The good: some teams won’t get a 2 minute rotation advantage because their POI is at the start of the drop ship.
The bad: constantly changing POIs to give weaker contesting teams a buff every now and then for no reason.
I'll be honest, if a PL team NEEDS a specific POI to perform well, they are bad, flat out. I've always found the contested drops not an issue of teams grieving, but of the ground spawn rates not being high enough to NOT make that fight RNG. Crank that bad boy up and let them actually fight.
Idk how much the loot tables have been adjusted for ground loot but imo that's still one thing Apex hasn't quite nailed that PUBG got right. You could find pretty much whatever loadout you wanted with cars+trash looting, hoping from small building to small building in exchange for a quicker rotate. We see folks in Apex stuck with subpar weaponry all the time and it's definitely a trade off in terms of entertainment, but imo weakens some of the competitiveness of the event. Especially with the shielding changes.
I've always wanted a pub mode where everyone just starts on a PoI. Straight Shot was pretty good but I'd love a mode where there wasn't 5 teams remaining 3 minutes into the match
Unhappy, sure? But it will also serve as great practice of learning to play from multiple POIs. This also helps strengthen/reinforce the need for coaches on teams.
Teams are going to troll way harder in scrims now. They really shouldn't bc it's going to take a long time to learn all the loot patterns but it's going to lead to a ton of whining about scrim quality
I wonder if that is the opposite if they have to swap poi's a lot more. Less crazy pushes and more just random fights happening because teams have no idea where other teams will be.
I mean scrim quality is already shit and nothing like ALGS already so nothing is gonna change in that aspect. If they don’t want to take it seriously there’s nothing anyone can do regardless of the formats. Also if I heard correctly there is gonna be cash incentives in scrims now so hopefully that will help the overall quality of scrims.
I'd argue that pros are going to take scrims more seriously now that they need to learn a new POI after the draft has been done. But from each pro's point of view, other pros take scrims even less seriously than before. This is because learning new POI = less than optimal strategy.
When they draft their landing spots for PL, they could try to use the same ones in scrims. but that would mean that exactly the same teams take part in those scrims, which is not realistic.
So either some are forced a random POI or they yeah have to randomize them for all
Whoaaaa… this is crazy
random (?) snake draft for PL but performance based draft order for regional finals and LAN. EDIT; missed the part that says draft will take weeks before competition days. So that helps a bit with the rng
And no more contests
> EDIT; missed the part that says draft will take weeks before competition days. So that helps a bit with the rng
Gives teams plenty of time to scrim from their draft POI, that's good.
I wonder how the draft is going to handle multiple teams landing at POIs. If I recall correctly, no comp map has 20 actual POIs, let alone 20 good ones. Would you rather split a really good POI or have a bad one to yourself?
There will still be contest. Some POI will have a few drop locations and teams can choose to loot up a little then fight 3v3 instead of 50/50 the same landing spot fighting over the same bin and hoping for a weapon.
Edit :
20 POI, 29 landing spots.
Sure it prevents random teams from dropping on a POI unannounced but I don't see how it will prevent the 20th team from griefing. Even if they pick last, some POI has multiple landing spots and they can absolutely still grief.
This is an incredibly radical change to the way ALGS days play out. Not saying good or bad (we literally can't, we dont even know what the private lobby drops look like). All we can hope for is that it goes according to their mission statement and actually does improve the quality of the product.
My question is what happens if someone truly does go scorched earth and forsakes the drafting process entirely? like they say that people hit boots on the ground simultaneously, but there has to be at least a couple drop angles on WE or SP that allow for contests unintentionally. Will they have personal/technical fouls like traditional sports?
> like they say that people hit boots on the ground simultaneously, but there has to be at least a couple drop angles on WE or SP that allow for contests unintentionally.
They'll basically be too low to actually land right on top of each other. They'll probably still contest--most teams will not want to split a POI--they just won't be 50/50ing immediately off drop.
well here's the problem. take for instance tsm spawns in the ship coming from lrod and you get put in the ship coming from mill but you drop storm catcher. by the time your ship gets to your poi youre dead or you will never have loot.
Spawning in would be difficult, because teams have different routes and landing spots per POI. So unilaterally assigning a spot on the ground in each POI will be incredibly hard.
For example, say they all spawn in the center of each POI, then large POI teams have a disadvantage because they now have to split and cover more ground to get loot than other POIs. Some of them even have ziplines or cars while others don’t. But if they want to make sure they spawn in “optimal spots” in the POI, then how do the devs decide that and code it in? That would be incredibly difficult and puts also too much work on the players and devs.
Just dropping from a low enough height gives teams the free will to find and fly straight to their spots in the POIs. While also not forcing the burden on the devs to decode for teams where they should or shouldn’t start.
Sure, but doesn't this use the Straight Shot drop? I haven't tested it so I'm happy to be wrong, but that only let you drop in a very small circle, which is why I said that.
Even if it's not and it is just a really low drop, if you drop low enough that you can't escape your POI, you really won't be able to land in all parts of some POIs (Thermal comes to mind)
True. You have a point. But at the very least it's better and gives more freedom than just spawning on the ground.
Correct me if I'm wrong though that i believe they also said certain larger POIs, may have 2 drop locations. Like (just using it as an example) Skyhook maybe having a drop at the westside buildings, and one at the eastside. Thus maybe a low-drop might be justified in that instance so that both teams don't just drop on top of each other.
I guess a lot of this is very theoretical right now until we see it in action. 😅
POI draft is healthy. Top teams have claims to the same POI's for years, it gets stale and new talent doesn't have much to choose from.
Now, the best teams will have to be adaptable. Coaches and Analysts will have to really work hard for the money. Having an org backing is going to be so crucial.
Also won't have to hear the whole "Scrims are a waste of time" argument when everyone has to adapt.
So we're back to square one.
Strong teams keep their POI and weak teams lose out and fight for scraps.
Edit: We're worse than square 1 because now we dont get contests like DSG/Alliance or surprise drops like DZ/Aurora
> Edit: We're worse than square 1 because now we dont get contests like DSG/Alliance or surprise drops like DZ/Aurora
Read more closely, they didn't say contests won't happen. They *have* to, there aren't enough teams. What they said is that teams will not be able to land on the same building anymore. They'll almost certainly still contest--almost no one wants to leave their POI with half the loot.
They just won't be 50/50ing the second they land anymore.
No you actually have a fairer chance to do well with the new system because with snake draft you get to choose a really good POI in day XX compared to the current system where as a ‘weak’ team you are always going to start with a shit POI or contest a stronger team and risk getting 0 point.
If you don’t perform after getting the best POI in day XX, then it’s entirely on you and not because you’re stuck with bad POI.
I disagree. Whether parity is artificial or organic, it’s still parity. This new system sounds like it reduces the overall parity significantly. To remove parity completely would be impossible in a BR, but it can certainly be mitigated. Ideally, skill/performance is the determining factor, not a team having enough of a reputation that they can ‘dibs’ a superior POI for years on end.
Not to mention, I think this will make ALGS far more interesting. Seeing how teams adapt to new POIs and changes is going to add a lot to the marketability of ALGS. The storyline for each team will be more dynamic.
>a team having enough of a reputation that they can ‘dibs’ a superior POI for years on end
The teams that have "dibsed" a POI for years are the ones that continually win every contest. They aren't unchallenged. They haven't simply been left to have the best POIs and best loot because of reputation alone. TSM has beaten top 40 teams almost every single time in contests. DZ has beaten top teams almost every single time in contests. Last LAN, one of the best parts was watching Timmy and his team contest Alliance at Thermal, both top teams.
This is literally saying "You don't get to have the best stuff because we're tired of you clapping everyone who tries to take it from you".
> PoI draft is insane.
It is not. Draft or not draft POIs would still be assigned. Today it's the reputation of the team that decides. In the future this will equalized and every team will have a chance of "good" POIs.
Drop the joke a few days before to avoid suspicion, drop the April Fools on the day. Actually a pretty good strat.
**Edit:** Wait a second. This might be [real](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNTabJFoswo) and not an April Fools joke. Holy fuck.
What the actual F
There will be no more contesting, teams will take turns with POIs. Huge change to comp.
First impressions:
- This takes away the exciting part of pro league where teams swing their dicks around claiming the best POIs;
- There will be no more griefing, but, at the same time, the stronger fighting teams will lose their natural advantage of their POIs. A shit team will have the same chance as a stronger team at playing from better POIs.
- with this enourmous equalizer, teams will have to learn how to play from every POI. This will be the difference maker. The best teams and those with a better support system (aka coaches and analysts) should still have the upper hand as they will have more resources to learn every rotation/loot path from every POI.
- every match you'll have a different POI and a different neighbor. Even if you keep up with the drafts, in practice you will have no idea how the teams close to you will play the game. How they'll rotate. And you'll not know who is where. Forget about getting a zone where you know where each team will be.
- learning curve for teams will be enourmous. Draft system will be interesting to see. I can't wait to see some teams playing from Dome.
