I-Reaper-I

Veteran player here with 2000+ hours logged, I haven't played this game in 3 years or so. Tbh if bots were added for mission encounters and this game was turned into a PvE coop game, I would happily return to play it for the chillz. Any thoughts on that?

Man, I love these "I want the game to fit my play-style and ONLY my play-style" threads. Not one of these kind of OPs ever think about how to make the game better for everyone, but only for one's self.

I wouldn't say realism, more like fixing a jack-of-all-trades weapon in the game.

It´s a concussion grenade. Supposed to cause blunt trauma by sheer kinetic force. It´s not a shrapnel or an impact grenade, therefore it should be useless against cars actually. Remove the car damage modifier from the grenade, and it will be a perfect anti-personnel weapon while being useless as an Anti-Vehicle weapon.

Until servers can only support 80 players in one instance and avg. pop does not go over 1000 on Citadel, I don´t think it´s a good idea to include any sort of extra game modes that take away from the standard missions. Think about it... the more game modes get included that do not reward the player but adds ambiguity to the game, the less people will actually play the original matches that DO reward the player. Consequence of that is that more people will leave the game, because at the current level, there won´t be enough players to continuously fulfill matchmaking requests, resulting in long waiting times and empty missions. It´s a good idea that should be added to the roster nonetheless, but at the game´s current state, LO needs to sort out priority issues, mainly completely implementing the new engine and developing cross-instance matchmaking, making a marketing campaign to bring new players into the game.

I think what he means is loadouts when you use the supply box or supply trunk in a car. If you arrive to a CQB location and had to defend or attack a long-range area, it would be nice to swiftly change to a CQB equipment with one-click, without exposing yourself too much while selecting guns. Tho obviously the ammo will still need to be replenished when selecting a new gun, but you get what I mean. For someone who could have lots of legendaries and situational guns, OSMAW, grenade launcher, etc etc... having loadouts will cut down some seconds when changing for the desired tactic.

I've read through the long list of requests that are in your initial post, so I will break it down to you, why most of this wouldn't work, since I have a bit of experience with how development teams work in different environments. Matchmaking has been a long time issue, it is partly due to lack of players to make matchmaking all the more diverse, currently the only fix for this seems to be the engine update that should allow for the dev team to implement more server-side features and upgrades later down the line. On another note, the option to quit the missions with enemies in the match has been removed for the exact reason, that too many people kept leaving the matches, often resulting in a very imbalanced, one-sided match. You can abandon missions where you have no oppoisition by simply typing into the chat field /abandonmission, but once opposition arrives, this option no longer works, it is to keep players in a game and give everyone a fair chance of game. Plus you can get a free perma N-TEC by completing the tutorials, and that is a jack-of-all-trades weapon, I used that for most of the time and I kept killing players who had JMB legendaries, Nanos, etc... Every weapon has its own advantage and disadvantage. Modeling a car from reference or not takes a very long time for it to be good quality at least, not to mention the body kits that would come with it, then all the wheel colliders, box colliders and rigidbody parameters would have to be individually set up and adjusted/tested to meet realistic expectations. Pulling away resources from more important tasks at hand for making new cars would be a bad business decision overall, QoL updates are usually higher up in the priority list to extend the game's lifespan. I'm sorry but you are essentially asking the dev team to work on all this and release it for FREE when the game is FREE to play. You are effectively removing their salary and bonus from the time they put in to make all this available. As a consumer you must understand that financial support from the community for a free to play game is their main source of revenue, along sponsoring and other smaller revenue that altogether would not make up for their equivalent expenses rate. The reason for this is that control mechanics for flying or swimming were never implemented to begin with. The controls (fundamentals of a game) are always worked out during prototyping stages, early development. For this too happen, there would have to be a major overhaul in the game's core mechanics, new controller scripts would have to be developed, as well as major overhaul on maps of water colliders, some water simulation, air drag and different gravity effects on rigidbodies for flying objects, these are all potentially hundreds of hours of work for a small team. Plus a major overhaul usually means public testing and with an old engine and spaghetti code, that this game was initally founded on, this will result in an infinite list of bugs, adding more hours to get the work done. Again it would be a waste of resources at this point. Ok so to make this one short, imagine instead asking for a handful of cars, you are now asking for 30 000 thousand new unqiue cars to be modeled and implemented. Level design is by far the most difficult aspect of game development, it takes an immense amount of time to create maps even if it comes to extensions with a more rural terrain. It is not the focus of this game though. This is a cops vs. crooks shooter game with driveable cars and a state-of-the-art customization option. The literal point of this game is to look cool while bringing criminals to justice or causing chaos. This was emphasized in all the trailers at the time of release, re-release. Hence why it is called social district. If you have moved prefabs of customization kiosks into tattoo parlors, clothes shops, car shops, etc... the action instances that are meant for PvP battle would be filled with AFK or idling players who would unnecessarily bloat the instances resulting in longer matchmaking queues, less action, because an action district can only handle 80 players at a time. Why, do you ask? Because there is a lot more going on in action districts, gun-shots, windows breaking, explosions and so on, all of this the server needs to compile and run quickly to make sure the latency stays low. This isn't a bad idea tho, I would say this is so far the only credible idea I would actually be happy to see in the game. Design some interiors that players can buy, your equipped graffiti shows up on a feature wall in your house and you can invite up to 7 players into your house for a party. These would be invite-only instances separate from social and action districts and it wouldn't show up in the instance selection screen. You get an invite through the mail kiosk where you can accept it and it will automatically put you into that invited private instance. Players can access their apartment from basically the district quick join tab. 1. Joker mystery boxes aren't free, the economy of the game would start declining rapidly. Other options would need trackers and given how control scripts work in the game, that might not even be possible at the moment. 2. There are places of interests already. Mostly the statues you can see placed all around the districts. 3. If you mean PvE jobs, no one would bother with the PvP aspect, further diminishing the matchmaking that is currently there. 4. We already had those, not sure why they were removed. Again, this will require overhaul in the core controls for cars that would take a long time and would be very difficult, plus the bugfixes might require even more work afterwards. CONCLUSION/TL;DR: I'm not saying that these are bad suggestions, all suggestions are in some way good, but they just cannot be executed in the foreseeable future, for the fact that the foundation of this game (the engine it's built in and the code) is proprietary, making changes to the core mechanics extremely difficult, they were not designed to be expandable, modular or plug and play. The only way most or all of these changes could be made is if the company decided to make a sequel to this game and build it anew entirely from scratch in a new engine (probs Unreal 4) with better optimized, more modular code. But this is probably not gonna happen, or at least I don't think so, because LO might not have the resources to start developing an entirely new game.

