Holiday season events and more

[Holiday season events and more]

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

[Armas sale for the holidays]

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

[Halloween events start the morning of Oct 30 Pacific time]

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

[Halloween event?]

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

[Fully reverting IR changes.. and why we tried them in the first place]

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

[Matchmaking and Threat]

10 minutes ago, Salvick said:

 

I'd like to bring a question, I always wonder why South America is barely considered at all by any gaming company. Is not like there are so few players from this region as you could easily find yourself if you could gather these stats.

 

I do understand instead that it is related with the costs to keep a server up it implies, while I'd let in your hands the idea to evaluate the cost/benefits rate of such investment since a bunch of us have been loyal to this game for years spending investing above the average in our purchases, and a lot of South American players left the game or ended up playing less often when the DDoS mitigation and server relocation started in the G1 era.

 

And for those who always think of "Brazil" when someone says something about South America well, just take a look at the map to figure out we are way more than just Brazilians. Regards everyone.

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.

[Halloween costume contest!]

6 hours ago, Xnetexe said:

So are we getting a free premium code for the event or not? There's still 5 days left in this costume contest, which is more than enough time for players to create an outfit.

Back when LadyTiggs was the community manager, she was able to create premium codes for events by herself, so it shouldn't be hard to generate one right now.

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.

[Matchmaking and Threat]

44 minutes ago, Similarities said:

Matching based on latency will make it very difficult for players from the SEA area of the world to find matches because they don't have their own servers and their pop is already REAL dead. That's the only worry I can really express there.

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.

 

44 minutes ago, ky4 said:

I was thinking about this as well. Phasing is a good idea but it also takes away some of the open world elements which (in my opinion) are core parts of the game. Perhaps it would work to include multiple matches in the same phase instead of having a phase for each individual match?

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.

[Fully reverting IR changes.. and why we tried them in the first place]

1 hour ago, Weeb TheEpicGuyV2 said:

Is it possible to get said designers to join in the conversation? Being the messenger and not the one making the changes, it must be rather hard justifying the changes they make as it's not a change you thought of. If they join in, it might help the conversation, with them knowing why they did the changes and all

 

Like when beastie joined in the shotgun changes 

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

[Matchmaking and Threat]

22 minutes ago, CookiePuss said:

As a Jericho player, I wonder how much phasing will even help considering we can barely fill a single silver  district anyways.

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.

[Matchmaking and Threat]

19 minutes ago, Hexerin said:

Even if you hide threat level and remove district instance choice, it's still possible (and easy) to dethreat because it's an automated system.

 

15 minutes ago, BXNNXD said:

i think mattscott has said in the past he’d like threat change to be more gradual, which would make dethreating more difficult 

 

i honestly don’t think there’s any way to make dethreating impossible without it also affecting regular players 

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).

[Community Discussion Topics]

Hi everyone,

 

I have posted the first Community Developer Discussion topic in a sub forum here:

 

Thanks,
Matt

[Matchmaking and Threat]

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

[Fully reverting IR changes.. and why we tried them in the first place]

4 minutes ago, Snubnose said:

 

ok, keeping the percentage based upside, but going back to the almost non-existent downside is basically buffing IR3 better than it was in the first place (atleast for every weapon with 30m range and above).

I think we may should slightly reduce the fire rate downside, maybe to 10% instead of 18% untill you implement a new downside. (although I'd be fine if the -10% fire rate downside stays, I like the idea)

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.

[Fully reverting IR changes.. and why we tried them in the first place]

27 minutes ago, CookiePuss said:

Can we just make up our mind already? lol

 

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

[Fully reverting IR changes.. and why we tried them in the first place]

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

[IR3 Preset Refund]

Hi all,

 

I've just posted an update that we are reverting the IR3 changes.

 

TL;DR - We're reverting IR3.

 

Thanks,
Matt

[Fully reverting IR changes.. and why we tried them in the first place]

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

[Halloween costume contest!]

7 minutes ago, Nessie said:

 

May I ask why it wouldn't be possible to simple provide a free 1-day or 2-day premium code to be redeemed by anybody during the event period?

