Development

Patch notes

The biggest changes, by the day they landed. This is a closed beta and it moves most days — everything below is already live on the server.

    • Training room: Infinite ammo now works with reload-shot. Your clip never runs out, and you can still reload after every shot, so reload-shot and the reload cancels can be practised with it on.
    • You pick your team in the waiting room, not mid-match. Switching sides from inside a running match no longer works — you can still choose a team before joining a match that is already in progress.
    • Security and stability fixes across login, rooms and combat, and improved cheat detection. If something that used to work has stopped, tell us on Discord.
    • Damage numbers in casual rooms. Every hit you land shows what it did, just right of your crosshair — a shotgun blast is one number, and headshots show in crimson. Never in clan war, the ladder or tournaments. Options → Damage numbers turns them off.
    • Casual scoreboards show everyone’s damage instead of pellets. Ranked boards keep DMG, AIM and PELLETS, and the Classic clan war board now has the AIM column the APEX one already had.
    • Clan war keeps your own weapon when it is the same class as the preset — bring any shotgun or any katana and you play with it. The preset loadout had silently stopped applying on 9 September; that is fixed.
    • Training room: a Launch bot button and an Infinite ammo checkbox (or /botlaunch and /infammo), and the bot can now be killed.
    • Every player on the server is searchable on the website. Type a name at playapextheduel.com/players/ to open anyone’s stat page — rank, rating, record and recent matches.
    • The server is up 24/7. There are no opening hours any more — no 09:30, no 01:00. If it is ever down, that is a fault rather than a schedule.
    • Other players are drawn where they actually were, not where the game guessed they were going. A player changing direction could be drawn up to two thirds of a body from where you had to aim, which is why standing targets felt fine and moving ones did not. Your own movement, dashing and cancels are untouched.
    • Hover any name in the lobby, the room list or the scoreboard to see that player’s banner, icon and rank frame. Right-click to reach their profile.
    • The shop is open, and everything in it is free for the beta: three cosmetic sets and two blade effects, Ember and Arc.
    • Dying works properly again — the wait, the prompt, and a real spawn point instead of dropping you back where you fell.
    • The character in a profile is now that player, not you. Opening somebody else’s profile showed your own character standing under their name. It shows theirs, including for players who are not online.
    • Offline friends no longer show the green “in the lobby” dot. Your friends list was marking everyone as being in the lobby whether they were logged in or not, which is the one thing a friends list is for.
    • Right-click a name on the rankings or ladder boards for Show profile. Choosing it closes the board and opens that player’s profile, instead of opening it behind the board.
    • The profile card no longer appears while you are queued for a match. Hovering or right-clicking a name during a search did nothing useful and covered the search itself.
    • Your profile leads with your rank. The rank badge, your rating, where you sit on the duel ladder, the highest tier you have reached, your duel record and your last ten results are all at the top of the page now instead of buried under it. If you have not played your placement duels yet, it says how many are left.
    • Every match on your profile opens into its scoreboard. Click any row and you get everyone who played it — their kills, deaths and damage, their damage per minute, and what the match did to each of their ratings.
    • Your rank is now yours to keep. Seasons reset — that is what a season is — but until now they reset everything, and a month of climbing left nothing behind on the first. Two things now survive it: your peak, the highest tier you have ever reached, and your finish, if you ended a season in the top five. Win one outright and you keep the crown. Both show on the character select screen, on your card in a room, and next to your name on the in-match scoreboard, in the colour of the rank you reached.
    • Season one has a name, and your profile has a history. Season one is the Closed Beta and it reads that way everywhere. Your profile page now lists every season you have finished — where you placed, the rank you held, and that season’s own record rather than your career total — alongside your recent games, the weapons you actually kill with, the maps you play and the hours you play them.
    • Ladder matches were only counting the last round. A first-to-five duel stored one kill and one death instead of the whole match, so every ladder result already on record reads 1-0. Matches from now on count properly. The old ones cannot be repaired — the rounds were never written down.
    • 1v1 rounds stopped talking about teams. A duel or ladder round used to end with a Your team and Enemy team line that only repeated the line above it, and an MVP of a single player. It now names your opponent instead. The round splash also had part of its D cut off at the edge of the image; the word is whole again.