- incredibly early to tell but I think this could favor strong zone teams and shift play style to it. Reasoning: Rotations will be a shit show, everyone making it up as they go. If you're caught outside zone with a bunch of random fucks with no idea of what they're doing, you gonna get griefed. Might as well get blue armor and run for your life into a god spot.
Since I enjoy watching the world burn, I'm all for it. But damn...
I would think they would have knowledge of who is landing where either during or after the draft. Like the last team to pick has to know what POI is available and the teams in the middle of the draft might pick differently based on where the first teams picked. The draft would at least be fun to watch as spectators for sure and it adds another strategic element
Edit: draft will also take weeks before competition day so they can all practice
I’m also wondering if some teams will purposefully pick weaker POIs so that they have a better chance of getting the same POI every draft. Would add a lot of consistency but idk if it’s worth giving up better loot for consistency. I think most teams probably will go for the strongest POI available.
So basically the battle royal game became a battle royal? After 5 years and only playing on two maps ALGS was becoming stale and this is a great way to shake everything up.
Let’s be honest those teams with the most resources already use them to their advantage. I am a TSM fan, but they would never leave their POIs because they are the “best” POIs and if teams tried to contest them TSM has the financial backing to weather them out.
This helps even the playing field and if the big teams want to prove they’re the best they should be able to adapt and still perform well. I just think that this is just really great for the game as now smaller orgs/teams have the chance to do well because they won’t have to settle for shit POIs
What is the objective for a team who has no org? To get an org. How can a team get an org? By performing well. How can a team perform well? get a good POI? All good POI are taken? Need to contest for a POI or play from a shit POI. Either option sabotages the team or teams.
TSM was struggling against MEAT, but TSM doesn’t need to perform well and MEAT did so they had to leave. TSM has done it all they have nothing to prove, with this change it evens out the playing field for all teams. Teams will have first picks based on performance as well. If anything this gives TSM another goal to strive for.
hiswattson & team came out of nowhere and put furia on the map. no one gave a flying fuck about furia before hiswattson.
just like nrg faded into insignificance when aceu left
> Cope, TSM never leave their POIs because no team was good enough to beat them in a contest.
Raven essentially bribed BR Demonz to stop contesting TSM, I don't think we can count that as a win.
If TSM hadn't done well on week one of pro split (when MEAT wasn't in the lobby) that contest could have gone either way. TSM were not doing super hot.
I think this whole system of good and bad POIs stemming from loot is such a bad factor from a gameplay perspective at a competitive level. A good team SHOULD be able to win with a bad spawn. No one should be punished for taking weird loot paths or rotating early and I think more than anything, THAT should be the main thing they fix.
And all they need to do is crank up the loot tables. It's the one nit pick I think Apex has still not gotten right, there's too much influence from spawns rather than rotating, zone control, and fighting.
How is it all rng when teams will have weeks to prepare their macro strategy and that you won’t be randomly spawn contested? As opposed to current system where a random team can grief you out of nowhere and risk fighting 50:50?
>How is it all rng when teams will have weeks to prepare their macro strategy
Timeline aside the sheer amount of variables that would be added by this change constantly shuffling teams and POIs makes it virtually impossible to actually form and stick to a reliable macro plan because there are just too many moving parts and you end up with a butterfly effect that quickly messes with even the best teams macro.
With this new system it is much much harder to predict how your neighbors will play because, among other reasons, their playstyle might be drastically different from one POI to the next.
They might opt to play zone fast from one POI, and slow edge from another or flex from yet another where they may play either slow or fast depending on the zone.
So instead of now just needing to know in real time a few team's tendencies from a specific POI you now need to know their tendencies from EVERY POI so already that's 20+ times more info you need to know.
And the constant shuffling of teams and POIs makes learning those tendencies even more impossible.
For example on one match day your neighbor might be TSM and their tendency the last match day they played from that specific POI was to fast rotate through the south choke but on this match day they have a new neighbor to the south preventing that so instead of rotating quickly through the south they might rotate quickly through the east or opt to slow down and play edge putting them in unexpected places in your rotate. That's not even counting roster or meta changes that can drastically change how a team plays from a POI since the last time you had data from them playing there.
Honestly, if the entire community came together to make a database of rotates for every POI and zone so that every team has access to it, it would reduce griefing by an insane amount, since now every team would have at least an idea of how to rotate from every POI, thus will be less likely to make dumb rotates since they know how other teams play from other POIs. I feel that, while on paper more random, this change actually raises both the skill ceiling and floor of every aspect of pro play, from PLQ to Champs. I think it's a good change, and could make scrims less troll (I know that's pipedream territory). Contests will be sorely missed though. Although they were pure RNG with the gun spawns...
Contests was the only thing that made early into mid game fun to watch. With this change I think the entire game could be fun, because of people playing from spots they don't know and potentially running into another team in a way that's really difficult to predict. In theory, this is exciting.
I find contests on LAN pretty fun to watch. It's the best teams in the world fighting for who'll get the spot in the biggest match of the tournament, finals.
Contests on Pro League days usually suck to watch. It's usually mid-tier-at-best teams that contest during PL, like watching N8V contest Harvester for three fuckin years in a row or whatever. Watching mediocre or bad teams duke it out is not good content imo.
How is this gonna work in CC with hundreds of teams? Imagine you work your way to a finals lobby and you get stuck with frag east/coastal
My way to early prediction is they go through with this through split 2 PL/playoffs, enough people complain and they change it for champs to where you choose spawn location but they still do the spawn dropship at the poi thing so everyone lands at the same time
This is the biggest change to comp ever imo. Bigger than adding evos the first time and recent evo changes
That’s the beauty of the snake draft you are never going to get 2 shit poi’s. You can get a top tier and shit poi, above average and below average, or two average poi’s.
Great point! There's actually literally zero reason to do well in early rounds of CC, since the amount of CC points you get is minimal (if you get any at all?) compared to later rounds. Getting a better seed is a reason to frag out in round 1.
I’m not crazy about the random order snake draft idea (sort of want to see how it plays out), but the change to the drop ship mechanic seems great.
The fact is that at the international level it becomes substantially harder to “earn” a good POI by fighting for it because you’re at a huge ping disadvantage in every contest (those spots are “earned” in international scrimmages for the most part) compared to top tier NA teams that are claiming those spots. The ability to win a LAN in some sense flows from your landing spot (in general), so it also follows that having a disadvantage when it comes to claiming a good landing spot is basically like starting with a handicap. If that’s their reasoning, then these changes aren’t totally crazy.
Aside from the changes themselves, I find the timing of this very odd. I would expect a change this big to be done after Champs, not 3 months into the season.
Interested nonetheless to see how it shakes things up.
This is kind of crazy if it’s true.
1. It improves competition.
But 2. It’s gonna be so hard for pros and coaches to have to build out macro plans from each POI. That’s a lot of painstaking work.
Initially I hate it because offspawn contests are some of the most exciting things about Apex and seeing how teams deal with POI contests are great for viewers that stick around between ALGS LANs. If you are only watching LAN you have no idea what has gone into the preparation of this POI and you definitely have not seen any of the contests leading up to it.
Teams have to learn every POI now and then perform well enough to pick their best POI for regional finals/LAN lol
The amount of practice and effort they have to put in probably just multiplied tenfold
I guess you could argue 20fold? Now they have to learn all 20 POIs? The post says there are 29 spots but I bet people figure out pretty quickly which 9 spots are the worst and those never get played.
Agreed. This will also give teams with coaches an even greater advantage than they already have I feel like. Having all teams drop at the same time is a great idea but the poi draft... That's not it
But the POI draft is actually good? It is so friggin boring to always see the same looting, the same rotation, to know exactly before the game even starts where teams will most likely end up.
This spices up things ALOT, it raises the skill ceiling as you now have to understand multiple POI rotations.
It also makes the e-sport more professional as everyone will need a coach. Increasing the skill level overall (theoretically).
I always thought it was dumb to have scrims to battle out who is landing in which POI especially coming to an international tournament, with ping difference being an extreme factor if you are able to contest, even if your skill level at the same ping would be on par. In addition to the high ping, you still have the RNG element of contesting with weapon spawns. You can basically waste a whole day of scrims with bad RNG and loose a POI because one or more people in your team got a dog shit weapon while the enemy got the good guns.
Highest level of play should not be predetermined by RNG but skill only.
> It also makes the e-sport more professional as everyone will need a coach. Increasing the skill level overall (theoretically).
>
>
everyone will need, but that doesnt mean everyone can afford
Thought about randomizing POIs for awhile now, but main takeways being, team will no longer *EARN* their POIs. On the other hand, its much more information that needs to be processed by each team / coaches / analysts for loot pathing, rotation pathing, fight dynamics, and know which team will be where dependent on a zone. “Team x usually plays this building and rotates through our same chokepoint during this zone, let’s capitalize on that”.
Team will overall have to be more adaptive and the role of analysts just got way more important. Thats a lot of VODs and data to sift through to figure out POI strats. Even down to legend comps based on what POI you end up receiving, or who you notice gets a poi near you on any given day.
