The new season of Apex Legends got off to a rocky start earlier this week when changes to the Battle Pass dramatically slowed player progress. The backlash was such that EA almost immediately changed course, but faced criticism from some players who felt that the company was trying to squeeze more money out of them by increasing the pressure to purchase Battle Pass levels.

However, in a response posted on Reddit, Respawn's director of community communications, Ryan Rigney, stated that there were no ulterior motives behind the Battle Pass change.

"Frankly, we are not manipulation gurus. We are not masters of manipulation.

"Today, in a meeting with a bunch of leads, Chad, the game director, said, 'Hey, we played for six hours last night, why did we only get one level?' And the other three guys basically said, yeah, Reddit is right, this is bad, someone should have pointed it out earlier. 'We noticed that a lot of people weren't paying attention to what it was like to go through the s7 battle path because when we swap builds for playtests, we often reset our accounts and erase our progress.'

Rigney said that there is a growing tendency among gamers to view erroneous decisions and retractions by studios as deliberate manipulation: developers do something they know players will hate and then retract it to appear to be the good guys. However, he rejects that theory once and for all, saying, "A studio that intentionally puts out shitty updates is not a place that makes great games, and it's not where I want to work, and I'm sure the team at Respawn feels the same way."

He also touched on why Respawn made the change in the first place, saying that the developers believe that stars, the new measure of battle path progression, "are just easier to track than an inflated currency like CP (challenge points). This, too, could be undone, but Rigney expects that studios will make this system work properly first.

"In the live service game, you have to learn to iterate. You have to try something new every once in a while. When you come out with something new and it has a problem, developers are not going to completely turn tail and run. They want to get deep into it, tweak a knob here and there, and observe the impact to see if they can't learn something new," he writes.

"Maybe we should ditch the stars and all the other things that come with the S7 battle path changes. Maybe we shouldn't. That is not my decision. I am just a communications officer. But I will always make a good faith effort to keep the good ones and fix the bad ones. Otherwise, I will miss the chance to learn, and I will be frozen in place with fear."

Another major change to Apex Legends in Season 7 is the addition of a new character, a time-traveling Scottish astrophysicist mother named Horizon. Despite her friendly, motherly demeanor, Emma considers her "the perfect member of an aggressive team."