As Apex Legends first ranked series begins, the highest skilled players are unable to queue into a game, forcing them to play on smurf accounts and wreak havoc on the rest of us. Multiple players report waiting over in matchmaking for over an hour in diamond rank before giving up and making fresh accounts.
Diamond isn't the highest rank, of course, as the rank designated to the best of the best is the aptly named Apex Predator. However, as players reach diamond and are unable to queue into a game, only 1 player has managed to climb to Apex Predator so far.
Apex Legends first ranked season has forgone the placement system that other competitive modes use, like Overwatch, and instead started every player at bronze IV. Each rank, starting at silver, requires that you spend your earned ranked points to enter: 1 point in silver, 2 in gold, 3 in platinum, and so on. In order to reach silver rank in series one, players will need to earn 720 ranked points plus re-earn the entry cost from each game they have played.
To put this in perspective, lets say you got 3 kills and finished 3rd in every single game you played, earning 10 RP per game (1 for each kill and 7 for finishing 3rd). It would take you 12 games to climb silver, 18 games to climb to gold (that's 160 RP, minus 1 RP per game for entry fee), 25 games from gold to platinum (now 200 RP minus 2 RP per game), and finally 34 games to reach diamond (240 RP, minus 3 RP per game). That's 3 kills and a 3rd place finish for 89 games consecutively.
Now, for the average player, that isn't exactly a realistic goal. And yet, less than a week into series 1, players are already reaching diamond rank. When they get there, unfortunately, they're finding themselves in such exclusive company, there aren't even enough diamond players yet to fill a game.
Reddit post after Reddit post this weekend showed players waiting for games that would never start. In one post, a commenter says "I haven't been able to get a game since hitting diamond."
What are these players to do then? Non-ranked is an option, but unless you have a full party, you are most likely going to experience a higher rate of leavers, griefers, and solo pubchamps. Streamer its_WicKeD, when asked what happened to his main account, explains that since hitting diamond he has been unable to get into a game, so he created a second account to continue playing ranked.
High skilled players using low-level accounts, or smurf accounts, is a fairly common practice in shooters when the player wants to stomp low skilled players for an ego boost. In this case, having no choice but to smurf in order to play is unfortunate, both for the player who wants a challenge, and for the scrubs like us that want a fair game.