MattScott

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

Hi all, We have had a rough week of persistent DDoS attacks against Jericho. We have protections in place, but occassionally an attack will come along and exploit a vulnerability we didn’t know about. The network team are working on the issue till it is solved. Sorry, Matt

Hi all, There have not been any DDoS issues today. I've contacted my network team to take a look at Jericho. Thanks, Matt

We have had multiple discussions with the FBI. We collect the evidence we can, and we pass it along. You'll see arrests are being made in this area (but not specific to APB DDoS attacks). But the vast majority of DDoS attacks come from machines that have been hacked - not from anything related directly to the hacker themselves. The problem is that the FBI, Amazon, Google, and other providers need to fix their vulnerabilities that facilitate the DDoS attacks in the first place. On our end we have protection in place for common forms of DDoS, and we continue to evolve those protections. But every couple months or so, someone will find a new vulnerability and hit that spot relentlessly. At the point, our engineers work overtime to fix the issue as fast as they can. Since Little Orbit took over, we have had several months in a row where we successfully defend all the DDoS attacks with little to no interruption for our players. If you look at the industry as a whole, everyone is dealing with the same problem. Toxic players have a bad experience and take out their frustration on the game. Thanks, Matt

Lots of good points here that have also been debated by other members of the community. Even though it does have a collapsing map, RIOT is not really Battle Royale. We have worked hard to create something that feels like APB but brings new gameplay, map changes, lore, and seasonal rewards. This is our first big push for new content that will be quickly followed by the engine upgrade. From there we have 2 other significant additions coming.

Hi there, We have OTW locked for testing RIOT right now. We'll open it up soon as we can. And we are looking at opening some regional servers after the engine update. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, Apologies. The lag is based on a series of DDoS attacks that have been persistent since Monday. Thanks, Matt

Thanks

For the record, nothing is getting delayed. Quite the opposite. The new mode and engine upgrade are coming, and that timing is driving our need to merge the servers so we can roll everything out properly. Let's be kind to the Russian members of our community. They have a right to be upset. They did not ask for any of these problems, and those being damaged are the ones that spent money to support the game with Innova. While we do not have the man power to do 1:1 item transfers, this still needs to be done the best way possible. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I did receive a response today from Innova. I am waiting to see if they will send the missing payment transaction data, so I can find a way to compensate ex-Innova players. Thanks, Matt

I realize it sounds simple, but in reality, that is not the case. I have previously stated there are too many items to handle on a 1:1 basis - literally thousands of items and even more components that make up those items. Each item would need a manually selected alternate on Citadel in order to be migrated, and then it would require 1:1 testing to make sure we don't break Citadel. We're looking at thousands of man hours and months of time. We are migrating APB$, JTs, and everything that we have proper payment records for on Nekrova. We are redelivering all Nekrova purchased JMBs. We are manually migrating the Legendaries. I understand your frustration, but that is hardly "taking away everything". Also, one last note for context: We have been losing money on Nekrova since we took over in May 2018. There is a minimum server footprint of about 20 servers to support an APB world. We are about to launch RIOT, which will require more servers per world. It is not feasible as a business to continue supporting the monthly cost for less than 30 player peak concurrency. Ultimately there is no way to position this migration positively to the Russian players. They spent money with a company who shutdown the game. G1 inherited the Innova problem, and now we're inheriting G1's problem. Due to the way Innova handled itself at the end, they have made it impossible for us to properly support these Russian players. As I said earlier, I have personally tried to reach out to Innova in an attempt to get more data from them. Their main site is up: https://inn.ru/en/ and their 4 games site is up: https://eu.4game.com/. But I have not gotten a response. I wish there was a better way, but we are now at the point where we have to make a change so the game can move forward, and the complexity of the situation limits what we can do. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, For better or worse, I have posted an updated Nekrova merge thread. Thanks, Matt

Unless you are one of the players who had their APB$ adjusted by GMs, then you should get all of your APB$. This was our original plan, but we have no records from Innova to know how much the player paid. We know some items were given away, and some items were deeply discounted at the end. We found it incredibly difficult to determine any fair amount of compensation.

Hi all, Let me be clear - this is not about greed. If it was, we would simply turn off Nekrova and move on. The vast majority of active Russian players have accounts on Citadel with significant progression already. For context, the database for Nekrova was highly customized to support the Innova items during the original migration. It does not match 1:1 with the database for Citadel. APB is very complex game. Each usable item is made up of smaller underying components that control its customization and behavior. There are 70,000 of these under lying components that make up all the ARMAS and regular in-game items such as guns, cars, clothing, mods, etc. Each item that we choose to migrate over has to be manually checked and mapped across from the Nekrova database to Citadel to make sure the underlying components all transfer. We are committed to migrating and checking all the Legendaries, because we understand the importance of guns to the Innova players. But migrating all character inventory would be filled with problems and potentially damage Citadel. Additionally, we don't have the staff to properly complete a migration of that size before the end of the year. Instead we chose to have Citadel re-deliver all the Nekrova ARMAS purchases that are stored in the Nekrova database. This insures that all the underlying components come across correctly. Thanks, Matt