Apex Legends players are reportedly getting hit with matchmaking delay penalties that stem from the game’s own connection problems and lag issues.
A Reddit post by user ‘nearerstephanie’ indicates that the player got a matchmaking cooldown for about 10 minutes after lagging in a Ranked match just before getting the infamous ‘code:net’ error.
The problem has been a recurring issue in the Apex community since the turn of Season 4, and it’s now putting players in a strange situation.
Developers Respawn Entertainment have already acknowledged the lag and freezing problems on consoles and said there would be a fix for that soon.
In the meantime, regardless of the platform, it seems some players who get hit with the connectivity issues might still accrue a penalty for leaving the game early, even though it was caused by those problems.
“After a ton of pub matches that went smoothly I decided to do ranked even though I said I wouldn’t,” nearerstephanie said, showing a screenshot of a nine-minute matchmaking delay. “Boom… it lagged super hard and code:net error me again, came back to this.”
The freezes have been a major point of contention with a portion of the community. Even players who don’t typically have issues with their connection to Apex are experiencing these kinds of lags.
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Ironically, Respawn’s abandoned game penalty is doing its job and punishing players who aren’t finishing the match they started. However, the reason why some of these users are unable to conclude their matches is because of the game itself.
One user wrote: “Hey, I got that like 5x in a row. I think I was banned for like 360 minutes.”
After getting hit with the delays, there seems to also be an inconsistency of whether or not these connection issues result in a loss of Ranked Points (RP).
“At my rank (Gold) it was a time out and -48 [RP],” user ‘OwO_Pinion_8Ted’ said.
The loss of RP hasn’t been a consistent issue however, as others earlier revealed they didn’t lose RP even in a game where they were disconnected because of the code:net error. At this time, it’s not clear how the RP loss is being determined in-game.
Respawn have said they’re working to investigate and fix this issue, but only time will tell how long it’ll take to implement a solution. For now, those who decide to play ranked have to deal with potentially getting penalized for something that’s not even their fault.
