Piggybacking on your Apex Legends team could soon get you a ban

Respawn is starting to crack down on piggybacking in Apex Legends: that is, earning XP off a good squad of players without actually contributing anything.

Posting on Reddit, one of the Respawn community managers said the development team had received feedback on the practice of piggybacking, and was investigating game data to check the scale of the problem.

Based on that data and internal discussions inside Respawn, piggybacking behavior will result in a temporary ban – and "extreme cases" could lead to a permanent ban. In other words: stop mooching off your teammates.

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You have some time to start changing your ways, though. The change isn't going to be immediate, Respawn says, so gamers will have some advance warning.

How it could work

It's been an issue that Apex Legends players have regularly brought up as part of a wider discussion on how XP works in the game as a whole.

Presumably Respawn will be able to gather enough data to identify players who don't collect weapons, don't fire any shots and don't deal any damage, and yet still level up faster because of their team.

Of course the developer is also going to have to watch out for players calculating the minimum level of interaction required and just sticking to that instead.

One possible solution would be to let teammates report each other for the behavior; another would be to change the way XP is awarded rather than issuing bans. No doubt Respawn will offer up more details soon.