Apex Legends is still enjoying massive popularity, but its players are naturally wondering at this point about upcoming features for the free-to-play battle royale. A leave penalty was accidentally included in a recent patch, and when Respawn disabled it, players took to Reddit to ask when they’d see it fully implemented. One of Respawn’s developers took some time to carefully explain why the studio is hesitant to announce upcoming game features, and the response is applicable to just about any game.
“Unfortunately, there are far more things for us to spend our development time on than there is time, so we have to prioritize,” the developer, who goes by Scriptacus on Reddit, wrote. “In the end, that’s going to leave someone unhappy because what they feel is important isn’t prioritized as highly as they think it should be. That’s just reality, and we can’t make everyone happy.”
Talking about specific features, like the leave penalty (which would help cut down on spammers in the character selection screen, for one thing) and duos mode, before the studio is ready to announce them just isn’t a good idea, Scriptacus said.
“Just mentioning this kind of stuff gets taken as a promise,” they wrote. “The timeline starts the moment it’s mentioned… and everyone has a different expectation of what’s a reasonable timeline… and many people heavily underestimate what is required.”
Scriptacus (accurately) points out that developers talking about adding a feature to the game “someday” would “likely get picked up by blogs and gaming news sites,” and “depending how those articles are written, they’re going to set expectations incorrectly for a lot of people.”
Read more: All the details on Apex Legends’ first battle pass
Frankly, fair enough – while we’re always committed to providing accurate information about the games we cover, it’s true that we’re in the business of finding the latest news on popular games, and different people read announcements and news items different ways.
So, long story short, it’s still unclear if or when a leave penalty will show up in Apex Legends. We’ll know more when Respawn is ready to talk about it.