DedGaem

I'm just going to put this out there... There are much older games with HUGE playerbases... like Everquest that still has around 20 servers... and PAID monthly subs.... So many older games But the thing is... the Publishers are ACTIVE. Their forums are up-to-date.. they have knowledgeable staff.. Eve Online... Guild Wars.. etc. They have to be earning easily 10x what any foolish company would make with 200ish paid cheaters. I think it's a possibility LO run's a game just to sell cheats on the side... but... if they "did" they'd have to see how both their population and revenue tanked over time... and that was an unwise "investment." I think they were going great guns in Dec... New contact.. New guns.. New ranks.. New activities.. hell, even new Match-making. What KILLED them... was failure to implement an anticheat. I heard the podcast where Matt Scott said he wanted the anticheat not to permaban. GREAT! But... WTF is it??????????????? WE CANNOT KEEP WAITING.

1. You think when a cheat-maker can already instantly reroll back into the game after detection, that temp kicks are FAIL? WE ALREADY HAVE FAIL. NO anticheat is KILLING what's left of the game. 2. If they have a working anticheat... it updates, moreover the population of APB is so TINY I doubt it's financially worthwhile to cheatmakers to constantly work at updating the cheats to beat out quality anticheats. Right now the 3 main advertised APB cheat sites all claim not to have detections in YEARS. These are OLD CHEATS. But... even if they weren't... it's the responsibility of a quality ANTICHEAT to update and preclude alterations of cheats. 3. No anticheat at all is killing the already tiny game. (repeat for emphasis)

Consider my solution... no permanent bans because 1. they don't work.. 2. we lose too much of an already too small playerbase... BUT a "good time" at the expense of the game and legit gamer's deserves a FITTING PUNISHMENT. TEMPORARY KICKS immediately on detection. Kick them OUT of the game so they don't screw the competitive game balance.

I'm as antagonistic to Matt and LO as anyone... because we ALL survey the ruin the game has become... but I still have hope he can turn things around, keep the game, increase it's popularity and profitability. He JUST has to do things different that what was done to DESTROY it.. by BOTH G1 and LO... Both took EXTREME roads... 1. to exterminate cheaters.. and thus the majority of the playerbase... 2. to WELCOME cheaters.. and thus exterminate the majority of legit players. There IS a middle path... neither catering to cheaters... nor punishing them to create DDoS attacks, reroll rage botters, etc. We CANNOT stop cheaters from logging in or making new accounts. Permanent ban is FAILSAUCE. We ALSO cannot ignore them and let blatants cheat daily... it caused a MASSIVE population DROP. The key is TEMP KICKS. If someone truly believes he's being kicked unfairly with false detections.. he SHOULD be able to OPENLY work with support (not like before, if you were banned, you had NO VOICE). We can WORK with the playerbase to make the game both fair and PLAYABLE... something it IS NOT when so many people are blatantly cheating, day in and day out for days, weeks, months, years.. on so many different accounts. It just makes the game where only cheaters are competitive.. and legit players are cannon fodder... and quit... and that's a LOT of lost potential revenue.

We had a big ole debate on another thread.. I'll recap. The highest population to log into APB at the same time is recorded by Steam as being about 11,800ish... round it out to say 12,000. This was, I believe 2011. Back then we were modifying game files with less graphic quality to optimize frame rates.. some modified custom crosshair, removed in-game video's to shave off time.. some of these "extreme" configs did allow you a visual advantage where you could see people in doorways. Since it was against the EULA, it was debated whether bannable.. for a couple years. Longest story short players created custom LAUNCHERS.. so back in the heyday, when computers were toasters and graphic cards were doorstops... the MAJORITY of the playerbase logged in bypassing Steam or via private launchers. This would give a CONSERVATIVE ESTIMATE 2-4x... perhaps was higher. Okay, 2 x 12,000 = 24,000 and that's the lowest conservative estimate. 4 x 12,000 = 48,000. My own conservative guestimate with Colby, Han, Joker, Citadel (+ Innova but we won't coun't that even though I and many other non-Russian APB fans played on it)... 4 active servers with about 20 active districts (well not Han, it was alway's small but BIGGER population-wise than what we've become)... My personal recollection and guestimate would be between 30,000 and 40,000 active playerbase... many of whom paid for monthly subs and joker boxes. I distinctly recall G1 having banwaves of thousands... and when we finally got FairFight... and then Tiggs flipping her wig at one point manually banning almost everybody.. that there were something like between 11,000 and 14,000 BANNED. So... yeah. NOW... with LO's failed pro-cheater policies (the OPPOSITE EXTREME... and just as destructive.. we have MAYBE 1,000 active accounts on 2 servers). Here's the deal... if LO took the MIDDLE PATH... eliminated permanent bans (except for the most disruptive persons) and just used temporary kicks, immediately out of game on detection... with a working anticheat (Fairfight WAS the best)... and allowed them back in within say 15 min. No account loss... No need for rage-hacking retaliation... and even if they already had 50 accounts to cheat on... EVERY DETECTION would result in immediate 15 min kick from server. THAT WAY... legits could have a fair game.. closets could closet (they ALWAYS will).. and blatant ragebots... could F-off because it's these OUT-OF-CONTROL bots and script kiddies who cause people to AFK, log-off or outright quit... because NO ONE plays to have NO CHANCE.

