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MattScott

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Posts posted by MattScott

  1. Posted

    For me a good report system needs to have limits so it cant be spammed, and ways of prioritizing data from players who use it well.

    It also needs to provide us with actionable information. We have mountains of server-side data. We just need to get solid player reports to inform where to focus.

    Ultimately I dont want any cheat systems in the game that we ignore. That’s why we removed /report for now. I didn’t want the illusion that we were actually getting anything useful from it.

    • Like 3
    • Thanks 7

  4. Posted

    Hi there,

    For the OP - I removed the pin because we have newer topics in the forum that needed to be pinned, and we need to rotate out older pinned topics. Otherwise we end up with too many posts locked to the top of the forums, and no one knows what's important. We have made significant improvements to the lag, and we will continue to work on it.

    The disconnect issues are a different problem that we are looking into.

    Thanks,
    Matt

    • Like 2

  9. Posted

    Here is a comprehensive list of changes:

    Original 7/30/2018:

    Improvements to networking:
    This is an ongoing effort to help clean up some of the last changes G1 made back in September of 2017. We've made several changes that need to be tested in a larger environment, and we're going to experiment with opening districts back up to 100 players.

    Fixes to Friends system:
    We found several bad problems with this system that allowed players to grief other players. You will now need to accept friend invites before a friend is added to your account. No other players can see your exact location till you accept the invite - including on the player search feature. Alongside this fix we are opening the ignore list for all players to the max size instead of continuing the practice of charging for expanded slots.
    NOTE: Originally we thought we would have to wipe friends lists. We don't think that will be necessary now, but we will still need to wipe non-reciprocal friends to reset the system.

    New weapon - Showstopper:
    We've introduced an entirely new gun. This is our first piece of new content. It's important that it was small and manageable for us to learn how to get it in properly. We'll be providing more details on this gun shortly. Stats are not final. We'll be adjusting these over the next couple days.

    Weapon Balance changes:

    • Linking accuracy to damage on the HVR 762 - Reducing the damage of the HVR 762 when it's not perfectly accurate allows us to reduce the ability to fire it at close range / snap shot and still be effective. Sniper Rifles, particularly the HVRs, are particularly hard to balance because they are currently effective at point blank range and also devastating at a distance. G1 tried a few rough balance measures in the past with initial inaccuracy and movement cooldown, but it’s still quite possible to use the HVR in CQC. We feel this change will preserve the HVR 762's place in our matrix of weapons, but make it less desirable outside of actually sniping. 
    •  Shotgun Damage Pellet Damage - We're adjusting how shotguns do damage, to allow for more damage for partial hits (the first pellets to hit a single target do more damage than the last ones). This allows them to be more forgiving without buffing their overall damage. Again, Shotguns are hard to balance. Currently we feel they are powerful but very inconsistent, and some of this is because how our servers perform at higher latency.
    • AR-97 'Misery' (Apoc Famine) - Improve damage to give it some overkill, and improve the tap fire ability.
    • COBR-A - Remove the accuracy curve and improve accuracy recovery rates.
    • ISSR-a - Low recovery time for accuracy loss, so you can wait less time after taking a shot to fire again. 
    • SWARM - Reduce horizontal recoil amount. We're also investigating increasing the time it takes to recoil to slightly higher than the recoil time, making the recoil smoother.
    • SBSR (Rifle) - We want to give this weapon a unique recoil pattern that's significantly less harsh than the sniper variant.
    • H-9 'Curse' - We want to give this weapon a new recoil pattern that has heavily reduced horizontal recoil.
    • S-247 'Oblivion' - Attempt to make the weapon a lot snappier when using it as a fire and reposition weapon. This would heavily improve snap fire by reducing the time it takes to gain accuracy after moving, and allowing you to switch during re-fire timer.
    • NCR - New crosshair (from existing asset). Removing the accuracy recovery curve that the HVR has.

    Fixes for today's patch 7/31/2018:
    • Fixed a crash when receiving a Friend Request
    • Fixed an issue causing the weapon stats to be incorrect
    • Changed prototype district display names to 'Weapon Prototype A' and 'Weapon Prototype B' to distinguish between them
    • Fixed a crash at shutdown
    • Updated chat and HUD text for Weapon Prototype Districts
    • Weapon Prototype B now correctly spins up the prototype minigame (simple Kill enemies)
    • Added multiple Anubis variants. Now that the exponential recovery gain has been removed (which fixes the jump bug) the reduced accuracy loss on each shot wasn't really having an effect. Adjusting the curves for the accuracy loss to be more noticeable, with the B variant being significantly more so. Also this requires reducing the recovery rate of the weapon to have pretty much any effect, but we've also reduced the cap at which the weapon can bloom to the same as the per shot modifier, so recovery time shouldn't get out of hand. Fire rate is also improved on both variants, to differing degrees.
    • Fixed CSG using DOW stats in Weapon Prototype District B.
    • Fixed an occasional issue getting stuck loading into a district

    Thanks,
    Matt
    • Like 17
    • Thanks 5

  10. Posted

    Hi everyone,

    We've made several changes based on yesterday's testing. I appreciate everyone who submitted bug reports to let us know about issues.