Such as the old famous "WELCOMETOSANPARO" code that gave to any player a 24h premium when redeemed, valid only once.

Having to sign up as a partecipant to be manually added the premium time sounds like an unnecessarily complex approach..

Ah. Much better. Good idea

[Halloween costume contest!]

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

[Community Discussion Topics]

9 hours ago, Weeb TheEpicGuyV2 said:

Will we be getting one this week, and if so, what will it be on. Or is it a surprise until it goes up

I wanted to give players a chance to read and respond to this thread, so I could pick the first topic based on feedback.

My plan is to put up the first thread on Friday, so everyone can weigh in over the weekend.

[Post 'Battleye' Update statistics]

Hi all,

 

I've already said that I will not post ban statistics or embrace the toxicity surrounding the practice of glorifying bans.
We usually communicate at least a couple times of month with their developers to see if there are upgrades.

We also have some very helpful community members turning in cheats they have found or paid for.

 

BattlEye has quietly flagged plenty of accounts for cheating. My team reviews each case, and has banned 100% of them.

I find it interesting that no one is stepping forward from that group to admit they got caught.

 

Thanks,
Matt

[Community Discussion Topics]

Hi everyone,

 

We're all working overtime right now to finish up the Halloween event and to keep the engine upgrade rolling along, so I apologize for not being more present on the forums. However after reading through the various posts tonight, I can see a lot of unhappy, vocal players all pointing at Steam stats and blaming Little Orbit for various issues.

 

Many of these posts debate whether Little Orbit has accomplished very much, and I'm not here to convince you one way or the other. Instead, I'd like to participate in the discussion and maybe share a little bit of my own perspective. To accomplish this, I'm going to try and create one post a week, where I will pick a topic that the community seems to be unhappy with, and we'll discuss it here in the open (as much as I can). 

 

Here are a list of issues that I see on the forums right now:

- Why did Little Orbit unban all these cheaters? / Demo version of BattlEye / Ineffective anti-cheat / Matt said he wont ban anyone

- Why hasn't Little Orbit fixed the Matchmaking system? / Threat needs to go back to the way it was / De-threaters

- Why did Little Orbit do the Weapon Balance? / Shotguns suck / IR3 changes are garbage

- Why isn't Little Orbit listen to me? / Why is Little Orbit listening to people that don't know what they are talking about?

 

There are plenty more. Perhaps you guys can recommend the first topic you would like to discuss with me.

 

Thanks,
Matt

[APB DevBlog and RSS]

Hi there,

 

Yep. We are in the process of adding an RSS feed.

 

Thanks,
Matt

[The Growth of GamersFirst]

Hi everyone,

I'm sure you've noticed the new GamersFirst.com site, and more changes are coming as we get the site where I want it to be.

We have also recently added Descent and Shards to the site.

We'll be adding Unsung Story and possibly one other in the near future.

 

I expect many of these titles wont be your cup of tea - and that's okay.

But I encourage you to be a good citizen and welcome these new players as they start to use the forums.

 

BTW - All of these titles have one thing in common - they needed a little rescuing somewhere along the way.

I have hand picked each member our little misfit family, and rest assured, we are just as committed to APB now as when we took over.

 

In fact, I'm going to be opening a couple topics on the forums soon to solicit player feedback on a couple things we're doing.

 

Moving forward, many people have asked me why we chose to keep the GamersFirst name.

Why not throw it away? Why not call it Little Orbit?

 

To me, Little Orbit was a retail publisher focused on kids games. We learned a tremendous amount from running that business, but it's not really who we are any more.

 

I like the name GamersFirst simply because of the company we want it to be -- a place where gamers come first.

 

That sounds sappy, and I realize that for many of you, the name means exactly the opposite. Even beyond anything in the past, we've gotten off to a bumpy start. If you feel like we have ignored your feedback so far or that screwed up an aspect of your game, then I sincerely apologize.

 

This is a work in progress, and we wont be able to make everyone happy.

But our heart is in the right place.

 

I appreciate your support,

Matt