MattScott

Hi there, I read this thread a couple days ago, and intended to respond, but I got pulled into a number of other tasks and never got back to it. I think we let this conversation go fair enough. I’m going to lock this thread, and instead I have put up my own thread and a poll to address the OP’s question. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I have already commented a couple times about the event. Many players have asked us ‘what were you thinking?’ So here is a bit of an explanation. - Autumn Assault was based on some existing mexhanics that we tried to polish up to make more fun. - We had just come off developing Epidemic as a mode we let players join any time, so we thought we would do something different for November. - We intended Autumn Assault as a fun series of GM run events where players could interact a little more directly. - Since we needed to fire off the event manually, we decided to publish a schedule we could stick to in advance with multiple times a day, so players would know when the events were happening. - We came up with a skin and joker ticket amounts that we felt would make the games worth it for players. And then we had some significant problems: - There was not enough testing. Period. - We swapped the skin at the last minute and made it account bound, so that players wouldn’t keep trying to win. GMs tried to encourage players who had already won to let others win. But the joker ticket inventive was too high. So very good players kept winning anyway. - One of the main games had very bad bugs and had to be replaced, and there were issues overall that prevented the games from being very fun. - We had performance issues in full districts, so we eventually moved the events to a version of Financial with lower player caps. That led to lower amounts of people who could get in at a time, so we tried running the games more often to give as many players as possible a chance to win. - We didn’t have enough staff to run the events later in the evenings so that players with schedule conflicts would have a chance to join. Overall, not great. Lots of lessons learned. Going forward, I think these sorts of events are best left as one-off things we can do here and there for minor prizes. They don’t work for larger scale extended events, and I doubt we’ll do 1st place rewards like this, because there is a finite (small) amount of players who can actually win. It has been proposed that we give out the Autumn Assault skin, which I’m not opposed to. Tell me what you’d like to see happen. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, Sorry for not posting more. The team has been up to its eyeballs running events for APB and FE since October. The work continues. Almost done reconstructing the art in a new engine. We have a set of new internal tools for Support and GMs that launched with the last patch. And fixing stack splitting is definitely on our radar. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I want to be clear on our stance. @SyllyBear/Excalibur - you chose to directly violate our ToS. This has nothing to do with your First Amendment rights or LO protecting cheaters. You can’t walk into a restaurant and take off all your clothes in the name of free speech. You will still get arrested and escorted off the premises. We don’t allow naming and shaming, and you repeatedly and blatantly broke that rule. Then you rage posted over and over after being warned, and then you verbally attacked my mod for simply doing their job. There were many other options available to you to address the issue. I respect your convictions. I respect that you chose to break the rules to ‘send us a message’. That message has been received loud and clear. But you have to take the personal responsibility for the consequences of your actions. The policy is clear. If I make an exception to name and shame for you, then I’ll have to do it for others, and we end up in a toxic cesspool of accusations on our forums. Instead, we encourage players to submit reports to customer support. We have a special queue those go to. They are reviewed. GMs have a list of folks to watch, and we verify what is happening. It doesn’t do us any good to have players advertise to the people we are watching on the forums. The goal is to catch them properly. Personally, I think its unfortunate how things ended with your situation. I can’t know how frustrated you were with cheaters in Fight Club, but I know how frustrated I am with the cheating situation. Trust me. This is not a simple problem to solve. We spend significant amounts of time working on this issue. There are announcements coming. New systems coming. Optimizations to existing systems happening. But before we start accusing LO of protecting cheaters or some other subversive agenda, let’s consider an alternate possibility - we’re just not very good at this yet. It’s new for us. Many of the things we thought would work, have only been partially successful. We have a dozen work streams to manage - all of them are critical. And we have limited resources. My promise is that we will get better. Hold us to that statement. All posts from new accounts are manually reviewed for a period of time. We implemented this a couple months ago to stop URL spammers. It has nothing to do with cheaters. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, We had a Citadel server issue this morning. The team has pulled the logs and are looking at what happened. Thanks, Matt

Btw we missed the double loyalty points. They were a little trickier to award. We will work on those tomorrow.

Just a note to say that refunds for the 20% off of Cyber Monday discounted items have been processed and credited back to players as G1C.

