Noob_Guardian

Scouts are fine, they overnerfed HVR, and due to how ranges work, snipers are really niche if they dont have high damage or mobility. Shotguns are hard and almost impossible balance, they have always been either overpowered, or underpowered, with no inbetween. This applies to EVERY game out there, not just APB though. In APB, shotguns have been OP off and on depending on changes. There has never been a "shotguns are balanced" period, because when they're balanced, people would have rather used PMG or OCA. When shotguns were broken, EVERYONE switched to using one. Buffing underused pistols is still useful. .45 was always a bit op, never will change. RFP was broken at a point and used more than .45 at one point because of a rework. Half the midrange weapons out there are niche or fun stuff. I enjoy the oblivion sniper rifle, it's not meta, but its not UP either.

LRR is a fine addition. I'm glad they made it a new mod. I was upset when they reverted the old IR nerf, but it did end up being a buff for some weapons unironically. NSSW and a few others, directly benefit from the mod. But yeah those were so botched back when.

The problem with headshots in APB, is that the cover system is so low, that you can still snipe people, without seeing them, by firing at their hitbox with or (and i forget but even possibly without a red reticle), to hit it. Hitting their "head" that isn't visible whatsoever. They increased cover height to try and fix it, but it still happens plenty, but not as frequently. Pistols are based on what's most accurate and viable. .45, fr0g, and FBW are the dominant pistols because they are the most accurate with the best ttks for it, with enough damage potential to be a problem. PDW and NFA are much much more niche and harder to use and almost worthless. The RSA and act isn't used as much, not because headshots don't exist, but because the game's gameplay style favors CQC-Mid over Mid-Long when it comes to secondaries. While great for shotguns or SMGs, other sidearms are better if already within close range, and with 3rd person view, getting to an enemy to attack them within the best range of your primary is often more effective. It'd also have to cause a whole tonne of balance issues, because shotguns and snipers are a thing. Having HVR or whatever they did to the strife, or add in any accurate weapon like oscar with easy headshot accuracy. TTK is high for a reason, they tried to re-increase it via RTW test districts but they didnt actually do it or balance it properly and turned most people off it. (Some weapons were massively bad because increased bloom and recoil, that never existed in the RTW version.) Almost every instance of TTK lowering has caused massive overpowered headaches. Ogre, S1-NA, ATAC - Prenerf, ACES pre-nerf, DOW, Shredder All weapons that were able to -consistently- hit TTK easily with no ROF reduction due to bloom or recoil were nerfed. Headshots would further feed into issues with those and other weapons. I can't imagine much fun against headshotting NTECs, Obeyas, and NSSWs, .-. Overall, it's been suggested a number of times. There's nothing particularly bad about making it. Though there's a LOT of both map, hitbox, and weapon balance that would have to go into it, that makes it not really worth changing to.

Fr0g pistols never were able to reach mid-range with that few shots. They came out initially with a 10m damage drop, which made 6/7 hits at 15-20m and more past that. .45 was always considered the midrange/cqc varient, with fewer bullets, and could reach to about 50m. It i believe did get a nerf to 35m or so, a while back I believe. That said, no .45 has no need for a buff. Fr0g varients could use a slight damage buff (10-30 damage a shot more, nothing significant, but CA3 makes it +1 bullet if you miss a little bit and the regen kicks in, due to the exact 200 damage it deals.), but thats it.

TBH i disagree here. While a few were removed (RIP) Most of the adjusted places only had 2 access points, and were extremely broken on VIP and item hold missions. Even with grenade launchers, breaking into some of them was really tedious. Most of the locations became much more balanced, some were removed, and other places ended up being discovered. (Most of which were glitch ones, that ended up getting removed with the OOB changes). But, I do agree here, Map and spawn design have caused many balance issues. (Car spawner specifically imbalanced a lot before its repeated nerfs). Weapons also, and while weapons are a primary form of imbalance, they tended seem exponentially worse, when compacted with broken locations, car surfer, and spawner. Not a bad idea, it was fun standing just outside of enemy ranges like haha you cant hit me! Though i do enjoy the curves, they are a mess for some weapons balance wise for things like the NTEC and obeya

Big blue truck tug of war

Then you are trying within limits.

I never minded losing if it was a fun/good match, or if it felt relatively balanced. My issue is that at larger matches, it tends to end up being a curb stomp, or such a cluster f*ck that you either barely scape by either stage due to imbalanced spawns, or just outright lose, due to imbalanced spawns. End stage? Good luck if its an item and they move it into a open sniping ledge, or deathmatch with whoever has more silvers, and VIP is just meh in general. (laughs in killing the VIP then spawn chasing the rest of the game) I tended to play casually except against certain players. Losing didn't matter heavily, though I still tried at times just because. (sometimes only because it would punish my team if i didnt actually play up to the oppositions level) I still hate moving items via movement glitches, and killing 1 then running, etc. Casual is more a mindeset. If i'm playing casual, i'm probably not using a meta weapon, and trying to level up my weapon roles. If i'm "trying" i'm probably using meta.