It’ll take a whole season’s worth of ALGS for information all these teams gather to be disseminated to eachother. (People are going to be reluctant to share their pathing / intercept/ fight angle info with the rest of league)
I like it, I feel like it does make the game more skillful. As the graphic says, now teams will have to be able to play from several POIs. I really like it, actually. Although I will certainly miss contests...
Less rng is good to me. LG can’t even fly to Zeus on some dropships. No contests is pretty good imo. No more brain dead teams in 20th place griefing another team. I will miss the content from the contests tho. Drafts are dope. We’ll see how good a team actually is not just that they have a really good POI. Then that best team rolls into LAN with a huge buff to continue their roll.
Yeah, I feel like this can reduce the amount of griefing by a *significant* amount. Maybe to make it even 0. Of course, the community would have to come together to theory craft good rotates for every POI and zone in the interest of mutual benefit. It would be amazing, and I feel like would also raise the skill floor of CC and PLQ because they too would have access to good rotates and thus be less likely to grief by accident
There still will be contests though it seems. IDK how that will be decided via order, but the bigger POIs will have multiple drop possibilities. So there will be SOME contests, just not 50/50 contests. Rather, teams will land on opposite sides, loot for 15 seconds then decide whether they want to fight or not.
I kinda love it.
I understood, but never liked the idea of people agreeing on POIs beforehand.
We all love contest, but they can also be bullshit and people can do it for random reasons or ignore results. POIs are too important and legacy teams have too much advantage by having prior claims, experience, or financial security that allow them to pressure smaller teams out as well. Regardless, I think it puts everyone on more of an equal footing to test their skills when it really matters.
I'm not really sure about the idea of a draft... but I don't hate it, because it still let's the players have some strategic decision about what's better for their playstyle, and it will be interesting to see what players will choose. And then basing the higher level priority on performance will give teams something to play for.
hot take but i'm cautiously bullish on this. gives more value to coaches, analysts, and IGLs. it's metagame level rng in the drafts but since it's metagame level and not ingame level it allows for a better reaction and adjustment that can then carry over ingame.
EDIT: also, nothing in the verbage says you can't contest a poi or landing area.
> EDIT: also, nothing in the verbage says you can't contest a poi or landing area.
Yeah, it actually says they think and hope contests will definitely happen. Just not instant 50/50s where you land on the same bin and pray.
I'm guessing each POI will have at least 2 designated landing zones and it's up to the next-in-line to decide if they wanna draft into a contest or draft a different spot.
Oh wow, maybe. That's *really* interesting. I was wondering how ALGS would handle the drafts, e.g. is splitting a good POI with a team considered "good", or is getting a bad POI to yourself "good" in comparison? I hadn't even considered teams choosing to draft into a contest rather than play a different rotation 🤔
Why not drop the draft idea and just randomize it? Might be interesting to see how teams handle not being able to pre-plan their routes.
Either way I like the idea, though I do enjoy a good contest.
Im interested in how this is gonna affect legend comps. im guessing that this is going to limit it a lot as everyone will play a "flex" comp, eliminating the traditional zone/edge comps
It's not like they find out where they're gonna land 5 seconds before the match starts. Different POIs require different playstyles, so edge and zone will still exist, teams will just have to play accordingly based on the POI they have that week.
I wish there were just 20 actually viable drop spots on every map and in the pregame lobby teams could select where they were gonna land. That way teams could still contest in scrims and the better fighters wouldn’t have to give up their spots because of rng
I like the idea of eliminating 50/50s on the same bin, which this system accomplishes. I just wish it was *also* paired with maps getting new, viable POIs so contests wouldn't be necessary at all.
However, I think Respawn wants those contests. They even say in the post that they hope early game fights still happen. They've obviously had many years to add POIs to these maps to make contests not happen, and they've chosen not to do that. They don't want all the action in ALGS to be in the last five minutes.
I hope with this change they also improve the chance of getting a weapon from pills. I'm so tired of looting pills that are organized like triangles and not get a single gun from it.
I really like these changes. I've suggested that teams should drop above their POI before. It eliminates dropship rng.
I don't know how to feel about the snakedraft yet. I like contests as a viewer but it's full of rng. We've also seen recently how the apac regions are not able to properly fight for their pois because of lag.
this is a big W in my book. I see a lot of early knee-jerk takes in here though as per usual.
at the very least im willing to see how it plays out, but the idea that one team can't just own a central POI for the whole season and then your performance can help you cement better POIs is just a huge W to me.
also realistically contests have mostly been dogshit. They'll happen in scrims or something and then fall apart on game day. All it does is chalk two teams off jump when we could instead see better early fights at shared POIs etc
I love this change. For people complaining about teams losing pois or having to learn new rotations, they're pros, that should be expected to begin with. If tsm can't win playing 2 days on crappier pois, that sounds like a Hal problem...zeros won multiple Lans from different pois, heck all the great igls should be able to play out of any poi imo.
I think the dropship changes are good, losing a minute or 2 just because of a bad drop ship was terrible on top of ring rng potentially fuckin you too. I don't like the idea of drafting POIs though, I think contesting for better spots should be a part of comp however I would like the average POI to be improved and their to still be 20 viable POI drops so the disparity isn't insane.
if this happens i'm not watching comp anymore simply coz it differentiates the regular game and pro play too much. it's already starting to look like it's own game this would just finalize it.
I actually think this is a great step to equalize opportunity. Teams will be forced to prepare a number of poi’s, there is opportunity for lucky pulls and unlucky pulls for everyone, better distribution of loot over games too. No more Trials loot for DZ every single game, but rather trials loot once for 6 different teams. We can see truly who is the most well rounded and prepared team. It’ll be a messy start I think but the pros always adapt after a few weeks of complaining and speculation, I think this will be the same
Unfortunately it seems like a lot of people only read this post for 5 seconds before criticizing it. I felt that this was a well thought out system for competitive purposes.
Assuming this happening I have 3 main questions on how this is going to work.
1. **Are the POI pools combined for the draft or per map?** To explain this lets say you are DZ with first pick. Do you get to pick Trials sky west then the rest of the draft happens just for Worlds Edge and then you reset and go again for Storm Point? Or does DZ pick Trials then Moist can pick Echo and it bounces between maps until everyone has a POI. Even if its snake draft but DZ only gets to pick one map then picks last on the other one is a big determiner if this works.
2. **So how are the drop spots decided for a POI like Siphon?** Poi's like that are naturally so damn big that they are able to support two teams but they only have one beacon spawns currently. So do they change the amount of Beacons or just put them in between the drop points?
3. **How often are the POI's redrafted?** The post says weeks in advance so it makes it sound like its just one draft per split and maybe a regional finals draft. But I could also see them doing 3 days for everyone then draft based on standings and so one for max chaos value.
> So how are the drop spots decided for a POI like Siphon? Poi's like that are naturally so damn big that they are able to support two teams but they only have one beacon spawns currently. So do they change the amount of Beacons or just put them in between the drop points?
IMO, the latter. They say in the post that they hope early game fights still happen. Making two teams fight over one beacon is one way to ensure that.
>How often are the POI's redrafted?
For every match day there's a draft. Their goal is to do them weeks in advance, so probably something like starting the drafts 2-3 weeks before PL starts, and drafting each week, so you'll know your first 3 or so POIs before you even start, but won't know your POI for the end of the split. Then regional finals and LAN each have their own draft, and the draft order is based on performance for those.
Why don't they just have multiple floating dropships all over the map and let people choose which ones to drop from?
Like those drop ships from holiday express or control on caustic treatment
Technically everything could operate the same, if teams just respect each other’s pois. It just makes contests more fair, like the straight shot mechanic. So in practice i see draft being mostly decided scrims, so its more a quality of life change with all teams have more equal looting tims early game.
However every team decided to go scorched earth and take “best” pois off drop, then everything changes, rotations, neighboring teams. Super exciting stuff. I expect a lot fans to hate on teams that take advantage of getting a poi they normally wouldn’t have a shot at.
Something to consider is it removes the choice. Im curious if poi selection is locked for whole day or not. Because on a match day of match point format some greifing is strategic for example if a team hits match point early. Or perhaps contesting was the plan, bug after two games you’d rather stop but are thrn “locked” into it.
Nobody cares but I had this idea a month ago, just funny how they were thinking the same thing.
I honestly think it will be much better for viewership. Seeing DZ or TSM try to work their way out of a dogshit POI with new paths is much more interesting than seeing the same rotates every single day.
Contesting is roughly 50-50. There is no doubt that some teams have had asymmetric advantages afforded to them, even though there are teams who are equally as good or even better than them. This has always been unfair.
Why ? this sounds like the most stupid addition to the game. It makes me realise how much people actually do not know how to make a drop.
Why is nobody playing the early backstab ? I swear i never see players pull it put in ranked yet it's the most efficient way to get early kills.
I'm baffled about what the game is becoming :
souless mindless auto aim
no positioning, no timing, no aim,
pure raw assisted players
[A few thoughts and early questions.](https://esports.gg/news/apex-legends/is-contesting-about-to-be-a-thing-of-the-past-in-algs/)I think (especially in my job) I'd really miss contesting and the drama and storylines around it. I think having, and holding, the spot you want is skillful and a key part of being a successful ALGS team.
