Competitive Apex Legends fans have barely had a chance to breathe since the ALGS Championship concluded in Birmingham, UK last month. TSM were once again crowned champions, cementing their place in the annals of Apex Legends Global Series history, but the time since has seen an unprecedented number of roster changes and region swaps from the teams involved.

Dubbed ‘rostermania’ by many, the switches and LFT posts have been hard to keep track off, with Championship underdogs Blvkhvnd leaving their org to pursue new challenges, DarkZero dropping youngster Rody ‘Xynew’ Geissler after the whole team underperformed on LAN, and Moist following in their footsteps by switching from APAC South to North America, picking up former NRG player Zachary ‘Gild’ Dennis after the latter organisation stepped away from Apex.

Photo courtesy of Joe Brady and EA

However, the repercussions of ALGS Year 3 can be felt in Apex Legends Season 19, as the developers told us in an interview earlier this week.

“The ALGS was a 30-30 festival,” said John Larson, Respawn’s game designer for balance, and his tone didn’t make it sound like it was a good thing. As such, its hipfire is being nerfed again in Season 19. However, the biggest ALGS-inspired changes are to what Larson calls the “can’t-see-shit meta” – the worst offenders being Bangalore and Catalyst.

As you can read in our longer interview detailing everything about Apex Legends Season 19: Ignite, Catalyst’s spikes and wall are both getting nerfed. She can no longer throw the spikes as far, and they don’t block bullets. Her Ultimate cooldown now starts after the wall has fallen down, meaning she can’t use it as frequently. As for Bangalore, the length of time of her Double Time speed boost, Tactical smokes, and the stun effect of her Rolling Thunder has been vastly reduced.

While Bangalore sees quite a lot of action in Apex Legends’ ranked matches, Catalyst dwells near the bottom of the pickrates. The opposite is true of the ALGS, where Catalyst is used by nearly every team.

"I'd love to see ranked bridge that gap right between just a shoot and loot fest, to the extremely strategic, rotational, calculated play of ALGS." - Aaron Rutledge, experience design director on Apex Legends

“The ALGS gets a ton of visibility for not only us, but just the playerbase overall,” explains Larson. “Stuff does trickle down from that level, but at that level of play with the amount of players in small areas, it really highlights – or doesn't highlight if you don't have a Digi Threat – some of the stuff that we see in terms of vision blocking. We've had this before in terms of the Caustic meta back in the day, where you're like, ‘OK, this is not as pleasant as we'd like it to be from both a player or spectator perspective.’ So a significant amount of [the nerfs to Catalyst and Bangalore] was influenced by just what we saw in the ALGS.”

The Digital Threat that Larson joked about has also been removed from the crafting rotation completely, so that Bangalore teams won’t be feasting on so-called ‘digi days’. There’s also bad news for Mikkel ‘Mande’ Hestbek, though, if he returns as a sub for Alliance in the future, as Larson said that the Bocek Bow will remain in the Care Package “for the foreseeable future” due to what its arrows do to the loot pool. However, it’s getting a buff to encourage more people to pick it up, which might be a silver lining.

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Aaron Rutledge, Apex’s experience design director, also explained the effect that the ALGS has on the game’s ranked system.

“As we try to establish what true competitive skill looks like in Apex, we have to reinforce the behaviours that we'd like to see players perform, right?” he explained when talking about the mode’s new challenges that discourage rats, or ‘passive players’ as he prefers to call them. “So if you think about the general player population and ALGS, I'd love to see ranked bridge that gap right between just a shoot and loot fest, to the extremely strategic, rotational, calculated play of ALGS. If I can get the high end of ranked to bridge that gap, then I think we've done a good job.”

I also asked Apex Legends’ design director Evan Nikolich about the changes to the ALGS in Year 4, after he had earlier confirmed that we’re looking forward to three LAN events next season. China is joining the scene with two invited teams entering the Playoffs in each Split. Furthermore, the best-placing Chinese team will qualify for the Championship along with any others that make the top 32 overall.

“We’re trying to be a global game, right?” says Nikolich. “We have a playerbase in China, a fanbase in China – we’re not officially present in that region, but the reach of Apex is long, with a big concentration in Japan and Korea and that region is spread out. So, I don't know the exact negotiation but, they came up to us, we found something to work and now they're gonna be in the ALGS.”

"Now, is just handing money over going to solve it? Absolutely not." - Evan Nikolich, design director on Apex Legends

On the opposite end of the scale, South America has lost its Pro League competition. South American teams will now duke it out in the region’s Challenger Circuit and Regional Finals and, similar to the new deal with China, the team with the most Playoff Points from the region will get a spot at the Championship. Many South American players expressed dismay when the decision was announced, but Nikolich says the reasons for it are numerous and complex.

“It was kind of performance based and also kind of a decision on their part as well,” he explains. “We have a lot of work to do in terms of strengthening our relationships and strengthening the incentives to be playing in the ALGS. I'm not going to deny it, there's been several high profile exits and I think that's an area for improvement.

“Now, is just handing money over going to solve it? Absolutely not. That is a band aid. There's something more systemic and something more to the engine of esports and how we get things working. And that takes communication between us and the teams. So that's something that [we] are particularly working on — how do we establish those lines of communication and truly understand each other's wants and needs?”

However, there is some good news for ALGS fans ahead of Year 4, as Nikolich hints at news arriving before too long. “We're going to announce some ALGS partnerships coming in November,” he says. “So keep your eyes out for that.”

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