Autumn Circuit Regional #1 review

This is The Final Circle, a newsletter for the competitive Apex community

The first tournament of the Autumn Series is over. Experienced teams that should have dominated fell short in almost every region, and lots of unfamiliar teams proved they could compete in the top lobbies.

King’s Canyon games continue to produce much more erratic results than World’s Edge. The map’s narrow chokes, difficult rotations, and easy third party opportunities make it simple for teams with good circle RNG to stay put and dominate, while outlying teams scrabble for edge positions and are forced to make high-risk rotations or take early fights.

Let’s start with the shake-up in the North American qualifiers, where the Sentinels (with one of the first Valorant defectors, Retzi, back on their roster) failed to squeeze through to the finals. Team Liquid, coached by community favorite Hodsic, also failed to qualify, proving (along with TSM’s results) that dominant wins in the weekly GLL Community Cups mean nothing for the big ALGS tournaments.

The NA finals had its share of upsets too. In the comments somewhere last week, I said I would eat my hat if TSM didn’t get a top 3 placement in this tournament. Send over your recipes, because they ended up in a three-way tie for 4th place. After an impressive win in the GLL Community Cup last week, TSM’s new Snip3down and Gdolphn-infused roster looked shaky in their first outing against a full lobby of other dangerous teams. They lost their contested drop in game 1 and were the first team out, and afterward TSM never really recovered their morale, though they delivered stronger performances on World’s Edge. They were uncharacteristically indecisive in their rotations at times, and played conservatively despite being behind in points, allowing other, more aggressive teams to win the day.

CLG, who clutched up for the win in the Summer Circuit Playoffs, also had a disappointing finals, finishing in 16th place, down with orgless teams who are playing without salaries, or, in Euriece’s case, juggling a competitive Apex career with the demands of high school.

A big congrats to Rogue, who proved they didn’t need Snip3down to frag out. They took 1st place in North America, winning $6000, a bunch of ALGS points and substantial bragging rights. Fan favorite Complexity continues to just miss out on winning tournaments. Monsoon and the boys finished in a strong 2nd place by tying Rogue for points, at 61, but losing the tiebreak because Rogue dropped a 16-kill win while Complexity’s best placement was 2nd.

Interestingly, Team Liquid and TSM, the two teams in North America with prominent coaches, failed to get results. We’ll have to look at the performance of both teams at the end of the Autumn Circuit for a fuller picture, but for now, it appears that coaching doesn’t net immediate performance improvements.

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When I asked where all the women were in competitive Apex, Millions Gaming’s Evzy must have heard me. Her squad showed up to play, dropping an 18-kill W in Round 5 of the South America final on their win to the win, securing a modest but hardly insulting $3000 and a guaranteed spot in the Autumn Circuit Playoffs. Felicidades!

In EU, the upsets continued. COOLER, a team without much success in Apex so far, had generated a lot of excitement (and high expectations) by signing two of EU’s most talented free agents, Gnaske and SirDel, to join Yuki. Two-thirds of COOLER had just come fresh from winning the Summer Circuit Playoffs, but they failed to qualify for the finals.

North also failed to qualify, a team with strong results in the recent past and the runner-up in the summer Playoffs. Wygers, a Spanish team with two British players that joined Apex in March, got two wins on their way to 1st place, with a comfortable ten-point margin between them and 2nd place. The more familiar Third Impact team took 2nd place, winning the tiebreaker at 51 points against NEW, a Portuguese team I hadn’t heard of (Thanks to BallonG for the correction).

In the Middle East and Africa, a tournament apparently run without a qualifier and with only 17 teams in the finals lobby, the Turkish org 1907 Fenerbahçe squeezed out a clutch win. They posted two high-kill wins in the last two rounds to overtake the dominant Lava City Boys, who had opened the finals with two wins of their own.

In Asia-Pacific South, Made in Thailand Team 1 went crazy on their finals lobby, finishing 25 points ahead of the second-place team, the Chinese org DreamFire, and 33 ahead of Thonburi, another Thai team, in 3rd place. This is the region where India made its ALGS debut, fielding 11 players out of the total 111 who entered. So pleased to welcome them to the competition!

In Asia-Pacific North, BlackBird Ventus, who won the Summer Circuit Playoffs, failed to qualify for the finals. The Korean powerhouse T1 managed only 5th place, while Hybrid Eclipse Arise, a team I wasn’t familiar with, got the win.

Did anyone catch any of the official broadcast? I missed it this time—how was it?

Crossplay drops

Finally, Wraith’s anime run is gone, making her easier to hit, Pathfinder’s grapple is…different, and crossplay launches today. The full patch notes for Aftermarket are here. These are strange and exciting times! I hope everyone enjoys their mixed lobbies and hopefully faster lobby queues.

I’ll be back next week to talk more in-depth about crossplay and how it’s affecting Apex by the numbers. And, as I’ve discussed in comments elsewhere, I’m thinking about starting to do more original reporting and interviews here. Is there anyone—player, developer, caster—you’d like to see me interview here? Sound off in the comments.

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