Apex Legends is a game under siege right now, with multiple performance issues plaguing the hit battle royale just as it was gaining traction with big creators. With Call of Duty’s Warzone suffering from hacker issues, Apex was set to pop off, but the last few months have been full of in-game issues, as well as the scandal that saw lead game designer Daniel Z Klein leave the company under a cloud.

In an effort to address community concerns, Respawn director of communications Ryan K. Rigly made a lengthy thread on Twitter highlighting the challenges of communicating with fans, which was subsequently posted to Reddit for users to discuss. Rigley then took it upon himself to go into the thread, and answer a few questions players had about his work, and the game, with somewhat varied results…

While some Redditors were sympathetic to Rigley, and Respawn’s plight, the top comments all highlighted how constant the problems have been of late, and how they are set alongside some extremely manipulative tactics from the development team, like EA’s notorious and universally despised  Engagement Optimised MatchMaking. Rigley himself made an effort to communicate with users, but quickly descended into fighting with commenters who were critical of his communication style, telling one person to ‘go kick rocks’.

APEX community disappointed in developer

It’s fair to say the thread was mixed overall, with a degree of sympathy for Rigley, but also a large number of users criticizing him for ‘throwing a pity party for himself' at a time when the game is at a low ebb. The fixes for Apex do not appear to be simple, reading the Twitter thread posted by Rigley, and it’s clear the communication with users has also reached an all-time low, with the director of comms fighting with players on Reddit.

Overall, the thread seemed to trend towards even the most reasonable users saying ‘thanks, but not enough’ to Rigley and his attempts to explain his position and points to the dire state of the game. Respawn have been under the pump for a while now, and if they cannot resolve issues and begin to rebuild user trust soon, we may see more player boycotts, and eventually the death not just of the game, but the company too, as users learn to simply not invest in products like Apex (and Titanfall 2) that will not stand the test of time.