He's definitely catered to the cheaters since the beginning... and the end result was thousands of players quit playing.. pretty horrible business decision.. since the cheating community... can't be larger than aprox 200,,, and easily 4,000 quit playing because... why play a competitive shooter when you're getting trashed by macroers, aimbots, ESP, no recoil, etc. The only incentive and reward is for cheating.

It's pretty clear Little Orbit as a game publisher HATES their legit playerbase.. and leaves players to fend for themselves against the most insane level of unregulated cheating (with no anticheat for months) in gaming history.

Hate Speech? WOW.. that's blatant MALINFORMATION intending to label my comments as something racist and hateful. That's bordering on LIBEL actually, because I'm not speaking of minorities to whome the perjorative HATE SPEECH is appropriately applied. Yet, you entirely CUT OFF the point I replied to: Here, I can CUT & PASTE what you said that I replied to... My comment: CLEARLY IF YOU DON'T HAVE ANY ANTICHEAT AT ALL... FOR MONTHS NOW.... AND ONLY A HANDFUL OF BANS TRANSPIURE BECAUSE THE PLAYERBASE IS REQUIRED TO DO THE JOB OF VIDEO RECORDING AND CATCHING BLATANT CHEATERS... SENDING THE VIDEO TO SUPPORT... AND HOPE THEY WILL ACT ON IT.... THAT IS THE DEFINITION OF INCOMPETENCE FOR A COMPANY PUBLISHING A COMPETITIVE SHOOTER GAME. IT'S NOT THE JOB OF THE PLAYERBASE TO POLICE THEIR GAME. WHEN LO BOUGHT THE GAME WE ALL LOVED THEM. WHAT WE, THE PLAYERBASE HATE IS THE INCOMPETENCE THAT IS RUINING THE GAME FOR US. GET SOME COMMON SENSE. THEY'VE ALLOWED CHEATERS FOR YEARS, SINCE THEIR MASSIVE UNBANNING SCHEME... WHICH BACKFIRED HORRIFICALLY... AS EVIDENCED IN MASSIVE POPULATION DECLINE. SINCE THEY INSTITUTED SARD... AND NEVER ALLOWED IT TO DO ANYTHING... THEN DISABLED AND REMOVED IT... MONTHS AGO... ON DAILY BASIS... THE IN-GAME CHEATING HAS BECOME RIDICULOUS... PEOPLE DAILY IN DISTRICT CHAT SPAM ADVERTISEMENTS FOR CHEAT COMPANIES... FOR HOURS, DAYS, WEEKS UNHINDERED. THERE ISN'T "LOGIC" TO IT... THEY'VE SIMPLY LOST SO MUCH PLAYERBASE, SUPPORT, AND FINANCIAL MEANS.. THAT NOW... THEY SEEM UNABLE TO DO ANYTHING PRODUCTIVE TO SAVE THEIR GAME... AND SINCVE IT'S RELATED TO A SERIES OF BAD DECISIONS... THE PLAYERBASE... NOT JUST MYSELF... BY AND LARGE VIEWS IT AS INCOMPETENCE. IT ISN'T HATE SPEECH TO POINT OUT OBVIOUS DEFICIENCIES THAT NEED TO BE RECTIFIED IF THEY INTEND TO SAVE THE GAME AT ALL.

Legits are paying customers too... and more numerous... which is why it's UNHEARD OF for a game company to cater to cheaters at the expense of longsuffering legits... and the crashing collapse of APB's game population is a testament to the HORRIBLE decision making to both cater to the cheaters while ignoring the concerns of legit players.

