Apex Legends players should avoid pulling animated poses, warns Respawn

Apex Legends players have been warned not to equip animated poses in an effort to counter a bug that's causing games to crash.

Developer Respawn has tweeted out a warning to players over the weekend, suggesting they should "tell [their] friends" about the problem to "help cut down on crashes [caused] by animated poses" until a fix is able to roll out next week.

"There's currently an issue with animated epic poses which can cause crashes," Respawn said in the tweet. "We advise you to unequip these epic poses while our team works on a fix. Thanks, Legends!"

We’ve just published this message in-game to help cut down on crashes called by animated poses. Tell your friends!A full fix is scheduled for next week. pic.twitter.com/mXguAzBvN3October 15, 2021

"There's no obvious reason - looking at the code - why epic (animated) banner poses should trigger this more often - I never saw this bug in testing, nor did QA, but I know the bug is happening," Respawn's "RobotHavGunz" explained to frustrated players on Reddit (thanks, TheGamer).

"And I can definitely believe this post [that purports poses are causes the crashes] - that epic banner poses are triggering this more often because the bug is with a safeguard to make sure we don't try to run a pose on a character for which it doesn't apply. Maddeningly, it's not 100% [...] it doesn't happen every time. And, again, we had no reports of this during testing.

"I'm sorry for all the frustrations that folks have had with this patch. We're working hard to get things fixed, and hopefully, things are already better thanks to some of the changes we've been able to make since Tuesday."

ICYMI, Apex Legends' Ping system – a novel new way to encourage camaraderie and enable players to communicate without using voice chat – has been widely imitated, but now publisher EA has protected this technology with a patent. But rather than lock it down and prevent other studios from using similar communication systems, EA is making it available, for free, to other developers as part of a suite of accessibility-related patents.

"By sharing these accessibility patents, we hope to encourage and support other developers to do the same," Chris Bruzzo, EVP of Positive Play, commercial and marketing, said at the time. "While we have long been committed to breaking down barriers within our games, it’s clear that we cannot do this alone, nor should we. We need to work together as an industry. We hope developers will make the most of these patents by building similar features in their own video games that make them more inclusive."

Apex Legends recently banned over 2,000 players for "dashboarding" and abusing a matchmaking exploit that let high-level – or Predator – Legends take on less-experienced Bronze-level players in ranked play.