Noob_Guardian

You do realize they were called the "Holy Trinity" because they were considered completely broke and the most necessary weapons to win right? I don't think anyone who called it the holy trinity meant it as a good thing.

Even casual games require proper weapon balance. Even competitive games like overwatch has changed weapon and character balance for the sole reason of -player enjoyment-. No-one cares about that because GTA is pretty much just single-player with PVP aspects. That can't really be said for APB which is purely pvp, as such weapon balance matters far more. Even modern warfare has a number of weapon changes, along with APEX legends. Apex nerfed a LOT of weapons that were originally "really good" as well.

True nfa is somewhat of a random mess, but it's definitely fun. Fr0g and .45 have the 3rd fastest ttk for a pistol ingame. .45 can still miss and not worry about CA. (I wish i could say the same about fr0g. I'd love for a damage increase of even 3-5 dps to make it 203/5 dps to help "slightly" against CA. Nah, im almost positive there was an accuracy buff as well. But it may not have been at the same time.

I mean, before their buffs you had to use a lot of effort to make the cobra or misery at all effective. Their buffs helped that but they still aren't quite there... well maybe the cobra is pretty close to where it should be. I think you forget that the vast majority of players also play differently than you or I or abduct or anyone else that's been around and active for 5+ years. What "vets" like us view as normal or best weapon usage, isn't often the same has how other players use it, primarily because they've never been helped to learn it know its ranges and such. I've helped a number of players learn how to use the NTEC and other weapons, and afterwords in a matter of a few matches they were doing much better with it. Being handed a weapon ingame and having no clue what you're doing with it, doesn't mean it's not an easy gun. If you have an inking of how to operate it, it becomes rather easy to use, well not anymore at least, but before LO's changes I'd of said that. Even using the ATAC optimally doesn't mean literally spraying with it at all times, it may be "easy" in the sense of just aim and spray like the OCA, but even then, if that's all you do, you end up losing out a lot of the time. I do agree some of the newer weapons and ARs can still use more tuning, though.

To be fair it also depends on which iteration of NTEC you both are talking about. The original NTEC he'd be right about, G1's first nerfed NTEC was a wee bit more balanced than the original with the hb nerf, however LO clearly nerfed it in CQC for some reason with jumpshooting and spray accuracy being drastically nerfed. They clearly have all the data they needed to nerf it, and SPCT AND the game population were open to testing and pretty much, "picked" which nerf they wanted.

That's the point ^,.,^

I don't mind losing, i just don't like losing to cheap tricks and broken things. I guess it's good that you know "competitive players" who left because there's no reason to be ultra competitive in APB, that's more than I can say. But then again I was often grouped with newer players, silvers, and the average player trying to help them learn the ropes, and try to have fun, make friends, build a clan (even wanted a competitive aspect to that clan ironically), you know "casual things". I've played like 5-6k hours and I realized that winning means very little to me. I find that it's the littler things that matter, making that cool jump, getting that one savior kill, making that perfect flank.I learned that "general" skill accounts for very little in APB. Timing, now that accounts for far more. I used to try to improve myself, constantly try to win, learned plenty of tricks, tactics, learned how to break every area in the game with little difficulty. I learned how to counter most players play styles, abuse their weaknesses to be their downfalls. I got it so ingrained in me by now that it happens without trying. I'm not perfect with aiming by any means, sometimes it's spot on for hours, other times, its trash all day because I can't focus, hey it happens no biggy. Now on Jericho the only people who give me any real issue in the game left are the same ones who have consistently abused exploits and glitch items/themselves where they shouldn't be over the years. You know why I don't play competitively anymore? Because I have no reason to. Between no actual competitive support for the game, a handful of weapons that had been extremely imbalanced to where there was pretty much no competition if you weren't using one as well, and no clan wars. What is there? A "you win" that disappears at the end of the match, and little "ratio" in the statistics until you leave the district. Half the changes I'd like to make the game play balanced people are against because they define "competition" in with "ez wins for defense". If the "hardest" players left for me to face are the ones who abuse glitches, broken animations, impossible to get into locations from special vegas jumps, and exploits. What is there left to improve? Aiming? Yeah I could, but that fluctuates greatly depending on mood for me that i'll never pin it down entirely. Sure I won't always win every mission, that's fine, I don't feel like I have to. I've already gone on either 2 19x mission win streaks, or 1x 19 and 1x20. I don't care about win streaks anymore. The first of which was during gold lock. (You know, when golds were stuck facing rampant cheaters, exploiters, tryhards, qsers etc. Sadly those pictures were also deleted -.-) Sorry if I tie competitiveness in APB to toxic gameplay it's nothing against you. It tends to happen when the only competitive players in the server tend to be toxic a--holes, and the pent up rage leaks out. I'd honestly be fine with clan wars, and some form of leader boards for "competition". However, my primary focus and support tends to be more towards calling for game play aspects that i feel should become better balanced so that they are more enjoyable for the average player. As such this often headbutts against what competitive players want. (Though i'm still baffled at why certain things people call "competitive" when it very clearly creates an uneven playing field. hmm....)

