MattScott

Hi all, Since we took over, I've been pretty vocal about the F2P implementation of APB. Aside from reducing ARMAS prices and balancing the value of G1C, I have always felt that we also needed to finish what Reloaded started. The changes to the Joker Store were a step in the right direction, but effective Wednesday, September 18th, we will start giving out Joker Tickets as rewards for opposed missions. For the longest time, players have only been able to earn JTs from events, Daily Activities and Fight Club. Now regular Free-to-play players will have a repeatable method for earning permanent items within the primary method of gameplay. As you can imagine, we're approaching this fairly conservatively, so please know that all of these values are subject to change as we collect more data. Here is how this system will work: 1) Regular Mission Districts Opposed missions in Financial and Waterfront will offer a random chance to win from 0-10 Joker Tickets. You need to participate and complete the mission to be eligible, but you do not have to win. There is a Daily Cap to how many Regular Mission JTs you can earn, which is based on your highest threat level reached that day. The Regular Mission District Daily Caps are: Training - 0 Green - 100 Bronze - 100 Silver - 150 Gold - 200 This means that you can cap out at Silver, but if you reach Gold then you can earn 50 more that day. 2) Weapon Prototype Districts In addition to the Regular Missions, players can also receive 1-10 Joker Tickets from doing opposed missions in our Weapon Prototype Districts. This doesn't sound like a big difference from Regular Mission Districts, but during our internal development, we were able to rack up tickets a lot faster. Weapon Prototype Districts have their own Daily Cap and track the JTs earned separately from the JTs earned in Regular Mission Districts. The Daily Cap for these districts is a flat 200 for everyone. Just to make things interesting, we have two extra rewards that can sometimes pop up if you haven't reached your Daily Cap in the Weapon Prototype Districts: Weapon Prototype Boxes. Players can open these to reveal a temporary random Legendary for them to try with limited ammo. A very rare 250 one-time JT reward. This wont count against your Daily Cap. Once you have reached your Daily Cap, you can still earn Weapon Prototype Boxes. 3) Future Premium Bonus We're going to watch the numbers, but sometime in the future we would like to add a bonus for players with Premium. This will be a guaranteed amount of JTs per mission that is added to the random reward. There are still more changes coming. We have a new design to address the gambling issues with Joker Mystery Boxes, and a potential new way for Legendaries to be collected. But rest assured that we will continue adding more permanent character items to the Joker Store and more cosmetic account level items in ARMAS. In fact, you'll see some new ARMAS items in this week's patch as well. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, This is an issue that we are watching very carefully, and from my perspective, there are multiple angles to consider. 1) I absolutely agree that dangerous gambling mechanics should not be available to kids. The problem I see is creating good laws that clearly defining bad gambling practices so publishers can make the proper changes. There is a world of difference between the Belgium law and the Netherlands law. One is very straight forward and easy to comply with. The other is a vague mess. Let me give you some examples: - Is any form of purchasable randomized reward gambling? Is there an acceptable payout threshold that makes it okay? - What if the rewards are not tradeable or sellable to other players? Does gambling require the element of "recoupment" if you hit the jackpot? - What if the randomized reward boxes are gathered via gameplay in addition to being purchasable? Are they still gambling? Lawmakers need to establish a clear set of guidelines. They are going to directly affect an entire industry of companies, jobs, and players. Hopefully they wont drag us into another Article 13 mess. 2) I feel that parents have a responsibility to monitor their child's activities. It is impossible for a child to get a credit card, so if they have access to money for these systems, then it is because an adult gave it to them at some point. Also APB is an M rated game and it should stay that way. The Adults Only rating is something altogether different. Prolonged sex or violence and real money gambling - not gambling-style practices. I'm not sure how much further we can go to subsidize the parent's role here. 3) Replacing these mechanics takes time - if it can be done at all. I don't feel that players completely understand the financial impact that this new legislation will have on game companies. Not all games have monetization mechanics yet that they can survive on if their loot boxes are removed. So I also think players need to be prepared for many games to simply shutdown when this eventual legislation passes. Perhaps that is okay. But I'm guessing that many players will be upset when their favorite, smaller game doesn't make it. For APB, we are committed to making the game a safe place to play - including removing loot box mechanics. We have spent months designing a replacement system that still preserves the fun aspects of chasing, collecting and selling Legendary weapons. It has taken a lot of brainstorming and work on our part, and it will require a significant level of development that we have to accomplish alongside the Engine Upgrade and other priorities. Even then, our new strategy carries a lot of economic risk that may or may not damage the game long term. Ultimately my preference is to move slowly and work with lawmakers on a reasonable timeline that we can all meet together. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, Waterfront has always been short two contacts. So while it is not ideal, this is where these contacts were designed to go long before we took over. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Still running very heavy on tickets. Not sure why the 13th through the 16th had so many submitted, but we're working through those dates very slowly. There are now 1160 total tickets and 880 tickets that have not yet had a response, which is down from last time. Today we are answering tickets from August 16th, which means that we are a couple days under a month response time. If your ticket is older than August 16th, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status. Thanks, Matt

Thanks for the heads up. We are in the process of taking down that package now.

