Revoluzzer

Starting at max bloom makes more sense, because it's a more logical behaviour, as far as I'm concerned. Having an increased minimal bloom for a certain duration is closer to damage being tied to accuracy and therefore less comprehensible mechanics for beginners. Currently weapons get equipped with full accuracy. 3PS could simply reverse this. Alternatively I could see it becoming the opposite of Mobility Sling. Faster equip time, lower movement while aiming down sights. (Coincidentally I'm fairly certain this discussion also happened when Mobility Sling was introduced.)

Corner-popping doesn't require a lot of range, as far as I'm concerned. The ability to break line of sight after the first shot creates an inherent advantage; having more range allows this advantage to grow, so giving the JG and CSG more range directly increases their corner-popping-capabilities. While I generally agree that there should be some difference between JG and CSG, simply giving the latter more range while keeping it a 2-hit-killer will render the JG generally inferior; same situation as the STAR and N-Tec, if you will. I disagree. It will mean HB turns the N-Tec into a better short range fighter, while IR will improve it at longer range. Originally both mods would improve the N-Tec, then only IR did, now both work more as intended. And even if people start disregarding red mods on the N-Tec altogether because they don't want to give up their jackest-of-all-trades, is that really a bad thing?

This is correct. Overkill-servers performed great with 100 default characters in Financial park, but crapped out in the live-environment. If players could copy their existing characters to OTW results might be significantly more accurate. Although I assume putting test-districts on the live-servers would provide the best data.

These only fight the symptoms of inherently bad gameplay-design.

I'm fine with it being OP too. It's such a small range difference. Most players would have died regardless. Conversely taking away this minor difference wouldn't make such big waves either. Rifles (and Snipers) don't really need Rilfing, because their damage-curves are way more forgiving to begin with. But since it had no downside on them anyway, it was a no-brainer to pick it. @LO_Beastie will have to make a balance-pass across all preset-weapons equipped with Rifling, however, because some might make more sense without Rifling afterwards.

Buffing them in CQC and taking away some of their ranged capabilities seems fine to me, regarding the JG and CSG in particular. It will make them behave more like shotguns do in other video-games and also open up some room for SMGs, which will inevitably become less competitive at shortest ranges, because corner-popping will become way more reliable. Sounds like a good thing to me. There is almost no reason not to put IR3 on any non-CQC-gun. APB really needs its meta broken open a little. 20% might sound harsh at first, but it's not such a great deal for most weapons. The N-Tec would still stay at a lower theoretical TTK than the Obeya CR with this version of IR3, whilst benefiting from reduced accuracy loss due to the lower firerate. With this change IR might actually reduce a weapon's short range capabilities in favour of ranged deadliness.

Adding Car Surfer was a bad decision. It completely removes the intentional restriction of anti-vehicle-weapons being unusable while riding a vehicle in the original game. Unfortunately the item hold missions are fairly terrible by design anyway. The ones which have both teams drop items of at a specific location work much better for creating a mix of car-chase and on-foot gameplay. The ones which have you keep control over a bank-truck work fairly decent as well, because it's a slower vehicle that you can actually catch up to. But generally car chases in APB only really work when you have to reach a specific location. Otherwise it's too easy to almost completely avoid your opponents for a couple of minutes, let alone allowing them to set up a proper ambush somewhere along your route. The Enforcer mission in which you have to drive a Dolton Fresno through a bunch of checkpoints tried to achieve some nice gameplay of this kind, but since Criminals can always see the Fresno, but not the checkpoints (iirc), it just boils down to camping the vehicle instead of the checkpoints.

Seeing the high poly models for all the new weapons makes me hopeful for a big visual upgrade later on. I know pretty much every new pack since like open beta had obviously the original high poly version and then the low poly dumbed down version for APB. Aside from better looking clothing I’d love to see properly animated and high quality weapon models some day I'm fairly positive every model in APB exists in a much higher fidelity version (created in zBrush, iirc), as screenshots of them have been shared by the original team during closed beta (and potentially alpha).

This was indeed a huge oversight when damage-drop-off replaced hard range limits. It was also a major indirect buff to all precise weapons (most prominently the N-Tec), because while they might not be able to kill you at all ranges, they could still stop your health regeneration. So even if you get tagged by the HVR and do not die within the next moment because some team coordinated their attack ever so slightly, you're technically out of the fight for several seconds. Time in which your entire team can get wiped out or disabled by the HVR in just the same way. It was a massive game-changer in the original game and it became an even bigger one after G1 changed core gameplay elements.

A big part of APB's value, as far as I'm concerned, is held by the lore. The team at Little Orbit should definitely try and build on the lore instead of watering it down like G1 did. Keep the nicknames for preset-variants like the original game did, but use more "technical" nomenclature for default and open-slot versions. The 'Showstopper' is a large caliber pistol, something like "Colby LCP 357" would make sense (obviously replace the number with whatever caliber/shell type you intended the weapon to use). Posted 2 years ago.

I appreciate you coming forward and talking about the issue instead of staying silent. Bottom line I'd wager you'll get more people on your side if you talk about the issues. Maybe even some of the individuals behind those attacks.

