Even in a LAN environment, sometimes the servers aren’t all they’re made to be. In some games, like Overwatch or VALORANT, that’s an easy enough fix, as games often pause for technical difficulties. In a battle royale like Apex Legends, where 60 different players enter a server to play a match, it’s not quite so simple.
TSM’s Philip “ImperialHal” Dosen has played enough Apex to know what a disconnected player looks like. And, with the highest stakes imaginable riding on the game, he chose to take the high road during the ALGS Championship on Saturday.
At the highest level of Apex, standing still out in the open is a quick ticket back to the lobby, which is why it was so odd to see an enemy Valkyrie alone in the middle of a field. Hal quickly deduced what had happened, even recognizing the positioning and skins of one of his opponents: SCARZ IGL Dan “rpr” Ušić’s game had crashed, and his teammates were frantically trying to get to him.
“Don’t shoot him bro, he crashed,” Hal communicated to his teammates, even as his teammates reminded Hal that they needed to get to the survey beacon very close to where rpr had crashed in order to gather valuable information on where the safe zone would be moving next. Despite the importance of gathering this information quickly, Hal remained adamant that the team not shoot the crashed player, even watching over him for a while until his teammates made it back to him.
Fortunately for rpr and SCARZ, as well as TSM, both teams managed to qualify for the finals of the Championship, despite SCARZ not being able to get rpr back into that particular match and TSM missing out on some easy elimination points by opting not to shoot. The tournament has a $2 million prize pool, and both teams came close to not qualifying for finals before strong final games in the losers bracket helped secure their spot, competing for Apex’s biggest prize.
The ALGS Championship concludes today, July 10. The winners of the event will take home $500,000.
