Apex Legends disables broken leavers penalties in Arenas
Apex Legends’ 1.69 patch has fixed some of the game’s most frustrating bugs and glitches, but now some players are encountering Arenas abandon penalties for no seemingly no reason. Respawn has had to temporarily disable the feature.
Despite Apex Legends’latest 1.69 patchtackling major issues like Wattson’s fences and fixing various map exploits, it seems the update has brought with it a new problem entirely. Since the patch went live, numerous reports have been flooding in from players that have received abandon penalties for leaving finished Arenas matches.
Respawn recently made a huge quality of life change in the Arenas mode by introducing a leaver penalty system that punishes early quitters in thegame. However, the devs have now had to remove this feature completely after innocent players were also being punished.
Arenas abandon penalties
Apex Legends’ Arenas mode has proved incredibly popular amongst the playerbase since its release inSeason 9. Not only does it enable players to flex their mechanical skills in smaller 3v3 fights, but it also provides a nice break from the competitive casual/ranked BR lobbies. However, the introduction of abandon penalties to the mode has caused some rather strange issues.
In fact, many Apex Legends players have been flooding into the game’sofficial Reddit pageto address the broken abandon penalty function. For now, it seems as though the new leaver bans are working a little too well, with players stating they’re receiving penalties for leaving finished Arenas matches.
The problem seems to arise when you leave during the end game animation screen, which obviously doesn’t equate to being AFK or leaving a live match. Fortunately, Respawn’s Director of Commsaddressed the issue. “Hoo boy. Investigating. Never happened in playtests. Computers are wild sometimes.”
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On May 26, the leavers penalties were disabled to prevent anymore wrongful timeouts.
A small@PlayApexupdate:
We’ve temporarily disabled leaver penalties in Arenas due to the system sometimes issuing inappropriate punishments.
The fix for this is scheduled for later this week, so we’ll let you know when we’ve solved the problem and restored penalties.
— Respawn (@Respawn)June 16, 2025
As of writing, Respawn has temporarily disabled leaver penalties in Arenas to help combat the inappropriate punishments players were facing.
The removal of leaver penalties will obviously enable players to leave Arenas matches without any repercussions, but this is a small price to pay for those that had been unjustly hit with time penalties for leaving finished matches.