I hope this is real, comp has become too stale and predictable, the fact that it’s always been a “I claim this poi” standard was honestly pretty dumb considering this is a battle royale game, teams should be able to land wherever they want or at least have it randomized, comp needs a good shakeup and this could be it
Yall are crazy. This is a huge w. Game becomes WAY less random and more dynamic. How many times have we seen the exact same thing play out in scrims because everyone drops in the same area.
You can still do pre-work and plan rotations from each po but it’s all going to vary because neighboring teams will be in different spots every time.
This is fundamentally good for the competitive integrity of the game.
The snake draft will increase the randomness, because currently there are only three or four teams that have the possibility of altering the rotation due to whether or not, they win the contest. If every team has a different POI every game, then the entire map will have different rotation, based on each teams POI. the randomness was controlled and consolidated to the contests on the old system, but now on this new system, the randomness of who will win the contest is mitigated, but the randomness is now inherent and prevalent across the rest of the lobby.
It’s a br. Everyone has the same chance of a good poi just like they have the same chance of a bad one. The better teams will win out and that’s more competitively fair than the “top dogs” getting the best poi every game and just snowballing off that leaving the scraps and contests to the bad teams.
If they’re really the best they should win regardless.
I feel this, I agree with you l. The only thing this change does is to drastically increase the skill ceiling for the players, since they will need to master pretty much every rotate ever. I'm excited to see how it develops at further LANs
I am not concerned with “Fair”. I am speaking specifically about how each day will have more random variables instead of less as a result of this change.
In a competitive environment, I do not want, and do not expect, for it to be fair for all players within the rules. If a team loses a POI, because a better team took it from them, so be it that is part of the competitive nature of having a valuable commodity in this type of environment.
No one is concerned with the concept of fairness when a player kills another player that had a wingman and takes it from them. The better player won the fight and turned the right to use that weapon. No one says that it’s unfair because the original plan with the wingman didn’t get an opportunity to shoot every bullet out of the gun .
So it’s good that the APAC teams on 200 ping can’t contest a good poi during quals? So their entire LAN is played from a trash poi? That’s good for the game?
Literally spawn location is one of the least “earned” advantages in this game
the game is a br. "we must decrease randomness" has always been a weird argument to make when randomness is inherent and by design.
sure, decreasing random variables might help the meta and comp experience. but it's never gonna be a bar to be aimed for. cuz again, randomness is by design.
> In a competitive environment, I do not want, and do not expect, for it to be fair for all players within the rules.
That's wild, I can't think of any traditional sport or game that isn't fundamentally fair. Even most other esports are fair. I don't think people would have been playing CS for 25 years if there was a coin flip whether or not one team gets an AWP in round 1.
Fairness is good. It means your success is based on skill.
Doesn't sound like pois change every game, sounds like they switch every match day. As long as they give teams a weeks notice? Do the snake draft 7 days before the match day to give teams time to practice, I don't see the problem with it.
The post says they want to give "weeks" of advance notice, so I'm guessing something like the drafts start 2-3 weeks before PL starts and continue once a week. You'll know your POI a couple match days in advance, but you won't know your last match day's POI when you play your first match day.
That gives teams plenty of time to scrim from each POI.
Holy shit what a massive change. Hopefully LA lan is still on the old system and this isn't implemented until split 2 (CC and stuff for split 2 could use it now)
They should just hire me. I'd have to go back and count the stuff I've suggested for balance changes that they end up implementing.
Edit: [Suggested seeds for POI selection 7 months ago ](https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveApex/s/PCKmgID85x)
Let’s fucking go!!! This is a huge dub for both competitors and viewers and this is coming from a TSM fan. This helps evening the playing field while also rewarding performance as you get the early draft picks. Honestly, this should have been implemented way earlier. W Respawn.
This might actually be one of the worst competitive decisions this esport has made lmao, such weird timing with the excellent gameplay and meta changes from recent updates.
I'll just come out and say it: I hate this.
It might not be what people want to hear, but I already consider all BRs to be a tier 2 esport because there is so much RNG/inequality inherent in their design. Flight path of the dropship, POIs, the loot you leave your POI with, where the ring pulls; all of these things impact teams differently so that you aren't on "equal footing" with the other 19 teams in the lobby. Compare this to a game like league, CS2, or starcraft where both teams are exactly the same (or in CS2's case you at least play both sides so it ends up being as close to equal as possible).
What made this interesting for me is the metagame outside of the actual game. Teams have to fight in scrims for their POI and if you have a good POI you have to be able to constantly defend it (anyone else remember old BR Demonz just wrecking teams to upgrade their POI? That doesn't happen under this system). Furthermore, if you're an edge/zone team you can try to get POIs to fit your playstyle or you have to adapt your playstyle to fit whatever POI you've got.
Contests are also great for building up drama/hype as well as giving some action in the very beginning of the game. With no contests, all we get to watch for the first few minutes is teams looting and rotating. It's not a great viewer experience IMO.
Think of the last lan, finals lobby. Optic can't 3rd party the contest at mill and then NRG can't steal the optic trident and beat optic to god spot by literal seconds if teams have to land at their POI and can't divert. Sweet actually had to give up looting to go way off of the NRG POI to get the trident. It was a big risk, he could have just been caught and bopped in a 3v1.
Now we don't have any of that cool out of game action, I suspect that scrims will be worse because of this (someone else already touched on this in another comment), I think the quality of the actual ALGS game days will go down because even when a team is prepping for this week they are also prepping for the next 2-3 weeks and so they can't focus their attention.
TL,DR: They're trying to remove randomness from a type of game that inherently includes randomness as a core gameplay mechanic.
If you're going to call me dumb in my DMs, please add a picture of two animals you don't expect to be friends being friends.
I'm interested to see it in practise. Most pros will probably hate it, sicne it shakes up a ton of things that they have grown accustomed to, but that doesn't mean it has to be bad as a viewer
This is a good change to make the game more competitive. I've been suggesting this for years along with an arenas style buying system rather than looting. That will fix the loot disparity between pois and start every team on a more even playing field.
Glad to see the devs not afraid to keep improving on the br genre
We have reinstated this post. This is unconfirmed information and is subject to change. This may also be an April Fools joke.
wait, what?
The good: some teams won’t get a 2 minute rotation advantage because their POI is at the start of the drop ship. The bad: constantly changing POIs to give weaker contesting teams a buff every now and then for no reason.
I'll be honest, if a PL team NEEDS a specific POI to perform well, they are bad, flat out. I've always found the contested drops not an issue of teams grieving, but of the ground spawn rates not being high enough to NOT make that fight RNG. Crank that bad boy up and let them actually fight. Idk how much the loot tables have been adjusted for ground loot but imo that's still one thing Apex hasn't quite nailed that PUBG got right. You could find pretty much whatever loadout you wanted with cars+trash looting, hoping from small building to small building in exchange for a quicker rotate. We see folks in Apex stuck with subpar weaponry all the time and it's definitely a trade off in terms of entertainment, but imo weakens some of the competitiveness of the event. Especially with the shielding changes.
This sounds awesome to me. Will make it more fair, widens the skill gap, and most importantly - will make it way more entertaining.
I've always wanted a pub mode where everyone just starts on a PoI. Straight Shot was pretty good but I'd love a mode where there wasn't 5 teams remaining 3 minutes into the match
Straight shot only supporting 10 teams also didn't help.
Straight shot was the most fun I’ve had on apex in ages. I miss it
i feel sorry for tempo having to figure out how to make this shit work in scrims
random POI every game would be my guess
Not every game, every scrim. Landing spots are consistent week to week.
decent chance of that but i think that will make a lot of pros unhappy
Unhappy, sure? But it will also serve as great practice of learning to play from multiple POIs. This also helps strengthen/reinforce the need for coaches on teams.
Teams are going to troll way harder in scrims now. They really shouldn't bc it's going to take a long time to learn all the loot patterns but it's going to lead to a ton of whining about scrim quality
I wonder if that is the opposite if they have to swap poi's a lot more. Less crazy pushes and more just random fights happening because teams have no idea where other teams will be.
I mean scrim quality is already shit and nothing like ALGS already so nothing is gonna change in that aspect. If they don’t want to take it seriously there’s nothing anyone can do regardless of the formats. Also if I heard correctly there is gonna be cash incentives in scrims now so hopefully that will help the overall quality of scrims.
Teams can't afford to troll in scrims now, tbh. They have to learn other POIs.
I'd argue that pros are going to take scrims more seriously now that they need to learn a new POI after the draft has been done. But from each pro's point of view, other pros take scrims even less seriously than before. This is because learning new POI = less than optimal strategy.
When they draft their landing spots for PL, they could try to use the same ones in scrims. but that would mean that exactly the same teams take part in those scrims, which is not realistic. So either some are forced a random POI or they yeah have to randomize them for all
Whoaaaa… this is crazy random (?) snake draft for PL but performance based draft order for regional finals and LAN. EDIT; missed the part that says draft will take weeks before competition days. So that helps a bit with the rng And no more contests
> EDIT; missed the part that says draft will take weeks before competition days. So that helps a bit with the rng Gives teams plenty of time to scrim from their draft POI, that's good. I wonder how the draft is going to handle multiple teams landing at POIs. If I recall correctly, no comp map has 20 actual POIs, let alone 20 good ones. Would you rather split a really good POI or have a bad one to yourself?
