Respawn Entertainment briefly had to take Apex Legends offline, because of issues with players losing their save progress.
Respawn shared this update on Twitter:
“We messed up! In order to resolve an account data loss issue, we are temporarily taking the @PlayApex servers offline.
Fear not! We are deploying a fast fix to restore progress and content to affected accounts, but players will not be able to connect to the game during this time. We’re hopeful that the game will be back up in about an hour.
Stay tuned for more updates, and in the meantime, please accept our apologies, and our thanks for your patience!”
Around three hours later, they said:
“Thank you for your patience! We have deployed a fix and the servers are back online! As a result of this evening’s rollback, we’re working to restore progress made throughout the course of yesterday.
Additionally, we’ve had to postpone the new Ranked Split and will roll it out at a later date — more info to come. Looking forward to seeing you on the dropship!”
This sounds like a minor issue that ended up ballooning to where Respawn just had to close the game for a while. It doesn’t seem to indicate to any bigger problems with the game on a technical level.
But we do have to point out this came up a month after hackers were able to send out cheats to Apex Legends for an upcoming esports tournament. Respawn did take notice of this, and managed to stop the event and patch the vulnerability that made that possible.
At the very least, it isn’t great optics for Respawn Entertainment, but the Apex Legends players themselves won’t be that worked up about it, as long as they get their saves back.
As is the case with other live service games, this sort of thing really is normal for the genre. Players are always on the lookout for the next updates, as not only do new gameplay features and ideas are added in, but Respawn is constantly chasing hackers and cheaters, and fixing bugs and improving security measures, as part of the total gameplay experience.
Respawn’s latest major shakeup has been the Legend Upgrade system, which limits the amount of bonuses you can use in a single match. This randomizing element is intended to keep playing interesting enough so that players are engaged.
Apex Legends has certainly weathered a storm that Overwatch 2 and Destiny seem to have failed to. They really need to avoid having issues like this prop up if they want to avoid the reputational damage their competitors have experienced.
