Respawn devs say that an Apex Legends bug preventing level up rewards from being correctly obtained by high level players in the FPS game has now been fixed. The issue – introduced during the game’s current season 14, Hunted – affected players who are level 500 or higher, and the team has given some insight into what went into resolving the bug as well as how it has tried to prevent similar issues from occurring in the battle royale game in the future.
Respawn says that players over level 500 who were not correctly receiving their rewards for levelling up should now find their missing rewards in their inventory upon launching the game. The team says the bug was caused as part of the Apex Legends level cap increase introduced in season 14, which sees the cap raised from 500 to 2000 through a prestige-like system that loops players back around through the rewards for levels one through 500 three additional times after their first.
“We have many different systems that keep track of players’ levels, rewards, and overall progress in the game,” explains senior community manager Kalyrical in a post on the game’s subreddit. “When updating our level cap, some of these systems started to get matched. In this instance, we were able to develop a fix that didn’t require its own update and could take effect through our back end systems.” In addition, Kalyrical notes that more sync checks have been put in place that should see the game automatically detect similar mismatches and grant the appropriate rewards where necessary.
In the comments, one player enquires about a potential fix for ranked rewards from season 13, where players who expected to receive badges for finishing as an Apex Predator found they were instead awarded a masters badge. In response, developer RobotHavGunz explains, “I’ve been trying to fix this [issue] for the past six months. My fix works 100% of the time in our dev environment and so far 0% of the time in live.” They say that “badges are a much more complex system than they might appear,” and that the team cannot simply give players badges directly where a mismatch occurs – although they joke that “rewriting the badge system so that we can do exactly that is looking like it might be the best option.”
Game development is hard, and it’s always refreshing to hear direct examples of some of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into even some of the seemingly simpler systems to be reminded just how complex they can be under the surface. RobotHavGunz notes that the team often doesn’t comment publicly even on issues they’re actively working on, because “we’ve had a couple times when we’re ‘sure’ we’ve fixed [a problem] and then it turns out not to work [in the live version of the game].” Nevertheless, if you were missing level up rewards previously then you should at least be able to claim those now.
Take a look at our Apex Legends tier list and Apex Legends weapons tier list for the best Legends and guns to use in season 14, as well as our guide to every Apex Legends heirloom set and how to get them. Players have been flocking to the new update, pushing the game to a new Steam player count record – but some have complaints with Apex Legends matchmaking, while others feel like the Apex Legends Ring speed changes this season leave them no time to prepare.