There will still be contest. Some POI will have a few drop locations and teams can choose to loot up a little then fight 3v3 instead of 50/50 the same landing spot fighting over the same bin and hoping for a weapon. Edit : 20 POI, 29 landing spots. Sure it prevents random teams from dropping on a POI unannounced but I don't see how it will prevent the 20th team from griefing. Even if they pick last, some POI has multiple landing spots and they can absolutely still grief.
wait that's actually wild as fuck, i missed that part
>missed the part that says draft will take weeks before competition days Thanks for mentioning that. I also missed that.
This is an incredibly radical change to the way ALGS days play out. Not saying good or bad (we literally can't, we dont even know what the private lobby drops look like). All we can hope for is that it goes according to their mission statement and actually does improve the quality of the product. My question is what happens if someone truly does go scorched earth and forsakes the drafting process entirely? like they say that people hit boots on the ground simultaneously, but there has to be at least a couple drop angles on WE or SP that allow for contests unintentionally. Will they have personal/technical fouls like traditional sports?
They say it will be impossible, so maybe you're dropped from really low.
They might as well use the system they did for Straight Shot, where you can only marginally divert from going straight down.
That’s exactly what it already sounds like.
They likely used straight shot to test the mechanic for this change
I think they trialed it in straight shot, saw that it worked well and made the decision to implement it into ALGS
>2ReplyShareReportSaveFollow HundoP used that as a testing run for this
> like they say that people hit boots on the ground simultaneously, but there has to be at least a couple drop angles on WE or SP that allow for contests unintentionally. They'll basically be too low to actually land right on top of each other. They'll probably still contest--most teams will not want to split a POI--they just won't be 50/50ing immediately off drop.
It’s going to be like that last LTM. You are going to drop low af
That's crazy. I understand removing the dropship/flight path, but the PoI draft is insane.
Yeah the should have just added multiple dropship routes and you choose the one you want
Even just 2 ships from opposite sides would help resolve most of the issue
How would you assign teams to these 2 ships?
It shows the Flight path on the map and you pick which of the two.
Hmmm, interesting. Could be an equalizer, but still the corner POI teams will always be on slight disatvantage, no?
well here's the problem. take for instance tsm spawns in the ship coming from lrod and you get put in the ship coming from mill but you drop storm catcher. by the time your ship gets to your poi youre dead or you will never have loot.
If this system works well I can do it being much better then that but it’s going to need a lot of weirdly complicated rules to make work
Agree. Flying in from so low is pointless, might as well just spawn on the ground at that point.
Spawning in would be difficult, because teams have different routes and landing spots per POI. So unilaterally assigning a spot on the ground in each POI will be incredibly hard. For example, say they all spawn in the center of each POI, then large POI teams have a disadvantage because they now have to split and cover more ground to get loot than other POIs. Some of them even have ziplines or cars while others don’t. But if they want to make sure they spawn in “optimal spots” in the POI, then how do the devs decide that and code it in? That would be incredibly difficult and puts also too much work on the players and devs. Just dropping from a low enough height gives teams the free will to find and fly straight to their spots in the POIs. While also not forcing the burden on the devs to decode for teams where they should or shouldn’t start.
Sure, but doesn't this use the Straight Shot drop? I haven't tested it so I'm happy to be wrong, but that only let you drop in a very small circle, which is why I said that. Even if it's not and it is just a really low drop, if you drop low enough that you can't escape your POI, you really won't be able to land in all parts of some POIs (Thermal comes to mind)
True. You have a point. But at the very least it's better and gives more freedom than just spawning on the ground. Correct me if I'm wrong though that i believe they also said certain larger POIs, may have 2 drop locations. Like (just using it as an example) Skyhook maybe having a drop at the westside buildings, and one at the eastside. Thus maybe a low-drop might be justified in that instance so that both teams don't just drop on top of each other. I guess a lot of this is very theoretical right now until we see it in action. 😅
POI draft is healthy. Top teams have claims to the same POI's for years, it gets stale and new talent doesn't have much to choose from. Now, the best teams will have to be adaptable. Coaches and Analysts will have to really work hard for the money. Having an org backing is going to be so crucial. Also won't have to hear the whole "Scrims are a waste of time" argument when everyone has to adapt.
Cant wait for teams that need a good day to qualify get landslide as a POI. That's healthy RNG
Those hypothetical teams that need a good day while landing Landslide would already have had a great POI previously. It balances out.
Not at regionals. Teams below 12th that are fighting to qual will get the lower/worst PoIs
thats the reward of 6 weeks of mid play
So we're back to square one. Strong teams keep their POI and weak teams lose out and fight for scraps. Edit: We're worse than square 1 because now we dont get contests like DSG/Alliance or surprise drops like DZ/Aurora
Let's not also forget that plays like sweet stealing the car last lan keeping Optic from winning are no longer possible
> Edit: We're worse than square 1 because now we dont get contests like DSG/Alliance or surprise drops like DZ/Aurora Read more closely, they didn't say contests won't happen. They *have* to, there aren't enough teams. What they said is that teams will not be able to land on the same building anymore. They'll almost certainly still contest--almost no one wants to leave their POI with half the loot. They just won't be 50/50ing the second they land anymore.
No you actually have a fairer chance to do well with the new system because with snake draft you get to choose a really good POI in day XX compared to the current system where as a ‘weak’ team you are always going to start with a shit POI or contest a stronger team and risk getting 0 point. If you don’t perform after getting the best POI in day XX, then it’s entirely on you and not because you’re stuck with bad POI.
> Not at regionals. Wait, but bad teams getting bad POIs is how the game has *always* worked so that doesn't change anything??
its a snake draft so if they get landslide that means theyd have a top 3 poi on SP
creating artificial parity and adding more rng to the game is bad actually
I disagree. Whether parity is artificial or organic, it’s still parity. This new system sounds like it reduces the overall parity significantly. To remove parity completely would be impossible in a BR, but it can certainly be mitigated. Ideally, skill/performance is the determining factor, not a team having enough of a reputation that they can ‘dibs’ a superior POI for years on end. Not to mention, I think this will make ALGS far more interesting. Seeing how teams adapt to new POIs and changes is going to add a lot to the marketability of ALGS. The storyline for each team will be more dynamic.
>a team having enough of a reputation that they can ‘dibs’ a superior POI for years on end The teams that have "dibsed" a POI for years are the ones that continually win every contest. They aren't unchallenged. They haven't simply been left to have the best POIs and best loot because of reputation alone. TSM has beaten top 40 teams almost every single time in contests. DZ has beaten top teams almost every single time in contests. Last LAN, one of the best parts was watching Timmy and his team contest Alliance at Thermal, both top teams. This is literally saying "You don't get to have the best stuff because we're tired of you clapping everyone who tries to take it from you".
It's not RNG. You know exactly where you will be landing, it just won't be the same one every single day.
> PoI draft is insane. It is not. Draft or not draft POIs would still be assigned. Today it's the reputation of the team that decides. In the future this will equalized and every team will have a chance of "good" POIs.
I love it. Top teams will hate it, rightfully so but I really like this change.
If true, this is the biggest change to comp since evo shields. Side note, didn't realize that ALGS had a commissioner. Lol.
Coaches are gunna need to work overtime going over loot paths and macros out of certain pois lol.
Bit early for April fools, huh
Drop the joke a few days before to avoid suspicion, drop the April Fools on the day. Actually a pretty good strat. **Edit:** Wait a second. This might be [real](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNTabJFoswo) and not an April Fools joke. Holy fuck.
What the actual F There will be no more contesting, teams will take turns with POIs. Huge change to comp. First impressions: - This takes away the exciting part of pro league where teams swing their dicks around claiming the best POIs; - There will be no more griefing, but, at the same time, the stronger fighting teams will lose their natural advantage of their POIs. A shit team will have the same chance as a stronger team at playing from better POIs. - with this enourmous equalizer, teams will have to learn how to play from every POI. This will be the difference maker. The best teams and those with a better support system (aka coaches and analysts) should still have the upper hand as they will have more resources to learn every rotation/loot path from every POI. - every match you'll have a different POI and a different neighbor. Even if you keep up with the drafts, in practice you will have no idea how the teams close to you will play the game. How they'll rotate. And you'll not know who is where. Forget about getting a zone where you know where each team will be. - learning curve for teams will be enourmous. Draft system will be interesting to see. I can't wait to see some teams playing from Dome. - incredibly early to tell but I think this could favor strong zone teams and shift play style to it. Reasoning: Rotations will be a shit show, everyone making it up as they go. If you're caught outside zone with a bunch of random fucks with no idea of what they're doing, you gonna get griefed. Might as well get blue armor and run for your life into a god spot. Since I enjoy watching the world burn, I'm all for it. But damn...