These are all fair points. For me, its a fine balance of rewarding the players who are sticking with us, and making sure we don't appear money grubbing. The reactions to our Cyber Monday sale on Twitter and Facebook were.. well.. angry. They saw the attempt as purely a cash grab and many claimed they were leaving the game because of our "abuse" in trying to get more money from them. We do our best, and we hope to do better in the future. We have reported the issue with Paywall multiple times, and we are now exploring alternatives for the countries they don't seem to handle very well. My apologies. The team is hoping to get this done today. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, Autumn Assault has been a flawed event at best. We are working on patching it one more time before the event ends, but various QA issues have prevented us from implementing a lot of the feedback that players have provided. I assure you that the feedback is being collected, and we're going to make a number of change so that GMs can run these events in the future with better results. We change the reward on the event at the last minute (and apparently didn't announce this on the forums), but the 1st place player gets an account bound skin for all their characters. I understand the appeal of 250 joker tickets, and that reward was implemented before we started modifying the event to make it somewhat more fun. But given how bad the event is, we have started asking players who have won repeatedly to not continue participating so that other players can get the skin. GMs have been announcing this request in District Chat at the beginning of the event, and then periodically repeat this request. We did announce the change during Kriosasacil's event, but there was some miscommunication on our end, so it wasn't clear. I can see why he was confused. I have reached out privately to him to apologize. Thanks, Matt

Nope. We're batting a 1000 on this event. We swapped out the Butcher for the Autumn skin, sorted out how to make it account bound (wasn't trivial), and then never changed the post on the forums to let the players know. I have now edited the forum post to reflect the change. And GMs are mentioning that the skin is account bound at the start of matches.

Yes. Yes. But we made the call to focus on 3.5 since it was a much faster timeline. More on this in the future. Yes. But we need to "walk before we run". More on this in the future.

My mistake. I got it correct in the edit of the main post, but then said 9am accidentally in my brief reply. Sales starts in 5 hours which is Sunday 9pm PST. Apologies for all the confusion.

Good catch. Not moved, but starts on Sunday 9pm PST through Tuesday 9pm PST. I guess we wanted to make sure players got the sale prices when they buy on Monday - no matter what part if the world you might be in. Edit: Corrected Sunday's start time. I got it correct in the main post, but incorrectly stated "Sunday 9am" here.

Yes. There is no need to message me. If you purchased on or after November 12th and the Pack you bought ends up being in our Cyber Monday sale, then we will automatically give you back 20% of the G1C you paid.

Hi everyone, We are looking at migrating Nekrova to Citadel, but there are several complicated issues we need to sort out first. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, Just so I've answered this publicly, we are not moving forward with either Vendetta or Retribution at this time. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, We are looking at bringing it back. But we need to solve the chargeback / abuse issues that forced us to take it down. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, This year I decided not to run our standard discount G1C sale for Black Friday / Cyber Monday, mostly because I don't want you guys to think we are trying to grift money from you. I recognize the state of the game, and we haven't yet been able to finish the Unreal 3.5 upgrade or RIOT mode. However, many players asked for something, so after a lot of internal discussion, we've decided to reduce the price of the most sought after stuff in ARMAS. For 48 hours only starting on Monday the 26th, you can get up to 20% off the coolest items in the ARMAS Marketplace catalog and enjoy double loyalty reward points. Visit the ARMAS store from SUNDAY, November 25th – 9 PM PST through TUESDAY November 27th – 9 PM PST to enjoy double the loyalty reward points and get 20% off on: Keys to the City Keys to the World Select Packs Character Names & Character Slots ALL Joker Mystery Box (20 Packs) And more... I had already posted on November 12th that we would not be doing anything for Black Friday / Cyber Monday, so once the sale is over, we'll be going through any purchases from November 12-26 and crediting players back the 20% difference in G1C on any of the sale items they bought. Thanks, Matt Edit: Whoops. Corrected the dates.

All good. You're fine. We'll honor the discount for you. Please message me, so I can get details.

Yes. The 20% Premium does stack on top of the sale. I’ll have to vet this against the items that go on sale on Monday.

The goal of the refund is to provide a discount for anyone I misled with my original post. Edit: See above. We are going to handle all credits automatically after the sale.

I would not describe what we are doing as "future-proof". A large portion of the code will be exactly what is running under Unreal 3.0. The goal is make the game better, but also to consolidate the codebase so we can upgrade everything again.

Hi there, Yep. This is a fair criticism. I made that post knowing we had just had an internal meeting where I told everyone we weren't going to be running a discount on G1C. Of course, within days of posting that, the main APB producer came to me with a Cyber Monday idea where we would discount a limited amount of "desirable" items on the store. It took several days to convince me this was a good idea.. right up to Wednesday evening. Ultimately I know players will be happier, so I'll eat crow for the final decision. Edit: There is no need to message me. If you purchased on or after November 12th and the Pack you bought ends up being in our Cyber Monday sale, then we will automatically give you back 20% of the G1C you paid. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, We are working on a fix. This got broken during Epidemic. Thanks, Matt

I keep meaning to look into this. It has dropped off my radar several times. I'm guessing there was a ratings issue when it launched that has never been addressed.