Are you SERIOUS? Because they are incompetent game publishers who started by unbanning EVERY BLATANT CHEATER WHO EVER PLAYED... then making a NO NAME & SHAME policy which PUNISHED legit players for calling out shenanigans... MEANWHILE CHEATERS AND CHEATER CLANS used organized toxic ostracism to PUNISH legits who called out cheating. 1. No anticheat 2. Visibly worsening BLATANT hacking daily... for MONTHS now... and the best you have to counter is... YOU (the player) has to police THEIR GAME... by recording, and sending a link to some absentee AFK staff member via discord and HOPE... they will look into it. Come on. People have been cheating in APB for years... Recently, since SARD, (which was allowed to do nothing, and then disabled) now players are cheating with IMPUNITY... Meanwhile, it's the legit playerbase that's forced to log off an unplayable game.. But HEY... Matt Scott says... we don't really KNOW for sure who's cheating... OF COURSE... THAT'S THE JOB OF A QUALITY ANTICHEAT AND A PROACTIVE COMPANY. When the job's done WELL... the COMPLAINTS from the playerbase are a lot less.

The forums have traditionally (for years) been the place where playerbase communicated problems to the publisher, Obviously Little Orbit has known about the cheating problem for years and watched it decimate their game. They tried to attract people back with new weapons, new lvl, new anticheat SARD,,, and all we've watched is SARD was allowed to do nothing... and now there is nothing.. and cheaters have become recklessly bolder and more blatant and are present in nearly every mission now (Citadel)... making the game unplayable for legit players who don't cheat. I mean.. until the game sunsets, shuts down and closes... we're going to be demanding some intervention because we enjoy the game... well, what it can be when legits actually get a chance to play it.. and aren't competing against speedhacks, wallhacks, warps, aimbotsa, triggerbots, macros, and ESP.. which .. literally you CAN'T compete against. It's no longer players saying... "HEY THEY CHEAT" It's more like "HEY DON'T YOU WANT TO HAVE A PLAYABLE GAME WHERE PEOPLE CAN LOG IN AND HAVE A BIT OF FUN?" The cheater playerbase will always be small... some 200 maybe... and that is about what the end result of what's left of the playerbase will be.. because Little Orbit, right now.. is ALLOWING blatant ragehackers to EXTERMINATE what's left of their playerbase.

Bro you literally used a steam chart to "prove" there were never more than 6,000 players on at one time. YET... I posted Steam charts which contradict you claiming there were nearly 12,000 on at one time... that's double of your claim. MOREOVER... we ALL KNOW... majority of the playerbase didn't use the steam launcher... so even if that's only 1/2... and I'm sure it's more (possibly even 3-4x more who bypassed the Steam launcher)... that would amount to approx 24,000 on at one time minimum... and that's AT ONE TIME... not... the actual PLAYERBASE.. possibly as high as 50,000 (if we go by 4x (steam launcher bypassers) x (Steam launcher all-time high of 11,813). These are numbers approximating what I and others recall when playing this game in it's heyday. We are NOT wrong... YOU ARE. Compared to what we have NOW... 6,000 would seem like a lot... but back then 6,000 would seem like a crash in population. Yes.. Little Orbit.. DESTROYED this game. We need a working anticheat.. to save it... NOW. Look at the DEAD forums... with posts still up from years ago... we used to have major DAILY discussions on a variety of topics with G1 Devs and GMs actually interacting with us answering questions. We used to have answers to support tickets within 24 hours... now it's DEAD. Little Orbit catered to cheaters who EMPTIED out the playerbase... and have nearly KILLED their game. They have to change tactics... even to get back a tiny functional portion of population.. and they need to do it SOON. For a competitive game to EXIST... it has to be competitive. Without a working anticheat, cheaters are exterminating legits.. and the population that pays for cheats... is small... relative to the thousands of legits who quit because they have no competitive chance worth playing. Again, I know playerbase is now "too small" to permanently ban cheaters... but we need to immediately KICK them out of missions on detection, and keep them out for a bit, say 15-30 minutes as a DISCOURAGEMENT to using cheats... that are so rampant now it's killing what's left of a small population. https://steamdb.info/app/113400/charts/ "Steam player counter indicates there are currently 164 players live playing APB Reloaded on Steam. APB Reloaded had an all-time peak of 11813 concurrent players on 10 December 2011."

There's a guy in Financial district (only one open atm) in District chat advertising one of the 3 main APB cheat sites and spamming a special for APB players... coincidentally there's a lot of cheaters in the matches... but I digress. Same guy was advertising same cheats for past 2 weeks. I reported a few times... nothing changed. Nothing will change. If Little Orbit ISN'T making money from the professional cheat sites... they're DUMBER than imagined... because that would mean they let idiots screw them AND their game to their faces.. while doing nothing about it.