Hi all, Since not everyone checks our forums or the Steam forums, we have taken down the Fallen Earth Marketplace. This is just to make sure that no one accidentally spends money on items or subscriptions without realizing that the game is coming offline soon. Additionally, we cancelled all Fallen Earth subscriptions so they didn't renew for players anymore. All players have been given Commander now till the servers go offline. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, I can understand your frustration. This effort to clean up the achievements was requested by a number of FE Achievement Hunters so they don't end up with less 100% on Steam forever. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, It's been an "all hands on deck" week in Customer Support with members of QA and other departments helping out. We are working hard to bring these numbers back down, but the volume of tickets has been steadily increasing. There are now 1208 total tickets and 990 tickets that have not yet had a response. Today we are answering tickets from August 13th, which means that we are at 24 day response time. If your ticket is older than August 13th, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, As part of cleaning things up to take the game offline, I would like to also remove the unobtainable achievements from Steam. Right now it appears that Achievement Hunters cannot 100% the game, because not all of the achievements work. However, there are 559 total achievements in Steam. So I need your help to let us know which achievements are broken. Here is the list I have so far. As more are reported, I'll update this post: - Down to a Science - Get yourself out of trouble using the following Science items. - 0-20 (wrong items are set and cant be used by player) - Prince of Whales - Win 100, 500, 1000, 10000, 50000, 100000, 250000, 500000 Chips (blackjack mini game was removed) - King of Pain - Lose 100, 500, 1000, 10000, 50000, 100000, 250000, 500000, 750000, 1000000, 2000000 Chips (blackjack mini game was removed) - Woods or Wires (requires missing content) - Monkey Business (requires missing content) - Northern Exposure (requires missing content) - Forest Ranger (requires missing content) - Embry Scavenge Expert (requires missing content) - Watchtower Scavenge Expert (requires missing content) - New Flagstaff Scavenge Expert (requires missing content) - Trader's Flat Scavenge Expert (requires missing content) - Deadfall Scavenge Expert (requires missing content) Let me know. Thanks, Matt

No. The forums will stay here so we can post updates on the new version.

Hi all, This is a bit bittersweet for me. Prior to September 22nd, we will be launching the first all new event in honor of the 10 year anniversary for Fallen Earth. We hope that players will enjoy what we have planned, because this will now be their last chance to play the current game with their friends. I'm sad to announce that effective 10/2 (or there about based on when the event goes live), we will be taking the Fallen Earth servers offline. Unfortunately after weeks of monitoring things and getting players feedback, I have determined the current state of Fallen Earth just isn't sustainable in its current form. You guys have been very tolerant, but the player experience is terrible right now. It's laggy and buggy. Servers crash quite often, and stacking is still disabled due to exploits. I don't blame the player base for the low concurrency numbers. You need a better game to play. For clarity, I am still committed to the new version of the game that we have been working on. However we are still very early into development, so there isn't a timeline I can provide yet. I want to personally thank everyone for their support over the last 17 months. Fallen Earth is still one of my favorite projects. I look forward to giving it the proper attention it deserves. EDIT: We will be turning on Commander for everything till the servers are turned off. Sincerely, Matt

Hi all, On October 2nd 2019, we will be releasing character and clan names that haven't been accessed in over a year. In order to preserve your names, just log into your account on APB Reloaded during the next 31 days. It's that simple. Just log into your account. For those with multiple accounts, you may want to double check that you logged into has your favorite character or clan names so there are no surprises later. If you don't manage to log in, then it's no problem. Everything will still be there, but your character names will be changed and we will flag you for a free name change. I appreciate everyone's help with this. We have a lot of work to get through in the next couple months, and this is being done to prep the large world consolidation between Jericho and Citadel that I have previously mentioned as part of this post: Please pass this announcement on to other players of APB Reloaded so we can spread the word. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, Unit Game are a well funded startup in Hong Kong led by a long time fan of APB. I believe the company was created just to pursue this new opportunity for them. This wasn't actually a quote from me - just the press release. Unit Game added the description of their company at the bottom, so I can't speak to that line or examples. I recognize this is one of the more oddball parts of the deal. It was critical to me that Little Orbit be able to deliver on what we promised and that the players not have to go through another change in management. So we negotiated to keep control and continue developing APB Reloaded. We have all rights to expand the plot, characters, locations, etc, and everything we do is considered "canon". Some of the ramp up in updates are being driven by preparation for the Engine Upgrade. August was very busy, and September/October are going to be worse, so I decided to host a stream on the Little Orbit Twitch channel to answer questions from the community on September 8th at 10AM PST. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, Good notes. This location is never visited again outside the opening to Chapter 1. We have been play testing it quite a bit, and the bottle necks in movement provide some good early challenges. In my opinion, these two missions you reference are heavily populated tutorial missions with lots of AI controlled units that require room to move around. With Bridges of Branholme, we have a lot less units - just your small squad of Mercenaries and Physicians and some enemies. For scale, the map for Mission 1 should feel more similar to the Magick City of Gariland map that shows up early in FFT. Thanks, Matt