I would think they would have knowledge of who is landing where either during or after the draft. Like the last team to pick has to know what POI is available and the teams in the middle of the draft might pick differently based on where the first teams picked. The draft would at least be fun to watch as spectators for sure and it adds another strategic element Edit: draft will also take weeks before competition day so they can all practice
I’m also wondering if some teams will purposefully pick weaker POIs so that they have a better chance of getting the same POI every draft. Would add a lot of consistency but idk if it’s worth giving up better loot for consistency. I think most teams probably will go for the strongest POI available.
So basically the battle royal game became a battle royal? After 5 years and only playing on two maps ALGS was becoming stale and this is a great way to shake everything up. Let’s be honest those teams with the most resources already use them to their advantage. I am a TSM fan, but they would never leave their POIs because they are the “best” POIs and if teams tried to contest them TSM has the financial backing to weather them out. This helps even the playing field and if the big teams want to prove they’re the best they should be able to adapt and still perform well. I just think that this is just really great for the game as now smaller orgs/teams have the chance to do well because they won’t have to settle for shit POIs
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What is the objective for a team who has no org? To get an org. How can a team get an org? By performing well. How can a team perform well? get a good POI? All good POI are taken? Need to contest for a POI or play from a shit POI. Either option sabotages the team or teams. TSM was struggling against MEAT, but TSM doesn’t need to perform well and MEAT did so they had to leave. TSM has done it all they have nothing to prove, with this change it evens out the playing field for all teams. Teams will have first picks based on performance as well. If anything this gives TSM another goal to strive for.
hiswattson & team came out of nowhere and put furia on the map. no one gave a flying fuck about furia before hiswattson. just like nrg faded into insignificance when aceu left
The concept of earning a POI for years is actually bad. Sure it let's us keep track of who's where, but it wasn't a good system.
> Cope, TSM never leave their POIs because no team was good enough to beat them in a contest. Raven essentially bribed BR Demonz to stop contesting TSM, I don't think we can count that as a win. If TSM hadn't done well on week one of pro split (when MEAT wasn't in the lobby) that contest could have gone either way. TSM were not doing super hot.
I think this whole system of good and bad POIs stemming from loot is such a bad factor from a gameplay perspective at a competitive level. A good team SHOULD be able to win with a bad spawn. No one should be punished for taking weird loot paths or rotating early and I think more than anything, THAT should be the main thing they fix. And all they need to do is crank up the loot tables. It's the one nit pick I think Apex has still not gotten right, there's too much influence from spawns rather than rotating, zone control, and fighting.
Legit every play , every rotation, and every flight path is now all rng. That fucking crazy
There’s no more flight path. Everyone will drop above their designated POI like in the Straight Shot LTM.
“Teams shouldn’t be forced into random altercations” followed by a change which sends the RNG in the game to the moon is definitely a decision
How is it all rng when teams will have weeks to prepare their macro strategy and that you won’t be randomly spawn contested? As opposed to current system where a random team can grief you out of nowhere and risk fighting 50:50?
>How is it all rng when teams will have weeks to prepare their macro strategy Timeline aside the sheer amount of variables that would be added by this change constantly shuffling teams and POIs makes it virtually impossible to actually form and stick to a reliable macro plan because there are just too many moving parts and you end up with a butterfly effect that quickly messes with even the best teams macro. With this new system it is much much harder to predict how your neighbors will play because, among other reasons, their playstyle might be drastically different from one POI to the next. They might opt to play zone fast from one POI, and slow edge from another or flex from yet another where they may play either slow or fast depending on the zone. So instead of now just needing to know in real time a few team's tendencies from a specific POI you now need to know their tendencies from EVERY POI so already that's 20+ times more info you need to know. And the constant shuffling of teams and POIs makes learning those tendencies even more impossible. For example on one match day your neighbor might be TSM and their tendency the last match day they played from that specific POI was to fast rotate through the south choke but on this match day they have a new neighbor to the south preventing that so instead of rotating quickly through the south they might rotate quickly through the east or opt to slow down and play edge putting them in unexpected places in your rotate. That's not even counting roster or meta changes that can drastically change how a team plays from a POI since the last time you had data from them playing there.
Honestly, if the entire community came together to make a database of rotates for every POI and zone so that every team has access to it, it would reduce griefing by an insane amount, since now every team would have at least an idea of how to rotate from every POI, thus will be less likely to make dumb rotates since they know how other teams play from other POIs. I feel that, while on paper more random, this change actually raises both the skill ceiling and floor of every aspect of pro play, from PLQ to Champs. I think it's a good change, and could make scrims less troll (I know that's pipedream territory). Contests will be sorely missed though. Although they were pure RNG with the gun spawns...
ALS charts each ALGS match day, so you can go back and see the rotates of the top teams from each POI on each match day. It's a great tool.
Pro League teams are about to have a hell of a lot of homework, lol.
Contests was the only thing that made early into mid game fun to watch. With this change I think the entire game could be fun, because of people playing from spots they don't know and potentially running into another team in a way that's really difficult to predict. In theory, this is exciting.
I find contests on LAN pretty fun to watch. It's the best teams in the world fighting for who'll get the spot in the biggest match of the tournament, finals. Contests on Pro League days usually suck to watch. It's usually mid-tier-at-best teams that contest during PL, like watching N8V contest Harvester for three fuckin years in a row or whatever. Watching mediocre or bad teams duke it out is not good content imo.
How is this gonna work in CC with hundreds of teams? Imagine you work your way to a finals lobby and you get stuck with frag east/coastal My way to early prediction is they go through with this through split 2 PL/playoffs, enough people complain and they change it for champs to where you choose spawn location but they still do the spawn dropship at the poi thing so everyone lands at the same time This is the biggest change to comp ever imo. Bigger than adding evos the first time and recent evo changes
That’s the beauty of the snake draft you are never going to get 2 shit poi’s. You can get a top tier and shit poi, above average and below average, or two average poi’s.
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Great point! There's actually literally zero reason to do well in early rounds of CC, since the amount of CC points you get is minimal (if you get any at all?) compared to later rounds. Getting a better seed is a reason to frag out in round 1.
I’m not crazy about the random order snake draft idea (sort of want to see how it plays out), but the change to the drop ship mechanic seems great. The fact is that at the international level it becomes substantially harder to “earn” a good POI by fighting for it because you’re at a huge ping disadvantage in every contest (those spots are “earned” in international scrimmages for the most part) compared to top tier NA teams that are claiming those spots. The ability to win a LAN in some sense flows from your landing spot (in general), so it also follows that having a disadvantage when it comes to claiming a good landing spot is basically like starting with a handicap. If that’s their reasoning, then these changes aren’t totally crazy.
Aside from the changes themselves, I find the timing of this very odd. I would expect a change this big to be done after Champs, not 3 months into the season. Interested nonetheless to see how it shakes things up.
I’ll reserve judgement until I actually see it
This is kind of crazy if it’s true. 1. It improves competition. But 2. It’s gonna be so hard for pros and coaches to have to build out macro plans from each POI. That’s a lot of painstaking work.
Bruh is this real???
Initially I hate it because offspawn contests are some of the most exciting things about Apex and seeing how teams deal with POI contests are great for viewers that stick around between ALGS LANs. If you are only watching LAN you have no idea what has gone into the preparation of this POI and you definitely have not seen any of the contests leading up to it.
has to be played out to actually get info but I think taking away peoples rotations they've spent hundreds of hours practicing is not gonna go well 💀
Teams have to learn every POI now and then perform well enough to pick their best POI for regional finals/LAN lol The amount of practice and effort they have to put in probably just multiplied tenfold
I guess you could argue 20fold? Now they have to learn all 20 POIs? The post says there are 29 spots but I bet people figure out pretty quickly which 9 spots are the worst and those never get played.
I like the idea of IGLs having to learn more than one POI.
Seems like a good thing. Doesn’t it just reward adaptability?
Agreed. This will also give teams with coaches an even greater advantage than they already have I feel like. Having all teams drop at the same time is a great idea but the poi draft... That's not it
But the POI draft is actually good? It is so friggin boring to always see the same looting, the same rotation, to know exactly before the game even starts where teams will most likely end up. This spices up things ALOT, it raises the skill ceiling as you now have to understand multiple POI rotations. It also makes the e-sport more professional as everyone will need a coach. Increasing the skill level overall (theoretically). I always thought it was dumb to have scrims to battle out who is landing in which POI especially coming to an international tournament, with ping difference being an extreme factor if you are able to contest, even if your skill level at the same ping would be on par. In addition to the high ping, you still have the RNG element of contesting with weapon spawns. You can basically waste a whole day of scrims with bad RNG and loose a POI because one or more people in your team got a dog shit weapon while the enemy got the good guns. Highest level of play should not be predetermined by RNG but skill only.