I said DISTINCTLY we need a solid anticheat. But we need it to WORK,,, IMMEDIATELY, during the mission to DISCOURAGE detectable cheating. Only thing I said was... temp bans rather than perma bans.. and this due to the woefully tiny playerbase. I don't believe the game can survive the kind of thorough purge perma bans would give it. G1 BANNED THOUSANDS... and it solved nothing. When LO bought the game, they did mass UNBANNING, which, at the time was largely viewed favorably... not only because of false bans... but because it welcomed back a LOT of players the game NEEDED to survive. We just didn't need them back CHEATING... but 2nd and 3rd chances are HEALTHY for a small game. THUS, the issue isn't about solving the FTP bane of rerolling cheat accounts at all. PLUS, if TEMP KICKS only lasted, say 15min, 30 min, an hour... it undercuts the effort to continuously make new accounts and rage cheat on them in revenge.. never said people WON'T reroll. The whole POINT of TEMP bans is to get the anticheat to AGGRESSIVELY KICK on detection... and not require the lengthy staff intensive process of REVIEWING BANS FOR FAIRNESS which provides an unacceptable DELAY often, in past of MONTHS... before deleting someone's account. In this process... detection doesn't have to be as stringent, because the penalty isn't... People with false detections can petition support. At that point of escalating a support ticket... the LO staff can review if the detections are valid or not and help legit but pro players NOT trigger kicks. The whole point is to get cheaters BOOTED out of missions they are abusing as soon as they're detected as a DISCOURAGEMENT TO CHEATERS AND ENCOURAGEMENT TO THE LONGSUFFERING PLAYERBASE.. like a SPEED BUMP. We KNOW perma bans don't work... it just erodes the playerbase. Under YOUR scenario... a reroll account will STILL get detection and KICK... the ONLY thing he would bypass is an escalating time limit...but he would STILL be kicked for 15 min... as a cooling off period. Suppose he makes a new account.. suppose he makes 15 new accounts... or already has them... WHAT THEN? Log in-cheat-detetc... KICK..... Log in-cheat-detect... KICK... Log in-cheat-detect... KICK. THAT'S the incentive NOT to cheat. He can play on 1,000 accounts and be insta kicked ALL DAY, on detection. He can't AVOID being kicked on detection. He just loses the motivation to rage at the company for a permanent ban... and abuse the playerbase in his anger over a permanent lost account. We've ALWAYS had closet cheaters in this game... and always will. The difference is, we USED to have closet cheaters... and now, without an anticheat we have full on cheaters and raging cheaters. THIS makes the game unplayable for non-cheaters... who at least with some skill and a good team could DEFEAT closet cheaters because they cheated, but in moderation. With immediate TEMP KICK on detection... it would provide an INCENTIVE to cheaters (who we KNOW will NOT stop cheating) to at least TONE DOWN THEIR LEVEL OF CHEAT and the resultant overly aggressive playstyle (because they have no fear as their bot kills faster than humanly aiming) which, in my view, would provide a MORE FAIR GAME especially to newer, casual players. I'm not proposing anything RADICAL... in fact it's moderate in the extreme.. just a temporary discipline to promote fairness and discourage the kind of extreme cheating that cause players to stop playing. Right NOW what we have without any anticheat is FC level tryharding aggressiveness that is a playstyle which literally is overkill and exterminates the less effective (read: LEGIT) playerbase... and that is on ordinary missions... and the frequency is alarming due to Cheater Clans created in absence of ANY disciplinary policing mechanism at all.

