Revoluzzer

To my knowledge Fight Club is entirely disconnected from the threat system.

This would only prove a good player can beat a bad player with any tool, though. It might give those players an edge who are really close to being among "the best", but can only quite cut it when min-maxing their equipment. Heck, it might even lead to players who consider themselves "the best" to realise they get carried somewhat by their guns. Might lead to more such threads! Should be 125 damage per shot, eight hits to kill.

The OCA was perfect in its original state. Should've been the benchmark for all other SMGs. It's beyond me why the buffed it. That said, it had the same TTK as the PMG, but less effective range. Comparing the N-Tec and Vegas works great, because both are too good at a few too many things at once. Sure, you can also use other things, but honestly every other combination puts you at some disadvantage. The N-Tec isn't bad in CQC either. But SMGs and Shotguns can't compete with it at mid range, Rifles aren't quite as versatile and LMGs aren't as mobile. With the N-Tec you can cover almost every ground and compete with almost every weapon in their respective niche. It is more balanced now than it was in the past, but it is still noticeably ahead of its peers.

The current system didn't introduce dethreating, it existed all the way back to alpha/beta. It was even easier in the original system, because you only needed a certain number of defeats to reach a certain threat level. The current system at least requires you to participate once in the mission to get enough score/participation to have it affect your threat. This only works if you deliberately keep your threat volatile. Under normal circumstances a player will play at the same skill level very consistently, which leads to the system slowly locking him in on a certain threat level. When a player performs at a consistent level he gains "certainty", which lowers the volatility of his threat level. New players and de-threaters will easily and rapidly go up and down in threat, because their "certainty"-level is very low or zero. Linking threat to rank doesn't make sense. Rank is a linear progression system - you can only go up, never down Threat is a non-linear representation system - you can go up and down Every player will eventually reach the highest rank. Not every player can reach the highest threat. As most things they did, however, they put very little thought and work into it. Could have been much better than what we got.

Looking on the bright side, it hides ugly low-LOD objects.

If you think Enforcers have it easier than Crims you're on your way to a world of hurt. Neither of those really matters at high rank and the corresponding contacts. At that point Criminals will spend a lot of time burning stuff and breaking windows, as well as delivering items. Enforcers will ram-raid a lot and deliver items, but instead of burning they usually investigate, bug or hack stuff. Primarily well exposed sat dishes, antennas and payphones.

You should really simplify this. All primaries should cost the same. Value is based on the number of slots and whether the weapon is preset or customisable. Secondaries should follow the same idea, minus slots, obviously. Then new releases can be added at a premium and go down eventually. Ideally you'd also streamline the system so a weapon is put into a category (e.g. primary/3-slots or primary/preset) and the price is based on that. This way you avoid the chaos that ensures when using individual entries for each item. By the way, this extends to all other content, too. Clothing items, vehicle kits, bundles. People get confused with different prices and, imo, will buy less when things get confusing.

They really only work if there are no less than two players on each side and the difference doesn't exceed two players. In other words 2v3 and 3v4 are fine. Once a 2v4 scenario is mathematically balanced, it is rarely fun for the 4 players, because their skill-level needs to be substantially lower than that of the opposing duo. Placing more than 8 people total in a mission is problematic, because the game isn't built around it and will usually allow each team to keep the pressure on the objective at all times. This is puts a major advantage on the defending team. Throw uneven numbers into the mix and the larger team will carry a massive advantage into the stages preceding the finale. As far as I'm concerned the game works best in 2v2, 2v3 and 3v3, but can accommodate 3v4 and 4v4 as well, if necessary. One on one is all around boring, because getting killed directly correlates with losing an objective and most finales just don't work well in this scenario.

It's a spitting image of the P90, which has a magazine on top. But the PDW-57 does have it's mag on the bottom, behind the thumb-hole. Presumably because they only have the appropriate animation for this scenario. Or perhaps to avoid licensing issues. You can even see the mag protruding from the body in the ARMAS pic.