Car chases should exist though, i'd be fine with making it so that you only see it if an enemy is in it, and further randomizing the spawns within a slightly larger area to prevent camping them.

I keep thinking it's a smg honestly, and i only have it through contact leases so i actually haven't bought one in ages cause i forget that I actually have one. Oh I thought you were complaining that LO had changed that aspect further and I was like what?! They do have feeling though, you might not like how they handle, how you have to change your play style to compensate for them. However they certainly DO have feeling. The difference between the NTEC and the other AR's (aside from ATAC and FAR) is that you have to put a LOT more effort into them and their playstyles for them to be anywhere near as effective as NTEC. You liked the "ease" of the ntec and how it's easily manageable and extremely efficient, fine. But don't dismiss other weapons because they aren't as easy. Can some of them use further buffs. Absolutely! But does that mean that the ntec should have remained as is? No, not really. Every weapon you listed aside from FAR and "maybe" star has extremely clear downsides and niches. Downsides that the NTEC doesn't have. Sure you can simply "buff" the weapons further and never touch the ntec, but that would have been little different from trying to hide the elephant in the room. Not only that, but you can't have almost every weapon but one have clear downsides.

Sorry for the wall of text: Main synapse/point is in the spoiler. What's just below simply explains that every loss isn't weighted the same. How so? If competition is literally "that two teams compete" why "should" it matter if it's high vs low skill teams? Why should it matter "where" a mission is lost/won and how? How is it magically unfair for once group but fair for the other? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When you look at game play and why it matters, it matters because of the how, the essence of that loss. When you play a game and lose, sure it can feel bad sometimes, but if it was fair, fun, maybe "competitive", and felt "good" up to the point of loss, then it feels okay to lose. But when you lose to something that isn't fun, or fair, nor competitive, it doesn't feel good. You can say well why does that matter? It matters because player experience is what drives a game to succeed or fail. APB has most certainly been failing because the community and how it operates; has gone literally unchecked for years, and when ANYTHING that causes such issues gets fixed, people complain that, that "feature" "glitch" "exploit" "tactic" "weapon" got removed or nerfed. What is the difference between losing to someone moving a medium obj 3 m/s at it's intended movement speed vs someone bypassing the base speed and jump exploiting it at 6 m/s? What is the difference between losing to a pioneer running from your team vs a pioneer who's movement speed reduction from carrying the VIP/Item is bypassed via car pushing? What is the difference between losing to a strong enemy team who guarded an item in a semi-decent area and losing to a team that just camped it into the easiest to guard place in the game? What is the difference to losing vs losing against someone who just exploited? What is the difference between losing to a normal mission vs losing to spawn pushers who just pushed your spawn 350m from the objective? What is the difference between losing to a team that just item camped 400m from the actual objective vs on the objective?" Aside from "just losing" there IS a difference. If they were "going to win anyways" why does it matter how, why, and where a mission "ends" if they were going to win? What's the difference between what "objective" the mission ends on? That's a simple answer. It matters because impalanced gameplay mechanics aren't "competitive", they aren't "balanced" nor "fun" to go against. Player enjoyment is a massive factor in how well a game is liked, it's population, and how healthy that game population and community is. A lot of veterans take such things for granted as "normal". But you get any new player, new popular streamer, or even the average player, and any of these things can be infuriating if you lost "that way". This "Normal" for APB "Vets" and "competitive players", isn't actually balanced, fair, competitive, nor is it generally "fun". How would I know though? Look no further than how few players that we have left in APB. That should be enough to reflect whether the mission balance, game "features" and "exploits", and weapon balance should remain the same or be altered. Synapse w/ times situation etc.