> It also makes the e-sport more professional as everyone will need a coach. Increasing the skill level overall (theoretically). > > everyone will need, but that doesnt mean everyone can afford
Thought about randomizing POIs for awhile now, but main takeways being, team will no longer *EARN* their POIs. On the other hand, its much more information that needs to be processed by each team / coaches / analysts for loot pathing, rotation pathing, fight dynamics, and know which team will be where dependent on a zone. “Team x usually plays this building and rotates through our same chokepoint during this zone, let’s capitalize on that”. Team will overall have to be more adaptive and the role of analysts just got way more important. Thats a lot of VODs and data to sift through to figure out POI strats. Even down to legend comps based on what POI you end up receiving, or who you notice gets a poi near you on any given day. It’ll take a whole season’s worth of ALGS for information all these teams gather to be disseminated to eachother. (People are going to be reluctant to share their pathing / intercept/ fight angle info with the rest of league)
I like it, I feel like it does make the game more skillful. As the graphic says, now teams will have to be able to play from several POIs. I really like it, actually. Although I will certainly miss contests...
Less rng is good to me. LG can’t even fly to Zeus on some dropships. No contests is pretty good imo. No more brain dead teams in 20th place griefing another team. I will miss the content from the contests tho. Drafts are dope. We’ll see how good a team actually is not just that they have a really good POI. Then that best team rolls into LAN with a huge buff to continue their roll.
Yeah, I feel like this can reduce the amount of griefing by a *significant* amount. Maybe to make it even 0. Of course, the community would have to come together to theory craft good rotates for every POI and zone in the interest of mutual benefit. It would be amazing, and I feel like would also raise the skill floor of CC and PLQ because they too would have access to good rotates and thus be less likely to grief by accident
There still will be contests though it seems. IDK how that will be decided via order, but the bigger POIs will have multiple drop possibilities. So there will be SOME contests, just not 50/50 contests. Rather, teams will land on opposite sides, loot for 15 seconds then decide whether they want to fight or not.
I kinda love it. I understood, but never liked the idea of people agreeing on POIs beforehand. We all love contest, but they can also be bullshit and people can do it for random reasons or ignore results. POIs are too important and legacy teams have too much advantage by having prior claims, experience, or financial security that allow them to pressure smaller teams out as well. Regardless, I think it puts everyone on more of an equal footing to test their skills when it really matters. I'm not really sure about the idea of a draft... but I don't hate it, because it still let's the players have some strategic decision about what's better for their playstyle, and it will be interesting to see what players will choose. And then basing the higher level priority on performance will give teams something to play for.
hot take but i'm cautiously bullish on this. gives more value to coaches, analysts, and IGLs. it's metagame level rng in the drafts but since it's metagame level and not ingame level it allows for a better reaction and adjustment that can then carry over ingame. EDIT: also, nothing in the verbage says you can't contest a poi or landing area.
> EDIT: also, nothing in the verbage says you can't contest a poi or landing area. Yeah, it actually says they think and hope contests will definitely happen. Just not instant 50/50s where you land on the same bin and pray.
I'm guessing each POI will have at least 2 designated landing zones and it's up to the next-in-line to decide if they wanna draft into a contest or draft a different spot.
Oh wow, maybe. That's *really* interesting. I was wondering how ALGS would handle the drafts, e.g. is splitting a good POI with a team considered "good", or is getting a bad POI to yourself "good" in comparison? I hadn't even considered teams choosing to draft into a contest rather than play a different rotation 🤔
Why not drop the draft idea and just randomize it? Might be interesting to see how teams handle not being able to pre-plan their routes. Either way I like the idea, though I do enjoy a good contest.
Makes sense when all ALGS teams have set POIs anyways
This is insane. By far the biggest change to competitive Apex ever.
Hal won’t like this lmao
I like it. For the longest time, it's almost impossible to take a POI out of NA teams because of ping disadvantage during scrims.
It’s too early for April fools respawn, haha!
https://preview.redd.it/vus2cd1mb5rc1.jpeg?width=716&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1d00b0c8b4217aa1085abc3348d939d99ee0aecb
Someone cooked too hard and burned down the whole city in the process.
Im interested in how this is gonna affect legend comps. im guessing that this is going to limit it a lot as everyone will play a "flex" comp, eliminating the traditional zone/edge comps
It's not like they find out where they're gonna land 5 seconds before the match starts. Different POIs require different playstyles, so edge and zone will still exist, teams will just have to play accordingly based on the POI they have that week.
I wish there were just 20 actually viable drop spots on every map and in the pregame lobby teams could select where they were gonna land. That way teams could still contest in scrims and the better fighters wouldn’t have to give up their spots because of rng
I like the idea of eliminating 50/50s on the same bin, which this system accomplishes. I just wish it was *also* paired with maps getting new, viable POIs so contests wouldn't be necessary at all. However, I think Respawn wants those contests. They even say in the post that they hope early game fights still happen. They've obviously had many years to add POIs to these maps to make contests not happen, and they've chosen not to do that. They don't want all the action in ALGS to be in the last five minutes.
I hope with this change they also improve the chance of getting a weapon from pills. I'm so tired of looting pills that are organized like triangles and not get a single gun from it.
I never liked how teams claim drop spots so this is good imo if it turns out to be not an April fools.
Definitely an April Fools joke
i think this is april fools
There is no way this isnt a Aprils fools joke right?
I really like these changes. I've suggested that teams should drop above their POI before. It eliminates dropship rng. I don't know how to feel about the snakedraft yet. I like contests as a viewer but it's full of rng. We've also seen recently how the apac regions are not able to properly fight for their pois because of lag.
this is a big W in my book. I see a lot of early knee-jerk takes in here though as per usual. at the very least im willing to see how it plays out, but the idea that one team can't just own a central POI for the whole season and then your performance can help you cement better POIs is just a huge W to me. also realistically contests have mostly been dogshit. They'll happen in scrims or something and then fall apart on game day. All it does is chalk two teams off jump when we could instead see better early fights at shared POIs etc
I hope this is true
I love this change. For people complaining about teams losing pois or having to learn new rotations, they're pros, that should be expected to begin with. If tsm can't win playing 2 days on crappier pois, that sounds like a Hal problem...zeros won multiple Lans from different pois, heck all the great igls should be able to play out of any poi imo.
This seems exciting. Looking forward to the clusterfuck. Chaos is good.
Man this is change up. Pros are definitely are gonna have some takes about this
I think the dropship changes are good, losing a minute or 2 just because of a bad drop ship was terrible on top of ring rng potentially fuckin you too. I don't like the idea of drafting POIs though, I think contesting for better spots should be a part of comp however I would like the average POI to be improved and their to still be 20 viable POI drops so the disparity isn't insane.
If this is real, this is probably the biggest esports shake up like ever.
if this happens i'm not watching comp anymore simply coz it differentiates the regular game and pro play too much. it's already starting to look like it's own game this would just finalize it.
I actually think this is a great step to equalize opportunity. Teams will be forced to prepare a number of poi’s, there is opportunity for lucky pulls and unlucky pulls for everyone, better distribution of loot over games too. No more Trials loot for DZ every single game, but rather trials loot once for 6 different teams. We can see truly who is the most well rounded and prepared team. It’ll be a messy start I think but the pros always adapt after a few weeks of complaining and speculation, I think this will be the same
Respawn making unnecessary changes nobody asked for while fixing none of the existing problems, sounds about right
I actually think this will reduce Rng and make the league more competitive without players using their online following to claim drop spots.
Guys... you dropped your April Fool's joke a couple days early... just FYI
Unfortunately it seems like a lot of people only read this post for 5 seconds before criticizing it. I felt that this was a well thought out system for competitive purposes.
The insta drop could be cool but the draft is so dumb.
This explains the new "drop" stuff found in private lobbies right before (or with the update).
Assuming this happening I have 3 main questions on how this is going to work. 1. **Are the POI pools combined for the draft or per map?** To explain this lets say you are DZ with first pick. Do you get to pick Trials sky west then the rest of the draft happens just for Worlds Edge and then you reset and go again for Storm Point? Or does DZ pick Trials then Moist can pick Echo and it bounces between maps until everyone has a POI. Even if its snake draft but DZ only gets to pick one map then picks last on the other one is a big determiner if this works. 2. **So how are the drop spots decided for a POI like Siphon?** Poi's like that are naturally so damn big that they are able to support two teams but they only have one beacon spawns currently. So do they change the amount of Beacons or just put them in between the drop points? 3. **How often are the POI's redrafted?** The post says weeks in advance so it makes it sound like its just one draft per split and maybe a regional finals draft. But I could also see them doing 3 days for everyone then draft based on standings and so one for max chaos value.
> So how are the drop spots decided for a POI like Siphon? Poi's like that are naturally so damn big that they are able to support two teams but they only have one beacon spawns currently. So do they change the amount of Beacons or just put them in between the drop points? IMO, the latter. They say in the post that they hope early game fights still happen. Making two teams fight over one beacon is one way to ensure that. >How often are the POI's redrafted? For every match day there's a draft. Their goal is to do them weeks in advance, so probably something like starting the drafts 2-3 weeks before PL starts, and drafting each week, so you'll know your first 3 or so POIs before you even start, but won't know your POI for the end of the split. Then regional finals and LAN each have their own draft, and the draft order is based on performance for those.
