Update 19.1 creates chaos for Apex Legends fans

Season 12 is here, and it has been an absolute hit with the Apex Legends community since it launched last month. Seeing as it’s not only the start of a new season, but also the three year anniversary of the game as a whole, Respawn Entertainment made sure to pull out all the stops. This started with giving players the opportunity to permanently unlock multiple Legends. Octane, Wattson and Valkyrie were given to players free of charge, and it only got better from there. The community gleefully learned how to play as Mad Maggie, a fun and aggressive new Legend with an easy to learn and difficult to master set of abilities. Players also got the opportunity to try out Control, a brand new mode so popular that there have been calls to permanently incorporate it into the game. As usual, players have all the other things to enjoy with the start of a new season - like a new Battle Pass!

But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for the season, as update 19.1 demonstrates. Released this Monday, the update was meant to be a small, unremarkable bug patch. Instead the update introduced a bevy of new problems to fix. Loba’s ultimate stopped working properly, Legends using ziplines could find them to be slow and cumbersome, and players were getting disconnected from matches left and right.

Respawn Entertainment immediately started working on fixing all of the bugs that the community brought to their attention, starting with the most serious, the connection issues. They assured the community they were working on a fix. A few hours later, in a drastic move to cut down on the disconnection problems, they took one of their three maps for the season out of rotation. King’s Canyon was down with an assurance that this would temporarily fix the issue. 24 hours later and King’s Canyon is allowed to return to the rotation, and Respawn says they have fixed the connection issue. It’s currently too early to say for certain if the fix has worked, but early news is promising.

Meanwhile, the fix for Loba’s accidental nerf and sluggish ziplines are still ongoing. Loba’s Ultimate, Black Market Boutique, had provided players a side benefit in addition to the gear they could get, as the Boutique could block doors and act as a small amount of cover. However, this ability currently is not available, leading to more than a few untimely - and unexpected - deaths. Meanwhile, Legends' slow zipline speed seems to be tied to their gear, with heirlooms and more recently released weapons seeming to significantly slow speeds compared to their older counterparts. Respawn has been informed of these problems, and has noted that they’ve begun investigating Loba’s nerf on their publicly available Trello board. There is less good news on the zipline front, as Respawn has not directly addressed the concern, so Legends might want to steer clear of equipping an heirloom for the time being. Alternatively, you could try out a new Legend while you team up with CarrySquad to become Season 12's Apex Predator.