    • A rating without a rank now says so. Play five rated duels in a season and you hold a position on the board; until then you have a rating, a tier, and a dash where the number goes. The board lists everyone who has placed first, then everyone still placing — so nobody sits above first place on the strength of one lucky win.
    • The room panel tells the truth. A ladder or duel room shows the players it actually holds and the rounds it is actually played to, instead of the numbers a normal room would have. Long room names are no longer cut off, and a room shows its map rather than the words Relay Map.
    • Changing your resolution no longer needs a restart. Pick a new resolution in Options and the game switches to it straight away, with the whole interface rebuilt to fit. It used to apply on the next launch, and picking certain sizes could leave panels stretched, overlapping or drawn off the edge of the screen until you restarted.
    • Auto-recorded matches saved you without your clothes, and with the wrong voice. If you had Auto-record matches switched on, the recording saved your own character stripped of its outfit, and played the wrong pain and death sounds over it. Everyone else in the match looked and sounded right. New recordings are correct; recordings made before this cannot be repaired. Watching a replay also no longer saves a second copy of it.
    • The lobby no longer lets you wander off while you are queued. With a clan war or duel search running, the buttons that leave the screen the queue belongs to — CLAN WAR, HUB, LADDER, RANKINGS, the shop, and joining or creating a room — are greyed out until the search ends or you cancel it, on the APEX interface and the Classic one alike. They stay greyed through the map vote, where clicking one used to change channel out from under a match the server had already locked in. The duel panel also no longer lets you post a second challenge while you are already queued.
    • A new logo. The APEX wordmark has dropped its metallic sheen for a clean, flat finish — on the login screen, the loading splash, the launcher and this website. Same letters, same cut in the A. Only the fill changed.
    • Your rank now shows up in the game, not just on the ladder page. Every player carries their tier badge next to their name — on the ladder board, on the scoreboard during a match, and on the end-of-match screen. Same seven tiers, same colours. A character who has not played enough rated matches to be placed shows no badge rather than the bottom one: an unearned rank is not a rank.
    • Every match can record itself. Turn on Auto-record matches in Options and each match you play is saved and appears in your replay list on its own — no key to remember, nothing to press before the good round rather than after it. Leaving a match tells you it was saved.
    • The game now tells us when it crashes. If the client closes unexpectedly, the next time you log in it sends four things: the version you were running, the Windows error code, which file crashed, and the position inside it. That is all — no memory, no file paths, nothing about your machine, and nothing at all unless it actually crashed.
    • Improved cheat detection.
    • Your last shots in a fight count now. If you and your opponent both committed to the same exchange and they went down a fraction of a second before you, the shot you had already fired was thrown away — drawn on both screens, doing nothing. Shots and swings that were already on their way when someone died are resolved properly, so trades happen again the way they always did.
    • The ladder on the website is live. Standings update within a minute of a match finishing, instead of whenever the site was last published.
    • The duel ladder is on the website. The top solo 1v1 ratings sit beside the clan standings, with each player's duel record, and it uses the same rule the game does — five rated duels in the season and you hold a position.
    • Corrected four duel ratings. Where the same two players met several times in a row, some of those duels counted for the record but moved no rating — which left the board showing a 3-6 player above a 6-3 one. That limit is off for the closed beta, and the affected ratings have been recalculated from the match history.
    • Duels against the same opponent always count. Playing the same person several times in a row used to stop your rating from moving. With twenty people in a closed beta that is simply who is online, so the rule is off.
    • The round number replaces LET'S ROCK. The splash and its voice line fired at the start of every round, so a first-to-five duel played it five times in three minutes. Every mode that plays rounds now announces the round it is starting.
    • Match scoreboards recorded only the last round. Kills and deaths were saved per round rather than per match, so every match in your history read 1-0 whatever the score was. New matches record the whole thing, and a duel is no longer filed as a clan match on top of it.
    • The duel ladder is open. Queue on your own from the Ladder channel, play a 1v1, and earn a rating that is yours rather than your clan's. FIND A DUEL is on the panel, the rankings are one button away, and the season rewards are shown rather than named.
