Apex Legends is going to start penalizing players for leaving early

Last week's rollout of the Apex Legends 1.1 update caused some brief moments of stress for players who logged into the game and discovered that their accounts had apparently been reset. It was, fortunately, a relatively simple problem to correct with no long-last consequences, but it wasn't the only thing that went wrong. Some players also noticed the appearance, and then sudden disappearance, of a "leaving early" penalty for players who bail out of a game too quickly.

It happens sometimes when impatient players get knocked down and don't want to wait to see if their teammates will (or can) revive them. But I've also had a few instances where a random matchup hurls a few obscenities at me at the start of a match and then immediately disconnects because I chose the wrong character or didn't drop fast enough. Both situations are annoying: My squad is left at a serious disadvantage while the leaver gets to go be a jerk somewhere else with absolutely no consequences whatsoever. It's a dick move that should carry penalty, and at some point it will—just not quite yet.

"So internally, we have been working on and testing this feature but it wasn't our intention or plan to have it go live with the update that went out today. There was a piece of script that was missing and caused the leaving match early penalty to be turned on when it shouldn't be. That's why it wasn't in the patch notes," Respawn community manager Jayfresh wrote on Reddit.

"We updated the script, tested with QA and it's now disabled for all platforms. We don't have an ETA for if or when this would come out for real. Apologies for the confusion."

In followup posts, Respawn clarified that the penalty wasn't applied if your team wasn't full or for players who were actually dead, meaning that players wouldn't be dinged if they took off before waiting for the respawn timer to hit zero. Whether those conditions will carry over to the intentionally-released version of the penalty, we'll have to wait and see.

Respawn also recently unleashed a new wave of hardware ID (HWID) bans against cheaters, part of its "ongoing war" against those who refuse to play by the rules. If you're in the mood for something a little less serious, a Redditor recently recreated a Borderlands intro using Apex Legends characters.

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Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.