People also tended to avoid the steam launcher and use game launcher from desktop or a number of privte launchers that tweaked settings and config files. It was conpetitive, people were changing xhair, removing the videos, etc to gain some fps advantage back in the day. Steam population stats were a fraction of the active players. I was there... we had Citadel, Han, Innova, Colby, Jericho. They had full districts.. sometimes 40-50 full districts.. major clans... it really did have glory days. This was followed by inreasingly aggressive permanent bans of THOUSANDS... I believe Tiggs lost her wig at one point and stepped in beyond Fairfight and began manual bans.. something like 14,000 were banned in one banwave just before Little Orbit bought the game. How differently the game would benow had the company simply listened to their playerbase who asked for TEMPORARY BANS... since many were questionable and unfair... and permanent bans simply created new raging hacker accounts that nearly killed the game. LO stepped in and did right by unbanning... but Battleye sucked, Fairfight did not. the problem with FFwas twofold... 1. permanent bans... and 2. Name & shame hostility of named announcements and Fairfight flames hate forum. We NEED a GOOD anticheat LIKE Fairfight... but just temp bans to discourage cheating, not kill the playerbase. I don't know what the max level of playerbase was.. some published reports say 1-3 million when G1 first opened it on Steam. But when I joined, easily... there were tens of thousands of ACTIVE players on multiple THRIVING servers.. and MANY were paying a monthly sub. Ask yourself logically... if there were only "the all-time peak is 6k" How the HELL did they manage to BAN so many THOUSANDS regularly over the years and STILL have a playerbase? Right off the bat your figure of 6k is refuted by the published SteamDB figure nearly 2x higher.. and you completely exclude the majority who launched from desktop or private launchers.. which easily would have been 2/3 of players esp then when computers and graphics cards ran like potatoes. That would give a reasonable estimate of 30,000-40,000 active players with easily 5x more accounts that played less actively. Maybe the published early articles exaggerated the 1-3million accounts.. the number of 6k is a dramatic undercount.

What's sad is the OP came to forums to warn of this... extremely game-breaking (extreme cheat)... and was derailed because when he went to Discord to draw needed attention to the problem, HE was kicked... for NAME & SHAME. It's at such level now that guys RECORD THEMSELVES CHEATING WHILE USING CHEATS (I posted one video...it's NOT NAME&SHAME when someone exposes themselves)... But I also posted a video someone else took of THIS VERY SAME EXTREME SPEED-WARP-TELEPORT cheat... the OP was warning about. I've seen it first-hand. It exists in game. The guy's not exaggerating. It's BAD. And too date... the cheaters are still doing it, you hear people call out in district chat SPEED HACK.... and not even a response from the company. LO, you are NEGLIGENT, and you NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE LEVEL OF CHEATING NOW. Show some respect for what's left of your playerbase. Enough is enough. I made report of one guy using it. The OP did. the guy who took the video did, it's on the video. And to date... NOTHING'S been done, not even an acknowledgement... just LO BAN'S THE GUY IN DISCORD FOR DARING TO SAY. Seriously, What the hell LO? FIX THE PROBLEM. WE NEED AN ANTICHEAT NOW... (one that works, not some experimental bs with a 10 year old SARD that has so many cheat work-arounds). When you get SERIOUS about your game... that's what will REVIVE it. As long as you treat it like abandonware without an anticheat... it plunges heedlessly toward full abandonment.. I don't know.. maybe that's what you want. I've been investing a bit because I want the game to succeed. I believe it can be revived... but your loyal playerbase is POWERLESS IF YOU DON'T LISTEN TO OUR CONCERNS. And I have NEVER advocated permanent bans... it's too easy for a guy to make a new account and come back rage hacking. But we DO need a SPEED BUMP to discourge out of control speeding (cheating). If people are DETECTED and KICKED repeatedly from game, for longer periods they'll tone down their blazing blatant useage and the game will be fairer, more playable, and more new player friendly. Now, if cheaters find work-arounds... your anticheat is subpar. Moreover... there should be atleast 1 GM... able to spectate unseen in-game at LEAST to follow people who either have frequent detections, or are accused in reports of seriously game-breaking cheats like the speedhack-port-warp thing. Those persons can be dealt with more harshly as a discouragement. The goal is to ENCOURAGE GOOD BEHAVIOR AND DISCOURAGE BAD BEHAVIOR.. Of course doing nothing will give you the opposite negative result.

Okay, but can you see the entire point you made was to derail the guys legit complaints? I mean basically you just blame HIM and negate everything he said. Cookie... I've seen this teleport, warping, speedhack.. a few times.. with diff names.. not sure how many of them are using it. It's not common. But I have seen it 2-3x a week. I've seen in it FC and on missions... (Citadel). Just yesterday I saw it.. was out of mission.. a guy whose name was in Russian letters (so I would have no way to copy for report).. was literally running faster than car speed on Financial while warping back and forth. Here's someone who caught it on video. I'm posting it because the staff really is negligent.. Yes they want to fix Matchmaking and do events.. and for their tiny staff that's about ALL they can do... but behind the scenes a literal deterioration of the game is taking place because cheaters don't fear bans without an anticheat. Yeah, I've matched a speed-warp-port hack guy before. We were WINNING and it pissed him off.. so he started these shenanigans and ported to EVERY member of the team and kept repeatedly wiping us.. because he comes at you so fast,, you can't humanly react. and you can't even hit him. My guess is, he warps faster than even aimbots can react. And the regular cheating is 1/3 of EVERY MISSION (yes, it's HARD to be sure it's actually cheating... but I'm trying to INFORM that cheating is now SO BLATANT you can't even DENY it. Since the LO staff doesn't play.. they don't see how teams with solid gold players... QUIT playing approx 1/3 of every mission. Fixing matchmaking... while this is going on... isn't helping. What's happening to this game in front of everyone's faces is going to KILL off the loyal playerbase. APB Reoladed cheat AIM + TRIGGER + VH + Cheat + Speedboost  2025