I have to try this, but my past experiences from the ooooold days are this: 1v1s - absolute garbage 2v2s - absolute garbage 3v3 fairly balanced 4v4 balanced 5v5 relatively balanced 6v6 unbalanced towards defenders 7v7+ just broken, no way to lose when defending unless you're all bad or the enemy team is just a bunch of coordinated tryhards or bots.

well... they are bannable, including shaders. Only a handful of things arent considered cheating and all of them are "vanilla game"

Conc isnt that great tbh. A bunch of vehicles got buffed life, and the conc remained the same 1k damage. Making it worse against high tier vehicles than before. Add it the fact that -it's not easy to use, and takes a lot of practice to get right, and even then it's buggy as all hell. (I've thrown concs onto vehicles, and no visible/heard damage occured. It's really only useful to destroy car spawners once they've stopped moving at this point. The people who have great accuracy with concs are rare. Most have years of play practice... EOLs are not great, but they can be fun. The conc one is the best of the EOLs, but the others are eh. The worst part is they all suffer from the OPGL/grenade through floor glitch. NTec isn't the end all be all as much anymore, especially in cqc with the high bloom/accuracy. CQC weapons still perform better, but it still easily presents a problem from CQC-far midrange. STAR however, can do just the same if not better in cqc... The only difference is a ~.07ttk. FAR is arguably better with the same out of aim stats as the star but a .7ttk. While I can agree that AV weapons aren't as good at AP as the AP counterpats. They aren't the worst. NTEC +.45+conc- covers a wide range. .45 helps cover cqc heavily, while the NTEC coveres mid. The conc is just high damage for vehicles and people. I personally prefer NTEC + Fr0g/.45 + Frags

No Idea why a VPN would get you banned... I use nord VPN on other games with no issues... I havent used it too much with APB since i dont play much, but I assume i've been fine. That said, i dont know what a lower latency program is.... and i have no experience with them. Regardless, use at ones own risk. Br's (hue) would use VPNs to play on Joker once they were locked out.

The link from weapon swap to bolt timer, was due to reverse quickswitching on the scout. There has been no change to the TTK of the scout, and the damage was buffed. Do I think the equip time could be lowered slightly? Probably, but do we need reverse-quick switching back? Not really.

District segregation, made Joker pop go from 2-3k to 800-1.5k, in 3 months, and it never recovered. It only went down after that. The issue is that no new content other than a few weapons, and Asylum, was added in almost 10 YEARS. You think that the population is going to stay high, when there's little to no content, no new maps, and no new content in 7-8 years? Gold has always been too easy to get. I alone can carry bronze/silver players into gold, with a handful of tips, and grouping them for like 10-15 missions. The other issue, is that the "pro types" abused the shit out of every bug and glitch to win, and hindered the game drastically with their try hard antics of always needing that win nomatter what, and LO and G1, didn't fix half the glitches EVEN NOW, and the others they fixed years too late. Segregation when it was put in place, put every cheat, tryhard, and hacker into one place, sure, but it also destroyed clans, preventing anyone with any semblance of skill, from grouping and mentoring new players. 3 months after segregation ended, I went into silver, and the silvers and bronzes were stupidly worse than the bronzes/silvers pre-lock, to the point it was just pathetic.. My clan died from Gold lock. 100 pop clan with a max of 20-30 members active at once different days, went to effectively dead with maybe 6 on... in 3 months during gold lock. So no, I will never pretend gold lock or "threat segregation" was or is a good thing. I see the issue with LO/G1 not fixing glitches, broken areas, broken missions, and no new content. However, we the community also shot ourselves in the foot. We said we wanted the engine upgrade, and to put content aside until then. That same engine upgrade won't happen to the degree that it was supposed to and so we got a half upgrade, and no content after 4-8 years of waiting. So yeah... We can blame the golds and segregation, but the pop was never going to last with threat seg in the first place. The biggest issue, is no new content and no good tutorial. 3rd biggest factor is just the community was toxic af and hoping for change that ended up not quite coming. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Popped in for a match yesterday. I got 6-8 kills, maybe 4-6 deaths, 1 gold both sides 2 silvers. Their gold and 1 silver rq. I havent played consistently in years, and the last time i played a mach was months ago, Im not even half as good as I used to and had 2 rqs.... Soooooooo..... yeaaaah people just going to quit over anything this point.

Consumables are fine imo, though I wish they would have been more of a new type of mod at times. Randomly getting them kinda sucks when you like to use a certain one in general