I’ve had a rollercoaster of emotions with Legend challenges in Apex Legends. At first, I was worried about how oppressive Rampart’s challenges were going to be. Then, I realised that she was actually an incredibly fun character to play as, even if she’s still a nightmare to come up against.

Now, I’m back to square one. For those of you who don’t know, a new set of challenges appear every two weeks in Season 20. Complete them with the prescribed Legend, and you unlock them for free. Most of the Legend challenges to date have been standardised: play 15 matches with the Legend, do 6,000 damage, and survive 10 ring closings. There will always be a couple of Legend-specific challenges thrown in as well – looting Legendary gear with Loba, saying thanks to your teammates with Maggie, that sort of thing – but it’s the ring survival that will always be hardest to complete.

It doesn’t sound difficult. After all, surviving five ring closings and emerging as the last squad standing is the whole point of the battle royale, isn’t it? But when you’re flying solo and relying on random teammates to win, it’s a surprisingly difficult task.

Think about it. The first ring takes the longest to close, to allow players to loot up and move into position. The next is slightly quicker, and the smaller the zones get, the faster they pull. Halfway into a ranked game, you’ll likely find that only one zone has closed. If you make it the full distance, the other next four ring closes happen in around the same length of time.

But players like to hot-drop, especially in solo queue. The mad fight off drop is 50/50 at best, and even in ranked matches, which are supposed to be more serious as precious RP is on the line, you’ll see five or ten teams dropping at the best locations. If you die here, there’s a chance you’ll get a decent wedge of damage for that challenge, but you won’t see a single zone close.

Close

It’s clear why this challenge takes longer to complete than the others, but Respawn recently changed it up. For the worse. For Loba’s Legend challenges, instead of having to survive ten ring closures, you have to survive 25. For no reason at all, the gargantuan task has nearly doubled. It’s unclear as to whether this is due to a declining playerbase (which is natural at this stage of a season), engagement metrics, or anything else, but it’s boring, dull, and encourages the worst behaviour from players.

There’s a way to cheese this challenge, you see. Instead of playing a match properly, you can queue into a no-fill Duos match on your own, fly as far away from the dropship as possible, and hide all the way until the final zone. It’s no fun, it’s not how the game was intended to be played, but if you want the pay-to-win Flatline skin, you’ve got to do it.

This technique is known as ‘ratting’, because it’s for dirty little rats.

Developers have told us countless times that ratting is not how the game is intended to be played. They have adjusted ranked so as to actively discourage it. And yet these challenges directly contradict that messaging.

Live footage of me completing challenges in Apex Legends Season 20.

“The passive player problem is something that was emergent from previous seasons,” Aaron Rutledge, experience design director at Respawn, explained to TheGamer ahead of Season 19. “Partially made aware by scoring decisions that we made, but also partially being, people just discovered, ‘oh, it's a battle royale, just staying alive is the main point.’ And so some people leaned into that.”

The changes to ranked he made in October last year were intended to eliminate the rat problem (although he prefers the less derogatory term “passive player”). And yet, these challenges are encouraging the tactic. Obviously there are different departments at Respawn tracking different metrics – and these challenges don’t have to be completed in ranked, of course – but Respawn needs to decide on the game’s identity going forwards. Is it the slow, careful battle royale akin to PUBG? Or is it a frenetic firefight of abilities and colour like Fortnite-meets-Overwatch? With the remnants of Titanfall’s slick movement running through the game’s veins, I know which I’d prefer.

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