Professional Apex Legends Player Praised After Doing The Unthinkable
Hearing optimistic tales about good sportsmanship is becoming rarer nowadays, and it’s next to unthinkable when it comes to e-sports or competitive gaming. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t occur. For example, this weekend, a notable professional Apex Legends gamer decided to abstain from shooting a competitor who got disconnected from the game, despite a $2 million prize being on the line.
As reported by IGN, the so-called “incident” happened during the Apex Legends Global Series (ALGS) Championship on Saturday, which is an Apex Legends LAN e-sports event in which teams of players compete for a $ 2 million prize pool. During one match, Philip “ImprialHal” Dosen spotted a lone player in the distance, out in the open. When he noticed that the opponent’s character wasn’t moving and was likely disconnected from the game, Dones told his TSM teammates to stand down and not shoot the player, who was, at that point, as easy a prey as a sitting duck.
Interestingly, the Apex Legends GS Championship tournament has no rules preventing gamers from shooting disconnected players, given the sheer front-end unpredictability of gaming disconnects. Considering how these things go, when the player losses a connection with the game’s servers, the servers take an extra few seconds before they remove the player’s character from the match. In competitive gaming, even milliseconds count and being unable to control your character for a single second poses a massive risk of being killed.
Considering that there were no rules stating otherwise, it was in ImperialHal’s rights to shoot the disconnected player and score a point for his team. However, in the spirit of good sportsmanship, ImperialHal instructed his TSM teammates not to take advantage of the opponent player’s misfortune, putting his team’s chances of winning the prize money at risk. Luckily, his teammates were also good sports, and the match resumed when the disconnected player returned to the Apex Legends video game.
ImperialHal’s act of kindness and good sportsmanship didn’t go unnoticed in the gaming community, and both fans and competitors praised his decision to spare the player who was dealing with technical issues on their end of the monitor. Responding to praise and comments, ImperialHal stated that he did the very least every player can do when their colleagues face technical issues — which is likely a reference to some of the problems Apex Legends has been facing recently. Some of these issues have led to calls for No Apex August — a protest event calling for EA to fix the game.
Ultimately, acting in the spirit of good sportsmanship didn’t come at a cost for ImperialHal and his team because both TSM and Scarz made it through their matches and onto the championship rounds. Unfortunately for both teams, the grand prize was eventually won by Australian team DarkZero, for the second time in a row. So, better luck next time for everyone involved, and if Electronic Arts doesn’t fix Apex Legends following the No Apex August, we would suggest switching to Battlefield 2042, but EA hasn’t fixed that game either.