    • The duel ladder screen is on the Classic interface too, laid out the same way as the APEX one: your character stands on the left with your name, clan and stats under it, the ladder is in the middle, and the player list sits above the chat on the right. The Classic lobby has a character render for the first time. Every other channel looks exactly as it did.
    • The lobby's Ladder button now says RANKINGS. It opens the standings, and Ladder is the name of a channel you walk into -- two different things were sharing one name.
    • The rankings board reached the Classic interface, and its PLAYERS tab no longer opens empty while you are standing in the Ladder channel. The ladder board also stopped running a band into a rating: DIAMOND I1962 is two columns, not one.
    • A duel starts you at a spawn point. Duel maps only ever carried solo spawns, so a rated 1v1 began round one with both players stood in the middle of the map, and every round after that wherever you happened to die. The two of you now start apart, on opposite sides.
    • The scoreboard counts the rounds the match is actually played to. It promised four in a match played to five.
    • 1v1 is queued from the ladder, not from clan war. Confirming the clan war team dialog with nobody selected put you in a duel -- a match that rates your character and never touches your clan -- from a screen that says clan war. The two entrances were not even the same duel, since only one of them let you turn balanced matching off. The dialog now says where 1v1 is queued instead.
    • A duel no longer wears clan war's clothes. The in-match scoreboard and the end screen were showing clan emblems, clan names and a CLAN MMR heading for a match with no clan in it. The numbers were right the whole time; the labels were not.
    • New rank frames, and they are on everything. The border around your character panel, the ladder rows, the rankings cards, the clan panels and the top-three podium is no longer a flat outline: every rank wears a sculpted metal frame with machined corners and a lit accent rail in its own colour, bronze up to APEX. Clan emblems wear the ring for their rank too, wherever a clan appears. Both interfaces.
    • The game now starts on a machine that has never run one of these before. The client needs a piece of the Microsoft runtime that Windows does not install on its own, and it was not being shipped with the download -- so on a clean Windows it closed immediately, with no message and nothing in the log. It is included from this version.
    • Clan war runs in monthly seasons from now on. A season ends at one minute past midnight on the first of the month, and Season 1 ends on 1 September. The clan that finishes on top is recorded as that season's champion, and the standings for the month are kept.
    • A season does not wipe your rating, it compresses it. Every clan keeps sixty percent of its distance from the middle and becomes less certain again, so the top of the board has something to defend and nobody starts the month buried. Clan wins, losses and clan points do reset, as they always have; the all-time totals are kept. A clan needs three rated matches in a season before it holds a place on the board.
    • The player MMR board has been taken off this site. A character's rating is earned in clan war, where a full clan party queues together every time — so team-mates' ratings move as one and the number cannot tell who was carrying whom. It comes back with the 1v1 ladder, where a rating can be earned alone.
    • The ladder on this website is real now. The standings, the match history and every clan and player page were a worked example showing the layout — invented clans, invented scores. They are now the closed beta’s own results, exported from the server’s database: nine clans, a hundred and one rated clan wars, and whatever your character’s rating actually is. Season 1 has not started, so treat all of it as pre-season; most ratings are still provisional and the standings will move a long way yet.
    • Clans that have disbanded keep their results. Their name still appears in the games they played, without a link to a page that no longer exists.
    • The clan ladder is ordered by MMR, not by clan points. Clan points count games played nearly as much as games won, so ranking by them put whoever queued most at the top. The points are still there as a column. A clan whose rating is still provisional does not hold a place above a settled one however high it reads, and those rows are marked.
    • The status panel moved up under the headline and now says how many of the twenty closed-beta keys are still unclaimed. It also asks the server directly whether it is up, once a minute while you have the page open, instead of showing a state that was true whenever the page was last built.
    • The ladder on this website now reads a rating exactly as the game does. It grows less certain about a clan that has not played in a while, it draws the line between a provisional rating and a settled one in the same place the client does, and clans and characters who have never played a rated clan war are no longer listed in the standings at all.
