Revoluzzer

If the core gameplay loop is solid, that's reason enough for players to return day in, day out. Counter Strike was popular for a reason, without any progression system beyond gaining money during a match. When gameplay design is lacking, dangling a carrot in front of everyone's face might work. But that's only borrowed time. Once players have unlocked the new content, they come back asking for more. I would rather see this precious time spent revamping the fundamentals of how a mission plays out.

Threat rebalance =/= QoL change. In my opinion a quality of life change would be a searchable mailbox for the hundreds and thousands of mails one can accumulate. Loadout-presets would be another. More broadly speaking, I don't think QoL matters for a game in APB's state. Jank doesn't stop players from truly enjoying a game. If a QoL-change can be easily implemented while working on core design issues, sure, go for it. But otherwise, don't bother. There are much, much bigger fish to fry.

One logical server can be distributed across different physical locations. Heck, the naming scheme of districts even suggests hosting them in different regions, while having all players in the same database.

The issue with displaying threat levels in a nutshell. If people didn't know what "colour" they're up against, they might actually try to win.

This would certainly make it more comfortable for good players to farm bad players. In fact, spawning 50 m from the objective is very much within the movement radius of decent players. Spawn. Die. Repeat. Welcome to the suck.

And there is. Your final score of the mission is put against each other's final score individually and as a result you gain or lose threat and/or confidence for each of those pairings. High confidence means threat moves little, low confidence means threat moves lots. Meeting expectations increases confidence, but not threat, Missing expectations lowers confidence and threat. Exceeding expectations lowers confidence and increases threat. If everyone in the mission is roughly at the same threat level, then yes, this is a practical guideline. When threat levels are more spread out, though, this guideline falls apart. Staying on this guideline-system for the moment: if the system expects a low threat player to perform in the bottom 25% of the field, but they perform in the bottom 25-50% (e.g. 4v4 and their total score places them at 6 out of 8), they would gain threat. I would generally advise against the mindset of "need not to lose threat", by the way. Threat is not a progressive system. It's merely a tool for matchmaking. Losing threat can be perfectly fine and should lead to better, more enjoyable matches. I'm pretty sure I lost threat on every mission I played these days, because I haven't played in years. If a group of four Golds faces a group of four Silvers, the threat system will expect the Golds to achieve a certain score. If you place 2nd on the scoreboard, but don't score as much as the system expected you to, you might lose threat (and the Silvers might gain threat). If you consistently perform as the system expects you to, it will gain confidence in your current threat level and you'll have to lower that confidence before your threat starts moving noticeably again. But the system does not expect you to hit a specific placement on the scoreboard, it expects to you score in relation to each other player. Ergo it also matters who was placed 1st, 3rd and so forth. You only ever see someone dethreat if their colour changes. Which is exceedingly rare as playtime increases (because the confidence value will be more affected than threat after a while). So you will usually see it on new accounts and dethreaters. Nevertheless a person gains and loses threat, even if the colour of their badge doesn't change.

There never was a 50/50 split. Ever. Some people misread the contents of the blog post which introduced the score-system and concluded there was . Unfortunately, that old blog post seems to have been removed when LO bought G1 and changed the blog. Fortunately, the internet archive exists. So here's the archived version of the 'Settle the Score' update blog post. Edit: I've been informed by @Amayii that the old blog-entries have been archived on blogspot. So here's the blogspot-link for that particular article. And here's the relevant bit from that blog post: "At the end of each Mission the system will rank everyone according to their Score (people that win matches get a bonus to their score that averages around the same amount of Score as about five kills). The Threat system looks at everyone’s score and then ranks them against each other as if it were a free-for-all match. While it’s likely that the team that won will have the most score, it’s not always the case. We've seen occasions on OTW where the losing side had higher individual scores but these were when matches were incredibly close calls." As the blog indicates, this part was edited for clarity after the initial release. Particularly because of the 50/50 issue, iirc. Also interesting: "Getting a significant amount of score in one match compared to everyone else won't move your threat any more than a very close win but it will give you a significant amount of cash as a bonus." This suggests there is a hard limit to threat mobility per mission. Or in other words: Even if you significantly exceed the threat-system's expectations, it won't move you around drastically all at once. It probably impacts your confidence-value more significantly, though.

