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.