Apex Legends leaver penalties were a little premature
A leaver penalty is coming, just... not yet
Respawn Entertainment are indeed planning to add penalties for folks who abandon their squads and leave in the middle of Apex Legends rounds, but not just yet - and not in the exact form that they accidentally added it last week. Wednesday's update, on top of accidentally making accounts seem reset, included a work-in-progress version of leaver penalties that was enabled by accident. Whoops. But the feature, which should discourage jerks in the free-to-play battle royale FPS from bailing and scuttling your chances of that Tofurky dinner, is coming. At some point. When it's done.
"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," Respawn said last week. "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."
And that's why it didn't stick around.
"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."
Respawn folks did clarify a few details of the implementation too. The leaver penalty didn't apply if your team wasn't full and anyone who died was free to leave, which are good touches. Though we'll have to see how the leaver penalty works when it's actually, like, finished.
For now, do behave, won't you?