1. We can't create a perfect solution at this stage of deterioration. 2. Our playerbase is ridiculously too small even for appropriate matchmaking... if they start a banwave, the game for all intents and purposes won't exist.. and being F2P these guys will come roaring back ragehacking because they lost their accounts and farm back all the joker ticket legendaries they used to own. 3. Hack sites haven't had to worry about detections since Little Orbit took control. I doubt the APB hacker population is substantial enough to warrant the cost investment of having to continually update the cheats they make and sell. Moreover, the POINT of a functional anticheat is to DETECT.. if it fails at this, it is useless and a better anticheat should be used. 4. Temp kicks will serve the function of forcing cheaters to tone down their rage hacking. I'm being honest here... APB has ALWAYS had cheaters. But, when they KNEW they could be banned they played "sort of" within the rules... aka closet. After G1 went on intensive ban sprees.. literally banning THOUSANDS of accounts... the game never recovered. LO bought the game and promised an unbanwave which was, at the time, extremely popular because there WERE false detections, false bans... and THOUSANDS of unhappy people.. sadly most left the game permanently... LO's failed promises were the icing on the sad cake. 5. The point of Temp Kicks is to keep the game at a "reasonably fair" manageable level. You can beat a closet cheater, sometimes, with skill. No one can beat a rage cheater who's ballstothewalls. When a lot of players are hardcore cheating without bothering to hide... because there's no detection, no report, and no penalty... it severely compromises the exiting playerbase and we lose MORE people. Temp Kicks are a REMINDER that rage cheating won't be tolerated... and this is to PRESERVE the game's existence. There are a few players who are... for lack of a better term... psychopathic. They play to DESTROY everyone else's enjoyment using full bore rage cheats.. even when matched against new and clueless bronzes. These few guys make full gold teams quit out midmatch.. and are responsible for a huge drop in the playerbase. Because... why play... when there's no chance at all and you're just being repeatedly farmed like a fool? They don't care what you do to them, because a stock gun can perform miracles while rage-hacking... they can lose their accounts again and again and just make new ones... but... if there are tempkicks on detection which have an immediate consequence... to PLAY they will be forced to tone down their excessive, blatant, playerbase eradication mode playstyle. If they somehow BYPASS detection... there are few enough of them that cumulative reports should be looked into by GMs who can then SEE the blatant rage hacking IF THEY BOTHER TO LOG IN AND SPECTATE SAID RAGE CHEATERS.. They can then fine tune settings to kick those guys. If BANS actually worked... it would be a thing... but in the age of F2P and VPN... it doesn't. Temporary kicks on detection would act like a SPEED BUMP in the road to derail the reckless SPEEDERS racing too fast and derailing the game... who make loyal players quit playing.

The solution with a tiny game population isn't bans... well maybe for the exceptionally psychopathic game disruptors who are egregious. The solution isn't REMOVE an anticheat. and let things slide into uncontrollable deterioration.. The SOLUTION is TEMPORARY KICKS on detection. If someone is detected cheating, kick out of game for 15 min. If he's detected a 2nd time in 24 hrs... TEMP KICK out of game for 30 min. If he's detected a 3rd time in 24 hrs... TEMP KICK for 1 hour... and for every detection within the rest of the 24 hour time frame... every detection kick for 1 hour. ALL kicks to be reset following 24 hours without detection. No points. No lifetime bans. Just DISCIPLINE in game to preserve the integrity of it. That 1. Preserves the playerbase when too many use cheats.. and removes desire to rage cheat after losing their account on perma-ban. 2. Protects the accounts of people from false bans... as they can work with support to find out WHY they're being falsely detected.. 3. It PROTECTS THE GAME from cheaters by removing them when they cheat. Essentially it makes the whole game into a Purgatory District... but that's a LOT better than a rage cheating broken game that causes everyone BUT cheater's to quit.. and effectively prevents any new players. In short... it's a CHANCE to save the game... even if it brings back closeters who "judiciously" use cheats, and rarely.. because even THAT is closer to normal than the insane broken, predatory depravity the game is becoming. Another thing you might consider since population is far too small to bring back Threat Districts... is HIDE THREAT. Let it be an internal detection.

