Christmas is still a week away, but Respawn Entertainment is already giving out presents to the Apex Legends community by addressing one of its biggest gripes with the game: matchmaking.
In a blog post today, the Apex team detailed changes made to matchmaking in 2024, including recent updates to how matchmaking works in high player-count windows as opposed to lower windows, as well as individual tweaks to specific game modes.
Your battle royale MMR isn’t the same as your ranked RP rating, and your hidden rating for non-BR modes is also determined a little bit differently—which makes all sorts of sense. Mixtape modes usually use a system of matching up players based on the amount of damage you put out over a large series of games, while BR modes take into account your placement, squad wipes and knocks, and the amount of time you survive compared to other squad’s survival time you go up against. Your battle royale MMR is now flagged for an update every time your team gets a knock, a very dynamic system that doesn’t just take into account your last game or two.
The dev also explained its implementation of “continuous window matchmaking,” a process which takes into account the total number of players in the game at any given time and how wide of a skill gap the system will use to match people together for an individual match. In areas and at times when there’s tons of people in the game, that gap will narrow, since it’s much easier to find players grouped closely together based on their MMR. But when there’s not many players in the game, that gap will widen to help ease queue times.
This does mean that if you feel like you’re getting stomped in pubs during a particular session, there’s a chance you’re playing at a time or in a place where there’s not a plentiful amount of other people in your server, and the continuous window system is trying to make sure people get games at the cost of some bigger skill mismatches. There are “rails” that prevent that gap from widening beyond a certain point, however, which should ensure you’re never in over your head too much.
Perhaps even more importantly, the post from Respawn goes into detail on the perception of imbalanced lobbies and seeing some fancy high-rank badges pop up on a champion squad when you’re just trying to grind your way through gold. If you were to ask the average Apex player what the biggest issue with the game has been this year, they’d probably bring up unbalanced matchmaking (in addition to cheaters). No one likes the feeling of being matched against players that are far more skilled than they are, or feeling like you and your teammates are hopelessly outmatched in a match where normally you’d feel fine.
Some of that imbalance, of course, is simply due to people having badges they’ve gotten in past seasons (to this day, I run into Lobas with season 17 Masters badges that run from every fight they see in ranked). But Respawn has also promised the company is “getting more aggressive with by prioritizing close skill matches over queue time.”
Closer matches will certainly mean longer wait time for games, but I’m willing to bet pretty much every player will take that trade.
The battle to make every match a fair one in a genre like battle royale is never-ending and seems nearly impossible. There’s so much inherent variance in the mode from game to game that “fairness” as a concept is kind of laughable. But the communication from Respawn on the matchmaking system and seeing there are still active updates being made to it should at least give players something to chew on as they consider booting up their next match or grinding some ranked.
