MattScott

Hi everyone, The reporting in our Support system only extends 90 days out. So these are going to be changing from here on out.. Here are the current CS stats this week: - 76,568 total tickets have been created for APB in the last 90 days - 8,161 of them have been closed. - 98,443 interactions back and forth on tickets. - 1,472 of them are untouched. Thanks, Matt

It was in QA when I left, but there was an issue trading weapons (which is what the bulk of the system is for). I believe that got cleared up, but I'm still seeing unresolved items in our issue tracker. I've been in Germany all week, so it's possible those have all been fixed but not marked complete. If I had to take a guess, we'll be releasing Trading the week of September 3rd. Thanks, Matt Edited to clarify target release date for Trading date.

Hi all, We have an internal connection that has been unstable today. The network engineers are looking at it, but it appears to have dumped players about 3 times today. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, We've been a bit busy at Gamescom this week, so I apologize for some of the silence. Lixil has been here all week with me doing meetings, so her focus has been split between the show and her normal duties. Despite the rumors, we didn't have a booth and we were not showing off the new Engine upgrade. The purpose of the trip was mostly to focus on physical distribution and the rollout of Descent later this year. Couple quick updates: 1) We are still working through Weapon Balance issues. Many players have voiced frustration that we didn't listen to them. From my perspective, I don't feel like that is true. Many of their comments have been taken into account. We simply got too excited and jumped the gun before changes were complete. New changes are still being posted to OTW, and once we've settled on the proper balance, we will update Production. Again, I own the mistake. We are working to rectify things. 2) It appears there was a scamming report being broadcast in-game, and our GM handled it poorly. I want to start by acknowledging the player who was trying to broadcast warnings and help make sure other players didn't fall into a scam trap. While they were technically violating our name-and-shame rules, I suspect their heart was in the right place. I understand the frustration players experience when scam tickets take a long time to complete. They take hours and hours to sort through logs and systems to revert items back to their original owners. That is one of the large reasons we escalated the new trading system ahead of the Engine upgrade. We are doing our best, and that is why I have publicly posted for players NOT to trade right now. I also want to acknowledge the effort of the GM who dealt with a tricky situation that was far from black and white. All of our GMs are under the microscope. Their's is a thankless job. This person did the best they could attempting to enforce our rules, but ultimately they made the wrong call. There is no way they could have known it was okay to allow the player's behavior, and Lixil was unavailable due to Gamescom. Lixil has spoken with the GM and worked through the issues. It wont happen again. 3) We try hard not to delete posts. If you see a post missing, please do not make the assumption that we are attempting some cover up. I committed from the first day we took over that we would be as transparent as possible, and I believe we have made good on that promise so far. More than likely a missing post means we have hidden it to correctly sort out the situation. This gives us a chance to contact the parties involved and get informed. Most of the time we will simply unhide the post and let things continue. Sometimes that's not appropriate. In this case, we didn't handle hiding the post as well as I would have hoped. We'll do better in the future. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Here are the current CS stats this week: - 77,422 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25 - 7,821 of them have been closed. - 97,465 interactions back and forth on tickets. - 1,443 of them are untouched. I knew were bound to slow down. Many of the remaining tickets are ‘difficult’. But rather than copy/paste responding, we are doing the work to respond after properly researching each issue. I know in several cases our agents spent more than 8 hours on a single ticket. We got 400 new tickets, but we closed 377. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Since Tobii managed to discover LO_Beastie's build notes, I'm going to unhide this now. We initially had to hide it, because there was a possibility of changes. However these changes are live on OTW now. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Little Orbit has published 22 titles since 2010, and about half were developed in-house under studios we own. The other half were done with 3rd party devs. Right now we are working on 4 titles - all of which are in different stages of development. We are not looking at anything new for a little while. These are getting 100% of our focus. - APB which is split between supporting the last changes in Unreal 3, finishing Unreal 3.5, and initial work on Unreal 4. This is being handled by a combination of teams both internal and external. We absorbed the devs from Reloaded and have added to that team. - Fallen Earth is a server and client port with no source art. Right now this being done internally, but its all pre-production and exploratory. - Unsung Story has been a combination of external and internal, but we are in the process of shifting everything internal and expanding that team. Engineering is very far along, but art has been running behind. - Descent is being done externally and is nearly done. That title comes out this Fall. Each project has their own ‘rescue’ element, where we came in to help finish. I guess that has been our unofficial business model since 2017. Thanks, Matt

This is actually being worked on. But remember, these aren't virtualized servers. They are traditional hardware that we have to provision and pay for 24/7. OTW US is a copy of what we run in production, so committing to OTW EU means additional cost year around.

Breakfix changes are on OTW now. @LO_Beastie will be posting a new thread first thing in the morning (or sooner).

This will go on OTW so that we can test it? Correct? That is correct. We're hoping to get it up in OTW later today.

