During the Overclocked season, Respawn ran two temporary experiments in Apex Legends Ranked. Both chased the same goal: cutting down how often you drop into a lobby against a fully coordinated squad of top players whose Rank feels miles away from yours. Now the team has published what the data showed – and both tests are being shelved in their tested form.
The problem the tests went after
Premade stacks of high-skill players make matches worse for everyone else, especially in lower-skill lobbies. The numbers back it up:
- A squad with a premade duo plus a solo fill wins 19% more often than three solos.
- A full premade trio wins 17% more often.
- 85% of Masters squads are premade three-stacks.
So the behavior concentrates exactly where you would expect – at the top of the ladder. If you are still getting your bearings in Ranked, our beginner guide walks you through your first matches.
Test 1: premade tier restriction
You could still squad up, but only with players within one tier of you instead of two. The idea was to stop wide-band squads from dragging lower-tier players into high-tier lobbies.
The effect was tiny. Diamond players faced roughly 8% fewer Diamond opponents and about 8% more Platinum opponents, while Platinum players saw more Diamonds in their lobbies. Outside those two tiers, nothing meaningful changed. A small improvement for a narrow slice of players was not worth restricting everyone who is used to playing with friends two tiers apart, so the one-tier restriction is not becoming permanent.
Test 2: solo queue for Diamond and above
Diamond, Master, and Predator players were locked to solo queue – no premades at all at the top end. Mechanically it worked, the three-stacks disappeared. The rest did not go as planned.
Who wins did not change
Removing coordination should have pulled the top of the lobby closer to everyone else, since RP does not measure teamwork. It barely moved. In Diamond, match result distributions stayed roughly the same. In Masters the top squads’ win rate dipped slightly, but the win-rate gap between the top 10 and bottom 10 teams held at 9%. The best squad in the lobby still wins, whether or not it queued together.
Exposure to top players got worse
This was the surprise. The matchmaker pulls 60 players of similar RP into a lobby, sorts them by RP, splits the list into thirds, and gives each squad one player from the top, middle, and bottom third. When Masters and above could no longer stack, most of them did not stop playing – they got spread one per squad instead of clustering into a few. The result: more squads in more matches contained a top-tier player.
For a Diamond player that reads as more matches with a Master or Predator in them than before. The pre-match skill display made it look even rougher, because a squad with one Masters player and a squad with three Predators currently show up identically – so you saw more red on screen before the match even started. Respawn says it will keep iterating on that display.
Social Ranked players simply stopped playing
Return rate – how many players came back to Apex during the test after playing right before it – was weakest among Diamond and above players who normally run duos and trios. Those are some of the most engaged players in the game, and their Ranked play fell off during the window. That is the part the team cannot accept: Ranked matchmaking improves when there are more players at every skill level in the queue, which means tighter bands, shorter waits, and closer matches. The test was supposed to improve Ranked and instead thinned it out.
Where it landed and what comes next
Solo queue is not becoming a permanent requirement for high-skill lobbies, though solo queue experiments are not dead – this version was just too broad. The goal carries forward without the blunt instrument: reduce how often you run into fully coordinated top-tier squads without taking away your ability to play with friends.
More tests are being prepared, with details shared closer to implementation. The biggest changes resulting from these experiments land in Ranked in Seasons 31 and 32, and Respawn plans to detail them in October.
Where to next
If you want more context around Apex, we have written about the Javelin anticheat and its matchmaking errors, covered Predator account sharing bans, and collected everything else in our Apex Legends news section.
FAQ
No. Respawn is not rolling out the solo queue experiment as a permanent requirement for high-skill lobbies. The team says solo queue experiments are not dead, but this version was too broad.
No. The change helped only a narrow slice of Diamond and Platinum players, so it was not worth restricting everyone who plays with friends within two rank tiers.
The matchmaker spreads one player from each RP third into every squad. With stacking disabled, top-tier players were distributed one per squad instead of clustering, so more squads in more matches contained a top-tier player.
Across Ranked, a premade duo plus a solo fill wins 19% more often than three solos, and a full premade trio wins 17% more often. Also, 85% of Masters squads are premade three-stacks.
The biggest changes resulting from these tests land in Ranked in Seasons 31 and 32, with details expected in October.