The first episode of season 10 will run a week longer than originally planned.
The Apex Legends community has recently united under one rallying cry, and Respawn Entertainment seems to be heeding the call.
After several prominent voices in the community asked the developer to extend the season's first ranked split in response to a week of server indecision, Respawn said today it's pushing back the ranked split end date by a full week. However, the developer also claimed that the problems causing players to be unable to connect to the servers could last until September 22.
“Despite today's improvements, we're still seeing roughly three times the normal disconnect errors in [Apex], and a full return to normal may take until the next patch scheduled for September 22," the developer said. “We will extend the current ranked split by one week – this update will go live on Monday.”
The ranked episode was originally scheduled to end on September 21, but this date will now be pushed back to September 28, the day the Evolution event will end. With this extension, players will be given an extra week to complete their ranked climb for the episode. The split two will then begin with a return to Kings Canyon.
After the game's Evolution event kicked off on September 14, a large number of players started reporting connection issues. Many failed to connect to the main lobby, others were kicked out of their games and resulted in AFK penalties or ranked points losses.
Respawn informed players yesterday that it will "increase server capacity" and has scheduled fixes for today to fix some issues. However, the developer said in the same announcement that most of these fixes will go into effect over the weekend. Now, however, Respawn has indicated that a "full return to normal" may not occur until the developer's next scheduled patch on September 22.
Following yesterday's announcement, several prolific streamers and pro players, including LuluLuvely, NiceWigg, and Rogue, have called for Respawn to extend the deadline for the first-rank split to give players a chance to make up for lost time and declining ranked points due to these connectivity issues. Apex content creators and professionals have continued to raise their voices across their platforms since battle royale's launch in 2019. In June of this year, many prominent voices on the stage got together behind the hashtag #SaveApexRanked to ensure that Respawn takes a larger role in deterring cheating and grief in the game.
When the Emergence season ends, players will receive rewards based on their highest ranked episode. For example, if they achieve Diamond in the first episode but only reach Platinum in the second episode, they will receive the Diamond rewards at the end of the season.
Players will have until September 28 to complete their climb for the first episode of the season. Ranked division will begin shortly.