Apex Legends Season 18 Will Deal with Ranked “Ratters”

Apex Legends creators Respawn Entertainment have plans to tackle “ratters” in Season 18, a term used to describe people who’d prefer to wait out the match in secluded, hard-to-see spots while others fight. Doing so is effective to a degree, but it does lead to a lack of action during endgame scenarios which is good for neither the average player nor viewers who might want to watch the ALGS. To that end, Respawn said it has plans to change things like how the ring moves and how much damage it does to force players back into the fight.

Respawn’s initiative to combat ratting were shared in a post talking about changes planned for Season 18’s ranked mode. For some context, the ranked ecosystem in the current season saw players skewing towards much higher ranks due partially to the introduction of the new Ladder Points system this season as well as “some bugs in the Ranked system,” Respawn said. This new system put more of an emphasis on survival rather than kill participation which caused players to preserve the wellbeing of their own team more often rather than eliminating others. If you played ranked throughout the season and saw scenarios where there were far more squads than anticipated that were alive in the final rings, you have the new ranked system to thank for that.

So, in Season 18, Respawn is looking at a number of ways to improve the experience, ratting being one of them. The technical term for this sort of playstyle is “Perceptive Play,” Respawn said, though ratting is the extreme example of this that stands out more often. The graph below was provided to show some data on how inactivity spiked this season. 

“Perceptive Play is more macro focused, where play is centered around ring positioning rather than all out aggression-an extreme variant of this is often referred to as ‘ratting.’ While exciting endgames are happening, there is room for improvement with the recent increase of ratting,” Respawn said.

“A portion of this is due to an increased number of players waiting for ring closures, but we can safely say that it is mostly due to players hiding and avoiding others (while crouching or standing).”

To address these instances of “inactivity and avoidant playstyles,” Respawn is doing there things: changing up the timings of ring movements to force more mid-game encounters, adjusting ring damage to make the outside of the ring a less comfortable place for players to rat, and the fixing of ratting spots where players know they can hide.

Specifics on these changes haven’t yet been given, though we’ll likely find out more about what, exactly, Respawn wants to change as we get closer to Season 18.