Apex Legends needles Fortnite developers in first patch notes
First set of minor balance changes sets out philosophy of not pushing out major changes without thorough testing
APEX legends has been out for a month, and today received its first set of in-game balance changes.
There are also some much bigger changes on the way, but these will only be rolled out once they have been thoroughly tested.
This time around though, two of the game's more popular weapons have had their rate of fire reduced slightly, and made to appear less often.
The Wingman magnum now fires less often and is less accurate when fired from the hip (as opposed to when looking down the sights), while the peacekeeper now takes longer to reload.
Both guns spawn will now spawn less often, with the other 17 guns presumably appearing slightly more to compensate.
In an effort to make things more balanced, the developers have made Caustic's traps slightly more powerful, so hopefully it'll be more worthwhile for people to use that character and his skills than it is at the moment.
Finally, energy ammo as used by the Devotion LMG, Triple Take sniper rifle and Havoc Rifle assault rifle will drop more often.
"Our goal is to make less frequent, better tested, higher impact changes, so it minimizes the effects on your time spent mastering a particular mechanic, weapon, character, etc."
The developers also acknowledged that Gibraltar, Caustic, and Pathfinder, the game's largest characters, are a bit too easy to hit.
As a result they're going to adjust their 'hitboxes' -- the name for the simplified space in-game you need to land a hit for it to be registered as a hit on the character -- when Season 1 starts.
If this doesn't help enough, they are "also considering a range of other changes such as natural damage reduction as well as individual kit power tweaks."
"Because many of these changes are significant, we want to make sure they are heavily tested before they go live, in the event they are necessary."
This could be seen as a dig at rival Fortnite, which pushes out changes very frequently.
Last year's $2.6m Fall Skirmish tournament, for instance, was marred by bugs, while Epic Games was forced to apologise and roll back changes after the Infinity Blade was introduced mid-tournament during the Winter Skirmish.
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It is also not uncommon for Fortnite's weekly updates to be pulled at the last minute as testing goes down to the wire.
Other notable mis-steps have included one particular outfit making players invisible.
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