Ya know that there is a game called Crackdown?

As long as the playerbase remains so low and there is no diversity in who you play against, it is pretty much inevitable that new players will quit. The main issue with the whole threat system and how this game works is: You meet the same damn person throughout 5 or 6 missions before you miraculously get matched against someone else or just rage quit! So you want to have fun playing this game? Start inviting more people into the game and populate the servers to a healthy amount.

Look for a clan that accepts and helps new players. I heard of one that was doing it back in the days, they would play with you, give you all sorts of tips and teach you about mechanics, tactics, etc... There is really nothing else you can do than to join a clan, watch youtube vids on how to play the game (BECAUSE THERE IS LITERALLY NO TUTORIAL FOR THE PATOOTIE YOU ARE ABOUT TO ENDURE) or just keep playing, lose a couple hundred missions in a row and slowly emerge from the ranks of newbies.

How I imagine all those hopeful players right now.

lmao the only good thing that happened to this game so far. Global pandemic and lockdowns everywhere and LO are bashing their 4ss to the floor out of joy because of a slight playerbase increase.

There's also CS:GO, WoW, EVE Online, No Man's Sky, R6: Siege, The Division 2, Starbound, Apex Legends, The Sims, Elite Dangerous, Skyrim, GTA 5, yade yade yada the list goes on. Must be something else that brought 500 players back. It's seriously not the corona beer, tens of thousands of games are out there that are far far better. I'm telling you there was an update or maybe the easter event lol.

Think of the social districts as second life - lite version. Some people don't have the energy to invest into Second life which is the most convoluted game ever, but still want to RP in their furry trash designer clothes or kawaii desu maid outfit.

That would make a lot of sense lmao, but honestly times aren't that desperate that you really have to return to APB. I mean there is Doom Eternal and Animal Crossing, the hottest sh!t out there right now.

My brain is surely exploding, but it ain't from the story you try to tell, but the inconsistency and incoherency of your phrasing. Jesus, at least if you're gonna give us a bedtime story, work more on formatting.

Where did all those players come from, I wonder. Did I miss an event or a big announcement or something?