True, because everyone manually joins districts. Letting the game decide which district it puts you in should prevent this. Although colour-locked districts mean that system is either disabled these days or severely handicapped. You need to update your knowledge, then, because those things are very much incorrect.

the threat system is not dynamic so it does not automatically adjust to an arbitrary "active population", iirc g1 has had to manually reset the threat category percentages 3 times over the course of apb's life They never had to manually adjust threat levels. It was just another band-aid "fix" to "improve" matchmaking (or at the very least make players feel like they did something to that effect). Naturally the system re-adjusted (or corrected) itself within the span of weeks. Having skill levels dynamically adjusted to the active population might be an actual improvement, though. Combine this with districts also adjusting their assigned district threat based on the district population and then always sorting players into the best suited districts automatically (i.e. no manual district selection) and one might even end up with a decent matchmaking-situation. This was, mind you, what they advertised way back in the day (when only 15 threat levels existed and TL15 player were permanently marked on the map). Only caveat: Districts spun up with some assigned threat range, but never adjusted to the population. So over time (and players manually joining the more populated districts) the assigned threat level became entirely meaningless. This is probably correct in the sense that Gold 10 is a hard limit, even if the Glicko-values might not be limited. If matchmaking is based on threat levels, there is a hard ceiling beyond which matchmaking becomes funky. If matchmaking is based on glicko values, there is no hard ceiling and matchmaking can still work properly. Of course now we're also talking about a mechanic beyond threat / skill calculation, which is the actual matchmaking process itself. Naturally the matchmaking system will try to find the best match for your skill level (e.g. you are Silver 8 so it starts looking for Silver 8 opponents). It is unlikely that a perfect match exists, so it might start out with a bit of leeway (e.g. Silver 7-9). With a pool of no more than 40-50 opponents to chose from at best, it can be very unlikely for such an opponent to be available on short notice. So, in order to keep your wait-times low, the matchmaking-system will relax the requirements. After, say, 15 seconds it will look for Silver 6-10, after 30 seconds it will look for any combination of opponents that will roughly equal Silver 7-9. After 45 seconds it might look for any combination that's close to Silver 6-10 (which might be a Gold and a Bronze). And so it goes until pretty much anyone in the district qualifies, some extreme edge cases excluded, maybe. It's not ideal, but it is a legitimate solution to keep matchmaking-times at a reasonable level. And it works well, as long as all players in one district are roughly in the same threat-range. Which they are currently not, because there are not enough players at the moment. And which they were not in the past, because players manually joined the most populated districts instead of the most appropriate ones. Restricting districts to a certain colour did not help, by the way, because a Silver 10 is closer to a Gold 1 than a Silver 1. Circling back to your original point once more: If the threat levels are distributed roughly in the way I hypothesised, it is very unlikely that any significant number of players is in the Gold 8-10 range. If there are any at all in the current state of the population. While this is technically correct, the threat-system should account for it by lowering its confidence in situations like this. Just like you bounced right back to Gold after your ALIG-escapades because you had not only lowered your threat, but also the threat-systems confidence in your threat level. So unless you keep getting matched against the same bronze players repeatedly, you wouldn't impact their threat-situation long-term.

By far the best implementation of this was given in City of Heroes / City of Villains. They simply had emotes for a variety of sitting and leaning poses so you could sit on or lean against everything.

I believe it was mentioned during the introduction of the current threat system, that people joining a mission late won't be considered for threat calculation. But I do not remember a hard cut-off every being mentioned. Even if this cut-off doesn't exist, the system remains self-correcting, mind you. Massive outliers like in this scenario would heavily impact your confidence-value, because they're just so far from your regular outcomes. But if you perform normally during your next mission, that confidence goes right back to where it was. Your extremely simplified explanation doesn't make sense in the current system or any of its predecessors. You even acknowledge that G=/=G when you say that you feel powerless against some Gold-threat players, despite being rated Gold yourself. And as I mentioned before, in some scenarios the matchmaking system might consider one Bronze player (more or less) equal to one Silver player. If they're both just at the edge to the other colour (i.e. Bronze 10, Silver 01). So sometimes the matchmaking will consider B=S, or S=G, or BB=SB, or GGG=GG. (If the lichess ratings are anything to go by, the last example is the least likely, by the way.)

