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MattScott

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Posts posted by MattScott

  3. Posted

    Hey everyone,

     

    Apologies - I missed a couple weeks.

    We have been super busy internally prepping the next couple of big releases.

    Totally my fault for letting this drop off my radar.

     

    STATS for 7/18/2025:
     

    Oldest ticket: July 10

    Total Tickets in the system: 645

    Unassigned Tickets: 64

    Assigned Unsolved Tickets: 193

    Pending Tickets: 36 (awaiting player response)

     

    STATS for 7/25/2025:
     

    Oldest ticket: July 16

    Total Tickets in the system: 561

    Unassigned Tickets: 57

    Assigned Unsolved Tickets: 219

    Pending Tickets: 27 (awaiting player response)

     

    Thanks, Matt

     

    • Thanks 1

  4. Posted

    Hi everyone,

    I want to let everyone know that we are aware of how awful the EU networking has been.
    For the last week, our primary network provider has been getting hammered into the ground by very large (1.5T) DDoS attacks.
    They aren't the only ones. Most of Europe and other regions have also been hit with these large scale packet floods, and it has affected a lot of sites.

    While Little Orbit has Anti DDoS protection that we route all of our game traffic through.
    But currently if our primary network provider's network gets saturated with attacks, then we still go offline.

    I am finalizing a new upstream provider with much larger capacity, better routes throughout Europe, and end to end Anti DDoS protection.
    I am hoping that we can get this new solution in place over the coming days to help stabilize the game.

    Thanks for bearing with us,
    Matt

    • Like 3
    • Thanks 2

  8. Posted

    Hi everyone,

     

    STATS for 6/13/2025:
     

    Oldest ticket: June 13 <-- NO BACKLOG!

    Total Tickets in the system: 640

    Unassigned Tickets: 0

    Assigned Unsolved Tickets: 215

    Pending Tickets: 64 (awaiting player response)


    If you have created a customer support ticket and not received a response, I encourage you to check your spam filter or reply to the current ticket and ask for an update.


    Thanks, Matt

    • Thanks 2

  9. Posted

    Hi everyone,

     

    STATS for 6/6/2025:
     

    Oldest ticket: May 27

    Total Tickets in the system: 528

    Unassigned Tickets: 140

    Assigned Unsolved Tickets: 428

    Pending Tickets: 258 (awaiting player response)


    There was a sizable jump in trouble tickets this week due to the network outage.
    We have fixes for players unable to get into the game, so I hope to clear those fairly rapidly.


    Thanks, Matt

    • Thanks 1

  11. Posted

    Hi everyone,


    Yesterday, we took the game down for standard maintenance and to switch Anti DDoS providers.

    This was supposed to be a pretty simple procedure... but like all things APB, it quickly unraveled and turned into a cluster.

    Our fiber connection in Amsterdam has had some issues, and it went out midstream.
    They got in back online, but an issue with other hardware prevented the EU World from fully functioning.
    We sorted out those issues, only to have the optic fiber connection go bad again.


    At this point, we have worked with our Amsterdam host to replace all the hardware giving us issues. The goal is get EU back online as soon as possible.


    To be clear, no player data was lost. The outage has been a cascade of fixing underlying network issues that were missed when we put Amsterdam online, or came up during our Anti DDoS cutover. I'll give updates here until that happens.

     

    Then over the next week, we will replace all of the other hardware that has been not been 100%.

     

    To be continued..

     

    Thanks,
    Matt

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 8

  18. Posted

    Hi everyone,

     

    Here are the end of Friday CS stats for this week:

    STATS for 4/18/2025:
     

    Oldest ticket: April 5 (this is close to being a firm number now that players have had a couple weeks to move their ticket over from the old system)

    Total Tickets in the system: 245

    Unassigned Tickets: 85

    Assigned Unsolved Tickets: 156

    Pending Tickets: 94 (awaiting player response)


    Thanks, Matt

    • Thanks 1

  19. Posted

    Hi everyone,

     

    I'm late posting these, but they are the end of Friday CS stats for this week:

    STATS for 4/11/2025:
     

    Oldest ticket: April 1

    Total Tickets in the system: 235 (down by more than 115 tickets!)

