MattScott

Hi all, Over the last few months, Little Orbit has created 2 new events and we are about start Slay Bells next week. We added 2FA, a new reporting system, and we’re going to be testing the new engine upgrade and RIOT mode soon. That’s a lot, and we’ve seen what it looks like when we rush things or don’t communicate enough with you, our players. So it’s more important than ever that we re-create the San Paro City Testers (SPCT) to have a group of dedicated players that we can test with to collect feedback. Although this job sounds glamorous, I can assure you these players work hard to make themselves available. They play through buggy content, and they spend time writing up notes to help us fix it. I am very pleased with the team we have selected. I wanted a combination of the best players who have the most availability, and even some who have been our harshest critics. In the spirit of transparency, here are the current members of the SPCT: Shini, Kempington, Skay, Frosi, Rooq, Skitty, CookyPuss, Shakespade, Kevkof, Elanih, Speedz We will be adding more over time. These players are under NDA, however whenever possible, I’ll try to give them approval to post their raw feedback on upcoming events and features, so everyone can track our progress. Thanks, Matt edited: ... for reasons

This is a great question. Copyright Infringement as a category is there purely so large corporations can flag content they want removed that violates their rights in a way protected by law. It would mean that a representative of Nickelodeon would have to get on the system and flag a character selling Sponge Bob pants for real money. Bear in mind by our definition, Copyright Infringement goes well beyond dressing up a character as Sponge Bob. It would generally mean using their character in a way that negatively reflects on them or making money off the content. IMO that scenario is pretty unlikely, but legally, we felt the need to at least support it. Thanks, Matt

Hi Wastelanders, The holidays are officially here! The Grunch Event - December 12 "I hate all those Whoms! How they sing and they shout! I'd love to destroy them, and rip their guts out!" The Grunch had an idea! An awful idea! The Grunch had a wonderful, awful idea! Grunches and Whoms have invaded the Wasteland! Seek out Cindy Loom Whom, found in Spider Hill, New Flagstaff, Trader’s Flat and Los Alamos. If you can stop the Grunch and bring back some of the xmas gifts he stole Cindy will give you a special holiday reward. Players Level 46-55 can take a second mission to earn an exclusive (and antlered) bonus reward. Quest giver: Cindy Loom NPC Locations: Plateau - Spider Hill, waypoint 4680480 4135025, quest available for player level 1-15 Northfields - New Flagstaff, waypoint 4482171 5508380, quest available for player level 16-25 Kaibab Forest - Trader's Flat, waypoint 6524573 5214506, quest available for player level 26-40 Deadfall - Los Alamos, waypoint 5527405 5105450, main quest available for player level 41-55, non-repeatable quest available for player level 55 only Grunch locations: Plateau - waypoint 4682417, 4297973 (for player level 1-15 quest) Northfields - waypoint 4249533, 5451852 (for player level 16-25 quest) Kaibab Forest - waypoint 6766428, 5292237 (for player level 26-40 quest) Deadfall - waypoint 5665130, 5103273 (for player level 41-55 quest) Alpha Zone (Alpha County) - waypoint 6544607, 3920430 (for player level 41-55 quest) Epsilon Zone (Outpost) - waypoint 6309186, 3380807 (for player level 41-55 quest) First Night - December 19 - January 2 Since the Fall, computer glitches and leap years have created controversy over the actual date of the New Year. For decades now, people in all areas of the Grand Canyon Province have used different dates, leading to much confusion. Now, the Archivist Coalition, with the help of LifeNet, has finally determined the actual date of the New Year. In the process of their research, the Coalition has also uncovered a great deal of information about various holidays that had been celebrated in the past. In honor of the establishment of the true date, the Coalition is sponsoring “First Night” a festival that combines many of the holidays past. There might not be any snow in the Wasteland, but citizens from all over the Grand Canyon Province can join together, build some Dirtmen, and wait for the arrival of S.A.N.T.A (the Seasonal Arctic Network of Toy-based Altruism). They’ve been keeping track of who's naughty and nice. The nice get gifts and the naughty get hunted down. Hope you were nice! There will be plenty more celebrating where that came from, as well as holiday missions and goodies. Enjoy party crackers, fruitcake, and festive top hats from gift boxes, or trade the unopened boxes in for a chance to win the ultra-rare white top hat. First Night waypoints for location of questors: Odenville -3989214, 3072292 (player level 2-15) Embry Crossroads - 4237238, 3218729 (player level 2-15) Watchtower - 4511717, 3941784 (player level 8-20) Sunshine Corners - 4565090, 4988004 (player level 10-30) New Flagstaff - 4523486, 5486292 (player level 20-35) Dieseltown - 6094646, 5709645 (player level 25-55) Trader's Flat - 6521150, 5229402 (player level 30-55) Thanks, Matt

Hi all, It's not really feasible for us to award the Top X winners from each session. We don't have that kind of tracking, which is why I didn't offer it in the first place. @Darkzero3802 I understand your frustration. I don't believe I'm setting a precedent here by awarding the skin from an event that didn't go as planned. It's also not feasible for us to create a 2nd skin, but I am looking into awarding a title to everyone who actually got 1st place to give them something unique. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, This is a real problem. I reached out to a couple players yesterday to collect some player information for the devs to look at tomorrow. Apologies, Matt

Hi there, I'm not sure where you heard we were doing 3 day bans on hackers. We have different ways of handling different problems. For toxicity, harassment, and some other issues, we have escalating bans (24 hours, 72 hours, until permanent). Our goal is to help players learn what is acceptable and what is not. For hacking and cheating, there is no escalation. We simply permanently ban. It's unfortunate, as I hate losing players that way, but it takes too long to catch them. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, My apologies. We are looking into this issue. It seems to be a bad interaction between BattlEye and APB on some computers. Unfortunately. BattlEye support hasn’t been very helpful. At this point we are focused on the engine upgrade which will significantly update the underying libraries of APB to 64-bit. It is our hope that the upgrade will help address issues like this. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, Just for clarity, I'm not talking about the Butcher skin at all. I don't know the history, and we shifted away from that skin well before the event started. I do recognize that the current Autumn Assault skin is bugged on some weapons, and it shows red where it shouldn't. That is being fixed. But this thread is just about awarding the Autumn Assault skin to people who logged in during the dates of the event. Thanks, Matt

Less difficult, but still an hour of a dev’s time vs a couple minutes. More than I want to devote.

This is a good idea, but it would take a lot of effort to try and go back through the logs to determine the participants and then sort them by the number of times they played to find a cutoff. I’d rather focus our development efforts elsewhere. It’s fairly easy for us to determine the players that logged in during the weeks the event was active and award those players the skin.

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