Apex’s new rating system makes life easy for boosters

Acceleration is an issue that will always be with competitive games. There will always be players who want to level up, getting promoted as easily as possible will find ways to cut as many corners as possible. This is also true for Apex Legends, where a boost technique involving the game’s mobile respawn beacon is running rampant on the ranking tier in season 11.

Increasing the respawn beacon on mobile is relatively easy and a safer way to cheat the system than hacking directly or teaming up with another team against the lobby. These methods are generally easier to detect and report. The mobile respawn trick requires two teams to play the same game against each other, arrange a meeting point, and then find a crafting station, usually some distance away from the opposing player. Once there, teams create as many mobile respawn beacons as they can, before taking turns killing players on the other team. Both teams make sure to leave at least one player on either side alive, who will revive the fallen players and the teams repeat the process to farm the kills.

Youtuber kauzey uploaded a video about two mobile respawn beacon exploit abuse teams (clip starts at 1:21):

This is not a new exploit. Crafting system in Top has been around since season six, and mobile respawn beacons have been in the regular crafting rotation since then. Previously, however, mobile respawn mining was only useful for farm kill and damage badges. However, that changed when Respawn changed the way its rated system worked.

Basically, for nearly the entire lifespan of TopPlayer rating system, players can earn more points in games where they accumulate more kills, but there will be a limit on the actual number of kills that will count towards ranking points reached at the end of the game. This incentivizes players to not only kill, but to stay alive until the end of the game, as winning the game with the maximum number of kills is the only way to get the most rating points.

However, at the beginning of season 11, The ranking system has changed from kill limit to point limit system. There is still a limit to the number of kills that can be generated, but that limit is instead bound to the maximum number of rank points a player can get from kills (maximum 175) . Basically, the ranked ladder became a lot easier to climb simply because there were as many kills as possible, and location didn’t matter anymore. As a result, players from the opposing team start teaming up to destroy the farm, making sure everyone gets as many kills as possible and making sure both teams always leave the game with positive RP.

Some players have suggested removing the mobile respawn beacon from the crafting rotation, which would prevent this particular method of boosting. But the rating system itself seems to encourage this style of push, and given how many experts and streamers don’t like rating changes at the start, it’s safe to say that there are many issues with Respawn will need to consider in the near future if the development team wishes to maintain any competitive integrity in the ranked system.