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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).

This really has to be sorted out before they should consider raising any limit. It's why the Overkill server test went so smooth - all new acccounts with barely any items on the characters meant much lower stress on the servers. At release they had to handle the real deal and crapped out.

The PMG was, for the longest time, superior to the OCA. But the PMG was too powerful then, not the OCA too weak. Generally speaking, a lack of accuracy should only be RNG when you're outside your ideal range.

Is the problem really solved if there is a limit which can be reached? Turning consumables into normal, yellow mods would get rid of the issue properly.

The latter is never going to happen, even if the HVR got a deserved adjustment to 750 damage. Kevlar would be way too much of a gamechanger if it increased health by over 50% or decreased damage by more than 33%. Very good points being made here. Coincidentally G1's quest of slowly bringing other weapons to N-Tec levels of deadliness has lowered the average TTK enough to arguably make CA3 as powerful as it is, because it has the biggest impact within a short time. Fights rarely "pause" in modern APB, so once you win there is ample time to regenerate. Kevlar doesn't keep you alive much longer because you already get killed within the blink of an eye, but its downside certainly does prevent you from drawing out a fight at all. Fragile will get you killed even faster, so you can hardly make use of its upside. Also, as far as I'm concerned, consumables were a terrible attempt of band-aid-fixing core gameplay-issues.

This actually already works. You can jump off great heights and "grab" the ladder at the bottom before hitting the ground, thereby preventing fall damage.