    • Diamond is blue and Master is purple. The top of the ramp ran violet, magenta and crimson — three shades of one corner of the colour wheel, stacked on top of each other, in a table where a rank gets one row of text to say what it is. The result screen also says when a clan’s rating is still being worked out, the way the ladder and the clan card already did.
    • Two rooms that are always open, and always already playing. APEX 24/7 Deathmatch and APEX 24/7 Team Deathmatch sit at the top of the room list from the moment the server starts and never close. Nobody has to be the first person waiting alone in a room they made — the match is already running, you join it, and it keeps running after you leave. They work through the whole map rotation on their own, and the room list shows them as Relay Map rather than naming a map they are about to leave.
    • The round clock tells you the truth when you walk in. Joining a match already in progress started your timer at the full round length, so two players in the same round saw two different clocks. You now get the time that is actually left.
    • The Team Deathmatch scoreboard was rebuilt. It counts rounds instead of calling them kills, the two teams are separated properly instead of running together as one list, and it shows the pellet column that every other board has had.
    • Enemy outlines are always on in Ladder and Clan War. The setting still decides every other room, and the colour is still yours to pick — but a rated match should not reward having found a switch in the options menu.
    • A map-skip vote in those rooms. Type /callvote skipmap map. If it passes the match ends, the room moves to the next map, and everyone is taken straight into it instead of being dropped back to the lobby.
    • A security pass over everything built for the beta. Several places where the server or the client took a badly formed message at its word now check it first and drop it. None of it changes how anything plays — it changes what happens when something arrives that a normal game never sends. The launcher's start-up token is signed with a private key from this build onward.
    • Your level updates the moment you earn it. Levelling up in a match left the room list, the lobby list and your own character card still showing the level you logged in with, until you restarted the game. Clan names, clan emblems and rank colours follow the same rule now, and your kills, deaths, clan war record and rating refresh when a match ends instead of only at login.
    • Replays pause, play at any speed and can be scrubbed properly. P pauses, [ and ] step the speed between a tenth of normal and four times normal, and the backslash key puts it back to 1x. X frees the mouse and brings up the seek bar without opening the chat box first, the handle can be dragged rather than only clicked, and seeks land where you put them instead of falling short. Scrubbing while paused draws the frame straight away.
    • Replays play back the hits you actually landed. New recordings store the hit confirmations your own client made at the time, so the blip in a replay is the one you heard in the match rather than a guess worked out again from rebuilt positions — which is why hits sometimes went quiet, worst right after skipping through the timeline. Replays recorded before this update still work.
    • Shotguns are no longer silent in replays. A shot fired while the replay camera was between players was thrown away whole — no pellets, no impact, no bang. The same thing happened live to anyone watching as a spectator.
    • Everyone can see you typing again. The speech bubble over your head only ever appeared on your own screen — nobody else in the match saw it. On the APEX skin it is a new one, built to match the rest of the interface.
    • Training weapons stay in the training room. The wooden sword, the training shotgun and the rest of the practice set deal no damage anywhere, and until now nothing stopped you taking one into a real match and spending the round unable to hurt anybody. They can only be equipped while you are standing in a Training room now.
    • The quest room looks like APEX. The offering altar is back under the two light beams instead of leaving them hanging in mid-air, and the item drawer that slides in from the left is an APEX panel now.
    • The room record is where you can read it. The standing time for the run you are about to start was one grey line tucked up next to the breadcrumb at the top of the screen. It is a block beside the altar now — who holds it, their time, and the tier it was set at — and it only appears in a quest room instead of hanging around after you switch the room to deathmatch.
    • The screen at the end of a quest is a proper one now. It printed your experience three times — once as experience, once as a penalty that is always zero, once as a total — in old green numerals on a rectangle two thirds of which was empty. It is one card now, with the reward on it once, how many monsters you put down, how far through the map you got, and what you picked up.
    • No rank ring on your character in a quest room. The ring around your portrait is a clan war standing and quest is not rated on it. Your rating and tier still show; the frame does not.
