Apex Legends is the hit new game by Respawn Entertainment and has already amassed over 50,000,000 players in just over a month, joining together to fight it out in a battle royale game mode to claim victory. Like other battle royale games, players are keen to partake in tournaments and competitions to win prizes and express their dominance. This article aims to guide you through the process of joining a tournament and teach you how Apex Legends tournaments work.
What is Apex Legends?
Being the newest game from Respawn Entertainment, the studio that was behind the creation of Titanfall 1 and 2, this game developed a lot of hype, with people originally thinking that it would be a Titanfall battle royale mode instead of being separate. Developed using the Source game engine, it was released on Origin in early February, along with making its way onto PlayStation and Xbox.
Despite the fact that Respawn was using Valve’s proprietary software, the hit new trend shall not be released on Steam any time soon. In just 4 weeks, Apex managed to amass a player base of 50,000,000 players, growing at rapid rates and achieving what it took Fortnite 16 weeks to do.
What is an Apex Legends Tournament and How do They Work?
A tournament in the esports world is similar to the sports world except for the fact that it involves video games. Players come together and challenge each other in a competition to see who can come out victorious and win, beating all of their opponents. Games like League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive have helped to popularize this concept over the years, bringing hundreds of millions of players together to enjoy watching their teams compete. The LoL Worlds 2018 Grand Final reached a record 200 million spectators at once.
In Apex, this is very much how a tournament works. In teams of three or as a solo, players will queue up and try to pick off as many kills as they can to build up a maximum amount of points, whilst also trying to rank well for bonus points. Of course, the point structure can differ from tournament to tournament and with there being no way to create custom games that can be used in matchmaking, this is currently the only way that these competitions can operate. Another downfall is that there is no public API for the game yet, meaning that it is not possible to get game statistics without using an unofficial API or by using screenshots/live streams to ensure people do as well as they claim to.
At the moment, tournaments have some problems when it comes to how they work but, nevertheless, there are still tournaments available to take part in that are run by members of the gaming community. The problems are expected to disappear in the future as support for an official API and custom games is introduced.
Apex Tournaments You Can Join.
We’ve talked a bit about what tournaments are and how they work but one of the most asked questions is what tournaments are currently available. Below, we are going to go through some of the available Apex Legends tournaments and some tournament providers, comparing them to see which is best.
Twitch Rivals and Code Red
These are both tournaments that have since happened and are no longer available but I think it’s important to talk about them regardless.
Twitch Rivals Apex Legends was organized by Amazon’s Twitch, a live streaming platform for content creators, in partnership with Respawn Entertainment. In case you haven’t heard of Rivals before, it is the platform’s tournament series that is open to streamers, by invitation, who are Twitch Affiliates or Partners. The tournament followed a points structure, awarding five points for a win and one point per kill. The team that came out with the most points at the end was victorious and the runners up, depending on their rank, also received prize money.
Code Red, unlike most other Apex Legends tournaments, is run and hosted by popular Twitch streamer and YouTuber, Dr DisRespect, in collaboration with BoomTV and EsportsArena, instead of being run solely by a company or organisation. This appears to be another invite-only tournament, congregating all the top players and streamers and splitting them into trios to battle for $20,000 in prize money through a brackets and points structure.
EGL
The European Gaming League is relatively similar to Legend.gg in the fact that they run tournaments that people can enter in order to win prize money. Being in existence since 2005, this platform runs more tournaments than its competitor, however, they are focused around multiple games, unlike Legend.gg which is dedicated to Apex. Matches are typically best of 1 and are usually squads.
UMG
This is another relatively large organizer and, like with EGL, hosts matches for a wide variety of games. Similarly, they also don’t allow other members to create tournaments which could be considered a downfall. The general structure for tournaments here is single elimination brackets like many other providers.
Conclusion
Apex Legends tournaments work by tracking and checking player’s statistics in matches to see how many kills they get and if they came out victorious. Based on this information, the player will receive points which add up to see who comes out on top to win the competition. Some competitions are done in brackets and competitors battle it out against each other, with the winner advancing to the next stage.
