If you haven’t played Apex Legends in a few weeks, the game is in a state of disarray. The game’s best LTM, Winter Express, was removed from the game for another year but cheaters are exploiting bugs everywhere.
Over the years, Apex Legends has been a hotbed for cheats and hacks, with some being more serious than others. Hackers have taken down nearly all of the game’s servers on multiple occasions, and the battle royale game has been plagued by bugs as new updates are released. Any competitive multiplayer game is ripe for abuse from players who want to ruin everyone else’s fun.
There is currently a problem with charging weapons. The Sentinel and Rampage LMGs can both be charged up to increase their damage and rate of fire. However, bugs currently allow the Rampage to be charged indefinitely, transforming it from a useful tool in your arsenal to an unrivaled machine of death. The Sentinel, on the other hand, has the opposite problem: it either charges automatically or fails to charge when you want it to.
Now that any Tom, Dick, and Harry can pick the Rampage up and transform from a Gold IV player to a Hardecki, the fun has vanished from Apex matches faster than Gregg Wallace’s wives do after a honeymoon.
For the duration of the match, one carefully placed Thermite Grenade puts the Rampage (a weapon that I already believe is slightly too powerful) on par with the pre-nerf Spitfire. In every ranked match, players are abusing and exploiting the bug in the hopes of climbing the leaderboard and inflating their egos but how can the developers deal with the issue? It’s safe to assume that Respawn is currently working to fix the bugs, but will the broken weapons continue to wreak havoc on matches left, right, and center until then?
Respawn should start ‘vaulting’ weapons, according to Twitch streamer Babynikki, which involves removing some weapons from the loot pool until they are fixed. Vaulting weapons have been mentioned by Respawn developers in the past, but only when discussing the game’s ever-growing loot pool rather than as a temporary fix for bugged or exploitable items. The Sentinel was removed in Season 6 when the game-breaking bug was used to fire the sniper, but we haven’t heard much about similar action for its faulty charges so far.
We players have no idea how difficult it would be to add short-term vaulting to the game (especially on such short notice), but it would at the very least make ranked playable. If this has happened before, the technology must be present.
Other than those who really want to use it, the Sentinel isn’t a problem right now, but the Rampage is a different story. In ranked matches, hearing the sounds of permanently-charged LMGs is nearly as annoying as dying in a few hits every game.
Players are simply told not to use exploits in tournament settings or they will be disqualified, but will Respawn punish those who ruin ranked matches? If the developer is unwilling to fix the problem, it could at the very least ban those who take advantage of it for their own gain and discourage others from doing so.
The solution to Apex’s current bugs is to vault the Rampage, ban players, and do something completely different; these broken weapons must be fixed as soon as possible.