Apex Legends now punishes players who leave Arenas matches early
Win as a team, lose as a team, or face a penalty
Earlier this month, Apex Legends added a new permanent 3v3 deathmatch mode, Arenas. It's brilliant, with one glaring problem: leavers. It's never fun to lose a few rounds in a row, and it's even worse a teammate outright gives up and abandons you, rather than sticking around to try and pull it back. Thankfully, a new patch released last night has added penalties for players who ditch Arenas matches early.
If you leave an Arenas match now before it's over, you'll be barred from entering another match for 10 minutes - the same penalty ranked battle royale leavers receive. You're only punished if you were in a full squad when you left, so if you want to dip out after someone else has already abandoned, you won't get the timeout (unless you're in a party with the leaver, but then you should also have a firm word with your game-ditching pal).
Respawn have also squashed a few bugs that have been plaguing the game since the ninth season started. The worst of these was Wattson's electrical fences no longer slowing enemies down, which effectively made said fences useless. She's back to her sparky self now though; I look forward to playing her again, she's one of my faves.
On top of that, it shouldn't be such a struggle to find a backpack in the battle royale mode now. Over the last couple of weeks it's been tough to find them, because they'd been spawning almost exclusively in loot bins. But now the devs have adjusted loot spawning so backpacks should actually appear on the ground too.
If you fancy hopping into the game to play some Arenas, do check out our Apex Legends Arenas guide for lots of tips and tricks. I have a tip for you, too: don't leave matches! It's not fair on your team, and makes you look like a sore loser.
There's always news to chat about in Apex-land, so if you'd like to hear more (rather than read about it), come and listen to myself and Ed Thorn on our fortnightly shooter-themed podcast Ultimate Audio Bang.