years ago, increased accuracy, it was in the same patch they buffed the PDW accuracy as well.

Yes, however LO didn't touch "that" mechanic in the patch notes, they touched other things. That's the point i'm trying to make, LO likely will never revert it to pre G1 nerf stats, however if you can "prove" that their changes unnecessarily tampered with that bloom mechanic by changing the bloom, you may be able to get that aspect slightly reworked/buffed slightly. As for that topic, most people agree in general that a number of the AR's do need buffed yes, however you also seem to discount that the forum population =/= game population. In general the forum population only accounts for ~10% of a game's population if that. Most casual players also don't tend to use forums so much. They didn't make new weapons based on the NTEC because such weapons would almost have be ntec clones to compete and that's disregarding the other weapons in the same niche that you have to be careful about, so that the weapon you're buffing isn't going negate those weapons as well. Instead they made the cobra- a carbine hybrid, the Misery (literal trash), FAR which is a star/ntec hybrid, and such. They didn't "witch hunt" after the ntec either. When almost every AR in the AR role got buffed in the last 4 years, and the NTEC still dominated and was used over any other AR in 90% of the games there's a reason for that. They already buffed the AR role, the NTEC was STILL "overused". You can say "well buff them more", but that disregards the fact that you just buffed an entire weapon role (aside from like atac and far) and still got nowhere, and would still have to be careful about those weapons negating other weapon roles.

I thought you wanted a high skill high reward weapon like the ntec to have a perfect firerate to be optimal? I like the changes of going against it more than I did before. Did I agree with all the changes? No not really/not all of them. I don't think they touched that wonky thing from G1 which would "somewhat" explain what you're saying and they certainly didn't mention nerfing consecutive shots. I think it's that people at that time may try to tap slightly faster to get the kill and it blooms instead. Maybe that thing from g1 was tied into max bloom/bloom modifier? I know the gun has for a long time bloomed on the 3/4 shot moreso than the first 2 bullets if you tapfired wrong/burst. It may just be more pronouned with them doing the bloom nerf. Maybe they mentioned nerfing the bloom per shot modifier and max bloom?? That would explain larger bloom on each shot, which would then explain worse bloom on the 3/4 shot if fired off optimal timing that you're experiencing. G1 had a wierd way of nerfing weapons indirectly. I'll have to log in and test some to check though. I've been leveling lmg/sniper/rifleman role so I havn't touched the ntec too much since the rework.

While true the problem is two faced imo. When a tactic used somewhere, others pick up on it, and it becomes widespread. It wasn't just "vets" doing it. I had newbie silvers who were yelling at me for not camping enemy items at times despite us very obviously going to win without it. Matchmaking surely didn't help the problem, no, but that also doesn't mean that the "tactic" is imo a fair tactic on its own. Have I done it? Yes, do I feel dirty when i do? Absolutely.

NTEC bloom has always been negated by firing within it's recovery time though and that wierd function thing G1 added with the HB nerf, otherwise it would bloom worse? LO didn't touch that to my knowledge. Like I could be wrong about that and I'll gladly admit it if I am. I thought they touched max bloom and jump shooting.

