Just months after Legend abilities were shaken up by the addition of
Apex Legends’ skill trees
, pro players are facing another huge shift in how they play the game. The
Apex Legends Global Series (ALGS)
is replacing the dropship that we know and love with instant-spawns across the map, and introducing a draft system so that teams can pick the POIs they spawn at more fairly.
This is a huge change, but to understand it, you first need to understand the sub-meta that competitive
Apex Legends
has had since its inception. Twenty teams of three players each compete in any given round of the battle royale. However, some areas of the map are better than others. You may want a central location in order to give yourself better flexibility and rotations to the endzone. You may want an area of the map that you know intimately and have planned careful loot paths through. You may simply want the POI with the best loot, as every hub offers different levels of weapons and attachments.
This change doesn’t affect the regular battle royale, and will only be implemented in esports competition.
If two teams land at the same spot, they have a 50/50 chance of making it past the first minute of a match. When millions of dollars are on the line, that’s not something that you want to chance. So how do teams decide who lands where?
Mostly, it comes down to bragging rights. TSM, the undisputed best team in the world, gets to pick and choose their landing spots. Part of this is a respect between teams, but also do you want to challenge the best team in the world every single match? Chances are you’ll sabotage your own game as much as theirs.
For mid-tier teams, these decisions are made during scrims, intense practice rounds where the best test their mettle ahead of major tournaments. If you want to claim a new dropspot, you’ll challenge an opponent in scrims, landing on them (usually having given them notice beforehand) and fighting it out. Whoever wins more out of the two tends to take control of the POI for LAN.
Of course, sometimes we get contests at LAN.
Yuki’s incredible 1v3
(well, his first of two) came from Alliance contesting Flora at Thermal Station. Contests are exciting, they draw the crowd into the match immediately, and without them the early stages of a battle royale match can be a little dull.
However, there’s another side to these predetermined drop spots. Firstly, it’s difficult for casual fans to understand what’s going on. With a televised draft where teams pick POIs, that issue is instantly alleviated. Then there’s the issue of actually flying in. Depending on where the dropship spawns, some teams have a whole extra minute or two to loot and rotate because their POI is first. By spawning the players immediately above their drafted POI, it creates a more balanced opening. But it’s a big change.
“Why are we changing sh*t that nobody’s f*cking talking about?” asked
Phillip ‘ImperialHal’ Dosen
, one of Apex Legends’ top competitive players, when he read the rules changes. “It’s f*cking stupid.”
Players are worried that appearing at random dropspots (as the draft would end up with essentially a random decision) will affect their consistency at tournaments. And it will. But this highlights a problem with the current system, where the best teams get the best spots, and therefore keep winning. The rich get richer. If this change levels the playing field and creates a better spectacle for fans, then maybe it could be for the better.
ALGS masterminds have
long talked about trying to, at minimum, televise the POI picking system
, and this feels like their way of folding it into the LAN spectacle. In their minds, this is likely similar to League of Legends’ banned characters, where chess-like strategy takes place before the matches even begin.
However, debuting this system in Split 2, which is just months away, could prove disastrous. It’s a huge change from the established system which, as ImperialHal points out, isn’t broken. However, it should level the playing field a little, it should add more drama and spectacle to proceedings, and it should be an interesting experiment that shakes up the ALGS like no change before.