    Unassigned Tickets: 130 (this went up slightly as more people submit new tickets)

    Assigned Unsolved Tickets: 104 (down from last week)

    Pending Tickets: 84 (awaiting player response)


    Thanks, Matt

    • Thanks 1

  20. Posted

    Hi everyone,

     

    It's been a while since I've done something like this, but in light of where we are at in CS, I think the community could benefit from a bit more transparency.

     

    Simply put - Customer Support is a mess.

     

    We tried switching to Zoho months ago, and instead of making things better, they got worse. It appears some sort of glitch in the setup of our queues caused specific types of tickets to get siphoned out of our main dashboard. It took us a bit to figure out that hundreds of players weren't being addressed properly, and once we did, we found significant bugs in the new system overall.

     

    So at the end of March we switched back to Zendesk. It's expensive, but it works.

     

    You guys should know that switching customer support systems isn't something we take likely. Each time we do it, the team has to backup all the history and evidence and load it up in a side tool so that we can look it all up without referring back to the original system.


    If you haven't already seen the message posted at the end of March, here is it again:
     

    Quote

     

    Hello everyone!

     

    We wanted to let you know that we’ve officially moved our support system from Zoho Desk to Zendesk. This change was made to provide a smoother, more efficient support experience for all of you!

     

    If you've opened a ticket through Zoho and still need help, please reply directly to your/our last response in that email thread. This will ensure we can continue assisting you without any delays.

     

    From now on, all new support tickets should be submitted through our Zendesk platform. We’re excited about this upgrade and appreciate your patience during this transition.

     

    Thank you for your continued support!

     

     

    IMPORTANT: If you haven't already, please reply directly to your/our last response by email. This will trigger our system to pull proper information over from our backup for your ticket.

     

    Until further notice, I'm going to start posting weekly stats on where Customer Service is at.

     

    DISCLAIMER: This week's stats look a lot better than they really are. Many players still haven't replied to their old Zoho ticket email. I'm guessing as word gets out and players read this thread, the number of tickets will jump up dramatically. Also, the oldest ticket starts the day we reactivated Zendesk. It's not the actual date of the oldest ticket because the original ticket date was lost in the transition.

     

    TL;DR: If you want your ticket addressed, now is the perfect time to reply and bump yourself up in the queues.

     

    STATS for 4/4/2025:
     

    Oldest ticket: March 26

    Total Tickets in the system: 352

    Unassigned Tickets: 114

    Assigned Unsolved Tickets: 165

    Pending Tickets: 35

     

    Thanks, Matt

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1

  21. Posted

    4 hours ago, BlatMan said:

    No shit. They purposely put that message to be vague. They could have shown the generic ban code, or even better, not banned the account at all and instead generate a customer support ticket to look at it. I thought that's what they were going to do since they seem iffy about banning players to begin with.

     

    Come on LO, at least be consistent. Then again, I guess random is technically consistent if the result is always random.

    We had a localization issue which displayed the wrong message when an account was banned. The incorrect message told the player to contact customer support. But the last thing we need is everyone contacting customer support and overloading those folks. This is why Mage worded his post the way he did.

  24. Posted

    For the record, I completely own the situation with console. I feel bad about it. I've been talking about console upgrades for years. I was excited to show PS4 running day/night when I posted that video on Twitter.

     

    When we got involved with APB, it was a simple plan:

    - Remove Joker Mystery Boxes and make Legendaries accessible through Joker Tickets

    - Finish APB 2.1 with upgraded lighting, 64-bit compatibility and better performance

    - Upgrade the anti-cheat

    - Finish the Battle Royal mode that would add some spice to the game

    - Add 2 new contacts, new clothing, new guns, and a new car

    - Upgrade console once we had PC merged onto the console code base

     

    Unfortunately nearly every part of that plan was all flawed. And it took us more than 3 years of wasted dev time to realize that.

     

    These are painful lessons as a CEO. It wasn't for a lack of trying.

     

    20 months ago, we threw away most of that plan because it wasn't working. We started over from the APB 1.20 code base. Unfortunately the current situation with console was the casualty of having to start over.

