Revoluzzer

Funny, I'd say compared to other shooters APB offers quite some "laser-sharp gunplay". It's very straight forward, easy to understand (ignoring some JMB weapons) and fast-paced. Also quite possibly the best third-person-shooter gameplay to this day.

On that note, I'd love to see some more diversity between factions by giving each side their own looks for certain weapons (e.g. CR-5 for Enforcers, N-Tec for Criminals; PDW-57 Enf, OCA-EW Crim; CBMP Enf, PMG Crim and so forth). Keep the skins available on ARMAS for both sides and/or add black-market-dealers which lease all skins to all players, once they unlock those contacts.

The fundamental issue with the HVR is its damage. It allows most weapons to finish off a target with a single additional hit over great distance. This wasn't such a great issue back when all weapons had a hard range limit and bullets would disappear beyond that, because it meant only snipers would truly be a threat beyond 90m. But now every weapon can prevent your health from regenerating all the way to 100m, so the excessive damage of the HVR is an even bigger issue. Taking it down to 750 would help tremendously. It would mean most assault rifles need two hits to score a kill on an "HVR'd" target within their effective range and fast firing sidearms become less effective when combined with the HVR in CQC. Any half-decent HVR user will indeed position themselves in a way that forces the opposing team to take them out first. And potentially second and third, because they'll most likely spawn close enough to their effective range to become a threat way before their remaining teammates have to put up a proper fight at the objective.

I bet one is the engine, the other is the upgrade. On a more serious note: I think they never showed us an upgrade customisation studio and only had preset characters in the demo footage. Wouldn't surprise me if this is still in the works and quite a major undertaking.

Did you mean FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)? F&Q reads like a hybrid of German F&A (Fragen & Antworten / Questions & Answers) and FAQ. _____ On the topic of avatars: Will you add support for non-square avatars (e.g. 120x100 px)?

Spawning "around" mission objectives doesn't work - both teams would be able to spawn in the same locations then. Nevertheless spawns should somewhat be distributed 180° around the objectives for each team. Ideally spawns would be manually placed and an algorithm merely figures out which team currently "owns" which spawns. As elsewhere mentioned in this thread going through the maps manually to select decent spawn locations is a monumental task, but then again there are dozens of players who know the maps inside out and could rapidly provide a list of decent spawns. As for the algorithm, I believe it work somewhat like a meta-gamemode, which allows each team to "capture" spawn points by occupying an area and keeping enemies out of it. Generally this is already how the current system works (i.e. spawns become available near teammates and unavailable near enemies), but sometimes the available spawns can not accommodate for all variables and then the system falls apart entirely. Again, hand-crafted spawns and a slightly more "interactive" ruleset might alleviate these issues.

Just a plain old BB-code editor instead of the java-script fully automated thing would be nice.

As soon as they make them look too close to the real deal they might have to license the real weapons. That's why they are neither exact copies nor named after real weapons. The CR-5 is a M-16 rifle with a 10 or 15 round mag, btw.

If that ever happens. But even then having a unified playerbase instead of several split groups would benefit the game's longlivety. It's in everyone's best interest to keep this game alive, I reckon, and the server situation is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the key detriments.

I guess I don't really have a question, but I want to touch on something that you might be approaching from the wrong direction currently: Concerning servers, server merges and character transfers, you seem inclined to keep the current state of regional servers with unique character databases. This is a flawed system to begin with and something which the original game was, iirc, supposed to handle differently. Despite the difficulties Matt mentioned about merging character databases / transferring characters, your team should consider merging all characters onto one database and have districts hosted in different regions (e.g. Financial-EN1 (US), Financial-EN2 (UK), Financial-DE1 (GER), Financial-RU1 (RUS) and so forth). This reduces the issue of a low playerbase in general, as well as low populations during off-time. At the cost of lag, players could then chose districts/servers from a different region.

I'm missing two things: A raw code editor (is it still BB-code based?) and non-squared avatars. Also the performance seems to be fairly meager, will this improve in the future? Digging the colour-scheme, though, you nailed that one.