    • Fixed: the Curiosity Box picker selected the wrong row. Clicking one curiosity picked the one under it, and clicking the empty space above a row picked that row. Long names were wrapping onto a second line and pushing every row below them out of step with where the game thought you were clicking — which also quietly fixes the same misclick in the shop and inventory lists.
    • Quest pays properly now. A clear is worth about as much experience as the same time in a normal match, at every difficulty. The old numbers had not moved since 2006 and paid a fraction of it.
    • Quest items no longer sell for bounty — they buy a Curiosity Box at the top of the shop list instead. Seventy-five of one kind, and it holds one piece of quest gear for seven days.
    • Boss weapons drop, and you keep them. Eleven named weapons that the drop tables had always referred to but that had never existed as items. They fight exactly like any other weapon of their class.
    • Quest leaderboards: /questtop for the fastest clears, /questtop damage and /questtop deathless for the rest. The quest room also shows the standing record for the run you are about to start.
    • Fixed: the damage counter in a quest run always read zero. Kills counted, damage did not, for everyone, in every run.
    • Hitting a block staggers you again. Swinging straight into someone's guard is supposed to knock you back and leave you open, and most of the time it was not — the check that decided it ran a fifth of a second after the swing, by which point the block had already ended. It is now decided the moment your blade meets the guard.
    • Clan war stops leaving you in an empty queue. Matchmaking looks for a clan close to yours in rating and widens its search the longer you wait, which is the right answer on a busy ladder and useless on a quiet one — if the only other clan queueing is far above or below you, nothing better is coming. After about fifteen seconds of finding nothing, you now play whoever is there. A close match still wins whenever one exists.
    • Fixed: your clan's wins and losses stopped moving. The record on the clan card was the one the server had loaded when it last started, so a clan could play a dozen matches and still read 0/1 — while the ladder, two clicks away, had it right the whole time.
    • Your own crosshair stays yours. Anything in the CUSTOM/CROSSHAIR folder was treated as one of our files, so the updater put its copy back every time you started the game and a custom crosshair lasted one session. That folder is yours now.
    • A crosshair size slider, in Options on the gameplay page under the crosshair picker. Crosshair art is drawn at a size worked out from your resolution, which is why a custom one drawn at 1080p came out enormous. A quarter size to triple, with a live preview.
    • Sword hits register where you swung, not where you were. On a high ping the server judged your slashes from where you had been a moment earlier, so swings that clearly connected came back as misses. Melee, the charged swing and the dash attack; shooting was unaffected.
    • Clan war sides are a coin toss per match. The same clan used to take the same side of the same map every time it queued.
    • Clan war showed the wrong MMR for each team. The figure above the scoreboard and on the result screen was the average of the four players' ratings, not the clan's, so it never matched the ladder. Mixed or unclanned teams still show the team average.
    • Fixed: the game crashed as it closed. Quitting worked, but Windows put up an error afterwards and left a crash file behind every time.
    • Fixed: the quest result screen stopped short of the real number. The experience counted up one point per millisecond against a screen that closes after fifteen seconds, so a large reward never finished counting.
    • Quest rewards are tuned so a run moves you a level or two, not ten. They had been set for a character at the end of the levelling curve, so one clear of the easiest tier took a fresh character from 1 to 10 in a single run.
    • Rented quest drops are actually rentals now. The seven-day countdown was real on screen and imaginary in the database, so everything you picked up was permanent once you logged out. The boss weapons stay the deliberate exception: those you keep.
    • The Curiosity Box turn-in asked for the wrong number. The caption in the shop said ten, and the game has wanted seventy-five since the box existed. The caption says seventy-five now.
    • The launcher has shipped, and it is the last full download. It checks for updates before the game starts and fetches only the parts of files that changed, so a fix that goes out in the afternoon reaches you in seconds. Everyone needs to re-download the client once to get it, and start from launcher.exe from then on.
    • The launcher tells you when the server is closed, with the hours, instead of a download error that looks like something broke.
    • The launcher no longer asks for administrator rights. No more Windows permission box every time you want to play.
    • The server is up from 09:30 CET instead of 18:00, and still goes down at 01:00. About eight more hours a day, every day.