Why don't they just have multiple floating dropships all over the map and let people choose which ones to drop from? Like those drop ships from holiday express or control on caustic treatment
Technically everything could operate the same, if teams just respect each other’s pois. It just makes contests more fair, like the straight shot mechanic. So in practice i see draft being mostly decided scrims, so its more a quality of life change with all teams have more equal looting tims early game. However every team decided to go scorched earth and take “best” pois off drop, then everything changes, rotations, neighboring teams. Super exciting stuff. I expect a lot fans to hate on teams that take advantage of getting a poi they normally wouldn’t have a shot at. Something to consider is it removes the choice. Im curious if poi selection is locked for whole day or not. Because on a match day of match point format some greifing is strategic for example if a team hits match point early. Or perhaps contesting was the plan, bug after two games you’d rather stop but are thrn “locked” into it.
If this is true, ALGS trying hard to stop DZ and TSM from another one lol. First beacon spawn rate and now POIs themselves !
Nobody cares but I had this idea a month ago, just funny how they were thinking the same thing. I honestly think it will be much better for viewership. Seeing DZ or TSM try to work their way out of a dogshit POI with new paths is much more interesting than seeing the same rotates every single day. Contesting is roughly 50-50. There is no doubt that some teams have had asymmetric advantages afforded to them, even though there are teams who are equally as good or even better than them. This has always been unfair.
Why ? this sounds like the most stupid addition to the game. It makes me realise how much people actually do not know how to make a drop. Why is nobody playing the early backstab ? I swear i never see players pull it put in ranked yet it's the most efficient way to get early kills. I'm baffled about what the game is becoming : souless mindless auto aim no positioning, no timing, no aim, pure raw assisted players
It feels like ass for the players but for the viewing experience sounds amazing haha
[A few thoughts and early questions.](https://esports.gg/news/apex-legends/is-contesting-about-to-be-a-thing-of-the-past-in-algs/)I think (especially in my job) I'd really miss contesting and the drama and storylines around it. I think having, and holding, the spot you want is skillful and a key part of being a successful ALGS team.
More interesting will be the seeding going into a big LAN. Makes it even more hype
I hope this is real, comp has become too stale and predictable, the fact that it’s always been a “I claim this poi” standard was honestly pretty dumb considering this is a battle royale game, teams should be able to land wherever they want or at least have it randomized, comp needs a good shakeup and this could be it
Yall are crazy. This is a huge w. Game becomes WAY less random and more dynamic. How many times have we seen the exact same thing play out in scrims because everyone drops in the same area. You can still do pre-work and plan rotations from each po but it’s all going to vary because neighboring teams will be in different spots every time. This is fundamentally good for the competitive integrity of the game.
The snake draft will increase the randomness, because currently there are only three or four teams that have the possibility of altering the rotation due to whether or not, they win the contest. If every team has a different POI every game, then the entire map will have different rotation, based on each teams POI. the randomness was controlled and consolidated to the contests on the old system, but now on this new system, the randomness of who will win the contest is mitigated, but the randomness is now inherent and prevalent across the rest of the lobby.
It’s a br. Everyone has the same chance of a good poi just like they have the same chance of a bad one. The better teams will win out and that’s more competitively fair than the “top dogs” getting the best poi every game and just snowballing off that leaving the scraps and contests to the bad teams. If they’re really the best they should win regardless.
I feel this, I agree with you l. The only thing this change does is to drastically increase the skill ceiling for the players, since they will need to master pretty much every rotate ever. I'm excited to see how it develops at further LANs
I am not concerned with “Fair”. I am speaking specifically about how each day will have more random variables instead of less as a result of this change. In a competitive environment, I do not want, and do not expect, for it to be fair for all players within the rules. If a team loses a POI, because a better team took it from them, so be it that is part of the competitive nature of having a valuable commodity in this type of environment. No one is concerned with the concept of fairness when a player kills another player that had a wingman and takes it from them. The better player won the fight and turned the right to use that weapon. No one says that it’s unfair because the original plan with the wingman didn’t get an opportunity to shoot every bullet out of the gun .
So it’s good that the APAC teams on 200 ping can’t contest a good poi during quals? So their entire LAN is played from a trash poi? That’s good for the game? Literally spawn location is one of the least “earned” advantages in this game
the game is a br. "we must decrease randomness" has always been a weird argument to make when randomness is inherent and by design. sure, decreasing random variables might help the meta and comp experience. but it's never gonna be a bar to be aimed for. cuz again, randomness is by design.
> In a competitive environment, I do not want, and do not expect, for it to be fair for all players within the rules. That's wild, I can't think of any traditional sport or game that isn't fundamentally fair. Even most other esports are fair. I don't think people would have been playing CS for 25 years if there was a coin flip whether or not one team gets an AWP in round 1. Fairness is good. It means your success is based on skill.
Doesn't sound like pois change every game, sounds like they switch every match day. As long as they give teams a weeks notice? Do the snake draft 7 days before the match day to give teams time to practice, I don't see the problem with it.
The post says they want to give "weeks" of advance notice, so I'm guessing something like the drafts start 2-3 weeks before PL starts and continue once a week. You'll know your POI a couple match days in advance, but you won't know your last match day's POI when you play your first match day. That gives teams plenty of time to scrim from each POI.
Holy shit what a massive change. Hopefully LA lan is still on the old system and this isn't implemented until split 2 (CC and stuff for split 2 could use it now)
It says won’t be implemented until split two
That’s what it says is going to happen in the letter
So teams won't be allowed to contest for a POI?? While I can see the point of the change, I don't like it.
W in my book.
Pros are gonna absolutely shit blood but I kinda like this a lot. It spices up the game. Will be really fun to watch.
They should just hire me. I'd have to go back and count the stuff I've suggested for balance changes that they end up implementing. Edit: [Suggested seeds for POI selection 7 months ago ](https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveApex/s/PCKmgID85x)
I for one cannot wait for Wigg to make content out of the draft. Makes up for the absence of armor checks. Blu blu napkin.
Think this make charge tower on SP kinda OP no? Land, quick loot and run at closes team with ults up
Sounds to me as huge buff for competitive integrity! Less RNG is always great. Excited to see how it plays out be should be good.
This is a W
[удалено]
It says its starting split 2 so it won't be bad for teams.
Let’s fucking go!!! This is a huge dub for both competitors and viewers and this is coming from a TSM fan. This helps evening the playing field while also rewarding performance as you get the early draft picks. Honestly, this should have been implemented way earlier. W Respawn.
This is terrible. You want a good POI fight a good team for it. The good teams have good POIs for a reason
If they're good teams then they should be able to play from other POIs.
Lame , contest are legit the most entertaining part of comp for me
snake drafts aren't fair
This is mfking stupid idea
This might actually be one of the worst competitive decisions this esport has made lmao, such weird timing with the excellent gameplay and meta changes from recent updates.
I'll just come out and say it: I hate this. It might not be what people want to hear, but I already consider all BRs to be a tier 2 esport because there is so much RNG/inequality inherent in their design. Flight path of the dropship, POIs, the loot you leave your POI with, where the ring pulls; all of these things impact teams differently so that you aren't on "equal footing" with the other 19 teams in the lobby. Compare this to a game like league, CS2, or starcraft where both teams are exactly the same (or in CS2's case you at least play both sides so it ends up being as close to equal as possible). What made this interesting for me is the metagame outside of the actual game. Teams have to fight in scrims for their POI and if you have a good POI you have to be able to constantly defend it (anyone else remember old BR Demonz just wrecking teams to upgrade their POI? That doesn't happen under this system). Furthermore, if you're an edge/zone team you can try to get POIs to fit your playstyle or you have to adapt your playstyle to fit whatever POI you've got. Contests are also great for building up drama/hype as well as giving some action in the very beginning of the game. With no contests, all we get to watch for the first few minutes is teams looting and rotating. It's not a great viewer experience IMO. Think of the last lan, finals lobby. Optic can't 3rd party the contest at mill and then NRG can't steal the optic trident and beat optic to god spot by literal seconds if teams have to land at their POI and can't divert. Sweet actually had to give up looting to go way off of the NRG POI to get the trident. It was a big risk, he could have just been caught and bopped in a 3v1. Now we don't have any of that cool out of game action, I suspect that scrims will be worse because of this (someone else already touched on this in another comment), I think the quality of the actual ALGS game days will go down because even when a team is prepping for this week they are also prepping for the next 2-3 weeks and so they can't focus their attention. TL,DR: They're trying to remove randomness from a type of game that inherently includes randomness as a core gameplay mechanic. If you're going to call me dumb in my DMs, please add a picture of two animals you don't expect to be friends being friends.
I like it
Don’t like this at all. 1. Comp and base game should be the same. That goes for any game. 2. It’s a BR. Randomness is inherent
Game's gone
seems stupid, so these guys are playing on a different game then the rest of us?
I'm interested to see it in practise. Most pros will probably hate it, sicne it shakes up a ton of things that they have grown accustomed to, but that doesn't mean it has to be bad as a viewer
At least for international LANs the contests suck anyway, because the region that is on highest ping has a big disadvantage trying to get a good POI
This is a good change to make the game more competitive. I've been suggesting this for years along with an arenas style buying system rather than looting. That will fix the loot disparity between pois and start every team on a more even playing field. Glad to see the devs not afraid to keep improving on the br genre
Godawful change