Apex Legends still has stability issues after patch that should've fixed them
The game has been wobbly since the Evolution update
If you've tried to play Apex Legends over the last week or so and noticed that things have been pretty slow, you're not alone. Since the game's Evolution Collection event launched last week, the battle royale and its servers have been struggling, and Respawn Entertainment have been tinkering away to try and sort it all out. Yesterday, they issued a patch to resolve a number of bugs and improve stability, but having played a few matches myself last night, it seems we're not out of the woods just yet.
Shortly after the new Evolution event went live, Respawn tweeted that players were struggling to load into lobbies. A few hours later they thought they'd managed to resolve the issue, then realised something was still broken, before claiming they'd fixed it again. But this was just the start of a week's worth of problems.
The server issues persisted over the next few days and into the weekend. The devs said that an "unusual amount of players" were timing out when trying to load into lobbies, and, as one of those players, it was rather annoying. I could get into Apex's menu screen alright, though the load times were a little higher than usual. But after joining with my pals, it was a gamble as to who'd receive a server time out and get booted to the home screen before we could load into a match.
Respawn tried "ramping up" their server capacity, but at the weekend they were still seeing "roughly three times the normal rate of disconnect errors." Fast forward to Monday this week, and they released another patch aimed at fixing teleporting, packet loss and lag. They also advised players to remove any animated banner poses they had equipped, which was linked to a crash issue.
The crashes should be resolved now though, because last night they released another client-side patch to fix numerous bugs and disconnect problems. They also pushed some server-side changes that should've helped with any poor performance players were experiencing.
Alas, I played some Apex last night, and it did not feel fixed. When I first launched it after these changes my entire game looked like it was running in slow motion. My framerate had died a death, and my game was properly chugging - and this was in the menu screen! I hadn't even tried getting into a match. It took restarting my PC to make the game playable, but even after that I suffered from a bit of lag.
I'm not the only one struggling either, a number of players have reported that they're still experiencing disconnects, getting stuck in endless matchmaking queues, and seeing similar FPS issues as myself.
It's a shame when this sort of thing goes on for so long. Apex is one of my go-to social games in the evening, so here's hoping things start to improve more soon. At the very least, Respawn have extended the amount of time players can jump into the battle royale's ranked maps. You know, if you can find a game in the first place.