Dopefish

Other than the HVR and the Yukon (which is more a bug fix), this patch is mainly about buffing weapons.

Cost of name changes: BattleTag: $10 Gamertag: ~$10 Uplay: [FREE] Origin: [FREE] I feel like $10 be a fair price for it, to avoid it being abused.

I wouldn't say broken, but certainly unbalanced. I also felt that -9/-15/21% were a much better drawback, but it seemed like alot of people dismissed that before even testing it or actually calculating the differences. I'm even fine to give it more range, but then it would need an even bigger drawback. I still think it would be more suitable with a percentage increase for the range instead, with my suggestion being 10/15/20%. At the moment I feel like it would be best to not change Improved Rifling for this patch, and do a bigger balancing pass on mods for the next patch instead.

But thats just an opinion, no? It's how I've interpreted the design intention of APB, and if it would attempt to be something more similar to The Division for example, then we got an even bigger issue. I'm maxed ranked, so being overpowered would be in my favour, but I don't find unbalanced matchups enjoyable. The reason why I care so much about this, is because it's a design philosophy that's important for player retention. If a new player comes in to the game and see everyone else being more powerful than him, and his only chance to catch up is with a severe time investment, he's more likely to quit and never play again. And before you say "but I stayed", keep in mind that for everyone who did, at least a dozen didn't. This change alone won't change that perception, but it's an important step towards it.

@Revoluzzer thanks for actively participating in the discussion with some good insight. I think your classification of the mods might be the most accurate, and even if they are not hard rules, it's good to have some guidelines for their purpose. I'm still of the opinion that there should be no straight upgrades, and as you already noted, some of the current drawbacks are negligible on certain setups. I personally would like this to be reworked, but what's your thoughts? To bring something more positive to the discussion, I'd like every mod to have an effect on the weapon it's used on, and if they're being tweaked with drawbacks it also means they could have an bigger effect while still keeping it balanced.

That's the thing, there shouldn't ever be any straight upgrades, but consider them more as side grades. You specialize further on something, at the sacrifice of something else. RTW had no mod restriction, and no drawback on their mods. There were character mods that increased your max health (Monolith), made you regenerate faster (Fast Regen), decreased incoming damage (Survivor), and weapon mods that increased your fire rate (Spray and Pray), increased your damage output (Savage), and other mods to improve your accuracy, with no restriction whatsoever. You can imagine the outcome for matchmaking high ranked players against low ranked ones. There were no conscious choice in which mods to pick either, since you simple picked the strongest ones and left it at that. No variation in character builds, so the only purpose mods served was to act as a money sink. The first change (and one of the only few good ones) that G1 did when they took over the game, was to color code the mods, and add drawbacks to most of them, to make them act as trade-offs, instead of the straight upgrades mentioned above. But they never got many tweaks after that, and some of the mods don't have any drawbacks, or their drawbacks isn't applicable for certain weapons. There's a lack of variation currently, since there's mostly dominant choices for mods, or they don't have any effect on certain weapons. Balancing the mods should make the game more fair towards new players, give more depth to veteran players, and provide much more variation for everyone. To post it in suggestions, we should first come up with a good suggestion to propose, and this is a good forum for such a discussion. Since this game isn't about getting stronger through progression, mods needs to be balanced so they don't give any advantage over anyone who wouldn't be using mods, see my example from RTW above to understand why. The good thing about having tiered mods, is so that people can pick one based on their preference, so there could be a mod that gives you +3% damage increase, for a smaller drawback.

Why do you consider adding drawbacks to mods as something that would make the game worse? The optimal mod balance is when a non-slotted weapon is just as good, but mods let's you tweak the weapons niche to be more favorable to how you play. APB is not meant to be a game similar to other MMO's where the higher level you are, the stronger you'll get, but instead it's meant to give you versatility.

@BXNNXD Utility is a bit broad, but maybe speed/time related (though tagger doesn't fit that description)? But it's difficult to make something else take longer, that would also make sense. I think starting at max bloom (for 3ps3) would be most suitable and make most sense after all. What problems could be caused by this? How would it affect shotguns, HVR, OPGL, and/or weapons with wind up?

Is there any general theme for purple mods, that would be applicable to all weapons, such as damage/TTK for red mods (not counting muzzle break), accuracy for orange mods, ammo for blue mods?

I agree, but the weapon is likely to recover that accuracy faster than the amount of time gained from the new equip time? It's a bit interesting to reduce the movement speed while aiming down the sight, but then that would only be a drawback for weapons that rely on that.

I like the idea of 3ps3 affect the bloom of the weapon after you switch to it as an form of drawback. Not sure if it would be best to start it at max bloom and let it shrink from there, or have the minimum accuracy being worse for a set duration. Currently it gives -13%/-26%/-39% equip times, so the drawback should be slightly longer than the time saved by using the mod. I'm also not sure how the drawback would affect shotguns, true ogre, projectile weapons and the HVR.

Adding new emotes would add a potential new revenue stream for LO. The biggest question is if it would earn enough to make up for the development cost of their creation. Emotes (especially dances) are a pretty big thing in the Fortnite community for example.

