It took minutes for players to read about the new respawn system in Apex Legends season 19 and theorize that many would exploit it to duplicate armors, and even less time after the season launch for that to happen. Thankfully, Respawn is already looking into the issue.
In a social media post, Respawn producer Josh Medina asked for feedback from players about the new season—and he also got out ahead of one of the leading complaints, saying that the Apex team was “aware of and digging into” players intentionally dying to duplicate loot.
The new respawn system introduced in season 19 gives players being respawned far more loot than previously. In the past, players would only spawn back into a game with a white body shield and meager healing items, but now players come back with the same level of shield that they died with, as well as their weapons (without attachments) and some ammo.
While the stated purpose of this change was to give freshly respawned players more of a chance at defending themselves when dropping in and to make ratting a less viable strategy, the new respawn system has mainly been used by players far away from any other teams on the map. These teams are intentionally killing themselves with high-level body shields so they can respawn with a new version of that same body shield, and it allows one of their teammates to loot their old armor from their death box.
Combine this strategy with a Replicator, and suddenly an entire team’s crafting materials can be used to craft one player’s armor to the max red tier. Then perform the respawn exploit a couple of times, and suddenly you’ve got a full team with red armors.
Really, the respawning exploit is barely an exploit on the level of many of the past exploits in the game, many of which involved players either knowingly abusing faulty map geometry or teaming up with opponents. The new system almost makes intentionally dying to duplicate shields sound like an intended mechanic.
Obviously, that’s not really the case, and the fact that the Respawn team is already looking into fixing this particular exploit is good for the general population of players and for the game’s esports scene with ALGS currently in its offseason.
Being able to get a full team onto red armors early on in a match provides a huge advantage to that team, especially in higher levels of play and esports where skill level is more closely grouped than your average pub. If the last few seasons of players abusing heat shields and ratting in ranked have taught us anything, it’s that Apex players will take any sort of advantage the game will give them, and it’s caused serious issues with game health in the recent past.
Don’t expect the new respawn mechanic to be reverted, however. If I had to guess, I’d imagine Respawn is working on a fix that involves the armor of the respawning player “consuming” the old body shield in their death box, or creating a system where players won’t get their old level of shield back if the game registers that they’ve died intentionally to their own ordinance or by jumping off the map.
Either way, taking the option to abuse a game mechanic away from players is the only real recourse Respawn has to fix the problem. Whether or not this is technically an “exploit” doesn’t really matter when not even the Vantage mains out there are going to hold to Scout’s honor.
