MattScott

Hi there, If the OP is on Jericho, then I can see why he would be frustrated. Those servers were nearly unplayable due to DDoS attacks for much of the weekend. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, More progress on catching up with tickets. As of today, there are 1,033 total tickets open (unsolved) which is 159 less than two weeks ago. There are 831 total tickets that have not been touched (contacted) which is slightly higher than the last update. I'm actually surprised we were able to keep pace and still bring the total open tickets down. The last three weeks had a significant uptick in support requests. We had one on vacation for a week. We had another out with a family issue. And the entire team has struggled with getting sick (it's rampaging through our offices right now). Everyone was back healthy on Friday, and as of yesterday Customer Support was following up on one tickets from January 26th 2019. If your ticket is older than that, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I have just posted about this issue. You can see it here: The issue isn't a lack of response. It's the lack of a viable solution that fits our current network. Basically, we have had to re-architect the old RG network so we can build a new defense solution to type of attack that is hitting us. That process has been ongoing for weeks now, and we are very close to finishing. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, This is frustrating. We have had an ongoing issue on Jericho with persistent DDoS attacks. I have spoken about this a little, but the issue is basically a form of attack that we had no defense for, and the attackers have been relentless over the last couple months exploiting the issue. We have been working with our ISP to design a new solution, we pushed hard to get the new solution working on Wednesday, but there was a problem and they couldn't finish. Today's attacks have been particularly bad. I apologize to all the players getting bumped. We are working on the issue. Sorry, Matt UPDATE 4/2: Effective this morning we have completed Phase 1 of adding new DDoS protection for Jericho. There will be another update in about a month, but we should see significant improvement in the amount of downtime.

We haven't done a full district test, but we have gotten fairly close. The plan is to open this to OTW as soon as the mode mechanics are fully working as intended. There were a lot of lessons learned in Epidemic and Slay Bells. We tried to apply all of them to RIOT. Hopefully, we can collect more feedback from OTW to address items we missed. The mode was very much designed for new players to jump in and have fun. It only uses randomly grouped teams to help balance things. Lastly, there are weapons to find. You can also enter the mode with your choice of load out, however you have to collect money in the mode to unlock those weapons for use.

Nice work! Remind me to ask you two for the Lottery numbers next week

There are two different skins. One is a RedHill themed skin for the ARG. One is the free skin for RIOT Preseason which is the Japanese themed skin. I made that edit. Thanks. For me, it comes down to when not if we make an Official Discord channel. The main issue is resources to properly support it. We already receives criticism for lack of GMs, long Customer Support times, forum mods, etc. I just want to make sure we don't overextend ourselves. I have already posted on this topic. They didn't just Brute force the password. They used the Morse Code hint to limit the number of characters, so they could eliminate all the other letters and numbers.