I'm happy to see mods finally being looked at, and work being done to provide proper drawbacks for each mod. I think the reduced fire rate is a really good drawback to balance the extended range, and the current values seems really good (perhaps even need to be increased slightly). Maybe change it from the static 3/5/7m increase, and make it percentage based aswell? So it would provide a 10/15/20% range benefit instead? It would mean that IR3 would give the LCR 15m more range, N-TEC 10m, and JG/CSG only 5m, but would be more balanced based on the TTK differences.

I agree that toxicity is a problem that should be taken much more seriously.

- Making the game free-to-play - Added overtime to missions - Jump height increase - Color coded mods - Steam release - Tutorial - Team kick requiring demerits - Automatic resupply when near ammo vending machines - Added a proper kill feed (instead of just text output) - Removing camera lock while climbing (though it probably broke camera tilt while driving) - Changes to car handling Most other changes they made were straight up detrimental to the game.

Cross-district matchmaking is one of the best upgrades this game can get. To avoid issues, you could "ghost" players during phasing until they're no longer colliding with anything in the new server. Hopefully this system will have a slight weight towards district population aswell, to retain the living world feel of APB. Anyhow, I'm glad to hear that you guys are aiming for a seamless transition

The only reason why crosshair is disabled while sprinting is to indicate that you're unable to shoot, but since G1 added sprintshooting this makes no sense anymore.

It's possible to do it seamlessly, but it would require alot more work. Here's how it's handled in Sea of Thieves:

Social features have cut down on toxic behavior in Overwatch Behavior outside Twitch can now lead to an indefinite ban

Overwatch’s Trolls Are Losing - New system where you level up a badge next to your name through endorsements. - Unable to see your teammates stats if you're not friends. - Improved reporting system, with the ability to report for toxicity.

I fully agree with this, and I don't see a reason why the crosshair should be coupled with the UI scale. This wouldn't solve the perceived increase of recoil though.

There's an issue in the game where the crosshair size and perceived recoil would differentiate between different resolutions. Crosshair is affected by the UI scale, and doesn't correctly represent your weapon spread if it's not set to the native UI size. Even though the actual recoil is the same, it's perceived differently as there's an increased amount of screen shake on higher resolutions, compared to lower ones, especially compared 4:3 to 16:9 resolutions. The screenshots below illustrates the differences in crosshair sizes based on resolution and UI scaling: 3840x2160 UI Scaling 1 3840x2160 UI Scaling 0 The video below illustrates how the spread manages to kill someone outside of the crosshair size: Screenshots and video courtesy of @ZombieBiscuit.

I think that might be a decent solution for a very specific type of griefing, aslong as you make sure the radius is very limited. For the other type of griefing, I believe more active GMs and more punitive actions would help. Turning everyone outside of your mission invisible would severely alter the experience of the game, and remove a big part of what makes APB unique. The type of griefing where several players is trying to disrupt a single player is highly unusual, and is mainly affecting bigger streamers. There could be a GM command that temporarily ghosts that specific player from outside of mission players, just to let him get out of those situations, but this should be an exception rather than the norm. I also believe that it would be good to have GM on duty for big streamers such as those, as they're directly promoting the game, and their experience with it is what's being advertised.

Toxicity in games is a big problem, and should be taken seriously. Disabling chat, putting people on ignore, or "growing thick skin" are not solutions to the actual problem. There has to be much harsher punishment for the use of racial or derogatory slurs, and even more so for death threats or insinuating that people should kill themselves. Overwatch introduced a system where abusive players would get warnings telling them to act nicer, which helped reduce abusive chat with over 25%. Another step would be to add a proper ingame report system for abusive chat, where it could mark the time in the chat logs for support to go through. If people know that they can easily get suspended from the game due to toxic behavior, they'd think twice before posting such stuff. Twitch have banned streamers for a month, just for saying a derogatory word. For APB, I believe alot of these issues stems from frustration caused by the game itself, mainly due to poor balancing, and being built to allow unsportsmanship like behaviour. Toxicity also feeds toxicity, so letting it remain unhindered will only turn more and more players toxic, as it becomes the norm of the language used in the game. I believe it's being detrimental to the growth of the game in general, as there's people who have left due to the verbal abuse in the game, not to mention how unwelcoming it is for new players. @Lixil & @MattScott, I suggest you should sign up with the Fair Play Alliance. It's a group of developers that collaborate on research and best practices that encourage fair play and healthy communities in online gaming. Blizzard, Riot and Twitch are only a few of the companies that are participating in this: http://www.fairplayalliance.org/ EDIT: Rainbow Six Siege players who use slurs are now getting instantly banned

The video clearly shows that Kass doesn't even have a chance to get close to the car spawner before the guy she just killed respawns in it and shoot her. She's running away from the objective because she's forced to remove car spawners before she can do anything else, and even if she'd removed that one, there's another one right next to the objective. In my personal opinion, car spawners are by far the worst addition to the game, and have made it worse more than anything else. You can't expect every player to have a full stack of satchel charges or save up all their grenades to take those out.