If, unlike me, you player popular battle royale game Apex Legends with any degree of strategy, you’ll be happy to hear that an intrepid player has crunched the numbers to determine the most popular drop sites in the game.
The data collected by Reddit user ZYy9oQ has been collated over a rather staggering 120,000 matches, in an effort to find some kind of rhyme or reason as to why and where people drop. Used to be that you’d simply pick a place that took your fancy and make a beeline for it, hoping that nobody else showed up with your name on their hit list.
As reported by Kotaku the data doesn’t just cover unranked matches, but also ranked matches, meaning that anybody willing to take a look at the data might even gain a small tactical advantage from those going in blind. I say might because let’s be honest, no amount of help will make some people any good. Myself included.
ZYy9oQ’s findings (catchy name by the way) are displayed in a number of heat maps, that seem to show a different preference of drop site, depending not only on ranked vs unranked, but also by what ranking the players carry.
The heat maps are apparently built by tracking players in 1 second intervals, to get a good idea of where they are at any moment.
Using the data, we can generalise that unranked players favour Skulltown and The Market over anywhere else. It’s worth noting that these two areas tend to contain mid-to-high-tier loot, making it an ideal starting point.
Skulltown is popular with higher ranked players too, possibly because of all that sweet loot, but probably because of all those easy to kill noobs trying to find their feet. Shameless really.
While the findings are certainly very interesting, I’m sure plenty of players can use these to find areas to avoid as much as places to land for a good scrap. Either way, it’s a pat on the back to ZYy9oQ for getting their hands dirty.
Now back to cowering in a corner for the entire game.
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Mark is the Gaming Editor for UNILAD. Having grown up a gaming addict, he’s been deeply entrenched in culture and spends time away from work playing as much as possible. Mark studied music at University and found a love for journalism through going to local gigs and writing about them for local and national publications.