Apex Legends developer Respawn has acknowledged it "has stuff in mind" for addressing the weapon loot pool.

In response to a tweet which demanded that the studio "remove weapons for God's sake, nobody cares about P20, Bocek, or 3030 and actually help with the loot pool distribution", associate live balance designer John Larson said: "You take that back. I care about the Bocek."

"We got stuff in mind," Larson added. "We know we can't keep releasing weapons without considering the health of the loot pool."

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Two and a half months after the arrival of Apex Legends' season ten hero Seer, it's time to do the official dance of welcoming once more, as developer Respawn Entertainment formally introduces the free-to-play shooter's next new playable character, Ash.

Ash should be immediately recognisable to fans of Respawn's previous work, given the formidable simulacrum played a prominent role in Titanfall 2 - but should also be familiar to Apex Legends players too, having been restored during Season 5's Broken Ghost quest.

Since then, the character has overseen Apex Legends' Arenas mode, and fans even speculated the animated short introducing season seven hero Horizon (AKA Dr. Mary Somers) was setting up an origin story for Ash, linking her to Somers' treasonous assistant Ashleigh Reid.

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Respawn has warned Apex Legends players not to strike a pose following a new bug that is crashing games.

Yesterday, Respawn tweeted to players that it has added a new in-game message to "help cut down on crashes [caused] by animated poses", adding players should "tell [their] friends" and spread the word until a fix rolls out next week.

"There's currently an issue with animated epic poses which can cause crashes," the message explains (thanks, TheGamer). "We advise you to unequip these epic poses while our team works on a fix. Thanks, Legends!"

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No, it's not just you - Apex Legends' servers are unstable right now.

The problem first crept in a few days back, but despite fixes and assurances from Respawn that the issues had been rectified, the developer has since acknowledged that despite improvements, players are continuing to experience "roughly three times the normal rate of disconnect errors".

"We're ramping up our server capacity today and have some scheduled fixes for tomorrow. However, we believe some problems will require work through the weekend," the team announced on Friday.

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Respawn has been battling hackers in its online games for some time, but the situation escalated recently when hackers blocked players from accessing Apex Legends in order to complain about hacking in Titanfall. And unfortunately it seems the saga is having an impact on Respawn's development plans, with work on at least one highly-anticipated feature for Apex Legends, cross-progression, slowed by the recent spate of attacks.

Earlier this week Apex Legends game director Chad Grenier responded to a question about cross-progression on Twitter, explaining that "recent hacks on Apex and TF have slowed down the progress of it". He added that the studio needed to "context switch to solving live game issues".

Although cross-platform play was implemented in Apex Legends last year, players have so far been unable to transfer progress between accounts on different platforms (aside from moving between Steam and Origin). It's a feature the team seems eager to introduce, with Grenier explaining via Reddit that implementing it will be "much harder post-launch since users may have multiple accounts to merge or use". Given the ongoing problems with hacking in Apex Legends and the Titanfall games, it sounds like it could be a little while longer before we see this feature implemented.

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Titanfall fans have hacked Apex Legends in an effort to flag the attention of developer Respawn.

Log into Apex Legends on PC right now and instead of the usual playlists, you'll get the URL "savetitanfall.com" with the subheader, "[Titanfall 1] is being attacked so is Apex".

Players are also getting an "important message" at the end of each match that requests players "visit and repost savetitanfall.com", a website that's been online since at least March 2021. Affected players are seemingly unable to access other game modes, essentially blocking them from playing at all.

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As with many online games, Apex Legends unfortunately has its fair share of cheaters, and developer Respawn is in something of a continuous battle to prevent them from misbehaving. In recent months players have reported increased DDoS attacks on Ranked games, with Respawn pledging to take "huge steps" to fix the problem. And we now have another update on what the studio is doing to combat cheaters, with Respawn hiring more people and developing new tools to keep them at bay.

As explained on Twitter, Respawn said it's hiring "more people to focus on manual bans", and is also investigating new ways to catch and remove cheaters from games - presumably through automated tools. Respawn also specifically addressed the DDoS problem, saying it was "developing more tools to automatically detect and stop DDoS attacks".

"Playing against cheaters sucks," said Respawn's Twitter account. "We'll keep you updated as we ship the above changes and pursue new ones."

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UPDATE 26/05/21: Apex Legends' new abandon penalty for Arenas is off to a pretty bumpy start, as the feature has been temporarily disabled after it accidentally punished some innocent players.

As discussed in the original story below, some players said they were given 10-minute bans for quitting during the end screen animations - even though the match itself had already ended. Director of communications Ryan K. Rigney explained that "this problem had to do with game logic after everyone on the opposing Arenas team left the match.

"Basically you'd sometimes still get a leaver penalty after leaving the empty game," he said in a tweet. "It's one of those things that never showed up in playtesting. Dumb bug! Fix should be p quick."

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The much-anticipated Legacy update for Apex Legends arrived last night, and while Apex saw record numbers of Steam players and a huge audience on Twitch, it wasn't exactly a smooth launch. The high demand meant many couldn't get into matches, while players also reported problems with the in-game menus and marketplace.

Legacy went live at 6pm UK last night, but as you can see from the Twitter thread by Respawn below, it took about eight hours for Respawn to iron out all the problems with the servers. Following matchmaking problems across all platforms, the marketplace went down, while some players found that their cosmetic preferences had been reset to default skins. Respawn explained this was a "minor side effect" of a fix, and told players to re-equip their cosmetic items through the menus.

Hilariously, there were some other strange side-effects to all of this in-game, including some extremely low-poly versions of Apex Legends characters. Or is that just the leaked mobile version?

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The ninth season of Apex Legends is a big one - so much so that Respawn has decided to do away with the numbers, and simply name the new season "Legacy". There's a whole lot of Titanfall lore, significant map changes, and a brand new game mode called Arenas. It's all part of Respawn's much-teased plan to bring Apex Legends "beyond battle royale", as game director Chad Grenier first told me in an interview for Season 7. Last week I got to take a peek at some of this in a demo session, and hear a little from the developers about the design decisions behind the mode.

In a Q&A session with press and content creators, Grenier said that Legacy was the culmination of "almost two years of experimentation and innovation," and that it's easily the biggest update for Apex Legends so far. "The long term goals for Apex were to go beyond battle royale: we've got this great cast of legends, really tight gameplay and gunplay - and we want to offer that in more ways to compete," he added.

This has taken the form of Arenas, a 3v3 competitive mode that will remain a permanent fixture of Apex Legends, separate from the battle royale. It's essentially a series of short, fast-paced rounds that take place on miniature maps - providing a more intense and less randomised experience than the battle royale mode. No third-partying to be found here, for instance. To win a match, a team must win at least three rounds and be ahead of the opposing team by two points - or else the two teams enter a tie-breaker ninth round.

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