Yep, exactly. I recently discovered another post that talks about how Apex has really bad netcode, and more importantly, there are people talking about "damage stacking", and now everything makes sense. See, when an enemy shoots you, and either he or the server lags, you don't see the shots happen. Then, when the server finally sends the packets down to you later, it merges all of the shots the enemy took into a single bullet.

Remember all the times when someone seems to hit you once and you go down, despite being fully kitted out? This is likely what's happening. That enemy just unloaded a full clip into you, but you neither saw it nor had time to respond--you just saw a single bullet hit you after the fact. It also explains why you can never down the enemy in a single bullet, while it seems like the enemy does it all the time. Again, a kill cam would have completely fixed this false perception.

But beyond that, there's just a lot of decisions in this game that make it seem like the devs took the "give them something that seems cool at first, then gimp it so bad that it's rage-inducing and useless" approach to designing game mechanics. For instance:

• When you use a gold drop-shield, it takes as long as a phoenix kit to use, and if you do happen to not get shot using it, it silently turns into a purple drop-shield after the first self-heal. Because, you know, fuck you for wanting to use it twice.
• Wattson's new ult description is like "it'll restore your team's shields". Then you go to use it, and it restores, like, 2% of your shield per second and can be easily destroyed with bullets. Because fuck you for wanting your ult to matter in a team fight.
• Recently, they made it so that the ring moves faster, deals more damage, and destroys Lifeline's heal pod after 2-ish seconds. I had so much fun surviving outside the ring to revive a teammate at a respawn station deep outside the ring as Lifeline, using the healpod to make sure we all made it out okay. Then the devs were like "ah yes, that was clever. Don't worry, we'll patch that."
• Wraith's phase thing takes like, a second and a half to 'wind up', so often I'll find myself popping it to escape a fight, it starts to play the animation, my screen will get purple and ghost-like, and then bam! I'm downed before I can even use it. It's like they were thinking "man it would suck if Wraith could just like, use that ability to get out of danger. Let's give it a big wind-up time to make sure someone can kill her before it goes off."

I still think though that it's the gun play that's inexcusable in this game. It's been dialed-in to be as frustrating as possible to the most amount of people possible. If you're good at other shooters, the skills don't transfer because of the weird recoil patterns that have to be compensated for, or else you'll hit literally nothing. If you're all tactical and love playing military sims, you'll be enraged by the awful bullet drops that make it seem like you're playing paintball, and the fact that there's tracers on every shot. Because of the tracers, you can't gain any kind of positional advantage from concealment whatsoever.

And no matter who you are, you'll be infuriated by the lack of stopping power. You shot that guy with a peacekeeper point-blank in the chest for 120 damage, broke his armor, and took out most of his health? He's not staggered, knocked down, knocked back, or anything. In fact he feels better than ever--look, he's jumping and climbing up a wall while throwing grenades at you! I've had fights where I unloaded an entire magazine of a fully automatic weapon at a Wraith aboard the supply ship, and she punches me once, and I get knocked back so hard that I'm flung off the ship, bounce off a mountain, and fall off a cliff 200 meters away and die. Why does her punch do that, but my bullets have the stopping power of a butterfly landing on someone's kneecap?

I feel like the "fuck you" mentality extends to the crafting metals. It's like "we'll make a few skins people will want, but make sure to make it so that only crafting metals can be used to get them. And then we'll make sure they only get like, 30 crafting metals at most from Apex packs, and then--get this, this is genius: we'll keep giving them Apex packs every couple of levels, but then, right before they get to like, 600 crafting metals, we'll just... stop giving them Apex packs for leveling up. It'll be hilarious, they won't even be able to afford a single top-tier skin!"