Since its 2019 release EA and Respawn Entertainment have been working on providing a better seamless experience while playing Apex, and one of the most requested features players (myself included) have been asking for is a reconnect feature. It does get annoying when you leave your screen for a few minutes just to come back and find all your stats basically thrown out of the window for that match. EA and Respawn might have just solved this.
Listed in the Season 5 patch notes, the reconnect feature allows players to re-join matches that are in progress, as long as they did not quit voluntarily.
How do I reconnect though?
The patch notes stated:
“Players that leave a match unexpectedly can now re-join their match in progress. “Unexpected” means exiting the match through any means other than the system menu, including crashing, using alt+f4 on PC, or “dashboarding” to close the game on console. To reconnect, simply restart the game and enter the lobby.”
This basically means the game will automatically try to reconnect you if the match is still in progress, your squad is still alive, and your chance to reconnect hasn’t timed out. The patch notes also stated that the reconnect feature will be available for all competitive modes.
You won’t be able to able to reconnect if you intentionally left the game (i.e. quitting through the pause menu) so it’s safe to say I won’t be able to re-join a match a rage quit from and have my teammates chat even more garbage.
What happens to my character while I’m disconnected?
“Disconnected players’ characters remain in the state they were in while the player was connected.”
“To their teammates, it will look a bit like the disconnected player has gone afk (with an icon next to their name to indicate disconnection)”. This means if the player reconnects, they can immediately go back to playing.
However, this also means that if your character was alive before you disconnected, they could be killed and knocked out as enemy players would think you’ve just gone afk, and lets not lie here we’d all love a free kill like that lol.
The patch notes also stated “There is a limited time window to reconnect and failing to do so in ranked will result in a loss penalty”. So if your teammate disconnects don’t hop out of the match thinking you will get loss forgiveness, you’d have to give them some time to reconnect first.