I got some suggestions right here. Atlas Apartments Fortuna Mall Green Spit New Haven Apartments Yard Stretch Terminal Border Broadway Bus Depot East Side Hope Mall Merchant Park & Village Metropolitan Arts Centre Triple Regent

Good question! The logical assumption, as suggested by NotZombieBiscuit, is that the Glicko-Value can increase indefinitely. As long as there are better players to beat. But of course you won't go beyond Gold 10, because that's where the threat range stops. So here's an interesting problem: How does matchmaking work exactly? Does it match players based on Glicko, or based on Threat? Again, the logical assumption would be a matchmaking based on Glicko. I'd expect that to be more accurate. But it might as well be based only on threat-level, since you can't go any higher than Gold 10. In the latter case, my earlier statement of "a Silver 10 and a Gold 1 player can be rated at 1500 and 1501 respectively" might not actually mean that the matchmaking system would consider them practically identical. Silver 10 and Gold 1 would still not be worlds apart, but the range could be significantly greater. We don't know how "large" each Threat-level is in terms of Glicko-values. Let's take a guess anyway. Magnus Carlsen's FIDE rating is ~2800. They use ELO, according to Wikipedia, but it doesn't really matter for this exercise. 2800 / 40 = 70 So each Threat-level would encompass round about 70 Glicko-values. In terms of the aforementioned FIDE world rankings that's roughly the difference between Magnus Carlsen and numbers 2 and 3 on that list, by the way. All the top 20 players are less than 140 points (i.e. two threat levels) apart from each other. On the weekly ratings for Lichess (which uses Glicko 2) the scale starts at 600 and ends at 2800. Quite a nice coincidence, assuming green Threat ends at 700 and you probably don't stay there unless you game the system or lack any comprehension of the game's mechanics. So if APB's threat distribution is anything close to the Lichess-curve(s), most players will sit somewhere in the lower silver range and hardly anyone is even close to Gold 10. With such a small active population, the curve of active players might sway noticeably to the right. New players will jump in, inflate the threat of slightly more experienced players, then give up if they can't get a foot in the door. That inflation ripples upwards, losing momentum on the way. But over time the system should correct itself. Rating-systems aren't a one-way street (or progression), after all.

As the link in my signature suggests, I had made a (at least I think) fairly good write-up how threat and matchmaking work in APB and what could be done to improve them. Unfortunately those links are dead, because LO seems to have taken the old forum-contents offline. Guess all those posts are lost in time... like tears in rain... So the short version of my post is this: At the end of a mission everyone's performance (i.e. your score) is put - individually - against everyone else's score. Each of those results in you either gaining threat or losing some. There's more to it, though. If your threat level is high and you scored better than someone who's threat is low, that doesn't automatically mean you gain threat if your score is higher. It needs to be significantly higher for that. How much exactly? That I don't know. But the game expects you to perform at least some degree better than a lower threat player and if you don't meet that expectation, you might actually lose some threat, while the other gains some. But wait, it get's more complex. As you play more and - at some point - improve less, you will meet the expectations of the threat-system more regularly. As this happens, it builds up a confidence-value. And what this does, is slowing down your threat-"progression". In other words, as confidence increases, threat-mobility decreases. A new player will have a confidence-value of 0, thus their threat swings up and down rapidly. A long-lived player will have a high confidence value and their threat moves like molasses. If the value reaches 1, you have to lower it before your threat starts moving again at all. This confidence value is also the reason why it is difficult to de-threat at first and then becomes very easy to gain threat again. The threat-level-scale is four colours (visible next to player names) split into ten levels each (nowadays these are hidden), or 40 threat levels in total. But that doesn't really matter, it's just a visual representation of the underlying glicko-values which the system uses. So a Silver 10 and a Gold 1 player can be rated at 1500 and 1501 respectively. For the matchmaking system, that's virtually identical. For players, it's worlds apart. As such, it does neither make sense to show players at which threat they are, nor to restrict districts to certain colours. Both undermine the entire point of such a rating system and make it either easier for players to manipulate it or harder for the matchmaking system to find appropriate opponents. The latter was supposed to be solved by dynamically moving players into other districts when they get matched with others (LO called this "phasing").

Could've told the people earlier you're busy making some money with other projects while APB is on the back-burner. Would've been a fantastic first step. I guess it's still decent as a tenth-or-so step. Might even happen this year.

If the underlying technology is the same, it doesn't matter how you call it, really.

The only time I remember gold districts having any noteworthy population, was when they restricted golds from entering anything else. Which didn't last long, because lots of people stopped playing for that reason.

Two factions with two distinct groups in each. Two districts split up between two of each groups. It's a perfect setup and seems very much planned to head in the exact direction of turf wars. I'd assume the only reason nothing ever came of it were engine limitations.

On paper, APB is the perfect game for NFTs. If they can secure some investor money and run with it, fine. If they buy into the whole thing, though ...

