Revoluzzer

That one precisely. It's particularly problematic when you launch the game with headphones on and might have either not adjusted your volume yet (e.g. starting the game for the first time) or increased it before for some reason and forgot to change it back.

In a perfectly balanced roster there are no "meta" weapons. Of course this is nigh impossible to achieve. And sometimes you want to add some toys which are really specific in use, but not very great overall. That's okay, too. But no gun should be so well rounded it dominates several others in more than one situation. Or so powerful its individual impact is practically unmatched.

The current system is already Glicko-based. I don't see why they would use two different systems (ELO & Glicko), but Matt sure makes it sound like that - ELO for threat, Glicko for matchmaking. _________ Matt: "Scaleform isn't much better, it still runs fairly poorly out of the box, so we fixed it up. We are definitely doing all the new UI's, the new scoreboards the new district select screen, ... that is all on Scaleform." Whenever I read about Scaleform for UI elements, it was praised as easy to work with and performing really well (e.g. Borderlands). So is this an issue APB in particular has to deal with? Aren't current Scaleform elements still run through the Kismet-pipeline, too? I'd wager eliminating this obstacle should reduce the performance impact significantly? Kemp: "I'd love the old login screen because it was nice and simplistic, it got you into the game. It wasn't just kind of an eye sore, with exploding lights everywhere." It sure was an earsore, though. I feel like people ignore the nasty screeching sounds all the time. Getting rid of those, while not a top priority, should definitely be considered. Matt: "So a lot of the design work we're doing is just how do we make missions fun again." I wonder if you'll actually ever manage to do this. But if you can get a decent turf wars system going (also based on what you've learned with RIOT), which incorporates ram raiding & witnessing, you might find what APB has been missing; some decent, open world, player driven gameplay.

You don't have long matchmaking times when everyone in the district is at a similar threat level. Is this so hard to understand? It's a simple quality over quantity solution.

I think this was somewhat intentional originally, because Crims were supposed to be the bigger faction (i.e. more players should play Crims). Originally matchmaking would put Enforcers against Criminals and Criminals against each other. Unfortunately the player cap was not adjusted for this, so oftentimes Enforcers would be idling unopposed while Crims were going at each other. But instead of fixing the population limits they disabled CvC matchmaking.

Will you remove manual district selection (i.e. the list view) in the process? I think you really need to get people out of the habit to try and join "the best server" by joining the fullest one (which might not even host players of similar threat). Even as an interim solution before phasing. Also, do you already know how you will manage servers with phasing enabled? Given that large numbers of players were always a weak point in APB's server performance and hosting a lot of players in one single district won't be necessary anymore then. For all intents and purposes this is how APB's server structure was originally intended. The times have been dire for several years, this is just a move back to the roots.

"So if you want to keep your name, all you have to do is log that character in, and you'll be fine." Logging in with any character won't secure all names on that account, then?

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that this is how Westerners think. The farther beyond the former iron curtain you go, the more purchasing stuff on Armas is considered a bribe that allows you to cheat. Just like crossing a border is usually impossible, until you pull out a carton of cigarettes.

This was not an issue when most players used the automated distribution system, because it put players of similar skill into the same districts. It wouldn't be a problem today either, because the system still works fundamentally the same. It would simply throw everyone into the district of their threat colour. And since people of similar threat end up in the same districts the matchmaking system wouldn't struggle so much to find appropriate opposition.

I know online translation is pretty rough (and you probably get the best results from deepl if the incoming text is comprehensive), but this just sounds to me like you guys are surprised you get banned for cheating, despite having bought some stuff for real money. Apparently this wasn't the case on Innova, which isn't entirely surprising.

Rate of fire and burst interval are the same, I wager. I'm not entirely opposed to make it 10 hits to kill at 30 rounds per mag and 120 capacity. But overall TTK wasn't the issue with the gun, so adding another burst to deliver the minimum damage for a kill should come with a shorter downtime between bursts. I wouldn't increase the speed of a burst itself for accuracy reasons and because it's very short already. If the gun feels more like this at the end they did a decent job.

Since players could always manually choose districts instead of using the automated, threat based sorting mechanics, they constantly broke matchmaking. Phasing is, probably, the end-all solution to this issue, because it will finally not matter if players manually select a district. Off course the easier solution would've been to simply turn off the "Choose district" window years ago. Then, depending on which threat system existed at the time, players would've been assigned to a district which mostly fit their level of skill. The only downside to this system was that districts wouldn't adjust their average (or median) threat level as players joined and left. So the longer a district existed the more likely it would host some players outside the intended skill-range. For example high-threat players who joined with an average-low-threat group, but eventually continued solo or even started inviting other high threat players into the district. At this point they would actually circumvent automated player distribution and break the system; some did this intentionally back during early beta (or maybe late alpha) days when manual district selection did not yet exist, wasn't prominently displayed or was not well known.

This will work. There are no cyrillic letters in 'racism'.