It's the bane of all APB reviews, really. If you haven't spent the time to get to know the game or have followed it from the very beginning, you won't understand why some things work the way they do. He talks about the bad (pedestrian) AI some two minutes into the video and how they run into him when he wants to run them over. What he doesn't and can not really know is that the pedestrian AI is absolutely barebones. They will always follow the same paths and can not diverge from those. For gameplay related reasons this makes sense. Predictable pedestrian movement helps Criminals to raise their Notoriety and Enforcers to avoid lowering their Prestige. The same applies to all kinds of mechanics in APB. They make sense in gameplay, but aren't immediately (or even eventually) obvious to "modern gamers".

The game was never built with randomised missions in mind, I believe. Each one tells a little story, after all. That's why the objectives are always the same, but the locations can change. I guess it would be more fun if you didn't know exactly what's coming next, but this would require a thorough balance pass for all objectives and especially mission finales.

This depends on whether the matchmaking-system is based on the Glicko-values or threat. In case of the latter it would affect matchmaking, even when the underlying calculation doesn't change.

I don't think anyone really wants to throw out the skill-system, only the visual representation.

Well the threat-distribution should be a bell curve, but currently is more of a pear curve is what he's saying. There is, as far as I'm concerned, a fairly simple and great way to solve this issue: Stop having threat be a static/fixed value and start having it be dynamic. Have the active playerbase (e.g. all accounts active within the past 10 days are considered) be dynamically distributed across the existing threat levels (e.g. 20% Gold, 40% Silver, 25% Bronze, 15% Green). The underlying Glicko-values do no change, mind you, only their placement on the threat-scale.

There shouldn't be any images. I was just trying to embed the "ackchually"-meme image, but the WYSIWYG-text-editor didn't let me do it. On my end I don't even see any embedded images. I do have a video showing the original quickswitch, though ("Captured on 15.9.2010/16.9.2010 on EU Server Patriot (Release-Version 1.4.1)."). Gotta add it's fairly cringy (for me, at least) and on a terrible skill level by today's standards. But in my defense, at the time I just wanted to show gameplay without using what was at the time known as the HVR-quickswitch (from the description: "No N-HVR-Quickswitch (proper noobshit!) included." *cringe*). It does, ironically, feature a couple HVR-quickswitches of the "modern" variant.

Do you have a source for this? I can not recall any such thing. Keeping a "threat progression" will keep two kinds of players who will do anything to win: Those who de-threat to get easier opposition and those who use every dirty trick to win. A skill-rating system isn't meant to be progressive and promoting it as such just leads to a bunch of problems. This was one of the fundamental issues with the original TL1-15 system, making players believe TL15 was the end-goal. This did only exist early in APB. You would either be sent on an unopposed mission or receive a "Dispatch" against other players. In this case you'd see the threat level icon for each opponent. Naturally most players would dismiss dispatches against high threat teams, which lead to those players having to wait for opposition most of their play-session.

Swapping factions is actually very similar. Not only since they technically have different progression-trees (even if it's "only" factions on a surface level), but they also have unique mechanics (e.g. Less than Lethal and Ram-raiding), which come with different roles. Of course at first glance these seem like trivial changes, but I wouldn't be surprised if these are integrated as complex as an avatar's gender.

As a player you are investing time in the game, however. And without these investors the game is dead. So as a developer you need to listen to these investors to an extend. Otherwise they might stop investing in your product.

But it wouldn't. Threat is just a visual representation of Glicko-values. Adding another colour on top might make people feel like the system momentarily improves, or it might make them feel like they get matched against way too good players because all of a sudden they face "Platinum" players instead of "Gold" ones.

Ackchually Original quickswitch was from HVR to pistol when there was no restriction for switching to your secondary after firing the HVR.

If it were easy to do and you could make money off of it, it would exist. Necessity doesn't even matter. But the game wasn't set up in a way which would easily (i.e. cheaply) allow it, so it doesn't exist.

