Revoluzzer

Ackchually Original quickswitch was from HVR to pistol when there was no restriction for switching to your secondary after firing the HVR.

If it were easy to do and you could make money off of it, it would exist. Necessity doesn't even matter. But the game wasn't set up in a way which would easily (i.e. cheaply) allow it, so it doesn't exist.

I'd like to discuss some problems (which partly have been mentioned in this thread already) and disagree with the idea that "threat" (i.e. the threat-calculation-system) is broken. I've detailed my thoughts on the matter in the past (of which a particularly lengthy example is also linked in my signature), which might have been more coherent than this late night write up. Problem: The threat-scale is fixed, not dynamic. What does this mean? In APB all active players could theoretically reach Gold threat, by "extracting" threat out of players who eventually stop playing. On a dynamic threat-scale, only a certain amount of players (e.g. 20%) could be Gold. The remaining 80% would always be split amongst Silver (e.g. 40%), Bronze (e.g. 25%) and Green (e.g. 15%). Inactive players would drop out of consideration after a certain time of inactivity. Now the existing threat-system does have measures to deal with in activity - inactive players gradually lose threat over time. However I had barely been active over the span of almost two years, if I'm not mistaken, and during this time my threat doesn't seem to have degraded drastically enough compared to my skill. In other words, this measure is probably not set to a harsh enough level. I think it should exist in the future. Problem: Players can see and somewhat manipulate their threat. This can of worms is outlined in my linked/mentioned post. I think hiding threat and preventing players from manually selecting districts is crucial to creating a good matchmaking experience. If designed well, phasing players to other districts would only become necessary in very rare circumstances. Problem: District threat levels are fixed, not dynamic. This is obviously similar to my first point. Currently a districts is set to one threat colour, which is a massively inconvenient restriction. After all, players at the very edge of Silver and Gold (formerly known as Silver 10 and Gold 1) are much closer to each other than players at opposite ends of the same colour (e.g. Silver 1 and Silver 10). Originally APB would create districts with a certain threat range and sort players into appropriate districts automatically, based on their threat level. Evidently this system wasn't without flaw, otherwise it would still be in use today. One flaw from back then was manual district selection (players chose the most populated district over the most appropriate) and fixed district threat. The latter means that a district might have spun up to host players from Threat 6-10 (of the original Threat Level 1 - 15 scale), but was also manually joined by players outside that range once it reached a sufficient population. The district then never adjusted its range accordingly (although eventually it would simply have been 1-15 anyway). In an ideal system districts will dynamically adjust their threat-range as players leave and the player-distribution-system will repopulate it with players of an appropriate threat level, thus ensuring the matchmaking-system doesn't have too much work to do because players will most of the time match up fine. Should, however, a player (or group) shoot outside a tolerable threat-scale for the district, you could use phasing to transfer them to a more appropriate district. Matchmaking mechanics. Speaking of matchmaking, there are a couple of issues people usually see when it comes to finding opposition. > For some, it is finding opposition at all. These players will usually resort to waiting for opponents at each stage of a mission. As the matchmaking system will gradually increase the tolerance for a matchup (eventually seeking opponents outside of a sensible threat range) they will either get opposed by much stronger or much weaker players. > For some, it is finding the same players over and over and over. This is usually caused by two teams (or players) being the only good match across the whole district population. Again, some players try to solve this issue by waiting, however now outside of a mission instead of during one. This does work if the other team gets a bad match by waiting in a mission for long enough. > For some, it is getting matched with a smaller team of stronger players. This is particularly common for randomly thrown together players of wildly different threat-levels. If they're lucky, they'll face a similar setup. But more commonly they'll be put against a (usually smaller) pre-made group of comrades, who might technically be at the same group-threat-level. Alternatively the thrown-together-bunch waits out their mission stages for opposition and gets put against a pre-made group which is way above their averaged threat-level. Generally the matchmaking-system is fine. It shouldn't need to be complex, because all systems before it take care of the difficult work. Bottom line, I think phasing might fix matchmaking-issues at large, but isn't the ideal solution. The current threat-system already has counter-measures built in. Threat has a volatility-level, which is very high for new players and gets lower the more they play at a certain skill level. De-threating increases volatility. Thus players who want to de-threat have to put in quite a bit of effort to first raise their volatility, while their threat barely moves. Once their threat starts moving down, however, it will just as easily move up again. Naturally de-threating only really works as long as you know you are making progress. Hiding any indication of a player's threat level quickly makes it nigh impossible to gauge where you stand. And if all the systems which determine how players are matched up against each other can function as they should, de-threating would hopefully be a much rarer occurrence anyway.

