Apex Legends Season 16 has just kicked off and has introduced a bunch of new content, character tweaks, and a whole lot more. Despite being the first season to launch without the addition of a new Legend, it hasn't stopped fans from returning in droves, as the game recently smashed its concurrent player count record on Steam. One of the main reasons behind this sudden uptick in players is the game's new Team Deathmatch mode, which pits two teams of 6 players against each other.
Unfortunately, while the draw of Team Deathmatch has managed to bring in players new and old, a lot of them are quickly finding that the mode isn't all it was cracked up to be. There seems to be a general feeling of negativity towards Team Deathmatch in the Apex Legends community, as a large amount of players have recently taken to the games subreddit to complain about strange design decisions and matchmaking issues.
One post in particular by Nobat211 criticising the mode has received quite a lot of support, slowly crawling towards 7,000 upvotes at the time of writing. In the post, Nobat211 takes issue with the design of Team Deathmatch and questions why developer Respawn Entertainment has made it round based. If you weren't aware, the mode functions like your standard Team Deathmatch as the first team to reach 30 kills wins. However, the mode then forces you into a best out of three, meaning you need to win two rounds in order to win the game overall.
That means that teams who are losing when it comes to the second round are just leaving the game, as there are zero consequences for players doing so mid-match. To make matters even worse, several players are also reporting that Team Deathmatch doesn't even fill the spaces of players that leave, meaning entire teams are quitting the game when they start to lose, leaving the winning team stuck with nothing to do except wait for a lengthy timeout or for the round to end.
As you can imagine, that isn't making for a particularly enjoyable experience for most people, whether they be on the winning or losing team. JarskiBoi shares the experience of playing hide and seek with the opposition team for almost 30 minutes since their entire team left when they started losing, while Pilalo had to deliberately let the opposing team of 2-3 players kill them a bunch so they wouldn't rage quit.
Many are calling for Respawn to implement some kind of leavers penalty to try and stop players from quitting matches when they start to lose, although they aren't holding their breath since this has been an issue with other modes like Gun Run and Control. Still, it's disappointing to see Respawn fumble a mode as simple as Team Deathmatch and really hammers home how much I miss Titanfall 2 right now.