As much as I want to see this game become popular again and have a booming playerbase, unfortunately I have to agree that this is not far from the truth. I just hope LO will get the EU done soon and maybe... JUST MAYBE... revive the game through some miracle.

While I agree and it's completely true, look at some of the notable examples, World of Warcraft, Star Wars the Old Republic, Runescape, Neverwinter, etc etc... All these games have consistently kept to something that this game has not done. Regular content updates, expansions and listening to community feedback. APB Reloaded is a one-of-a-kind MMO game with an also one-of-a-kind customization feature and it could have become very popular, lest the former developers made the right choices and put effort into bringing new content to the game rather than reskins and cosmetics. The engine upgrade and many more content releases and fixes afterwards could bring back the game, but LO needs to implement huge and drastic changes for this to happen, without proper funds and a community to support them, it is very unlikely this will ever happen in the foreseeable future.

Don't forget that even tho there are 80 players on an instance, usually half of them are AFK or just messing around in the district they aren't actually readied up for missions. For player diversity and equal matches you need instances to be doubled and you need more players to have different outcomes for each match.

500 players during peak time, 250 on Jericho. I'm sorry but it is simply just not possible, because during a gaming session you end up seeing the same player about 60% of the time, probably even more. EDIT: 70% of these players spend their time on social districts, so you play against 200 players at best. Remove threat system, re-implement a revised threat system once the game has been promoted and balanced enough that around 5000 players will be active on the game. I suggest a timed event with rewards for downloading the game and logging 30 hours of gameplay on it to earn 3000 G1 credits, 30 days of free premium and a 30 day lease of an ARMAS weapon of your choice. GIVE. PEOPLE. INCENTIVE. TO. RETURN. OR. TO. START. PLAYING. THIS. GAME.

Remove threat system altogether and base the matchmaking on reputation level. You won't be able to get rid of smurfs anyway, because that exists in literally every competitive game and it's an issue that cannot be tackled. People will open numerous new accounts just to start from scratch but with the experience already in their hands. Once you remove threat from the scoreboard so you cannot see what rank the current player is, you will give yourself the benefit of the doubt by not knowing how good the opposing player is, making you think "I might or might not have a chance". It's not going to be the usual "oh frick he is a gold, I'm so done". Currently the threat system is obsolete, useless and creates unnecessary segregation among the players. Why am I saying that? Because elitist golds deliberately reduce their threat to silver and bronze to be able to jump on the more lively instances and steam-roll players with the actually less experience. I saw numerous bronzes and silvers play like veteran golds, trust me, the threat system showing changes nothing, it simply adds unnecessary segregation to instances and results in a more broken matchmaking system. EDIT: De-threating is massively easy by the way, all you have to do, regardless of winning or losing a match, is to be on the lower 50% of your team's scoreboard with 100 points at least (equal of 1 kill) so you still qualify as having taken part of the mission. Around 10 matches like this and your gold threat reduces to silver. Another 10 and you are reduced to bronze. I tested this myself, it takes no effort, can be done within 2 hours and this is why the current threat system and matchmaking is doing more harm than good to the game.

When is the EU happening? It's been years now. Honestly someone from the dev team should just win the lottery already and hire a dev branch to sort things out.

The only argument I have against this is that the TTK for each and every gun is, in my honest opinion, a necessary function of the game. It just makes for a more tactical approach to situations as you don't have the option to one-shot headshot everyone in the game. I don't like the idea of games becoming purely reflex-based and the best thing about APB is TTK allows to work your way out of tough situations in a smarter way than using snap-shots, because you actually have to track the enemy for a few seconds before bringing them down and it even allows a chance to escape line of sight, since Waterfront is a severely open and flat map. Mind you, there is no staggering from guns (except LTL soft damage guns) your character runs incredibly fast and can jump very high effortlessly, character movement and physics is very light on this game. To make guns 1-3 shot guns would be a very bad decision from the devs. Accuracy, ROF, drop-off range and crosshair bloom can be reworked but TTK should not be tampered with.

Why tho? Since June 2018, exactly how many times did the playerbase thrive with more than a thousand players? Ah yes... 0 times. Has de-threating been adressed?... No Are the gold instances thriving with players now?... No Do we see an influx of players rolling in with RIOT added?... No Has there been any considerable changes that introduced new players to this game?... No Has the matchmaking become balanced to the point people enjoy a good fight between teams?... No Give me a good enough reason, why not to get rid of the threat system entirely.