Matt actually commented on this video before:

I just hope you don't run out of money and motivation before you might succeed with APB.

In which case they would rapidly reach their previous threat level, because accounts with little playtime have a more volatile rating. It wouldn't be a decent bandaid fix, for the reason you mention. The underlying threat distribution system is flawed and needs to be fixed. The calculation system, as far as I'm aware, is well designed, mind you. Same as the matchmaking system. But allowing players to freely select districts they're not supposed to be in and allowing the system to, over time, throw the majority of active players into a fairly small threat-range completely undermines matchmaking.

I dig it. Will this Epidemic event turn civilians into actual, aggressive zombies, or only change their looks?

The Call of Duty way of balancing weapons.

They really don't do the ear-bleeding sound-design justice.

The STAR has always been really versatile as a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, which made it a well rounded, balanced weapon. The N-Tec has historically been a really versatile jack-of-all-trades and a master of mid-range. And after many mediocre balancing-attempts, it has remained in a very powerful position, albeit at a higher skill-floor.

The pictures you posted are from the Enforcers social district concept called "HQ". Asylum was the corresponding Criminals social district. Early during development they scrapped the idea of separate socials and introduced Breakwater Marina instead.

How is a weapon that a good player never has to switch out and is "just far too versatile" still not unbalanced? None of those statements supports coming to this conclusion. "The speed limit is 120 and you were going 150, but I wouldn't really say you were going faster than you are allowed to." "He's the best runner, sprinter and jumper in the world, but I wouldn't really say he's better at all those things than most other people."

Pretty sure G1 added a stopgap so negative score doesn't affect threat anymore. Not just for yourself. but it takes you out of the calculation for everyone in the mission (otherwise you'd inflate everyone else's threat. too).

It was a thing in All Points Bulletin form the very beginning. I think @LilyV3 isn't far off with the idea of a "living city" mechanic. I too think, besides having a money-sink, RTW simply thought it was a nice detail to have in the game, adding immersion. Just like the cost for spawning your vehicle

On UE3.5 or 4 this might be possible. Missions could/should still be limited to the district they're started in (which in turn is based on which contact you pledge to), but you could simply drive into an adjacent district, possibly without a loading screen at all. The reason APB originally didn't have this, as far as I'm aware, is that their version of UE simply didn't support modern game-world "streaming". I believe the current districts are essentially still built as individual "rooms" that load when you enter them, which is how UE handled environments at the time.

"Meta weapons" have become the best choice because they are too powerful compared to everything else. Not because everything else is too weak. You wouldn't try to fix a dozen things to accommodate one that is different, when you could simply fix the one thing. Additionally buffing a lot of guns would mean making a lot of weapons more similar, because it's otherwise nigh impossible to get them on the same level. And on top of that you'd introduce some serious TTK-creep lowering the average across the board, which breaks the way the districts are laid out.

I think many weapons simply do too many things too well nowadays. The original LMGs (SHAW, ALIG) stick to the core design principle of APB weapons: do one thing great, be serviceable at most at everything else. They're a cornerstone of weapon balance and shouldn't be adjusted to the current situation, rather the other way round.

I appreciate these updates, but I don't see 3.5 happening this year.

Technically all player-created symbols are vector based. And if they were stored as numeric values and rebuilt client-side, the quality could be entirely dependent on that client's graphics settings. But they ditched that system for textures distributed by the server for some reason.

They're rotating debundled items, supposedly. Might have to do with the ARMAS interface (or front-/backend?) still not supporting high amounts of items.

The second tweet certainly makes it sound like this. "Course corrections" is probably weapon balancing.

Not loading irrelevant data when a player is on a district, for example. As far as I'm aware even unavailable items (e.g. clothing items not included in any outfit) affect the servers currently. With the engine upgrade this is hopefully a thing of the past. As Hexerin correctly said: it's a result of the way Realtime Worlds cobbled together their version of UE3 to make APB work at all.

Resolution and gimmicks like anti-aliasing probably matter, too. Your screenshots look very smooth, are you running at over 1920x1080?

APB's spread system exists because recoil (i.e. screen shake) originally didn't. Making aimbotting slightly less effective was just a neat bonus on the side.

Not in APB. It mainly targets the CPU. Well, at least one core of the CPU and perhaps a second one a little? It's just not built for modern hardware, because it's held together by duct tape and prayer already. LOD is really awful in that video. Looks like zero progress over the current engine. I like depth of field, but it should only start at 100m and be rather subtle. I'd still like to see fog (or smog? heh) in the distance, though, just to cover up lack of details (starting at about 150m).