After stepping up its efforts to combat cheaters, Apex Legends developer Respawn is now turning its attention to serial quitters. 

In the most recent Apex patch (as spotted by Game Informer), the studio accidentally implemented a work-in-progress cooldown deterrent designed to discourage people from leaving games early, and it's interesting to see how the dev team is attempting to overcome the new challenges being presented by its popular shooter. 

Given Apex is a squad-based game, it's fairly important that teammates don't jump ship as soon as the going gets tough, leaving their remaining comrades in a rather frustrating situation. To help prevent that from happening, Respawn has been toying with the idea of imposing cooldowns on players that leave early. 

The version of the feature the team accidentally pushed live stopped players from rejoining another game for five minutes if they'd quit mid-match three times, but that timeframe will apparently increase for repeat offenders.

In short, it's a sin bin for players who aren't prepared to take the good with the bad, and while Respawn explained the feature has now been pulled, there's every chance we might be seeing it again further down the line. 

"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," explained Respawn's community manager on Reddit.

"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."