MattScott

Hi all, As much as Selali came out and took responsibility for this, we are also seeing the ‘cost’ of a changed policy. Coming from kids games, my initial reaction in the Q&A was that I didn’t want to see nudity in the game. On a personal level, I’m not bothered by nudity in the slightest. But I still believe that it doesn’t add value here. Players aren’t given agency on seeing nudity or the questionable symbols other players sometimes use. Consent is the key - not the actual content. However, after that stream it became clear that policing nipples was not a good use of our time. It is after all an 18+ M rated game. There is a warning label on the game that should properly set expectations, so we went back to G1’s long standing rules. Those types of changes (which I believe was the right thing to do) still have a cost. Now I try to go back and edit posts so that later visitors get the full context and ‘final word’. It’s my attempt to prevent confusion and this exact situation in the future. Honestly, we (not the GM in question) deserve a little chiding on this. My advice to the community is to keep watching and see if we keep making the same mistakes... you’re seeing how the sausage is made in realtime. Lots of growth and learning happening across the entire team. That’s inexperience. If we keep making the same mistakes, then we’re incompetent. Thanks, Matt

Yes it will.

I’m curious why threat calculation hasnt been adjusted to fallback to asymmetrical matches. For instance, I wonder if we could match 3 medium threat with 2 slightly higher threat to make it more even. Or 3 vs 4.

Hi everyone, Just a quick note to say how much I enjoyed checking these out. I honestly wasn’t sure how much the community would engage this kind of a contest. I am really impressed. Well done. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I’m going to save a bookmark to this thread and unpin it to focus on the Community Discussion Thread. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I just posted the updated Halloween schedule. We will be going live after server maintenance early on Oct 30th Pacific time. Sorry about that. With all the chaos in the office getting things ready, we forgot to post the new date. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I have just posted that once the Halloween events go live, we will be pushing up a significant overhaul to ARMAS. This includes a site wide adjustment to Weapon prices. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Looks like a scheduled announcement didn’t go up to explain the delay with the Halloween events. We needed a couple extra days to fix some issues. We are going to take servers down for preparations on the evening of Oct 29th, and the event will start as soon as we come back up the morning of the Oct 30th Pacific time. Both events will run for 2 weeks. Instead of a sale on G1C, we have massively overhauled the ARMAS store and done a significant adjustment to Weapon pricing. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I’m posting about this now. We needed a couple extra days on Epidemic, so we are going to patch both the console Headless Horseman and PC Epidemic events late on Oct 29th to go live the morning of the Oct 30th Pacific time. Both events will run for 2 weeks. Thanks, Matt

Just arrived in Paris for Games Week, so I’m a bit tired, but I wanted to post a quick update. On the Halloween patch we will be FULLY reverting IR3. Both the upside and downside will be going back to the way they were before weapon balance. There was a lot of discussion internally, and I don't think we want to introduce anything ‘new’ until it has had a chance to go through OTW player testing. It was correctly pointed out several times that reverting the downside and leaving the new upside will make IR3 more powerful than it was before. Sorry for the confusion, Matt

We investigated hosting servers in Brazil almost immediately, and the cost was very high. However I think with a smaller footprint of 6-8 servers to support player districts it becomes more feasible.

We aren't going to do a free premium code this time around. But it's a great idea for next time. Instead, we modified the rules to guarantee that at least one non-Premium player will get a decent prize.

I think we can balance it so that latency is only part of the algorithm. At first SEA players might find themselves matched on servers that are farther, giving them higher latency. But I believe over time, since those players are still able to engage and play, we can market and attract new players in smaller regions to help fill in more local opponents. This is basically a chicken or egg problem. Cross district/region matching allows us to start the cycle that leads to higher populations / better matches. We have to include multiple matches in the same instance, otherwise the server cost would be excessive. I also agree that we need to preserve the open world elements of having players in other matches running around as nice ambience to your own match.

Agreed. Beastie was my first choice, but he's unavailable today.

My first reaction is: "It wont hurt" I feel like filling a Silver district right now is a bad criteria because it is affected by other issues like dethreating and general server population issues. The concept of "Silver" or "Gold" goes away. Instead I think players would choose to enter the type of action district they want.. Financial or Waterfront. Then we would load balance and put the player in whatever instance makes sense. That could be 3 instances of Financial with 40 players each. It could be 2 instance of Financial with 60 players each. Once they want a mission, we can match their skill across all of the players in any instance of the same type.

I think a lot of work needs to be done on how threat or skill is calculated. It feels like we should be measuring activity better, and change should be more gradual (like BXNNXD referred from an earlier post of mine).