Spare us the gaslighting. A lot of us have matched people who are just the extreme blatant cheats to go along with the numerous wallhackers, triggerbotters, macroers, ESP guys. He's not lying. Weekends are the worst... the game is nearly unplayable if u don't have cheats or carried by a cheater. The EXTREME hackers.. are few.. maybe 2-4 guys.. but they're pretty unmistakeable. You can watch on your map... as they full speed warp and kill EVERYONE on the mission. It's out of control. This is on Citadel btw. yeah and FC is a hacker's paradise as well... but it's worse when the blatants play in missions... because they just farm until the district empties. Name & Shame has been a horribly ineffective policy that clearly protects the cheaters and frustrates the legit players. Come on, you don't even have an anticheat or a working report system. Look, the game has ALWAYS had cheaters. IN fact, the golden age had closet hackers. Closet hackers play very close to normal. We're way beyond that. When he's talking about these warping, porting, speedhackers... it's a whole new level and entire teams of golds quit out and stop playing. While it isn't the role of the playerbase to POLICE the game... Blaming the guy who mentions something egregious happening to deteriorate the game should have SPCT/GM/VOLUNTEERS logging into the damn game... to spectate the guys who multiple people have reported... with zero result. If not, then at this point and level of failure... just add proprietary cheats to the game for a sub and delete accounts detected using"other companies cheats." At least then the game would be remotely fair and playable... right now it's flushing down the cosmic commode.. and so many players just give up and AFK the mission or quitout and leave you against RIDICULOUS level of cheating. Why would any sane company allow a handful of selfish psychopaths ruin their game, make their loyal players miserable and quit playing... not to mention eradicate any new players trying the game for the first time. You think they don't see the guys insta-porting to objectives or warping out of the line of fire while never missing... or speed hacking so fast they kill everyone on the team, at different distances... in seconds? We ALL see it. Some might deny to hide THEIR cheats... but anyone with half a brain who wanted their game to thrive would log in and see for themselves the DAMNED obvious. This is why game reviews are all saying the Devs don't care... not only that... their volunteers are clueless and also don't care.. and aggressively attack and blame the critics. It's well beyond some hackers now. It's hard core out of control hacking to a level that's downright abusive to the longsuffering playebase. But yeah.. punish the guys who get frustrated when report does nothing and "name and shame." It's not even fair to call it "name & shame." It's friendly warning to other players after they've seen the degree of insanity.. giving fair warning about outrageous cheaters to beware of. The only SHAME belongs to Matt Scott and Little Orbit for treating this game and the playerbase like abandoned dog POOO.. and ofc defending all the outrageous cheaters.. and I'm not even talking about the closeters. MATEK94 x RAGEKINGS VS KOVAAKSCHAMPIONS DONKEY-BEARDED, TURBAN-WEARING, SANDALS WEARER, MONKEY LEGS.-  399 views  1 day ago

You're so wrong... GamersFirst has confirmed that APB: Reloaded has over 3 million user accounts. The game sees between 25,000 and 30,000 active players every day. APB: Reloaded Surpasses 3 Million Players Following Steam Launch

So your entire response is... don't give a damn... don't bother. The decisions they make are based on the people telling them what they want to hear.. but it's adversely impacting a lot of us who never say anything... since it doesn't matter... that is my 2 cents. In my view the game could still be saved, and turned around... it's not too late, but if LO has given up... then our last hope is they leave as publishers.. and hand over the reins to a company with more resources and experience. The WORST thing they can do is let incompetent half-patooties screw the game code.

