If you’ve played more than a couple of battle royale matches in Apex Legends, you’ll know that people love hot-dropping. Most non-ranked games on World’s Edge see at least half the lobby cleared in the first couple minutes of a match as teams gleefully plummet to their demise at Fragment, eager for a fight as quickly as possible.
That’s a little bit of an issue that one map, Broken Moon, hoped to address when it was introduced last season. But in season 16, the devs have snuck in a further change to one particularly popular POI to nerf hot dropping even more.
Terraformer, the giant, rotating tower POI that dominates the southern area of Broken Moon, has become the map’s de facto hot drop. There are a few other popular spots to drop, but you’ll consistently see anywhere between three and six teams all dropping at Terraformer for an all-out brawl to begin most Broken Moon matches.
Hoping to curtail that impulse a bit, it seems that Respawn has nerfed the available loot at the POI. The loot bins at the top of the arms that stretch out from Terraformer are gone in season 16, meaning teams that land there must get their loot either from the highly-contested middle section or from one of the lower portions of the gigantic structure, a safe distance from the middle.
When Broken Moon was first introduced to players, the devs talked up how there were several large-scale POIs. This, they hoped, would create not one centralized hot drop spot for players who wanted to fight early and often, but several hot drop spots that could accommodate multiple teams, allowing everyone to grab a gun and fight. Finding a weapon in Fragment is far from a given when there are often upwards of 30 players landing in its buildings and streets, and Broken Moon hoped to appease the hot droppers while also providing a better pacing experience than World’s Edge did for the casual player base.
Apparently, that hasn’t happened as much as the devs would like. The nerf to the POI’s loot makes hot dropping there a bit harder for more than three or four teams at a time. No matter how tall and enticing the Terraformer tower is, if it’s difficult to actually find any loot there to fight, players might soon migrate to other POIs as their go-to spot.
Published: Feb 23, 2023 01:08 pm