With the launch of Apex Legends Season 5 this month, players all across the globe are hopping back in to get in on the chaos. It’s a very fun game, and it’s really annoying when your playtime is interrupted by network issues. Respawn has built a notification system into the game to give users a clue as to what’s happening if their connection starts acting up.
There are four kinds of errors you might see: Latency, Packet Loss, Congestion, and Prediction Error. Each one has their own specific cause and potential solutions for each one too. A handy user in the game’s community has created a visual aid for identifying each one, learn what each of these means, and commit it to memory.
It’s worth mentioning that if you’re constantly having stability issues with your connection, liked dropped WiFi signals, or consistent connection drops at certain times, this is often indicative of issue up the line from your network hardware. It may be worth scheduling a service call with your ISP to get them to check your connection for technical problems.
With that said, let’s dive into connection error icons in Apex Legends and what they mean.
Latency
Latency is the measure of how fast data travels between a client and server. If a network is suffering issues with high latency, ensure that you’re prioritizing your gaming traffic to get the best possible connection. Latency will often fluctuate, but lower values equate to better response times. So if you’re noticing issues like “rubberbanding” where your character is appearing to jump around the map or travel back in time repeating the same actions, this could be a latency issue.
Power cycle your network hardware if the issues don’t clear up. Run a network diagnostic, either through your router or the command line of your system. Many modems and routers have built-in tools for helping with this, learn to love the admin panel of your router. Windows has various tools within the ipconfig suite to help check the health of your connection. Commit the various commands like flushdns to memory, they can be useful for resetting a bad connection.
If you’re consistently getting connection error icons in Apex Legends for this after troubleshooting your network on your end, it may be an issue further up the chain. Sometimes servers go down and the system needs to remap the route to remove the bad link. Try clearing your DNS cache within the operating system as a second step after checking your networking hardware.
You may also want to take the time to enable QoS on any routers or other hardware you have. QualityofService prioritizes traffic on a network belonging to certain ports or services. You apply QoS usually at all supported levels of your network, which is typically the router for most home users. Some modems also support QoS. QoS rules need to be enabled and supported on all devices to gain any real benefit. Be sure to set it up for all of your online games so that they can all benefit.
Pushing QoS rules to the networking stack can help clean up the noise and get your traffic out first. Keep in mind that not all hardware or games support QoS though. You will need to Google around to figure out if QoS is supported by your device(s) and game(s).
Packet Loss
Data is sent over the internet as packets, little bundles of data that stream from a server to a client. Sometimes, connections drop packets, pretty regularly in fact. The modern devices and software are designed to accommodate this and employ various tricks for the sake of data integrity and resiliency. If you’re getting packet loss connection error icons in Apex Legends a lot, it could mean a few different things.
You could have a bad piece of hardware or misconfigured element on your own network. Servers could be getting DDoSed, anything could be happening.
For diagnosing this problem, repeat the same steps from the Latency section, with a focus on checking your modem, router or PC for any hardware/software issues. The steps to do this will vary based on your hardware though, so you will have to do some Googling to find the necessary information for your device. Most routers and modems have built-in diagnostic tools, start there and look for any packet loss errors. Command line tools are also built into Windows for diagnosing issues with DNS caches and routes to various servers. Run some tracert checks and flushdns on your machine to ensure that you can talk to the wider internet.
If you’ve checked your hardware and are still getting packet loss or similar errors, it may be time to call your ISP or order new hardware.
Congestion
This is a general class of error that’s almost always on the server side of things. EA and Respawn are usually quick to diagnose and update players about consistent issues with this. If you notice constant congestion errors, check the Apex Legends official Twitter account, as they may have updates for you on what to do.
Prediction Error
This particular issue is something that’s much more problematic to solve. What it means is that the server is having trouble predicting the movement of players in the game, be it you or another player. This could be an issue with server-side hardware, so check the Apex Legends server status on social media before going on with other troubleshooting.
If you don’t see any issues from official sources, try the troubleshooting steps listed above.
