Apex Legends early quitting penalty being tested

Respawn is testing a new Apex Legends feature which penalises players for leaving matches early.

The feature came to light after it was inadvertently released alongside the most recent Apex Legends game update, before being disabled shortly after.

“So internally, we have been working on and testing this feature but it wasn’t our intention or plan to have it go live with the update that went out today,” Respawn community manager Jay Frechette wrote on Reddit.

“There was a piece of script that was missing and caused the leaving match early penalty to be turned on when it shouldn’t be. That’s why it wasn’t in the patch notes.

“We updated the script, tested with QA and it’s now disabled for all platforms,” he added. “We don’t have an ETA for if or when this would come out for real. Apologies for the confusion.”

While Frechette didn’t offer any further details on how the penalty would work in the squad-based shooter, Reddit users claimed players who quit mid-match on three occasions were stopped from joining a new game for five minutes, and that the penalty increased for repeat offenders.

Among other features, the latest Apex Legends update adds a post-match invitation option enabling users to party up with the squad they most recently played with.