Hi all, As promised here is the final breakdown of the ARG event complete with reward descriptions and who will be awarded them. First, I want to use this opportunity to address a bit of lore clarification that has come up from players. The district in San Paro is "Red Hill". The company name is "RedHill Institute of Technology". There is a tiny space between Red and Hill in the company name, so I know we weren't super consistent with that and felt the need to clarify. Stats from the Unofficial APB Discord channel: @SKay posted a fun breakdown of the Discord chat during the ARG. There are some interesting stats there. I appreciate the support that Natzu and the team on that server gave us. (Many players have asked for an Official APB channel, and that is something I'm still considering) Stats from the Redhill website: Since Skay posted their stats, I figured I would do the same. The game ran from February 23 through March 28, and was never directly advertised. The URL was initially only available in-game on select billboards and was later spread by players here and on Discord. During those weeks we got more than 2.2K unique visitors to the site. The highest single day was March 27th with 738 unique visitors. Anonymous user data showed our most engaged player visited 38 times and spent a total of 5 hours and 43 minutes going through pages and images. 21.83% of visitors were from the US. 19.62% of visitors were from Russia. 8.4% of visitors were from Germany. 6.11% of visitors were from the UK. And now.. the rewards. Redhill Newsletter Reward We had just under 300 sign-ups as of EOD 3/28. That list has been pulled, so signing up now wont get you the reward. Some players used fake emails. But for anyone that took the leap of faith and trusted us with their real email, we'll be mailing out a unique (1 time redeemable) code for an account wide Tin Foil Hat. Participation Rewards The ARG itself was very experimental for us. We had initially decided on a reward structure that would limit the winners and go to the Top X that solved the puzzle. But as the game evolved it was clear that codes and solutions would be shared with the community. Rather than discourage this behavior, I wanted to encourage it. So we changed gears and decided to eliminate the reward limit and group effort based on tiers. I'm going to list these rewards in reverse order. These categories below (formerly referred to as Tiers) stack. That means if you redeemed the code and participated and posted a winning solution, you'll get Category 3, Category 2, and Category 1. Category 3 - Final ARG Code redeemed in ARMAS This reward goes out to anyone who redeemed the long GUID-based code from the end of the ARG up through noon PDT today. Those accounts will get 3 Days of Premium. NOTE: Premium will start today and run through the weekend. All accounts who redeemed the code will get an email letting them know. There were more than 2,200 of these redeemed. Category 2 - Contributors These rewards go out to anyone who participated in the brainstorming and contributions to puzzle solving. My team is working with SKay and Natzu to pull the list of Discord usernames who where involved in the #redhill channel on their server. Admittedly, I opened Pandora's box here, because we need to reach out to each of those players and get their APB account info to deliver the rewards. My producer started that effort yesterday, but was identified by Discord as a Bot and shut down their ability to keep messaging. These players will get an account wide title "Conspiracy Cracker", and an exclusive new Weapon Skin made just for the event. NOTE: The Weapon Skin and title both need to be patched into the game. Give us a couple weeks to collect all the account info and get these in. Lots of players in this category. In addition to all the players who contributed to our Official Forums, there are well over 200 players who contributed on the Unofficial Discord. Category 1 - Winners These rewards will go out to anyone who was early to publicly contribute part of a puzzle solution. Again, this is a bit of a subjective thing to determine since there were 3 threads discussing the game (thanks @Yood for pointing that out). It’s hard for us to gauge who was absolutely first, and it's possible that people solved the puzzle and didn't post it, but I wanted to reward the people who got the solutions right. Obviously these players contributed, so they will all get Category 2 rewards plus 1000 G1C. The team is going to try and get the G1C issued today, so it can be combined with the Premium reward from Category 3 over the weekend. These winners from the forum posts are: Ketog & Kevkof starting the main thread, posting the billboards, url, and updating the post as details emerged which I think all heavily contributed to the success of the game Nanometic & SKay - finding the hidden link in the first puzzle MartinPL - finding the valid username in the second puzzle Latsha - catching the updated password hint in the second puzzle / finding the spectrogram in the audio file for the third puzzle Wewhoo - figuring out the password in the second puzzle CookiePuss & Weeb_TheEpicGuyV2 - piecing together the RIOT Preseason skin image IROCkiller & PancakePower - finding the bit.ly link on the camera that linked to the audio file in the third puzzle EyePop - brute force solve for final password in the third puzzle SK4LP - puzzle solve for final password in the third puzzle There are some others from Discord that I'll likely add to this list after reviewing. EDIT: I already have a couple more, but it's getting too cumbersome to keep editing the list of winners. NOTE: My intention isn't to overlook anyone, so if you feel you publicly posted the solution somewhere first, and we missed you, then reach out with proof, and we'll try and sort it out. Easter Eggs and loose ends: There are quite a number story items that were left open. Some of them will get addressed as the mode rolls out. Some of them *might* be carried forward in another ARG down the line before the year ends. I am considering an AMA or some other format where players can get online with the producer who worked with our design team to craft the puzzles and narrative. If that becomes a possibility, I'll let you guys know. Lastly the biggest Easter Egg was this image that players pieced together. This is a tease for an upcoming free weapon skin that players will be able to earn when RIOT launches. The plan is to do a RIOT Preseason as soon as the mode is ready - sort of a beta test for the various systems so we can work the kinks out in a live setting. This initial season wont have any Premium rewards, so everything will be able to be earned by players through regular play. The skin itself is the first in a series of new Japanese themed skins that were designed by our lead UI / UX artist. I feel like it represents Little Orbit's first "real" skin that we did from scratch with a full understanding of the system. Here is a WIP shot of what the skin looks like in-game. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, For clarification, Lynette and Lucas are the new mid level contacts that will get added to support the engine upgrade (merging different rewards between console and PC). RIOT will have its own new contacts related to the new Redhill Institute lore. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, We have some fixes that have been submitted bu a couple helpful players, but they were linked on a cheat site. We simply cannot direct players to a cheat site and ask them to download unknown files. My team is working through the files to see if we can: 1) distribute them ourselves 2) properly fix the issue in the game Thanks for your patience, Matt

I think you raise a fair point here. The original release date for RIOT was yesterday, but I made the call not to rush the mode based on continuing feedback from testing. March has been an especially bad month for server-side issues. The team has been scrambling to implement a couple new protection solutions. This is a case where the best laid plans meet the realities of game publishing and development. The ARG was meant to be a small lore tease for RIOT, and the timing was locked in ages ago, because it required coordination with the development team for the in-game billboard takeover. Once started, there wasn’t a good way to pause it. We have new internal dates that we are targeting for the public release of RIOT and the engine upgrade. The team is working overtime to hit those dates, which will hopefully address your accurate criticisms of the current game experience. Thanks, Matt

Congrats SK4LP! That was the full solution to the final puzzle.

