Today's fixes for ongoing problems with Apex appear to have backfired
This is The Final Circle, a newsletter for everyone in the competitive Apex community
(UPDATE, 5:40 PM EST: I'm seeing that today's $15,000 invitational seems to be going off without a hitch, and heard at least one report that private lobbies are stable. If no further issues arise today, I'd expect this weekend's preseason qualifiers to continue as scheduled, and for grousing by players on social media to significantly lessen. Fingers crossed!)
It gives me no pleasure to report that the latest fix for Apex doesn’t seem to be as effective as players and devs had hoped. If social media is any indication, the patch may have introduced more errors than before.
Meant to fix the remaining issues players were experiencing in Apex lobbies, the patch got a quick thumbs-down from pros and content creators on Twitter:
If the game continues to have issues into the weekend, which seems likely given how thorny they appear to be, the state of Apex stability might force the delay of this weekend’s second preseason qualifer for the pro league of the ALGS, or else risk three days of competition filled with connection issues, crashes and lobby re-dos.
This game has had its share of buggy times, and last week’s crashes, lag, no-regs, and various other problems probably ranks among the buggiest; but it’s also happening during an optimistic time in Apex.
High-profile figures like Jack “CouRage” Dunlop, NICKMERCS, Ninja and Tfue regularly stream the game. Community fixtures are crushing it: Ninjayla joined Complexity a while back and NiceWigg just joined 100Thieves. Pros simply aren’t in mutiny mode, threatening to jump ship over to Valorant or actually going forward with it; in fact some of them, like Mendo, have come back to Apex and are streaming it regularly again. Despite the problems of the moment, Apex is in a much better place than it was during the last few buggy periods.
What to watch:
If they go on as scheduled, the second preseason qualifiers for Year 2 of the ALGS pro league are September 25-27 (this Saturday, Sunday and Monday). Teams that didn’t get an invite to the pro league will try to secure their spot through these preliminary tourneys, either by winning a tourney outright (with 4 spots in the league allotted to the 4 winning squads of each qualifier) or placing in the top 16 for points throughout qualifiers. Catch the action here:
The $50,000 Twitch Rivals event scheduled for tomorrow at 5 PM EST has been pushed back to Thursday, October 7. I wrote about the delay and the new format for Dot Esports.
To that end, some housekeeping news: I’m happy to announce that I’ve joined up with Dot Esports! I’ll be covering Apex topics in general and the ALGS in particular for them. Needless to say, I’m incredibly excited to build out their coverage of pro Apex as the scene develops this year, and I hope you’ll all check out my work there going forward.
Thanks for reading The Final Circle! Honestly, not much will change around here. I’ll continue to be an independent source of high-quality news and analysis for everyone in the Apex community. Going into the regular season of the ALGS, I’ll be providing a weekly update on the big stories in Apex as always. I’ll keep live-tweeting qualifiers and other events from my Twitter @UR_Scrubb, and if I’m feeling particularly energetic I might even make some Apex TikToks and finish my big post on the history of competitive Apex I planned for earlier this summer.
A big shout-out again to everyone who’s encouraged my work, and thanks in particular to Jessica and Cortes.