I'd like to discuss some problems (which partly have been mentioned in this thread already) and disagree with the idea that "threat" (i.e. the threat-calculation-system) is broken. I've detailed my thoughts on the matter in the past (of which a particularly lengthy example is also linked in my signature), which might have been more coherent than this late night write up. Problem: The threat-scale is fixed, not dynamic. What does this mean? In APB all active players could theoretically reach Gold threat, by "extracting" threat out of players who eventually stop playing. On a dynamic threat-scale, only a certain amount of players (e.g. 20%) could be Gold. The remaining 80% would always be split amongst Silver (e.g. 40%), Bronze (e.g. 25%) and Green (e.g. 15%). Inactive players would drop out of consideration after a certain time of inactivity. Now the existing threat-system does have measures to deal with in activity - inactive players gradually lose threat over time. However I had barely been active over the span of almost two years, if I'm not mistaken, and during this time my threat doesn't seem to have degraded drastically enough compared to my skill. In other words, this measure is probably not set to a harsh enough level. I think it should exist in the future. Problem: Players can see and somewhat manipulate their threat. This can of worms is outlined in my linked/mentioned post. I think hiding threat and preventing players from manually selecting districts is crucial to creating a good matchmaking experience. If designed well, phasing players to other districts would only become necessary in very rare circumstances. Problem: District threat levels are fixed, not dynamic. This is obviously similar to my first point. Currently a districts is set to one threat colour, which is a massively inconvenient restriction. After all, players at the very edge of Silver and Gold (formerly known as Silver 10 and Gold 1) are much closer to each other than players at opposite ends of the same colour (e.g. Silver 1 and Silver 10). Originally APB would create districts with a certain threat range and sort players into appropriate districts automatically, based on their threat level. Evidently this system wasn't without flaw, otherwise it would still be in use today. One flaw from back then was manual district selection (players chose the most populated district over the most appropriate) and fixed district threat. The latter means that a district might have spun up to host players from Threat 6-10 (of the original Threat Level 1 - 15 scale), but was also manually joined by players outside that range once it reached a sufficient population. The district then never adjusted its range accordingly (although eventually it would simply have been 1-15 anyway). In an ideal system districts will dynamically adjust their threat-range as players leave and the player-distribution-system will repopulate it with players of an appropriate threat level, thus ensuring the matchmaking-system doesn't have too much work to do because players will most of the time match up fine. Should, however, a player (or group) shoot outside a tolerable threat-scale for the district, you could use phasing to transfer them to a more appropriate district. Matchmaking mechanics. Speaking of matchmaking, there are a couple of issues people usually see when it comes to finding opposition. > For some, it is finding opposition at all. These players will usually resort to waiting for opponents at each stage of a mission. As the matchmaking system will gradually increase the tolerance for a matchup (eventually seeking opponents outside of a sensible threat range) they will either get opposed by much stronger or much weaker players. > For some, it is finding the same players over and over and over. This is usually caused by two teams (or players) being the only good match across the whole district population. Again, some players try to solve this issue by waiting, however now outside of a mission instead of during one. This does work if the other team gets a bad match by waiting in a mission for long enough. > For some, it is getting matched with a smaller team of stronger players. This is particularly common for randomly thrown together players of wildly different threat-levels. If they're lucky, they'll face a similar setup. But more commonly they'll be put against a (usually smaller) pre-made group of comrades, who might technically be at the same group-threat-level. Alternatively the thrown-together-bunch waits out their mission stages for opposition and gets put against a pre-made group which is way above their averaged threat-level. Generally the matchmaking-system is fine. It shouldn't need to be complex, because all systems before it take care of the difficult work. Bottom line, I think phasing might fix matchmaking-issues at large, but isn't the ideal solution. The current threat-system already has counter-measures built in. Threat has a volatility-level, which is very high for new players and gets lower the more they play at a certain skill level. De-threating increases volatility. Thus players who want to de-threat have to put in quite a bit of effort to first raise their volatility, while their threat barely moves. Once their threat starts moving down, however, it will just as easily move up again. Naturally de-threating only really works as long as you know you are making progress. Hiding any indication of a player's threat level quickly makes it nigh impossible to gauge where you stand. And if all the systems which determine how players are matched up against each other can function as they should, de-threating would hopefully be a much rarer occurrence anyway.

Matt actually commented on this video before:

I just hope you don't run out of money and motivation before you might succeed with APB.