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Apex Legends Season 17 brought a new Legend to the game, overall changes to the meta, and some big unpopular changes to Apex Legends Ranked Mode. Some of the problems with the ranked changes have been obvious to see since they were unveiled, making it considerably easier for players to rise up the ranks. These problems are clearly visible now we have some decent data for Masters Apex Legends players. There’s been a staggering increase in Season 17.

According to Apex Legends Server tracker, @_ApexStatus, we’ve gotten some full-ranked stats for how the Masters players are breaking down at the moment. The current stats for the total players hitting Masters on PC have eclipsed Season 12, to reach an insane high. Compared to every other season’s later date (where more players make it through to Masters), the current season has a crazy number of Masters Apex Legends players.

An other interesting ranked stats: there are now 314,320 Masters all platforms combined.

This is more than S12 split 1 on PC, but still slightly less than all platforms combined (338,213 in S12). With more than 2 months until the end of the season, I wonder how high we'll go ? pic.twitter.com/2hhiVLppJv

— Apex Legends Status (@_ApexStatus) June 4, 2023

What’s especially shocking is the season isn’t over yet. These peaks for the Masters Apex Legends players for past seasons above are all pretty much end-of-season. Season 17 has plenty more time to get more Masters players in these numbers! If enough are actively keeping up with the game, we might see Masters becoming a majority in Ranked.

At the moment, more players than ever are in the top-ranked mode for Apex. This has a knock-on effect for everyone. It makes actual skills-based matchmaking much more difficult. We’re already seeing the effects for Apex Legends as a whole for having such a broken ranked mode for so long.

Season 16 of Apex Legends was called out as an all-time low for the game from content creators. However, the current season’s ranked problems haven’t helped Apex look like it’s made a comeback. Instead, many high-profile players are calling this a brand-new low, and some measures of interest are reflecting this.

The number of Masters Apex Legends players is making it pretty hard for streamers to continue with the game. Twitch viewership is continuing its recent downward trend as many streamers drop the game. This is just one metric.

There are probably plenty of players happy to have finally made it to masters. However, the Apex Ranked system isn’t really there to let everyone get to the top rank. It’s there to let you actually test your sill against similarly skilled players. The current Apex Legends ranked mode just doesn’t reflect that.