MattScott

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

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.

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

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

Hi there, Yep. We are in the process of adding an RSS feed. Thanks, Matt

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

We have petitioned Amazon multiple times to get an adjustment on the G1C being sold there. We have yet to get a single response. Sorry, Matt

Hi all, Just FYI. Several of our services are being intermittently impacted by provider outages related to hurricane Michael. I haven’t yet seen any extended outages, but connectivity is definitely going up and down which will cause disconnects from the game right now. Apologies, Matt

Sorry guys. North America got hit by large, reoccuring DDoS attacks tonight. We had to turn on mitigation which turns the servers to mush. Overall, for the last 2 months, we have been able to withstand about 80-85% of the attacks without negatively impacting players. However the last week has been worse. We will continue to implement various protect systems.

I can appreciate the OP’s frustrations. We are not perfect, but I do read the forums, and we do our best. For the record: - this was requested by players - it was already implemented for Fallen Earth, so it took very little effort to just standardize the code for APB - we are working on 2FA Thanks, Matt

Hi there, We are working on a fix for this issue. Paypal changed their systems which require an update the in-game browser. Thanks, Matt

NOTE: I was not on the original RTW team, nor was I on the Reloaded team, so much of this is internal hearsay. As I understand it, Midtown was a development area for the game's work in progress assets. Most of the buildings were used in Financial, although a couple unique designs remain. Technically we did find it on a map sketched in between Financial and Waterfront, and it is referenced in the lore as a separate place. The idea of Criminal and Enforcer Social Districts were too fragmenting to the player base, so those districts were scrapped. The Criminal Social District was used to create Asylum. The assets for the Enforcer district are still there, but for reasons I wont go into, they aren't very usable as in-game models. We would be better off doing something from scratch using that district as inspiration. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I love this post. and have enjoyed checking it occasionally to see the responses from players. I figure it's probably time for me to weigh in. First, I think the OP did a fantastic job organizing information and data about Midtown. We do have quite a bit in the archives, but the work was all temporary and never intended for the final product. Second, I don't think the current version of the game would benefit from LO building out Midtown right now. In my opinion we need to make sure there is enough content in the current 2 action zones so they can progress characters and get matches. Having said that, we do have some ideas for possibly incorporating Midtown in the future when the game has different matchmaking and streaming systems. As others have mentioned, I also think it would be fun to free roam and drive all over the map from district to district. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, Sorry I've been quiet for a bit. I'll be posting on Wednesday on this exact topic :) Thanks, Matt

Hi guys, We are adding 2FA very soon, and players will be able to use this to circumvent the 7 day issue when switching systems. Thanks, Matt