If the core gameplay-loop is decent, players will stick to a game. APB does has (or had) some decent gunplay-mechanics, good movement/mobility and a serviceable progression system. It's generally fun to play. The customisation system also gave creative minds a great entry-point. But as far as I'm concerned, the whole mission design and matchmaking-ordeal is far from ideal and thus not a good gameplay-loop. Too much downtime between missions, too much downtime within missions. So it's not just a lack of development that will kill APB eventually (or fail to revive it, really). It will also be a lack of vision. More of the same won't cut it. If LO do, at some point, deliver on both, they can pull this horse out of the swamp.

Bloom allows for more variety in weapon design, as ColorBauss correctly pointed out. With bloom you can define a range in which a weapon is comfortable. You can either give it the ability to operate outside that range (low bloom per shot and/or high bloom recovery), or restrict it from functioning efficiently beyond a certain point (high bloom per shot and/or low bloom recovery). What you vilify as "rng" is really just operating outside the comfort zone of a weapon. It doesn't hit reliably then, because it's not supposed to. But it still gives you the option to take a chance, yet not without risk. The early STAR 556 and N-Tec 5 were great concepts for this, albeit terribly executed. One was supposed to perform well under sustained fire, but struggle at precise shots. The other should be able to reach out further, but struggle with actual long range encounters. At the end of the day the N-Tec 5 did everything the STAR could, but better. Why? Because the N-Tec was able to kill faster (i.e. had the upper hand at close range, where bloom does not matter), had a higher base accuracy (i.e. had the upper hand at long distance combat) and recovered bloom faster (i.e. could stay closer to its ideal TTK at medium range). The STAR, on the other hand, had a very limited window of distance, in which it was comfortable to use. Now, had their damage and rate-of-fire values been reversed, they'd have made a great pair. The STAR would have had the upper hand at close to medium range, the N-Tec at medium to long range. But at the far end of it's comfort zone the N-Tec would not have been able to out-pace marksman rifles. From a purely visual standpoint I'd have had the N-Tec be dominant at close to medium, and the STAR from medium to long range. But that's less important. Without bloom, however? You'd have a hard time creating two distinguishable weapons from this very similar set of characteristics. The original ATAC was a great addon to this concept, by the way. With very low base accuracy, but hardly any bloom it was perfectly comfortable at close to medium range, but mostly useless beyond that point. Yet with the necessity to use it in marksman-mode, it was still discernible from proper SMGs. It's also why the 'Watchman'-preset was such a useless pile of junk. It tried to turn the ATAC into a medium to long range weapon, turning the very concept on its head.

Who is we? I remember gathering in front of what is now the Breakwater Marina building. Although that might've been at the end of beta... https://i.imgur.com/X0El1CE.jpg https://i.imgur.com/gWc5t6B.jpg

"...we can continue to try and get APB where I want it." I think you're still taking the wrong approach, continuing work on Frankenstein's Monster. Better get a fresh body and start from scratch. "I feel like there are more unknowns around the corner that could block our efforts again." Narrator: There would be. "Q1 2014" was a meme on an already postponed engine upgrade launch, iirc. So the whole ordeal started in Q3 or Q4 of 2013 most likely. Then again, it doesn't really matter.

The game originally had a mission prompt which showed your opponents threat levels and you could decide whether to take the assignment or not. (This screenshot is from April, 2010.) It was not a good system, because naturally most players wouldn't go into missions against "better" opponents and matchmaking suffered thus. People need to get the notion out of their head that every match is supposed to be entirely fair. That's simply not possible. And you'll only grow if you face better opponents. Not curb-stomp annihilation type opponents, of course. But being Silver doesn't mean Gold opponents are by definition impossible to beat. The way the threat system works, a Silver and Gold player can be closer in skill than two Silvers or two Golds, when the Silver is at the peak and the Gold is at the very bottom of their respective colour-range. Taking away some information from players would be beneficial to their mental state, because the information might be misleading. Such as threat colours. Or rank. Disregarding the topic of this thread, I like the idea for the sake of novelty. Replace names with Enforcer/Criminal symbols and player outfits gain some significance. Also short names wouldn't provide a miniscule advantage over long names anymore.

I think instead of disabling threat-segregation they should've gone the proper no-threat-districts and thus hiding threat levels altogether. This whole debate would possibly be much less heated if players wouldn't throw in the towel the moment they saw a higher threat colour than their own on the scoreboard.