Hi everyone, Okay. That was a rough weekend. First, I own rushing 1.19.6 to Live. I was feeling good about the testing in OTW on Weapon Balance and the other 3 features we're pretty well buttoned down. From my perspective, we have a backlog of finished work that will be coming out over the next 3 weeks, so pushing out on a patch means that everything shifts by a week or two. Having said all that, we definitely rushed the Weapon Balance and that wont happen again. Second, it's really frustrating when we patch in new content, and then spend the whole weekend getting DDoSed. I apologize to the players who got on and experienced lag, warping, and other issues. Many players on the forums took the opportunity to poke fun at our "potato servers" or the "crappy new net code". Unfortunately we were under mitigation all weekend, so no one really got a chance to experience the benefit of the changes. Rest assured this is still my top priority to fix. Here is how we're going to move forward over the next couple weeks. 1) Weapon Balance We're working on a short term fix to shotguns that should stabilize things. That will be tested and go live as quickly as possible. Then over the next couple weeks we will continue with our A/B testing on OTW till we dial everything in properly. I'm not putting a time limit on it this time. We'll wait till it's ready before pushing any of the weapon balance changes live again. 2) Showstopper clean up This week we will be patching in the Showstopper Thunder variant for Joker Boxes. 3) Trading System & Marketplace Policy Change The goal is to launch the new Trading System next week. Development is done, and we're going to spend this week testing to make sure we haven't missed anything crucial. In preparation for this launch, @Selali will be posting an updated policy on Marketplace trading. This policy change is being implemented to help Customer Service provide quicker turnaround on other more important issues. Currently, we have supported making trades through the Marketplace where players can exchange item-for-item with other players. Historically this system has been done on the honor system. But based on the amount of trouble tickets, Customer Service has seen rampant abuse which is why we are introducing the new trading system. Effective today, support will no longer be taking scam case tickets related to this type of Marketplace trading. We will strive to address all of the scam case tickets currently in the system, but going forward we no longer support this. The Marketplace will now be used to trade items for in-game currency and vice versa. The Trading system can be used to safely exchange guns and other items. Please note: if you wish to trade items for items, please hold off until we have implemented the new trading system in game. Thanks, Matt

This is the exact issue we're looking into.

Not right now. We have a number of players who have expressed issues now that we raised it. Even thought their system *can* support the higher rate, they want to tune their system lower for better performance. I think we need to address that issue before we continue to raise the limit.

Hi all, We don't often comment on suggestions. Sometimes they are just not feasible. Other times the suggestion is good, but the solution needs to be very different. But we do read and evaluate where in our timeline we can address an issue (if its something we think needs addressing). This is just a small note to let you know we see your comments. I appreciate the time it takes for everyone to post here. I can imagine how frustrating it must feel when there isn't any acknowledgment. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, We did raise this in the last patch. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, We were able to implement this feature in the last patch, and we kept all your friends that had actually accepted the requests. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, We are working to bring this back, but as @Nitecorrectly pointed out, it needs to work differently than before to eliminate abuse. BTW - even a player who actively chooses to accept the gift can still find themselves in a situation where the sender claims fraud. Thanks, Matt

We have just implemented the daily restarts, and the team is still getting the Sunday schedule worked out.

Hi everyone, I've started this update multiple times, and for various reasons I set it aside. But my communication with the FE community has honestly been piss poor. Sometimes managing GamersFirst is like drinking from a firehose. As I stated in an earlier post, I'm frustrated with the game right now. The code is an ancient mess that barely compiles under current development environments. We have nearly constant problems with server lag and stability. We're missing all the source art to the game. And we have problems with cheaters. Above and beyond everything else, this last one is the most problematic. I would prefer to spend our money on fixing the game - not on expensive anti-cheat. But at this point I can't ignore the issue any longer. Since my options are limited on the front end, we have begun working on a custom server-side cheat detection system. This wont be an overnight solution, but at least we can largely introduce it without disrupting the game - or even patching. I do want to thank several members of the community who stepped forward and helped provide copies of various cheats. Those are helping us tune things, so we can properly detect cheaters. Aside from anti-cheat, we are making progress in a number of other areas. The core server code is being completely written from the ground up. I would estimate we are about 10% complete so far. There's a lot to do, as Fallen Earth is a big game that supports a lot of features. I don't want to get everyone's hopes up. This is slow and tedious, but I'll keep updating the community. Another area we have been working on is the lack of source art. I'm happy to say that we have been able to successful export a sizable amount of static game geometry, materials, and textures so we can recreate them in another engine. Our strategy is to first bring everything over so we can make sure the maps and areas still fit together properly based on the server-side data and placed instances. From there, we'll make a PBR pass on the materials. For those that don't know, PBR stands for Physics Based Rendering, and in a game like Fallen Earth, we can vastly improve the look of the game by simply adopting better rendering methods. After that we'll make a pass to tessellate and upgrade world terrain based on the original height map data. And then we'll look at specific upgrades to characters, monsters, etc. The initial progress bringing over buildings is far enough along, that despite my better judgment, I'm going to provide screenshots of a small area we mocked up in-game. This is just work in progress. Still so much to do, but it's is a good start. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, Yes. Honestly, this should have happened at least a month ago. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, We have now been tracking support for more than 60 days. Hopefully these updates help give a gauge of where we are at. Here are the current CS stats this week: - 77,022 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25 - 7,444 of them have been closed. - 96,266 interactions back and forth on tickets. - 1,356 of them are untouched. We got 462 new tickets, but we closed 677, which means we continue to make up ground. Thanks, Matt

For the record this patch *does* include the net code and hit reg fixes. But the settings that worked in OTW aren’t working exactly the same way in live. So we need a reboot. Thanks, Matt

Please don't. I can confirm that the Showstopper is initially going to be available in ARMAS and as a leased base variant through the Joker store. Unfortunately, we're running behind on the Thunder variant which needed a unique skin. It will be available in a new JMB. It was our first time organizing anything like this, so the new JBM will launch next week. We have some other variants planned for in-game, but those are a bit longer term and farther off. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, We just started patching 7pm PDT 8/8/2018 or 2am UTC 8/9/2018. My apologies to everyone for the early "prime time" patch. Normally we don't do that. The network code upgrade requires a little babysitting, and I wanted devs around to quickly revert changes if there is a problem. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, We are patching tonight. I know there is some concern over weapon balance. We are collecting stats and we will be monitoring the meta. We are all in this together, and we want the best for the game. Rest assured we will continue to balance after this patch. Thanks, Matt