MattScott

We are going to be soliciting feedback from players to rework the overall naming conventions across ARMAS, the Joker Store, and regular guns.

Hi all, Sorry for the late explanation. This was intentional, although we need to adjust a couple things. Edit: Nitronik beat me to the link. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, A couple quick notes: Some players reached out to me asking if we are still going to release the new content tomorrow, and I realize now that I wasn't clear enough in the blog. These new contacts will launch with the Engine Upgrade - not in July. These are Tier 3 contacts, so they only have 10 levels. When evaluating their backstory and the possibly rewards, regardless of what G1 had planned, they just didn't feel like Tier 4 contacts. Thanks, Matt

Bonjour, Serait-il possible pour vous de nous donner plus de détails sur le problème que vous rencontrez afin que nous puissions le résoudre? Je vous remercie, Matt

Hi all, We are looking at this issue. The problem is that we are using an extremely old version of Vivox which is no longer supported and requires custom servers. Once we upgrade the console builds of APB, we can move to their newer solution. For now the network team is troubleshooting to see what the issue is. I’ll post an update once we know more. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, Servers are back online. We are investigating the outage. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, We are back online. Thanks, Matt

Yes. There will be new ranks to accompany the new contacts.

Hi everyone, Here is my weekly Customer Service update. We are now at 594 total tickets (unsolved). There was an uptick again this week on new tickets being sent in. There are 365 tickets that have not been touched (untouched). This is down from last week, which is moving in the right direction. Today we are answering tickets from July 12th, so we continue to sit at a 2 week response time. If your ticket is older than July 12th, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status. Thanks, Matt

Fair point as usual.

Hi all, For the record, we get daily analytics from /report. We had a different process until June when Easy Anti Cheat launched. Now /reports go directly into Easy Anti Cheat and trigger extra client inspection and a number of other items. The /report system itself is rather complicated. We don't weight additional reports from the same account to the same account. We also reduce the weight of new account reports. And we reduce the weight of false reports, but over time all reports lose weight and "fall off". So in Seedy's case, he doesn't need to do a thing. Things will self correct. With respect to dethreating, griefing, and AFK players, we have struggled. None of our previous efforts have made much of a difference. However in the last 2 weeks, we have adopted a new strategy which utilizes a combination of behavior analytics, invisible GM reports, and player reports. We sent out a significant set of warnings to players violating this policy. Many got a 1 day ban. That seemed to have a much better impact overall on the issues, so we will stick with that procedure. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I believe this issue was fixed in last night’s patch. Thanks, Matt

I promise to post more complete info on the Weapon Balance. Let’s not get too hung up on the ‘current balance’ verbiage. Nothing is going to happen in a vacuum.

Hi all, Max rank players will have the new contact automatically unlocked, but they will need to play missions to level them up and unlock the rewards. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, My July blog is up here: https://www.gamersfirst.com/apb/news/2019/7/23/content-update We've talked a lot about the Engine Upgrade, and even though I know many players are excited, I don't feel like a visual and performance update is enough to get players excited about the future of APB. So this month I'm revealing a lot of our new content plans for the main game that will launch alongside the Engine Upgrade. NOTE: A lot of the design elements are subject to change as they are still in development. NOTE: A couple players reached out to me asking if we are still going to release the new content tomorrow, and I realize now that I wasn't clear enough in the blog. These new contacts will launch with the Engine Upgrade - not in July. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments below. Thanks, Matt

Yes. I was only indicating "golds" and "bronzes" as a way to describe their skill. The plan is to try and remove the information used by dethreaters to game the system. We have another idea in progress to indicate ELO. The whole point of Phasing is to avoid any loading. There may be a transition screen while server-side objects are resynced, but there is no loading of assets on the client, since those are already in memory. Our matchmaking logic chooses a server that is more appropriate for your skill level, and then from there, you shouldn't need to phase at all.

Hi all, I just posted a minor update. We took a break from the new engine for the last 2 months to troubleshoot FE's existing servers to get the game running better. We just put a big fix up today (crosses fingers). Hopefully that will stabilize things so we can get back to the fun stuff. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, We just made another change this morning. I wont go into the technical details, but it appears that when moving servers, one of the core libraries was left linking to the OS version. There was a slight difference in OS compared to where the servers were hosted. After fixing this issue, we did notice another significant improvement in performance. My hope is this will help clear up the Character Select / lag issues. Let us know. Thanks, Matt

I have commented multiple times on this, and the SPCT have also revealed that general loading times in the Engine Upgrade are already drastically faster (even without Phasing). The Phasing implementation will spin up new server instances for each type of district when we need them. However, these wont be unique, empty districts just for 1 mission like what you see on WoW. That is only necessary for PvE situations. We are also looking at changes to how threat (or matchmaking calculations) are done to help prevent dethreating. For obvious reasons I am not ready to comment on this yet, but we will be scrubbing all visible indicators of threat from the game, so players wont have as much information to abuse.

Hi all, Phasing is simply our term for seamlessly moving a player between two instances of the same type of district. It allows us to matchmake across instances and then aggregate each side together. In rare cases we may need to spin up a new instance which may be empty for a time till we add more players, but for the most part players will be moved to instances where other missions are taking place. Phasing can sometimes be confused with Instancing, where players are moved to a unique unpopulated area to play just for their quest/mission/etc. We are NOT implementing Instancing. Thanks, Matt

Okay. Back to the drawing board.

Hi everyone, There are now 581 total tickets (unsolved). And there are 386 tickets that have not been touched (untouched). We have been getting quite a few older players needing help to get back into the game, which is why our untouched ticket count went a little higher. Today we are answering tickets from July 5th, which means we are now at a 2 week response time. If your ticket is older than July 5th, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, We have been troubleshooting several solutions for the ongoing Character Select / Lag issue that happens regularly. Several changes were made last night, and the logs have cleared up, so we could use some community feedback to see if this has fixed the issues. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, We are working with select players to collect logs and diagnose the issue. Many players reported this issue initially after the 4th of July. As of last night's patch, some of the same players reported a slight improvement where the issue would either die down or only showed up when many characters were on the screen. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I was asked specifically to weigh in on this poll. First, I am very much aware of the overwhelming negative opinion of RIOT on the forums. However, I also feel like those players that gave specific feedback on changes would complain if we dropped the mode and did nothing. So there is a bit of a catch 22 for us. Second, we have completely changed our strategy with respect to this game mode. We may still continue making small tweaks, but there are no ongoing plans to do any significant amount of development on RIOT itself until we get better feedback from the console launch. Instead we are incorporating some of the underlying systems into future plans that will go towards improving the main game. Thanks, Matt