I said within its "effective range" and also noted that "overal range" isn't "effective range". The range of the OCA is 30m, its "effective" range is ~15m. The DMR is good up to 100m, but it's "effective" range is 88+. Just because a weapon functions within certain ranges, does not mean that it is, or should be "effective" all the way from 0 to "past" its damage drop. Which is what the NTEC was, which is why LO made it so that it isn't very effective sub 5-7m but still functions exactly the same at 25-60m which is still essentially its "effective range". (At least, to my knowledge they touched the max bloom and jump shooting, I don't believe they touched anything else, however i'd have to check the patch notes to double check)

"they're mad because a silver killed them from chip damage". Most of the time people still would have died anyways even with 750 because most guns do more than 750 damage in 2 shots. It's just people can't admit that they'd have died anyways that they want it nerfed, but I chock that up to ego. Did you know bringing about a discussion on game balance, and whether something is or is not balanced, is to first provide an opinion, provide statistics and ingame experience with it, and use that as an argument in favor or against a certain change? Regardless of "bias" for or against something, it has to be founded on something. My argument for nerfing bloom recovery had always followed those things. Just because you think it isn't a problem, doesn't mean others do not, or will no. Instead you chose to insult them, call them noobs, silvers, blah blah whatever. As shown in this thread. The ntec is still usable, it's not trash, and its litteral best features remain untouched. A large number of players still use it as well instead of other rifles, so it's also clearly not trash, however you are permitted to have that opinion that it is.

Yes, abused qsing, i'd go into 4v4 missions with 4 enemies hvrs and out qs each of them and win. I also wanting QSing removed. Do I agree with how LO and G1 did it? No, I think it's dumb that I can't hit someone with an hvr 3x in cqc and kill them, but that has nothing to do with QSing, and me actually liking to use the weapon out of marksman mode in cqc. Merged. How am I a hypocrite? It's not hard to look at a weapon regardless of location, and decide which range you want it to be effective in, and which range you don't, and adjust it accordingly. They clearly felt that from that data, as well as likely other in-game experiences they felt it was too strong. The facts show that they nerfed it for a reason, regardless of your OPINION of the matter. I suggested a ttk nerf in like 2014 if the star wasn't going to be buffed to .7. I didn't "harp" about the subject on forums either for years. I didn't call for its cqc accuracy and max bloom and jump shooting accuracy to be nerfed. I called for its bloom recovery to be reduced to be like .4 from .5 after that. That's not being hypocritical at all. Yes, i wanted the ntec nerfed slightly, no i didn't want it "ruined". I used HB and QS because that's what it took to play against players who did the EXACT SAME THING TO ME 24/7. I didn't have to like HB or QSing or jump shooting to use it if it meant having slightly more enjoyable "games" because literally EVERYONE was doing it. I qs'd because I had no choice to when RAOV and Bromatoasts group and all them would have one or more qsing snipers against my group. Don't pretend that you yourself never qsed, used hb 2 on an ntec, or jumpshot either at some point in the past 7 years. I did what i had to regardless of whether I liked it. I called for those very things I was "abusing" to be removed so that the game could be more enjoyable overall. If that makes me a hypocrite go ahead i'll call myself a hypocrite. I perpetuated the problem so that it would be fixed. Ntec has a niche, it's still heavily used as well. Crying because they nerfed its cqc abilities which plenty of other vets (not me) wanted done is okay, but don't blame me for THOSE changes because I DIDN'T CALL FOR THEM.

People complained about HVR because they hate getting hit once with a silver and dying from chip damage. It's a balanced gun and practically useless in cqc without a lot of effort being put into it. LO destroyed its cqc and quickswitching capabilities, and people still aren't happy because as always, they won't be happy until any weapon that lets a silver punish you for being stupid, gets removed. Here's a fact then Abduct. LO had been gathering weapon data for weapon reworks for a while now, with that data they decided to nerf the NTEC.