    • Your experience is on the HUD. How far through the level you are shows as a percentage next to your level, beside the health and armour readout, and it updates as you play rather than at the end of the round.
    • The character button in the lobby asks before it drops you back to character selection, because it was easy to hit by accident and there was no way back.
    • Clan war announced a different rating change than the result screen showed. It was still using the 2006 clan-point formula, which is not what the ladder ranks you on. Both now quote the ladder rating.
    • You can see how the fight actually went. The health and armour bars in the APEX layout now change colour as you take damage — blue at full, then teal, yellow, red, the same as the 2006 layout — and when someone kills you, the message tells you what they had left, in those same colours.
    • The killer's health was missing from the “has defeated you” line. The message printed HP with nothing where the number should be. Both numbers are back, coloured the same way as your own bars, in every game mode.
    • The server list is no longer empty. Anyone outside the local network could not see the server at all, because the port the client asks for the list on was never opened. It is open now.
    • Opening your account items no longer takes the server down. Looking at the items attached to your account could crash the whole server and drop everyone mid-match. Fixed.
    • Health bars show the fight you are actually watching. Waiting your turn in a duel, or watching a clan war round after you were killed, showed everyone on full health and armour no matter what was happening to them — and for a moment after someone walked into a room, their bars showed impossible numbers. Both fixed. Two players who are both alive and still fighting still cannot see each other’s health, and that is not going to change.
    • Improved cheat detection. Nothing about it is visible while you play, and nothing about it is going to be described here.
    • Invite people to the Discord and get paid for it. `!invites` in #general shows where you are: five invites is the Recruiter role and 300 coins, rising to 4,000 at fifty. An invite counts once the person you brought has been around five days, and the coins land on your account as soon as you have one, so inviting early costs you nothing.
    • The game starts straight from the download. It used to stop and tell you to run a launcher that is not in the beta zip and will not be until the auto-updater is finished.
    • Quest mode is open for testing, in the Elite channel.
    • The quest scoreboard shows damage, live, while the run is going rather than after it, and sorts by it — so the player doing the work is at the top instead of whoever landed the last shot.
    • Quest damage is worked out by the server instead of being taken on trust from whoever reported it, so everyone in the party sees the same numbers.
    • Movement steps at the 2006 rate again. The finer step added on 14 August is reverted — veterans were asked what they wanted and they want the ijji feel, which is exactly the kind of difference they can feel.
    • Characters can be deleted again. Every character on every account was being refused, because the check for cash items was guessing from an ID range that stopped being true after 2006.
    • Shotgun hits no longer count toward the combo counter. A shotgun fires slower than the combo window is wide, so a combo climbing on one was never really yours. Hit feedback is unchanged.
    • The training ghost records where you went, not only what you did — and it no longer spawns naked.
    • The Options screen is laid out properly on a large monitor. Sliders ran underneath their own labels, the keyboard tabs sat on top of the search box, the macro boxes covered the F1 Key captions, and the last two settings on the second Misc page were hidden behind the OK button. Every tab has been re-spaced.
    • Every weapon of a class now carries the same stats: damage, delay, magazine, reload, control, range. Within a class the only thing that differs is the mesh. A cosmetic can never be an edge, and that now holds at the level of the data.
    • Clan war hub finished. Queue from the hub itself instead of going through a room, your own clan is pinned under the top five, and the results ticker survives a server restart.
    • Clan names and emblems on the clan war board carry their rating band, ring and all.
    • Greatswords have been removed. All five were already switched off and unobtainable; the last one, the Large Training Sword, is gone too.
    • The Pioneer keeps its six shells. Every other shotgun carries five. That is how it was in 2006 and it is staying.
    • The monster book tells you how to summon what you have killed. Fully unlock a boss's page and it names the two items that call it up. Twelve bosses have a summon recipe and the game had never told you what any of them were.
    • The combo counter is back — the banner, the number climbing as hits land, and the GOOD / NICE / GREAT / WONDERFUL calls. It had been switched off wholesale to stop a crash; the crash is fixed, and the counter has APEX art now.
    • One rating ramp, everywhere. Colour and name always mean rating band, on the ladder, the podium, the hub and your clan card. Position is the number in the # column and nothing else, and the whole ramp is printed under the ladder.