Tier 1 = Anyone who was early to publicly contribute part of a puzzle solution. (It’s hard for us to gauge who was absolutely first between the two channels). Tier 2 = Anyone who spent a reasonable amount of effort brainstorming and contributing to puzzle solving. Tier 3 = Anyone who redeems the code before my post on Friday.

Hi all, Couple recap items for the ARG: - We did award 1 G1C to any account who redeemed the code. We needed to award something so we could track the dates for each player. - The rewards have 3 tiers. Everyone who redeemed will get something, but the tier will be related to your level of participation. The team has done their best to keep a watchful eye on the forum thread and Discord thread. We originally planned to only monitor the forum, but then random players started posting solutions that were being worked out on the Unofficial Discord. So I feel the need to include the participation of those dedicated Discord players too. We sincerely hope that players will feel the rewards match their level of effort. - The last puzzle was hard. So hard, that we mitigated the length of the password by making it potentially guessable from the hint or even solveable by brute force. NOTE: While the password has been posted, no one has shown the puzzle and solution for how it was solved. I will still give a tier 1 reward to any player who posts the correct solution. If no one gets it right by the time I post the rewards, winners, and random tidbits on Friday, then I will reveal how the puzzle was intended to be solved. - While the last puzzle was brute forced, I want to congratulate the team that took the time to implement the script. It is important to understand that it wasn’t possible to simply take all the numbers and letters from the spectrogram and execute the brute force script. That would have taken months to find the correct combination. Instead that team used the Morse Code phrase (which also intentionally contained the 4 letters of the password) to eliminate enough characters and get close enough to the correct steps to apply the brute force method. I am amazed and thankful for all the players who spent countless hours brainstorming with the rest of the community to solve our ARG. This was largely driven by a very small team at Little Orbit, and you guys made the entire process so much fun for us. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, As much as I appreciate the banter on the forums, I appreciate the time spent by Ketog to post his findings. This is an irritating problem that we have spent months hunting down. Let's keep this civil and respect, what I believe, was meant to be a helpful post. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, 1. Yes. The plan is to re-deliver all the ARMAS purchased items that you bought on Nekrova. 2. Yes. Any purchases right up to the migration date will transfer.

Hi there, Some of the team has been away at GDC, so this was just brought to my attention. I'll have some devs look at it. Thanks, Matt

Oops. Good catch! This shot got uploaded as a placeholder while it was being photoshopped with the article name over it. Ultimately I was in meetings off site and not reachable to approve the final header, so the team went with the old ‘Progress Update’ header. I’ll have to remember how savvy our players are and cover our tracks better in the future.

It’s actually three different implementations (PC/XB1/PS4) that all need to fit the Unreal interface. PC has been updated to use the DX11 immediate/deferred pipeline that didn’t exist in Unreal 3.

Hi everyone, I have put up my blog for the month. Apologies for running behind. My travel schedule was aggressive this month. EDIT: I also recognize this update has a lot of ‘almost there language’. But I felt it was better to socialize where we are now rather than keep waiting to post an update. https://www.gamersfirst.com/apb/news/2019/3/22/end-of-first-quarter-review Thanks, Matt

Hi all, Hasn’t been abandoned. Just postponed. We stopped balancing because it was clear we needed to first focus on networking, hitreg, and the engine upgrade. Once those are addressed, then I think we can work through weapons again. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, I appreciate the effort in creating these notes and ideas. Right now the team is 100% focused on the engine upgrade and RIOT mode. And then we can start evaluating ideas for changes to the main game. Thanks, Matt

Since some players got different levels of discounts and some paid the full price, it makes it very difficult to determine what credit to give Innova players without the actual payment records.

Hi there, I have passed this info along. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, As a small follow up, here is where we stand: I have received a single email last week from Innova saying they had been on a break and missed my earlier inquiries. In that email, they did say that all data was provided. I have repeated my request for the purchase history, which was not provided to G1 during the transition. The ARMAS pricing at Innova was very volitile towards the end, and it’s impossible to know which players paid full price, got a discount, or got the item for free. I am hoping to obtain the account payment history so that we can grant some sort of G1C credit based on actual payments made by these players. This payment history is missing from all data we have. Thanks, Matt