    Here are the fixes:

    • Fixed a crash when receiving a Friend Request
    • Fixed an issue causing the weapon stats to be incorrect
    • Changed prototype district display names to 'Weapon Prototype A' and 'Weapon Prototype B' to distinguish between them
    • Fixed a crash at shutdown
    • Updated chat and HUD text for Weapon Prototype Districts
    • Weapon Prototype B now correctly spins up the prototype minigame (simple Kill enemies)
    • Added multiple Anubis variants. Now that the exponential recovery gain has been removed (which fixes the jump bug) the reduced accuracy loss on each shot wasn't really having an effect. Adjusting the curves for the accuracy loss to be more noticeable, with the B variant being significantly more so. Also this requires reducing the recovery rate of the weapon to have pretty much any effect, but we've also reduced the cap at which the weapon can bloom to the same as the per shot modifier, so recovery time shouldn't get out of hand. Fire rate is also improved on both variants, to differing degrees.
    • Fixed CSG using DOW stats in Weapon Prototype District B.
    • Fixed an occasional issue getting stuck loading into a district

    Have fun! I'd like to get some feedback on server responsiveness with full action districts.

    Edit: Full patch notes for 1.19.6 on OTW can be found here: 
    Thanks,
    Matt
    • Like 14
    • Thanks 7

  11. Posted

    58 minutes ago, Similarities said:

    is the FPS limit being raised to 145 intentional?

    Yes. It's a small fix for players with higher refresh rate monitors.
    20 minutes ago, Shini said:

    I mean, not to be entirely negative on the Shotgun and HVR testing being a flop.
    The friend list change and the 145fps limit is pretty damn PogChamp.


    Really 2

    53 minutes ago, Similarities said:

    yeah shotguns are broken???
    EDIT: as in god awful, they dont 2 shot at ALL

    Yep. Looks like the weapon balance changes went a little wonky. We'll make some revisions and let everyone know when they are up.
    • Like 8
    • Thanks 1

  12. Posted

    18 minutes ago, Kiida said:
    But one more thing, what about the player search function that most of us use to spam-join full districts? That currently also shows anyone's location whether added as a friend or not.
    Non-friends cannot see your location now.
     
    3 minutes ago, Hexerin said:
    16 minutes ago, MattScott said:

    Yes. When you invite a friend, they now have to accept the request before they are added. We also now hide your exact location from friends till the entire process is complete.

    Edited for clarity.
    Further clarification needed: If you remove someone from your friends list, does it also now remove you from theirs as well? Cause that's another glaring issue with the current system.
    Yes. If you remove them, then you are automatically removed from their friends list as well.
    • Like 5
    • Thanks 5

  13. Posted

    BTW - The Showstopper stats are not final. We'll fix that in the next two days with a patch.
     

    5 minutes ago, Saxtus said:

    Question about new friends system:
    We will need permission to add people to our friends list after its wipe?


    Yes. When you invite a friend, they now have to accept the request before they are added. We also now hide your exact location from friends till the entire process is complete.
    Edited for clarity.
    • Like 7
    • Thanks 5

  14. Posted

    Hi everyone,

    I have posted a new dev blog with the July update on our progress. You can read the details here:
    https://apbreloaded.gamersfirst.com/2018/07/end-of-july-update.html

    This update covers the details for 1.19.6, the upcoming 1.19.7, progress with Unreal 3.5, and some updates for our console players.

    Build 1.19.6 is now available to all players on our Open Test World. Once you log in and create your account, you'll have a bunch of in-game emails waiting with all the weapons in the game to play with. In order to access that system, you need to download an alternate installer for the game. You can download the OTW version of APB here:
    OTW Download Link

    Thanks,
    Matt

    • Like 36
    • Thanks 15

  18. Posted

    Hi everyone,

    This morning at 7am PDT one of our circuits had rolling connectivity issues which caused servers to be unavailable. That circuit is back up, but the engineers are looking at the core issue. When these types of network issues happen, we are forced to do a round of server reboots to make sure Districts and World servers can talk to each other properly. 

    We've spent quite a bit of time patching server performance and looking at forward-facing network systems, and I believe we've made real progress there. However clearly there are still more cobwebs to clean. Personally it's frustrating to see failures in these "back of house" systems that cause downtime on a weekend like this. Tomorrow I'm going to sit with the networking team to start evaluating them one by one to see if we can reduce the possibility of this kind of downtime in the future.

    Thanks,
    Matt

    • Like 9
    • Thanks 37

  20. Posted

    Hi everyone,

    We had a rather unfortunate setback yesterday in CS. The provider that runs our customer service portal was hacked, and ~68K bad support tickets were opened. 
    It took the better part of the day to get things sorted out. However, since we don't run this tool in-house, and we can't mass delete the garbage, it means our stats are now forever wonky going forward.

    I'm just going to list them here, but I'll likely stop posting these stats and come up with another way to communicate our progress in Customer Support.

    Here are the current CS stats this week:
    - 77,478 total tickets (est. 8,923 before spam) have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25
    - 6,046 of them have been closed.
    - 92,362 interactions back and forth on tickets (est. 23,807 before spam).
    - 1,660 of them are untouched.

    The key points are:
    - We are capable of closing ~750 tickets a week @ an average of 4 interactions per ticket.
    - This week we only saw 333 new tickets, so we were able to catching up a lot.
    - It would take 5 more weeks to completely clear all the tickets if we can hold this rate.

    Thanks,
    Matt
     

    • Like 10
    • Thanks 8

  25. Posted

    Hi all,

    Yes. We can't do cross district matching till Unreal 3.5 is released. The current version of the game can't support phasing.

    The new design will allow players to join any district they want to play in, and then match with any other player in that same district.
    We can phase the matched players to a new district server with the best response time, and the game wont have to reload any art for the district.
    This does mean that cars and pedestrians and other interactive props will change during the transition, but I feel like that is a small price to pay.

    Aside from the player matching benefits, it also means you can join any district while you wait.
    No sitting at the district listing and competing with every other player to get the last spot on the single desirable district with the full population.

    Thanks,
    Matt

    • Like 13
    • Thanks 6
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