    • Room list banners are drawn from the full-size map art instead of a 360x32 crop, and the game mode is a readable badge rather than a count of skulls.
    • Player, friends and clan lists scale correctly at every resolution. Rows, columns and badges had each been on a different scale.
    • A hitmarker: the crosshair marks for a moment when one of your shots or swings lands, red for a headshot. There is no sound, and it tells you nothing beyond “that one connected” — no damage number, no name. It can be turned off.
    • Fourteen pieces of clothing that shipped with the game but could not be worn are now obtainable. The models were in the client the whole time with nothing to equip them with: the Scrider's set for both men and women, the Bug Buster Trench Coat, the Black Dragon Clan wig and skirt, and the women's wedding lower garment. All at the same health and armour as everything else.
    • APEX Coins now accrue from playing — five for every fifteen minutes in a match, with a daily cap. Only real play counts.
    • Every armour set now carries identical HP and AP. What you wear is a look, never a stat choice.
    • Changing resolution or display mode no longer needs a restart before the menus look right.
    • The two ring slots are gone. There are no rings in the game, so they were two boxes you could never fill — on the equipment screen, in the shop, and in the lobby. The lobby equipment list closes up neatly where they used to be.
    • New logo. The APEX logo is now just the name — APEX, with THE DUEL on the rule underneath, centred. The chrome A that used to sit beside it is now our emblem and stands on its own: the icon, the avatar, and the badge on your name plate in a match. You will see it on the login screen, in the lobby, in the shop and on the stage screen.
    • Interface type now scales with the window, at every resolution up to 4K, in both the APEX and the 2006 layouts.
    • Clan war card in the lobby: your clan's standing, record and queue in one panel.
    • A drawn clan war could reduce a clan's all-time points. Fixed.
    • Letters with tails — g, y, p, q — were having the bottom cut off at higher resolutions, on both interfaces. “Login” read as “Loain”. Fixed everywhere text is drawn.
    • Med kits and repair kits work again in server-based matches — five separate faults, all of them found in one pass.
    • In-match chat opens on the first Enter instead of the third.
    • Your ping is shown outside a match, not only during one.
    • Your character is now moved up to 500 times a second instead of a fixed 150. The delay between the key and the character roughly halves. No movement speed, dash distance, jump height or cancel timing was changed.
    • An APM counter, a connection strength meter, and an input overlay for recording guides.
    • Vertical sync is a setting now, off by default.
    • Every armour set now protects you the same amount. A few sets were quietly worse than the rest — the Fenrir Guardian pieces and their Emberforge colourway gave less armour than anything else in the game, the men's Xian Tactical coat gave no health bonus where the women's did, and the tournament Crown gave nothing at all, so wearing your prize made you easier to kill. All corrected: what you wear is a look, never an edge.
    • A tutorial for your first character: fifteen steps and four K-Style techniques, graded on screen as you do them, replayable from any training room.
    • Balance pass across casual modes, putting values back where 2006 had them.
    • Dual SMGs and machineguns hit less hard. They were killing in well under a second — roughly three times faster than a shotgun — which made spraying the only sensible thing to do. They are still the fastest guns in the game, just not by that much. Swords and shotguns are worth carrying again.
    • Every server-side hit path audited end to end.
    • Ping is validated before it can move the rewind window, so a client cannot claim latency it does not have.
    • Clan war issues everyone the same weapons and the same HP and AP — ordinary 2006 values — so a ladder match is a test of play rather than of inventory.
    • Enemy outlines, so players read against busy maps. Nine colours, and it can be turned off.
    • Combat validation moved to the server. Damage is no longer applied client to client, and lag compensation rewinds by your measured ping rather than by a timestamp your client sends.
    • Clan war rebuilt as a rated ladder: Glicko-2 ratings, rosters locked to the machines that queued, and forfeits that apply themselves.
    • Ladder results and server status relayed into Discord.

Movement and K-Style timing are not on this list and will not be. Nothing that touches animation cancels, dash physics or weapon delays has been changed, and that is a rule rather than a coincidence.