Hello, and welcome to the final episode of my Road to Pred series, which follows my journey through the second rank split of season 10 of Apex Legends! I hope you have enjoyed the series so far, as I document the ins and outs of my journey through the competitive ranked ladder detailing the means of understanding of how to improve in the everchanging meta of the game. This final episode will detail the second half of Platinum as I reach into Diamond 4, which is the top 1.89% of all players. Sadly, we only have 5 days left of the split, which means my chances of climbing into Masters will be really unlikely but nonetheless, I will attempt to break into Apex Predator next season during Australia’s summer break!
Difficulty
The Platinum II and I ranks have been the most difficult out of my rank grind yet, as I have been actively continued to be pushed into Diamond, Masters, and Predator lobbies due to my high matchmaking rank (MMR) which is attributed to an algorithm known as skill-based matchmaking which moves players around match per match to place them against people playing at their level during the play session. This climb from Plat 2 to Diamond 4 took 2 days of game time as I climbed from 6000 to 7200 RP. Even though it was the hardest of the ranks so far when you have two good teammates to back up your plays it can make matches an extremely swift experience as we breeze through enemy teams. The only times that the games were really difficult are those that we had a bad landing, in which multiple teams landed with us. Leaving us exposed to third parties from neighboring places of interest. (PoI) If we avoided those types of landing locations and we were able to drop to a location with one or no enemy teams, we could quickly loot and move to third-party teams fighting with bare minimum supplies and gain swift early game KP.
Enjoyment
Skills & Demands
During the second half of Platinum, a major shift in skill and demands had started to take shape, as we begin to move into the higher echelon of ranks, at this level your basic cognitive abilities to play the game has already been established as a key skill, however, communication, leadership, and game sense have all took center stage. Apex Legends is often called ‘Third Party legends‘ as in almost every fight you take, another team will try to come and counter your attack while you are distracted, this means that having great situational awareness, and understanding what fight to take and not take are all extremely important. This plays into the importance of communication and having strong leadership. Having one individual make calls about plays, where to move, and what is best for the survival of the team is crucial for surviving the onslaught of high-level play. Getting in the top 10 or top 5 is good, but having the kill participation to boost your RP gain is extremely important to make every game you play have a meaningful impact on your ability to climb into the higher ranks, which implies the importance of communication between players to call out movement of enemies to make sure team fights go off without a hinge.
Enjoyment
Enjoyment
This section of my climb was the least enjoyable so far, being so close to reaching Diamond than having two teammates, who refuse to communicate and runoff and die, leaving you to fend for yourself is excruciating with games lasting up to 30 minutes having to camp in a corner to try and salvage any RP due to the incompetence of teammates always leaves a really sour taste in my mouth. However, when the games do go well due to the importance of communication people will now start to talk on the mic which helps a lot with curing the boredom that I discussed during my last two blog posts. Now that I’m in Diamond, the use of microphones is basically a requirement which means that (hopefully) dealing with solo teammates is a thing of the past, meaning that my experience will leave me satisfied with the few hours of gaming, rather than wanting to ALT+F4 out of the game and uninstall.
Aim Labs
Lastly, due to this being my final episode I will be redoing the benchmarks that I did during the first episode of my blog series, as we look to see if I have improved at all with my different skills like Flicking (‘Gridshot’), Tracking (‘ReactiveTrack’), Speed and Precision (‘Spidershot’), and lastly cognition and perception (‘Decisionshot’). After grinding my way through the ranks, and retaking the previous mentions in the first episode of my series and the results have seen a successful improvement across multiple different aspects of my cognitive skills, reaction time, and accuracy saw a major increase across the board which can be attributed to both my focus of expanding both my close-quarter fighting along with long-range engagements. Going forward, I will need to continue to increase my reaction, time along accuracy which will allow me to gain a higher score by getting more opportunities to shoot the targets. Overall, It’s evident that Apex Legends (model of gameplay) can increase different aspects of your skills which would be a good thing to consider by educators who are looking to adjust this type of gameplay experience into a more child/young teenager learning experience.
Thanks for Reading
This journey has been really enjoyable to document, and I hope that you have been able to gain some insightful information out of the videos and blogs so far. If you have any feedback for my future blog series that I may do in the future please feel free to comment below, on any other of my posts or DM me on Twitter! Thanks again!
Jacob Suter 
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