Respawn Entertainment has announced that it intends to start banning players who are guilty of “piggybacking” in its hit free-to-play title, Apex Legends.
Piggybacking is when players get into matches but don’t actually participate, leaving their teammates to carry them so they can level up and reap rewards without having to do anything. According to Respawn, this includes not collecting any weapons throughout the course of a match, not firing any shots, dealing damage, etc.
A Reddit post by Community Manager, Jay Frechette, seems to suggest that piggybacking has become a serious issue, prompting the developer to consider banning players.
“We had been seeing some feedback from players around this and have been doing some internal investigations looking at game data to understand how many of the matches being played are affected by this behavior,” wrote Frechette. “After looking at the data and internal discussions, we’ve decided that in the future we’ll start instituting temp bans for players that exhibit piggybacking behavior and extreme cases could lead to a permanent ban.”
Frechette added that Respawn’s new policy of disciplining piggybacking players will not come into effect immediately as the developer wanted to give people a chance to “adjust that behavior” first.
Elsewhere, Respawn said that it’s also working on a fix for Apex Legends crashing on the PlayStation 4. The issue was caused by a recent update and is triggered by the following actions:
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If you’ve earned the Banner Card and hover over it in the customization menus.
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Viewing your Banner Card, squad mate’s, or the champion’s banner in the intro or on the in-world screens.
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Inspecting someone who has the card equipped by right-clicking a friend in the lobby.
A temporary fix has already been deployed while the developer works on a proper resolution.
We’ll update our readers when the patch goes live.
[Source: Reddit]
