend's 1.1 update - a few bugfixes, a little bit of balancing, and one brand-new bug that was quickly fixed - because for a brief time after 1.1 launched, players who quit the game early received a quickly-vanishing penalty for their actions, leaving many people confused as to what exactly was going on: after all, Apex Legends doesn’t have a system to punish early leavers…

…not yet, anyway.

Because as it turned out, what players were briefly experiencing was the premature release of a “leave busters” feature that, while not finished yet, will be implemented at some point in the future.

So internally, we have been working on and testing this feature but it wasn't our intention or plan to have it go live with the update that went out today. There was a piece of script that was missing and caused the leaving match early penalty to be turned on when it shouldn't be. That's why it wasn't in the patch notes.

We updated the script, tested with QA and it's now disabled for all platforms. We don't have an ETA for if or when this would come out for real. Apologies for the confusion.

It’s happened to just about everyone who’s played Apex Legends. One of their teammates leaves when you don’t drop immediately, or the second they die, or if you fail to grab their banner the moment their box spawns… no matter what causes it, it can be a huge hassle for the players left behind, who will be permanently handicapped by their lack of another teammate. Presumably, this will be less of an issue when free-for-all or duo modes are introduced, but for the time being it’s a pretty big issue, so it’s kind of appropriate there should be some kind of penalty for doing it… at least, doing it routinely.

Still, on Reddit, they clarified that there were times when you could leave early: if your team isn’t full (either you start with an incomplete team or someone leaves first) you could leave with no issue. Also, once your respawn timer reaches zero, you can leave for real too.

Sounds like it’ll be a welcome addition when or if it’s finally added to the game. Hopefully it’ll be soon.