I honestly never once mentioned that it should be nerfed in cqc specifically. My issue with the ntec was its capabilities at 40-65m range, while I admitted it was strong in cqc, i didn't feel that it's cqc abilities "needed" nerfed. I felt that it was definitely strong in cqc, as such I felt a ttk increase would have sufficed to .75s to balance it out with the star, if the star wasn't going to be reduced to .7. Not once did I call for its full auto accuracy to be nerfed (i wanted a reduced bloom recovery), and i certainly didn't call for its jump shooting to be nerfed. I had mentioned to others in the forum i felt the jump shooting and cqc nerf wasn't the right way to go about it, however i was still glad "something" got done to reduce its power level, even if it wasn't what I wanted. As the weapon was at least in "some" way easier to handle. I never "bullied" the devs, not once did I insult the devs and bully them into nerfing the ntec. I don't know where you get this from but you're clearly delusional about it. How so? All the weapons that can "compete" against the ntec in its range even after they were either returned to their original power (obeya) or got buffed (star), STILL couldn't stop people from using NTEC 95% of the time instead of any other usable rifle ingame. You think buffing literally every other gun is going to fix that? Buffing litterally every AR and Rifle to compete against the ntec would break the both rifleman and AR class as a whole. Buffing every other rifle/ar to be as powerful as the ntec literally would mean making them ntec clones, or zerg lasers, and further break game balance. I don't get why you can't understand that. Weapon balance means that something should have a "niche". That it shouldn't be just as effective in cqc as it is mid range, that there be some form of weakness to it. It doesn't matter if it's an AR and should be "versatile". NTEC is STILL versatile, even after its nerf, it's just not as good at CQC, which is FINE. Star/far can now easily be said to be better than it in cqc, and not as "good" at mid range. So what if the ntec had to be nerfed "somehow" to better balance the AR role? The gun still functions THE EXACT SAME in the WITHIN ITS EFFECTIVE RANGE. Usable range =/= effective range. LO has clearly shown they want to keep the NTEC's niche mid-range and not nearly as good in "cqc". Name and shame removed. - Azukii

Most times the defending team actually cannot destroy the vehicle if it hasn't been "unlocked" yet. If it blows up such as in the car garage, it's because of a glitch. Honestly, I think it would be better if they could only see the tracker when the vehicle is moving, not while it's sitting there doing nothing. As a defender it's generally far too easy to get a vegas and explosive, kill the vehicle, go to where it spawned, and smoke it. Unless you're going against vet 195+ players who can fix the vehicle, the offense can't just grab it and go, add into the fact that it only spawns in 2-3 generally "known" locations if destroyed and generally in a cycle, you can cycle location lock the vehicle spawn without much issue and know where it may be next. These kind of vehicle missions are an issue. However another issue for example is the crim mission with the frenso, which litterally has no hud marker on it for like 4 stages, and it really should. Missions need an overhaul in general. that or while moving is something I can agree on, it's been pretty bad being able to predamage vehicles at all times, with no issue.

