I mean come on. Expecting the average player to get 3 top 3 matches?
I dunno which battle passes you're comparing it too but its biggest competitor, Fortnite, the battle pass is monumentally easier to level up, for all skill levels. I'm not even that bad at Apex, played last night with my friend and we got a number of wins in the few hours we played. I got one level up during that time. Mean while if I spend the same amount of time on fortnite when I have dailies/challenges to do. I get like 5 battle pass ranks. I practically only need to play Fortnite for like an hour every 3 or so days(depending on whether I forget to log in to get a daily) to do dailies + weekly challenges and I'll get max battle pass easily with a number of weeks to spare at the end. Never mind the fact the rewards in the Fortnite are actually good.
As a counter point, I fundamentally resent that Fortnite's battle pass so specifically biases to playing on their clock.
Log in every day.
Play every three days.
Play a chunk every week.
Play a great deal more to fully unlock the progressive skins.
Not only that, but your entire time playing now revolves around completing challenges which are, at least for me, tedious, repetitive and not engaging. You can't just 'play' the game any more. You're opening a cheat sheet each week to knock off those challenges efficiently, especially because a good portion of them are practically hidden randomly. You're landing where they want. Competing with squadmates to get challenges done. Waiting while squadmates get challenges done. Yet not a single one of the challenges is interesting. Can a competent and determined player knock off a Battle Pass on a few hours a week if they play in a very specific, way at very specific times, and put up with having to spend several minutes every day logging into the game even when they don't want to play it? Sure. I did that for a while, but it made me enjoy the game
less and so I stopped playing entirely.
Is this 'better'? For some. I think a lot of gamers fall into a trap of assuming that their experience is far more common than it actually is. Epic themselves say their Battle Passes take 75-150 hours to complete. The low end of that estimate is in line with the kind of hours/week you'd have to put in to complete the Apex pass. That you can do it faster if you basically go about it like a military operation is interesting, but just because it's your normal doesn't mean it is normal.
There are certain pretty significant issues with the Apex Battle Pass progression even ignoring the issues with the rewards. It's a surprisingly clumsy piece of monetisation/engagement retention mechanic. Having a flat level curve is an obvious mistake and demoralises people off the bat and, in actual fact, because you get XP bonuses as you progress, you will end progressing
faster towards the end. The rate of progression without XP bonuses is problematically slow. The bonuses themselves would be better balanced if they were stronger and faster depleted. The progression and particularly the bonus progression being so heavily oriented around time rather than success
feels bad, even if fundamentally it's done so the system doesn't bias too heavily towards skill. They can do much better with the Battle Pass and, frankly, I think they should seriously consider making changes to the progression of the S01 Battle Pass, let alone the S02 one. Yet while they should learn from Fortnite's Battle Pass, there's a lot wrong with it.
