Wanna know how not to put out a dumpster fire? Pour some gasoline on it! That’s the lesson we’d like to think was learned this weekend by the Apex Legends studio and community. (We’d like to think that, but we’ve been doing this too long to be truly fooled.)
As we noted last week, the AL subreddit was on fire over the Iron Crown collection packs and their apparent $154 ask. Respawn tried to calm the situation with a Reddit post apologizing, ultimately vowing to be better communicators, not sell competitive advantages, not to “squeeze every last dime” from players, and ultimately to change up how these exclusive legendary items are being sold.
“At launch we made a promise to players that we intend to do monetization in a way that felt fair and provided choice to players on how they spent their money and time. A core decision during development of Apex Legends was that we wanted to make a world class battle royale game – in quality, depth, progression, and important for today’s conversation – how we sell stuff. With the Iron Crown event we missed the mark when we broke our promise by making Apex Packs the only way to get what many consider to be the coolest skins we’ve released. We’ve heard you and have spent a lot of time this week discussing the feedback and how we structure events in the future, as well as changes that we will make to Iron Crown.”
But things took a messy turn after executive producer Drew McCoy noted that the team wasn’t going to “engage with temper tantrums, and personal attacks or virtriolic threads.” “I’ve been in the industry long enough to remember when players weren’t complete ass-hats to developers and it was pretty neat,” he wrote. “Would be awesome to get back there, and not engaging with toxic people or asking ‘how high’ when a mob screams ‘jump’ is hopefully a start.”
It would be nice, but that’s now how the internet works now. The next player post in the thread effectively accuses the Apex team of being “money grabbing fucks that scammed their players”: “Good riddance to your game I loved it at release bought both season pass’s lvl 100, hundreds hours but after seeing how greedy you got (no surprise really as you’re ea’s bitch) the games uninstalled and anything from you in the future can die as quickly as its released IMO. And fuck anyone that’s saying this is better, like take there dick out your mouth and have some respect for yourself. Yes iv gone over the top and I can blame the whiskey all I like but iv gone from thinking oh shit these devs care to yep just as bad as ea’s reputation. You had no choice but to answer ‘risky’ comments so get the fuck off your high horse.”
McCoy clapped back: “Hey everyone – found the dick I was talking about. Guess what, I didn’t even read your comment except for the first sentence and last. This kind of garbage doesn’t warrant a reply – but lucky for you I already made a comment about this earlier. Go find it.”
And now there’s another Reddit war over whether devs should ever be allowed to snap at people provoking them, the likes and dislikes and golds and silvers are flying, and here we are. Didn’t we just do this last summer?