Dear Backers, Today we celebrate our 2 year anniversary on the project. It's already been quite a journey for myself and the team, and I want to take another moment to thank everyone for continuing to support us as we finish Unsung Story. Change in Update Content After last month's update, I got a lot of feedback not to spoil any more of the missions or story elements publicly. Some backers also said that monthly updates were not necessary any more given where the project is at. Moving forward, I am going to start trimming down the updates to not give as many details away, but I'm still going to post on a monthly basis so we can keep the community up to date. General Update In July we made many revisions to the Storyboard. Most of this was merging cutscenes and dialog to streamline things. All of the whiteboxes remained the same, so we were able to keep sending those out to keep the concept art pipeline moving along. We finished and imported all of the 3D geometry for the 7 missions in Chapter 1, and several cut scenes are now working. In August, we will be focusing on implementing more UIs for the start of the game, character management, inventory management, vendors, etc. We will also be working on building out vfx art, animations, and engineering for more of the abilities on the job tree. And we need to finalize the 3D character art. I'll share some of this work as we finish. But the most important topic for this month is our next major milestone: Finishing Chapter 1. Releasing Chapter 1 to the Backers Based on our progress, I feel like the project as a whole could benefit from a chapter by chapter release on PC. In order to do this, we have broken up the job tree so that we can release seven jobs with Chapter 1, seven more jobs with Chapter 2, etc. You can see the job tree from my June update here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/littleorbit/unsung-story-tale-of-the-guardians/posts/2524318 The jobs for the Chapter 1 release will be: Mercenary, Physician, Archer, Guardian, Elementalist, Sage, and Sharpshooter. This covers all the first and second tier jobs in the tree. The races for the Chapter 1 release will be: Horned and Humans. We will hold back the male and female Singed race for the Chapter 3 release. I don't yet have a release date for Chapter 1, but I want to do this for a number of reasons: The first and most obvious reason is that I believe there is a large portion of the community that would love to get their hands on something sooner than later. This project has a long controversial history. I want to get the backers something to play so they can finally see the results of their Kickstarter funding. The second reason is that in a project this larger, the sooner we start beta testing and getting feedback the better. And lastly, this approach will allow us to eventually release the final more polished Chapter 1 through Early Access to start building up steam (excuse the pun) with reviewers and new fans for the full release next year. More details to come. As always, we appreciate your continued patience and support. Sincerely, Matthew Scott

Hi there, Yes. In May 2018, we took over GamersFirst.com, and it didn't make sense to keep running the Unsung Story forums on a small separate WordPress site. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, Totally agreed. I am hoping to show more of this in October's update. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, We are still in early talks with the guys from Epic about their store, so I can't really share how a deal would work. However Unsung Story simply cannot be exclusive to them. It needs to be made available in all the channels PlayDek originally advertised. I'm sure once Epic opens up to more non-exclusive content, we will support it. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, I think this is a pretty broad question. There are 20+ jobs (classes) that your character units can be, but those aren't specific characters. There are also lots of Story Characters. Some are playable and some are not. But we haven't revealed a lot of them yet, so backers may not know yet which one they like the most. Can you be a bit more specific on your question? Thanks, Matt

Hi there, The numbers are mostly theorycrafting at this point, and very much subject to change based on play testing. This month's blog walks through the Player Hub which has a lot of the functionality you're asking about in terms of leveling up characters and class changes. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, I recommend opening a support ticket at http://support.gamersfirst.com. If you can supply the email that you registered your PayPal purchase with, then we can look it up in BackerKit (which was transitioned to us when we took over), and they can get you all setup. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Big jump in tickets due to several factors: - We had a large ban wave for a non-approved launcher. - We did the Nekrova merge which had issues for some players. - We continue to gain old players back who have issues with authentication or passwords. In the month of August we have gained more than 55 average concurrent users per day which adds up to more than 1000 returning players. There are now 1199 total tickets and 1015 tickets that have not yet had a response. Today we are answering tickets from August 8th, which means that we are at 23 day response time. I recognize these stats aren't good. We have added some temporary resources to Customer Support to try and get the response time back down. If your ticket is older than August 8th, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, I have been on vacation, but the Newsletter and blog should be up by tomorrow. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, If someone wants to contact apb-r.ru and let them know to take down the link, they are usually very helpful. I just don't speak Russian. Thanks, Matt

We sold the APB Brand and IP to Unit Game, but retained all rights related to APB Reloaded.