Hi everyone, I have posted the first Community Developer Discussion topic in a sub forum here: Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I'd like to start by thanking all the players who threw out suggestions about topics they would like to discuss. The point of this discussion is to peel the curtain back and attempt a two-way conversation with you guys. I'm going to make the disclaimer that while I strive to be as transparent as I can, there are some things I can't share for any number of reasons. If I point an area out that is off limits, please do not assume that I'm trying to hide some evil intention. My hope is that we can use this discussion to help inform my team to some of your concerns, needs, or wishes, and then we can try to take those into account as we move forward. I saw a lot of comments on threat / matchmaking, so we'll try to tackle that one first. For most of these, I'm going to start by giving my opinion/context on the subject. Again, I'm going to make the disclaimer that I am not an expert on APB. I have employees who are that design these systems. Instead, I am the final vote. So it's important that I be as current as possible with the game and the players. The purpose of me exposing my knowledge (or lack there of) is so we can have a discussion on common ground. If there is a concept that I'm missing, then I trust that you, the players, will point it out and fill me in. So.. IMO: 1) Why is matchmaking so important in APB versus other games? APB is somewhat unique in requiring PvP conflict to progress through the game. Any time someone wins, someone also loses. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with losing matches. That's how we learn. But in an ideal world, those matches would be close, so that both sides get an opportunity to learn and get better. 2) What are my requirements for good matchmaking? - Matching based on skill that goes up or down each match based on an accurate assessment of how you performed as an individual and how you performed in your team - Matching based on latency so that all players have roughly the same response time from the server - Matching across the widest pool of players to narrow the difference in skill as much as possible 3) What are the problems I see in APB's current matchmaking? - Due to Unreal 3's notoriously slow loading times, and the fact that "phasing" or switching to another instance of the same district, isn't supported in Unreal 3 - APB was designed to only match one player against another player inside the same district on the same server. - Working off that limitation, they needed some way to segregate districts based on "threat" or some other skill rating. In theory, with balanced districts, the players are already close in skill to any other player, so that matching can work again. - Exposing the threat levels and giving players a choice on which districts they enter only breeds a way for players to undermine the necessary balance in districts. Is Threat broken? Yes. Is it frustrating? Yes. Here are my current thoughts on how to fix it. "Cross district matchmaking" The concept is to allow players to join whatever action district they want. No spamming servers to get into the one full district. They simply join, drive around and get to interact as part of the district while waiting for a group. Players are matched with other players across all instances of the same action district, so we can ideally narrow the range of skill as much as possible. Once they are matched, the server moves both teams to a different server where the mission plays out. In my opinion, this is the holy grail. We eliminate segregated districts, because it doesn't matter which one you join. We eliminate visible threat levels, because it's not information you can act on. We increase the pool of players you match against for even matches. What are the problems with Cross-district matchmaking? First, and most importantly, it requires us to finish upgrading to Unreal 3.5 which supports Phasing. We need the ability to move players from one instance of a district to another instance of the same district without unloading all the art. Second, we need to add latency to our matchmaking algorithm so that you are all grouped on an instance of the district that is closest to most of the players. Lastly, in an ideal scenario, we would collapse down to a single World with multiple servers in North America, Europe and Asia. Then we can distribute Regional districts in as many locations as possible for proper latency / skill / matchmaking. Thoughts? Thanks, Matt

This is a solid idea - but I hate the idea of shoving it into production without going through player testing. We have OTW locked off right now while we're testing Epidemic, so we can't get players in until after the Halloween event starts.

To be clear, all of these changes come from our designers who are extremely familiar with the game. While I enjoy attempting to play APB, I'm awful at it (which many of you can attest). I'm just the final vote and the messenger. In this case, it was just a misunderstanding on my part how reverting was going to work. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I appreciate everyone's feedback, and there are several ideas that could work well. 1) We are not reverting the upside to the mod. That will continue to stay percentage based instead of static values. 2) There will be a new downside design for IR3 coming, but I didn't want players to continue to have to wait or be put through another rushed change that needs more testing. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I've just posted an update that we are reverting the IR3 changes. TL;DR - We're reverting IR3. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, NOTE: This has been edited since the original post. Just like the title says, I've made the decision to fully revert the IR changes with the Halloween patch. For the record, I still feel like the IR3 changes were better -- in most cases. I still feel like the original IR implementation ends up with little to no downside. The mod uses set values and not percentages, so players can use that mod to force weapons out of their intended category by extending their range. Changing the mod to be percentage based allowed us to scale the upside/downsides properly. However, "most cases" isn't good enough. Since the changes went live, the design team and I have been trying to solve IR3 on pre-modded Legendaries that players paid for. We toyed with a bunch of scenarios, but all of them create more complexity / variations of the same mod and muddy up understanding how the game works. Hindsight is 20/20. We should have immediately reverted this months ago when players raised the various issues, and then gone back to the drawing board. Instead, each week it appeared like we had a new solution, so I let the changes stand while we explored each new implementation. My apologies to all the players who were affected. We'll do better in the future. Thanks, Matt

Ah. Much better. Good idea

Hi all, All good comments here. Let's see if I can add some context: The Halloween customization contests were meant to be a fun way for people to engage APB without competing in-game. On paper, the idea of doing a "Facebook only" contest looked cool because of the 1.1MM followers there that we want to engage and drive to the forums. However in retrospect, we would have needed to stage the contest differently for it to be more successful. Going forward, we are making more of an effort to post everything to all of our channels (Facebook, Twitter, Forums, etc). Also, the yellow, orange, and purple theme for the character contest was intended to be a fun thematic way to tie-in with the team colors for the upcoming Epidemic event. Not trying to stifle anyone's creativity. Lastly, giving away premium for these contests is a great idea we can try to implement for the future. Once that idea came up (after we posted the contest), we determined it just wasn't feasible. My apologies for those without premium. It wasn't our intention to force you to buy something to participate. The main problem is having an easy way for contestants to sign up ahead of time, so we can add that to their accounts. I didn't want to put more burden on Support, since they are already bogged down. Lessons learned for next time. Thanks, Matt