That's the problem though, APB has NONE of those competitive rewards nor competitive background. It doesn't even reward playing "competitively" very satisfactory, cool you won with like .75X-2X the cash as the losing team, oh wait, that guy did way better than half your team and got just as your team much from losing. It's fine to want to win and play, however you have to realize, that mindset has pretty much killed APB as well. ingame Cash barely means anything unless you're free to play and havn't bought a single weapon. Even that is now being negated because of joker tickets. I have never, not once heard someone say "i quit APB because it's not competitive enough". I have heard them say "I quit APB because the community is toxic, the players glitch cheat and exploit to win, the matchmaking sucks. I got tired of people trying too hard all the time and got bored". You seem to forget that APB has always gotten all the backwash toxic community members that care only about wins. The majority of the casual playerbase who actually played for fun and cared about the game left. Why? Because the overt-competitive mindset of certain players and cheaters, and the lack of gm's and order given from the GMs. Want to know why the game population in joker/jericho dropped to below 200? Think real hard, its not hard to know why. What happens when you have an unregulated community that hates on any casual player, exploits every glitch and location, cares only about themselves and how easily they can pull that win for their dying twitch view count? What happens when toxic trash who only cares about competitiveness and winning chase away the literal lifeblood of the game? Look no further than APB. The competitive players shot themselves in a foot and sit there on a high horse saying the game isn't competitive enough. No, the game is fine, they are the ones taking it too seriously and destroying what little there is left. We no longer have a population for "competitive" players to constantly stomp for their ego and feel good winning. They removed leaderboards which was the ONLY competitive element in APB. Vehicles got buffed by G1 after the ALIG got buffed. Ironically counteracting the exact thing they tried to fix. What APB needs is a literal overhaul on the entire mission, matchmaking, spawn, and objective system, that I can agree on. But it's not because of "competition", it's because it's the only way to save the game at this point. G1 did a lot of things to help the game, rebalanced locations and fixed weapon issues, but it also left glaring issues which should have been fixed, regardless of "veteran" and "competitive player" outcry.

You shouldn't have to buff every gun to compete if only a single weapon is the problem. Any other weapon that was at NTEC's powerlevel in any niche got hardnerfed. While I agree there are still a number of minor buffs and minor nerfs that can happen to a large number of weapons in this game, the fact remains that if they had been buffed to be competitive against the NTEC, they would have been nerfed to the ground shortly after. I strongly disagree that simply because a weapon is what you start with, that it should be inferior to other weapons as well most games nowadays do not follow that, nor should APB, especially since you can 3 slot the STAR as any other weapon. In fact there was at one point a push to MAKE the NTEC the starter weapon. To be fair the Ursus was always considered a better ntec lol. G1 wasn't great at balancing new weapons, half of them are complete trash, the other half got nerfed, and a most of them still need reworks to some degree. The obeya got the hammer because G1 thought it was too powerful because of the "range dropoff" changes. While I see the issues that the dropoff addition to weapons has created with balance, i cannot say that the weapons were any more balanced just because they couldn't shoot past their range. I wouldn't go back to pre-drop stats on weapons, however I wouldn't mind losing the damage drop per say if the weapons remained the same as is, and got minor tweaks from there. Merged. Any weapon that got even remotely close to how powerful or versatile the NTEC was got nerfed. The problem is you can buff all the weapons you want, and it'll lead to worse gameplay. APB was never made to have this fast of TTK with weapons. Buffing them to do just that would be worse than making a handful of nerfs, buffing weaker weapons, and tweaking out the problems from there. Only buffing weapons "feels good" but ignores some of the core issues with doing so in APB and with game balance. You can't power-creep yourself to a balanced state.

" Owner Briefing These Criminals aren't happy about you raiding their drug operation. Protect your leader while trying to kill or arrest them, so they can't re-open for business. Dispatch Briefing The Praetorians are going to keep disrupting our operations unless we can stop them, permanently. Take out their leader." VIP is litterally TDM except that VIP lives being the only one that matters for the attackers. I'm not saying dont take out enemies nor am i saying that you can't shoot objective cars when you see em, just don't camp items 200+m from the actual obj. You can think what you want, I just want people to stop camping items 200+m away from the actual objective against a team full of new players and silvers. (No really, they actually do this then have the audacity to say that they're "good" players against newbs.) I feel its against the spirit of the game, and extremely cheap as well. You can say what you want about the blurb, but it's a remnant of times where TTK's were far higher and it was generally easier to get away and get to point. You couldn't shoot things past the bullet range back then. Times have changed, and so should what's viewed as acceptable. I cannot honestly say, that that tactic, has not encouraged hundreds of new players to leave the game. It's one thing for the feeling after a mission to be like well, "we were close but couldn't get it" vs yeah that feels terrible we couldn't even get close to the objective because they were playing dirty.

NFA and Fr0g are useful at 5m+, Showstopper isn't. (NFA was even buffed)