    Thanks,
    Matt

    • Like 6
    • Thanks 7

  25. Posted

    I've seen the couple of requests for controller support. I'm adding that to our "todo" list. I know it will help console players who are transitioning, and it will make the eventual port of 1.30 back to console easier.

    @apdnoo asked a lot of good questions, so I'm going to try and go through them one by one here.

     

    8 hours ago, apdnoo said:

    1. Since I do have multiple accounts, is it possible for me to actually merge all of them into 1 GamersFirst account? I have around 5-6 Characters spread across my accounts and I wouldn't want to have 1 GamersFirst account for each Console account I've had.

    You can merge multiple console accounts down to a single PC account. We even raised the f2p cap on the PC account so that you can merge in more than the default 2 character slots. There are account theft / security issues involved in merging PC accounts which is why we dont current allow that.
     

    8 hours ago, apdnoo said:

    2. Will we get some sort of compensation for this happening? I mean we are losing the platform we've been playing on. It was fair for you guys to not do something about this since we technically were 1 Engine Upgrade ahead of PC, while PC had the new content like newly released Weapons, the new car, clothing etc. But now that Console is being shut down what would we get once we first tune in on PC?

    This is an active conversation internally, and it's something I want to do. We just haven't come up with what the reward will be yet. Stay tuned.
     

    8 hours ago, apdnoo said:

    3. Personally I've spent more than 400$ on my account, buying account bound weapons and packs such as Juggernaut Pack, Revelations Pack, Key To The City Pack and even some Jokerboxes since they are still around there. I've read that there is some loyalty rewards thing going on, and would my spending count towards it?

    We tried to pull across as much as is technically feasible. These are still older systems on the backend, so there were a couple limitations. I honestly have no idea if the spending from console counts towards PC loyalty rewards at this point. I'm checking on that.
     

    8 hours ago, apdnoo said:

    4. I am also a symbol designer and sometimes make clothes too, if I switch to PC, would all of it go to PC without any issues or will there be a level of distortion and make me have to rework on the designs on my Avatar, Symbols and Vehicles.

    In theory, all the symbols should work. However, we've noticed in the past there were some distortion issues between console and PC. My guess is that the 2.0 console code had slightly different math for projecting the symbols. So there is a decent likelihood that there will be some rework necessary. Honestly, I would love to get your feedback once you log in and check things out so we can get a sense how things came across. This entire process had to happen relatively fast for business reasons between PLAION and Little Orbit. We didn't get to test things as much as I would have liked.

     

    8 hours ago, apdnoo said:

    5. Will we get the opportunity for us to get past event items/titles? Like I've pointed out before, we didn't get around 5-6 years worth of updates, so I'd like to know if we will be given the opportunity to get those.

    Generally, we've been stuck recycling events due to the focus being on Matchmaking and Cross-District play. But I'll make sure to highlight this for the event team so that we make sure older rewards are offered as we go forward.
     

    8 hours ago, apdnoo said:

    6. Would there be a day where you guys would revive the game back on consoles, but with the new Generation Hardware? I mean it's obvious that I will get slandered on by whatever diehard PC player around here with them saying console is a mistake or whatever. But at the same time console is just more accessible to the community, while also giving the chance that others from there may spend a lot more compared to PC players, since you also said that "Console users spends as much if not more than PC players". I guess it'll take a lot of effort to do rerelease APB on Consoles, but at least there wouldn't be the same drawbacks you guys had with working on 2 different codebases, and would ultimately make the game available for everyone.

    I'll go on record saying that I would love to release a clean, updatable version of APB on console. The 2.0 version from Reloaded was a mess. I've said it before, but it bears repeating, I have no idea how Microsoft and Sony approved it, because any changes we wanted to submit required a full "resubmission". Ignoring all of that, the current district setup for APB is problematic for low populations in general. We've seen that with both Xbox and Playstation 4. The gold, silver, bronze threat system really breaks down if you can't fill even a single district.

    Having said that, the 1.30 64-bit upgrade was a big step in supporting modern hardware. All of our upcoming matchmaking changes are aimed at fixing some of the backend issues. And cross-district matchmaking will take that a step further. If we were to add controller support at that point, then there wouldn't be too much left to do in order to resubmit back to Microsoft and Sony.

    • Like 4
    • Thanks 2
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