Respawn accidentally rolled out an Apex Legends feature that the community has been split on

After today's Apex Legends patch 1.1 dropped, players found that they were being penalised for leaving matches early but this has since been fixed.

Apex Legends update 1.1 rolled out on all platforms this week, but it left a few niggles in its wake, including players' accounts losing progress which was swiftly seen to. One change that took the community by surprise - and clearly wasn't a bug - was a leaving-early penalty that wasn't mentioned in the patch notes.

Respawn has since clarified that the feature is being worked on, and that it wasn't supposed to go live just yet - hence why it wasn't included in the patch notes. It's since been rolled back.

"So internally, we have been working on and testing this feature but it wasn't our intention or plan to have it go live with the update that went out today," Respawn said in a Reddit post on the snafu.

"There was a piece of script that was missing and caused the leaving match early penalty to be turned on when it shouldn't be. That's why it wasn't in the patch notes.

"We updated the script, tested with QA and it's now disabled for all platforms. We don't have an ETA for if or when this would come out for real. Apologies for the confusion."

A penalty for leaving early is something a lot of players have been requesting over on Reddit, although other have chimed in to say that it's not feasible, and that they don't want to get punished if they don't feel like hanging around spectating if they're downed.

During the brief time the feature was live, players received a five minute timeout for every three matches they left early. That included squad mates who absconded before their Banner card expired. Penalties weren't applicable if player squads weren't full, however.

Presumably the feature is planned to be introduced at some point, which should please those of you who are sick of your teammates buggering off willy nilly. Currently, if you leave early, you just won't get any XP, which people who are against a penalty system argue is enough of a deterrent.

Respawn doesn't appear to agree.