Have you ever sat and waited to find a ranked match in your favorite FPS and thought, "I wish this wait was a little longer! I'm having such a good time doing nothing.

In Apex Legends, that wish comes true: Respawn Entertainment declared today in a blog post published about Apex's recently rebooted Ranked Mode that "queue times are too short" (found by PCGamesN). The lengthy and surprisingly candid post examines the mode from all angles, what is working, what is failing, and the issues that are creating friction at high levels of play, one of which is queue times.

The studio has the audacity to tell millions of players that they should have to wait longer to play the game, but before we detonate the review bomb, let's hear what they have to say Respawn has been working with Apex Legends' matchmakers to ensure that the highest skilled players and they don't do a good enough job of finding good matchups for them, in other words, they believe that they are more concerned with finding quick matches than fair matchups. Often the losers are the lower skilled players that the higher skilled players end up playing against.

"Matchmaking fails at the very high skill extreme. These players are getting into matches too quickly, creating unfair matches with MMRs that are too wide and ruthlessly eliminating lobbies." We are working to improve matchmaking at the ends of the ladder to combat this."

Respawn illustrates the problem with a graph that certainly looks very boring but is quite compelling. The graph above shows that the skill gap between you and other players is low and constant at most ranks (good news: most of your opponents are at the same skill level as you).

Looking below, we see that the average wait time for a ranked match is about the same, 25-35 seconds, in all skill brackets. This is certainly odd; at the highest levels of Valorant, CS:GO, Rainbow Six Siege, and Overwatch 2, it is not uncommon to wait 10-15 minutes for matchmakers to work their magic. It sucks for them, but it shows that the system works: if you are in the top 1% of players in the area, there are naturally very few players that are fair to match with.

This is not news to Respawn. According to the post, the insufficiently short queue times are the result of a currently identified but not yet fixed bug.

Apex's new Ranked, which will debut in Season 17 in May, replaces the traditional Ranked Points (RP) system with Ladder Points (LP) and places more emphasis on surviving and dropping out. This aspect of the mode was criticized early on by some players as rewarding players who played with less effort, and one streamer proved a point by reaching the top rank without killing. At the time, Respawn stated that this was an outlier in the way things unfolded as planned, but after considering data from the entire season, a major adjustment to ladder points was made in Season 18.

The first item on the agenda is to address the "excesses" of Masters players due to a "mixture of bugs and overly generous LP tuning". Apparently, Apex is giving out so much LP to ranked players that far too many players are able to reach Masters, the second highest skill bracket in the game.

To quell the overabundance, Respawn will conduct an open season for overrated players with two changes in Season 18:

From now on, there will be more to lose as you rank up, and Apex's rank system will be more in line with the way other games Respawn has more to say about the future of Ranked, including plans to change circle damage to combat the practice of "ratting," where players hide outside the playable zone for as long as possible to avoid a fight. In my opinion, passive players will always be a problem in battle royale as long as survival is the ultimate goal.