1. You spend inordinate server downtime with this stupid matchmaking"fix." It's not a FIX. Putting in a WORKING ANTICHEAT is a matchmaking FIX. Bringing back ESCALATION is a Matchmaking FIX. But... forcing players into missions makes playing in an open world impossible and turns the entire thing into an ARCADE GAME... which is really BAD. 2. Maybe your tiny dev team thinks "doing something" to the game code is an accomplishment. It's not. You're simply breaking the game further... and eventually, even your tiny loyal core population will vanish. Look at the HISTORY of this game... things that were POPULAR were having a working anticheat. I realize banning your tiny playbase is self-destructive... so just do TEMP KICKS for 15-30-45 min. per detection... then reset at end of day.. at the very LEAST it will knock down the flagrant rage hacking that goes on, daily, interminably, without any anticheat or GM presence. The game ALWAYS had a core of cheaters. Who knows.. by now maybe 20%. Listen, when cheaters are FORCED to "closet" essentially hide their hacks... the game was popular and playable... not so much nowadays... you have wall hacks, warping, speed hacks, smooh aim, not to mention macroers.. just an absurd, out of control situation.. and ZERO oversight. Why expect cheaters to "behave" when there's nothing and no one to stop them? Of course the logical conclusion is preventing any new players or legit plyers from staying. It's also RIDICULOUS to put the burden of proof on the playerbase to POLICE the cheaters in your game with a WEAK report system... and no staff to sift through. REMEMBER when LO bought this game, they wanted to remedy the wrongs of false bans and toxic hackusations. Now you went to the OPPOSITE EXTREME... and created a game with hardly anyone left playing.. new, casual and legitimate players are treated like DOG POO,,, kicked, TK'd, shit talked... treated like toxic, unwanted trash.. and EVERYBODY seems to love the hackers on their teams.. because.. ya know... it takes a hacker to BEAT a hacker. Imagine thinking a hacker streaming (yes, all hack sites advertise no visibility of hack UI on the stream) will bring new players to this game... while the core of this game is to EXTERMINATE NEW PLAYERS with the most vulgar toxicity, hostility and ostracism. WHAT a DELUSIONAL company. Your company never even bothers to ask WHY the game is in this condition... but HEY... let's put in a ridiculous "matchmaking FIX" that forces players OUT of the open world and into a gimicky arcade instance (essentially an instance because matches are often ported to basically EMPTY unalive districts) and CHANGE the game structure COMPLETELY.. while keeping the SAME PROBLEMATIC mismatch matchmaking... because, let's face it... doesn't matter if a there's a gold pro, elite player on a team... a wallhacker, aimbotter, full auto macroer will still win... and definitely will screw the game for lower ability teams. We ALL know by now.. hackers aren't always gold... there are NUMEROUS reroll, low lvl accounts where trainees, bronzes, silvers perform MIRACLES... TRUST ME... the stupid Matchmaking fix FORCING players into matches will NOT make matches fairer. What will make matches FAIRER... is when you can escalate and bring 10 people to help a couple bronzes unfairly matched against a team of max golds... and a WORKING ANTICHEAT that temp kicks BLATANTS on detection. People want to play in an OPEN WORLD... where they can roam around, chit chat with friends... not be ported into essentially empty and dead, arcade-style instances. STOP BREAKING THE GAME DESIGN. YOUR COMPANY IS THE WORST THING TO EVER HAPPEN TO THIS GREAT GAME.

Being rickrolled, repeatedly, outplayed, tk'd, shot at by own team, trashed talked by own team for NOT being a tryhard gold or cheater... and farmed by literal cheaters, macroers, exploiters, and toxic tryharders... who want nothing more than 25-30 kills per match... is how we lost THOUSANDS of players. If people CAN'T compete... they go away. For the game to THRIVE and SURVIVE... there has to be some grace extended to the newer/weaker playerbase... and I don't mean reroll cheats. No one is taking them under wing or teaching them... the game is so hardcore toxic... they literally tell you to go away, to uninstall... to fuck off. They only want their core 200 gold players... and this is all that's left of the game. Merged. Agree. Segregation was, way back in the day.. the beginning of a host of problems. The escalation is actually a shining improvement... but the weighting of the matches needs work. Back in the day... your threat wasn't as easily lost, which removed some of the tryhardism.. and when very low players met with a rank 10 gold... they would get like 4 guys to help versus the rank 10 gold. Alas, matchmaking is now unrecognizable since it's original system, which was actually great. In any event, fight club for the longest was the domain of the hardcore cheaters/tryharders... and now.. all that's left of the districts is the same.. the slower paced.. play with lower/newer toons... letting them get objectives, giving them clothes/cars, inviting them to clans... is long gone. The game expresses just sheer HATRED of newer/lesser skilled players... literally exterminating them. And then there's absentee Mat Scott.. doing jack turd nothing... listening to the tryharders whisper in his ear... about how to make the game they way THEY want... and not the way it was when it attracted tens of thousands of REGULAR players.

Woot, patcher updating and working now... Can't wait to play dedgaem