Definitely Joker Tickets. Since those are actually meaningful now players will flock to test districts more likely. Have them as a mission reward (50 for winning an opposed mission, 25 for losing). If you want to make the current B variant of the RFP usable you need to increase the burst-fire speed lower the fire interval, imo. Keep the bursts the same length, but allow the gun to be fired more rapidly.

Lower fuse time, higher flight speed, better throwing arc. Overall they're easier to use than Frags and Conqs.

Do you think Google Stadia will manage to run APB without microstutters? HDMI 1.0 runs at up to 3.96 GIGAbits per second, which allows 1080p60 without chroma-subsampling. Just to give some perspective for lossless video signals. HEVC encoded video at 20-30Mbit/s would probably look good enough to even a trained eye as long as there isn't too much detail or movement in a scene, though.

I have to admit I barely play the game currently (this isn't exactly news to you in particular, I assume ;) ). But over the few hours I spent in Baylan Shipping FC recently the number of Obeyas I saw was negligible. The number of N-Tecs and its derivatives was more than expected. Balancing the N-Tec doesn't have to leave the N-HVR untouched either. Both are - or should be - well known as problematic. And as far as I'm concerned both were also fairly easy to improve (N-Tec TTK up to 0.75; N-HVR damage down to 750). They should also revert the awful curve-based accuracy-kerfuffle which attempted to fix the N-Tec. The maps were certainly designed with lots of combat in mind - if I remember correctly the designer of de_dust2 was on RTW's map design team? Longer, more drawn out gunfights helped alleviate the poor respawn-system. I remember the game was originally more fun because more time was spent fighting than running back into combat. (Still at a very poor ratio, but better than now.) Objectives were more regularly completed over the course of a constant back and forth, rather than during the time the entire enemy team was on their way back from the respawn area. As Hexerin already mentioned player vehicles were originally not quite as common as they are now. But iirc they also had less health, which Gamersfirst later "fixed" because some players complained about it. I agree that objectives are less than ideal and sometimes outright terrible and unfair (in fact I made lengthy, elaborate posts about this topic way back). But this was somewhat less of an issue when players didn't go down within a split second, unless they were subject to a coordinated attack by more than one enemy. And changing weapons to adapt to the current environment was much more common, unless you carried a N-Tec or N-HVR (with quickswitching from HVR to your secondary, originally!).

A high rank player should be good enough at the game to compete with the average Gold player, though. The bar is low enough. Restricting high ranking players to their own districts wouldn't solve anything anyway. You can just stop ranking up avatars below R255 by pledging to a maxed out contact. Or create a new avatar, as others have suggested (although you'd lose a bunch of customisation, then).

The maps are designed incredibly well - for a higher average TTK. And the Obeya and OBIR would be more popular if the N-Tec didn't poach in their territory. A TTK of 0.7s with a relatively stable accuracy is perfectly fine. That's how the gun worked originally and that's when it was most balanced. Gradual accuracy loss with CJ3 equipped did balance that one out fine, too. This would reduce the variety you can have. The N-Tec and STAR should be very similar and mainly distinguish themselves by initial precision (i.e. N-Tec: high; STAR: low) and accuracy over time (i.e. N-Tec: low; STAR: high). But for some reason the N-Tec also got a better ROF and slightly more damage on top.

Late to this party, so I'll go with a meme answer. I'm stumped how you've come to this complicated "solution" for the RFP. It makes so little sense. Range is a very small issue if accuracy or precision are low. Given that there is nothing wrong with the RFP by being precise (i.e. able to land one shot down range), just have its accuracy degrade rapidly within a single burst so the second shot will most likely and the third most definitely will miss beyond 40m. What's the point about "testing" weapon changes, if you don't go against existing weapons, though? You need a natural-ish mix in a testing environment to get satisfactory results.

If it still follows the original stats, it differs from the N-Tec by: a higher effective range (originally a flat value, now a different curve?) lower zoom FOV (i.e. more zoom) less recoil (to offset the higher zoom) lower accuracy when moving

The outfits worn by Action District contacts are created with "player"-clothes. The outfits worn by the Social District faction fixers are supposedly part of their model, i.e. one single asset. Turning them into individual, usable items might not be an oh so trivial task.

Pretty sure APB was one of the earlier games which did in fact feature a day-night-cycle. Even though it was only a rudimentary, custom implementation made by RTW. I'm not sure if G1's fog implementation was tacked onto the time-system, but it could be considered a very simplistic weather-system.

I actually try to avoid these things. But that's only my avatar doing it, not others.

Leaning pushes the camera away from your character, creating a larger field of vision. I believe that's why a lot of people do it. This is my state of knowledge as well. Leaning does widen the hitbox to accommodate the shifted upper body position, but also the unchanged lower body. Of course this might have changed at some point (especially during the crouching hitbox time). Fun fact: Even if you can not visibly target their hitbox anymore (i.e. red crosshairs) you can oftentimes still hit them. I don't know what the technical implications are, but my theory is that the bullet-spread-system has to do with it. Or maybe hitboxes extend slightly beyond the point at which the crosshairs detect them. Or it's bad netcode. But I've found it too reliable to blame that one.