Apex Legends drops solo-only Ranked after its test

Respawn published the results of two Apex Legends Ranked tests on 30 September, both run during the Overclocked season. They went after the same problem: running into a premade squad of top players who steamroll the lobby. The first test barely moved the needle, and the second had side effects the studio didn’t want. Neither change is being made permanent as a result. Respawn is promising further Ranked changes for Seasons 31 and 32, with details due in October.

At a glance

The premade squad problem in Apex Legends

Respawn starts from something plenty of players will recognise. Meeting a three-stack of the game’s best players, ranked well above you, is no fun at all. In its post on the official Apex Legends site, the studio puts numbers on that feeling.

Across Ranked, a squad made up of a premade duo and a solo fill wins 19% more often than a squad of three solo players. A full premade trio wins 17% more often. The pattern sits exactly where you’d expect, too: 85% of Masters squads are premade three-stacks.

To tackle that imbalance, Respawn tried two approaches during Overclocked. First, a tighter limit on rank gaps within a group. Second, a mandatory solo queue at the top of the ladder.

Two tests, two letdowns for Respawn

The first test only let you group with players within one tier of you, down from two. The aim was to stop Platinum players being dragged into high-level lobbies by their friends. Respawn measured a real but narrow effect: Diamond players faced roughly 8% fewer Diamond opponents and 8% more Platinum ones. Outside those two tiers, nothing meaningful changed. The studio concluded that such a small gain wasn’t worth the restriction on everyone who plays with friends.

Test two went much further. Diamond, Master and Predator players were locked to solo queue, with no premades at all. On paper, the high-level three-stacks vanished. Yet the winners stayed the same: in Masters, the win-rate gap between the top ten and bottom ten squads held at 9%.

Worse still, players ended up meeting more top-tier opponents. Respawn puts that down to how squads are built. The matchmaker pulls 60 players of similar Ranked Points into a lobby, sorts them and splits them into thirds, and each squad gets one player from each third. With the stacks broken up, Masters and Predators were spread one per squad and turned up in more matches. The pre-match screen made it feel worse, since a squad with a single Master and a squad of three Predators look identical on it.

What Apex Legends has planned for Ranked

What settled the matter was player behaviour. During the test, Diamond-and-above players who usually queued in duos and trios came back to Ranked less often. Respawn describes them as some of its most engaged players, and calls this “the part of the test we cannot accept”. When Ranked thins out, matches get less balanced for everyone.

Respawn is keeping solo queue on the table all the same. It feels this version was too broad, and it wants to keep the goal while dropping the blunt instrument: fewer encounters with fully coordinated top squads, while everyone can still play with friends. The biggest changes to come out of these tests will land in Ranked in Seasons 31 and 32, with a full rundown planned for October. The studio also wants to rework the pre-match display.

In a separate post on 1 October, the Apex Legends anti-cheat team said it had permanently banned a player who was crashing servers. They were using a modified client to duplicate weapon optics through Ballistic’s passive until the match overloaded. The exploit has since been fixed. Competitive games are cracking down at the moment, as Riot Games showed when it banned hundreds of thousands of accounts for rank manipulation in September.