If you’ve spent any amount of time playing Apex Legends, you’ve most likely landed in Fragment on World’s Edge at least one time. Maybe you just wanted to fight early and often, maybe a Wraith player with “TTV” in their name was the jumpmaster. Whatever the reason, the point of interest in the middle of World’s Edge is one of the most popular landing spots in the game’s entire history.
If you feel like you’re finding less and less good loot when you hot drop there these days, though, that’s because the loot got worse.
The loot change question is a pressing one for pros and casuals alike but was probably felt most acutely by pros who land in Fragment, like TSM. While multiple devs responded to comments about a “shadow nerf” to Fragment’s loot, claiming the loot pool wasn’t changed, the season 12 patch notes included a note that… the loot pool in Fragment definitely changed.
Patch 11.1 changed Fragment from a high-tier loot POI to a mid-tier loot POI, and this note was “inadvertently omitted” from the season 11 patch notes. While the devs might have assumed a note went out with the season 11 update about the change to Fragment, and their responses then meant that there had been no further change to Fragment loot since the 11.1 update, player frustration with this communication and confusion is understandable, to say the least.
The extent of this change was further visualized by one of the most trusted Apex data miners, Shrugtal.
The vast majority of Fragment isn’t even a “mid-tier” loot area, according to the game’s files, with only the construction building in Fragment West and the bins outside of it having the medium-tier designation. Importantly, this doesn’t mean that blue or purple-level loot can’t spawn in Fragment anymore. It just means that the chances of finding purple armor or a rare weapon attachment are substantially less in the majority of loot spawn points in the POI.
Why did this happen? Since a post was never released explaining the change, it’s impossible to say for sure. Most likely, the change was made to deter half the lobby in most games from dropping there and to prevent the POI from being too powerful in general. Having both a central location for players to rotate from in addition to being a high-tier loot area might have been deemed too strong.
The extent of the change visualized like this is eye-opening, however. Based on Shrugtal’s map, it’s difficult to even classify Fragment as a mid-tier loot location since the vast majority of the mid-tier loot spawn points around Fragment are actually in the nameless group of buildings to the east of the city. The change also directly affected many teams throughout the first split of the ALGS Pro League and the split one playoffs, without those teams knowing that the loot tier of their landing spot had been changed. At best, this was a major blunder by the Apex team.
Be warned: Landing in Fragment might result in several Mozambique and P2020 fights.