Extremely flawed thinking, as far as I'm concerned. If you take the N-Tec as a baseline, every other weapon would have to do good in more than it's particular niche, just like the N-Tec. It is an outlier to ARs, because it can kill as fast as an SMG, is as precise as a rifle and still retains the typical traits of an assault rifle, like decent range and accuracy. The STAR is a much better weapon to look at for decent balancing. It does everything an AR should do well, but nothing exceptionally so. The N-Tec was obviously supposed to trade prolonged accuracy for initial precision. But for no good reason it got a lower TTK and high accuracy recovery on top. One or the other would've made sense. Not both. The VAS-R2 is shorter than the N-Tec and CR-5, because of the bullpup design. This might result in a reduced screen-shake, because the barrel has to move less to achieve the same amount of recoil. So technically it goes up the same amount (e.g. 5mm), but at a reduced angle (e.g. 2° vs 3°). Assuming the recoil is essentially a triangle with one corner at the center of the player avatar, going into a right angle at the tip of the barrel and a movement vector going out towards the recoil-direction.

Automation might be a solution for you. DeepL does some really good translations for little money.

Gotta agree with @Dopefish here, this is an unintuitive way to balance the amount of damage the HVR is able to dish out. Ever since the "advanced weapon characteristics" were introduced more weapons fell victim to mechanics which a player will normally not expect. This makes gunplay as a whole less fun, because knowledge from other games doesn't translate well into APB and vice versa. Reducing the HVR's damage to sensible levels which reduces the comfort of combining it with allrounder-secondaries like the .45 or FBW would do a great deal against quick-switching, while also raising other sniper rifles to a competitive level at ranged play. As it stands your proposed "fix" will probably still render the HVR king at long range support, while other snipers are still only acceptable in their intended role and at best bearable outside of their supposed niche. APB's original gunplay was great because it was simple. Guns behaved as you would expect and legendaries featuring oddball mechanics didn't exist. Having the latter isn't much of an issue, because new players won't immediately be confronted with them. But having those mechanics on the most common type of arsenal other games offer sets up new players for a bad experience.

The tunnel which leads from the underpass to the platform (from the left in your screenshot) should extend all the way into the building and have stairs going in there, not a ladder like to the platform (which should be kept, though). And adding some roofs to the bridges which lead onto the isle would shield attackers from defenders placed on the Mist's rooftop.

Will the queue-system be a band-aid-fix to the general issue with player-distribution across districts, or is it supposed to be your final solution? Because placing players into districst based on their threat is a great system, but poorly executed in APB for a variety of reasons (mainly this).

For what it's worth, the current weapon "balance" and the never-ending issues with the N-Tec and N-HVR can apparently be tracked back to one particular designer/dev/person. So if you hired a quality designer for the balance pass I keep my expectations low. Then everyone switches to NTEC and snipes everyone from 90m away ! If they'd go back from the damage-drop-of system to the original one, N-Tec bullets would vanish beyond 60m (iirc). It wasn't a perfect system either, but at least managed to enforce the effective range of each weapon.

The time from initiating the spawning-process and switching from spawn-map to game-environment is sufficient to have another player cover 10-15m, I'd wager. The cutoff-distance should've been much greater from the beginning (60-70m, I'd say) to stop the car-spawner from becoming such a pivotal element.

Rebuild the game from scratch in UE4. Maybe change the name to APB2: Recoded, heh. I don't think they'll ever get rid of the teething troubles by porting the game over to a newer engine version. It's headaches all the way down.

It's not wonky spawn "detection" (prevention, rather), the range to disable spawning is just very low (25m, iirc). As far as I'm concerned, most "recent" additions to the game ("new" vehicle mods like car spawner, radar tower, the consumables and some weapons) made a negative impact to gameplay. It's become less about playing the mission and fighting other players and more about meta-fights and meta-objectives surrounding certain weapon-loadouts and vehicle-configurations.

Sounds like you are getting a little sick of it? Hue hue hue The spawn system and map design is also fairly simplistic, so figuring out where enemies can spawn is fairly trivial. In case of map design, this is a good thing, mind you. But for spawns it's kind of a drawback.

This video from 2011 has a lot of distinct audible echo in close quarters combat.

This is, as far as I'm aware, how district threat worked originally. It was removed when we switched from TL1-15 to the colour-variants and fixed district-threat. However dynamic threat districts will, in my opinion, only work in conjunction with automatic player distribution (and ideally the removal of manual district selection; why this would be a good thing can be read here). The Threat & Matchmaking link from my signature goes a bit more in depth about some of the threat-issues that I see with the current system. Another thing which I mentioned here: Threat in general shouldn't be an absolute & static value, but heavily depend on the actively playing population. I call it "dynamic threat ranges, which keep every bracket at a certain percentage for the total active player-base. For example only the players who logged in during the past 30 days are considered for overall threat evaluation and Gold is always 20%, Silver & Bronze 30% each and Green 20% again."

Disregarding the way customisation is handled by the game clients and servers, it appears to have quite a significant impact on both. During the various tests of new server-hardware having a hundred newly created uncustomised avatars at the pagoda in Financial park wouldn't hurt performance at all. But 60-80 heavily customised avatars butchers both the server and client performance. The customisation contest queue in the original game killed client framerate and made physics behave entirely wrong; I could push that entire row of cars with the Ceresco. Similar story with the goodbye-gathering in Social the day before servers shut down. The server would lose packets en mass and player models wouldn't load for an eternity.

Aw shucks, that's awful news. If @MattScott could elaborate on this matter, that'd be great. The UI is a major performance-killer in APB and Scaleform can, as far as I'm aware, be integrated into the Unreal Engine fairly well. There's a reason lots of games use it, no? Even though Autodesk ended support for the technology, Little Orbit should have obtained a license and the code with their purchase of Gamersfirst, I reckon. If using Scaleform is no option at all, what's the plan to replace Kismet?