MattScott

Hi everyone, This is just a brief post to acknowledge and apologize for the horrible networks issues today. Our servers were hit with a series of nonstop DDOS attacks across both regions for about 5 hours between 11am and 4pm PDT. This is by far the worst series of collective attacks we’ve seen. We switched to mitigation and tripped another network issue with our provider that made the issue worse. We will do better in the future. Sorry, Matt

Hi there, We are working on the issue. (I know that sounds like a broken record, but it our #1 priority right now). Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, This week had an unusually high volume of tickets +721. We got a large influx of account recovery requests, which indicates that many old players are still discovering the game again. We closed less tickets than last week. Some of them required a lot of research. Several tickets took more than 4 hours to resolve. Overall we've been working the oldest tickets to try and get our general wait time down, but those are also the most complex. We were able to start splitting tickets up to various internal specialists that have gotten better at handle specific types. Hopefully that will help. And we've created several new queues with various priorities. Be sure to correctly identify what kind of issue you're having. Here are the current CS stats this week: - 7,809 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25 - 4,702 of them have been closed. - 19,662 interactions back and forth on tickets. - 1,641 of them are untouched. Thanks, Matt

I can confirm this was a DDOS attack. *sigh* A little salt in the wound for this morning’s outage I suppose.

Hi guys, We are having a rough morning. We had an outage this morning with our European provider. My team is looking into this one. Thanks, Matt

Hi guys, I haven't responded to this in a while, so here is an update. For context, this morning's outage had nothing to do with DDOSing or lag. Our European provider had a problem, and it took our servers down. That caused another problem, so we had to restart Jericho. My apologies to the players - especially in Europe - who had to wait. We have another round of server code updates that we're hoping will address the lag. One of the big blockers is how to get that code properly tested. Most servers run fine with 20, 30, or even 50 players. We don't generally run into problems until we have a nearly full district at 80 players with a bunch of missions going on. Yesterday we were finally able to get an environment up and organize a regular group of employees to run a decent test. The results were mixed but very informative. I'm hoping we'll be able to do this now a couple times a week until we have a build that we feel is stable and addresses the issues. For now, I'm sure you've noticed that we are rebooting the servers a little more often to help alleviate the problem. I've setup a schedule with our NOC to try and do that during low concurrency times, and I apologize for the disruption that causes, but I feel it's better than leaving the servers in an unplayable state. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, Lots of good discussion here. Per the request of the OP, I'm going to lock the thread. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, This is exactly why we normally do not delete threads unless they violate our ToS. Deleting a thread removes the context for readers like yourself aftert the fact, and it leads to assumptions like ‘censorship’ and ‘abuse of power’. In this case, the OP of that thread asked us to remove it. I started a new thread. Let that get discussed for several hours, and then removed the OP’s thread. It wasn’t ideal. I felt she suffered quite a bit at the hands of the community, and I don’t like all that toxicity. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I'm going to weigh in again here, and then I'm going to lock this thread. First, I've read every response so far. Rest assured I am 110% committed to continue trying new ideas on how to interact with our community. That's the only way this game will grow. Second, I still believe there were problems in our approach in this case. If we are going to stream, we'll do it on an official channel - as representatives of the company. If we play against players, they need to know and agree to that possibility before they join the match. And we can't use anything we haven't earned as a regular player - unless it is a special event setup that way. I don't view our response as letting a vocal minority win. I'm not taking anything away from the community. I view it as a learning opportunity. We're going to try stuff like this again. But next time, we'll do it better. Lastly, here is my opinion on the subject of Lixil's team members: Everyone in the game right now has started with zero strikes against them. I'm not interested in toxicity, finger pointing, or treating any one any differently for past accusations or bans. We only unbanned people where there wasn't any evidence to support the original ban. However, that is not the same thing as condoning cheating. If we have proof of cheating or breaking our ToS, we will ban you. Period. That's a shame, and every ban feels like a failure on our part to salvage that player. But APB is a challenging game that takes a lot of practice to master. Using cheats to gain an advantage destroys that fun challenge. If we don't get it under control, it will destroy the game. It's our job to make sure that doesn't happen. Thanks, Matt

Of course Edit: If a player cheats after they were unbanned, then we will ban them. We are not going to engage in witchinting and reversing unbans.

I made a quick edit. We still want to do streams with devs, Q&As, and special events. Just not against our players in game missions. This was not meant as a punitive post to the community for how things went. It was just a clarification on our policies.

Hi all, Lots of unintended drama today, so I’m going to unpack it a little. Here is the context: My Community Manager came to me with an idea. She is a former streamer, and she asked about playing APB on Twitch. The goal was to show players that we are making an attempt to learn the game and how it works. On the surface it seemed harmless enough, so I approved it. I was wrong. She did her first stream, and it went terribly bad. First, I wasn’t specific that I needed her to start from scratch with a new character. Clearly having her play a max rank character was not well thought out. Second, APB is PvP. That means if her team wins, then another team loses. And that fact alone opens up too many questionable areas. It’s all well and good for me to run around a district and get shot at. Sure, you may not get to be the one that catches me, but I will eventually lose. And a player will always be the one to win. Lastly, she got paired with questionable team mates. If we lack the history of knowing everyone’s reputation, then we shouldn’t be streaming. Lesson learned. Our CM works tirelessly to create a fun space. She’s had a rough couple days. Everyone makes mistakes, but her heart was in the right place. There will be no more gameplay streaming. Going forward none of the LO staff should ever be in competition with our players. It’s impossible to prove they didn’t get extra high end gear that would unbalance the teams. Thanks, Matt Edited for clarity. We still plan to do dev streams and special events.

Hi everyone, I can confirm that we are going to be turning the new weapon balance on in a specific zone for live servers so that players can test. Waiting to see when that will be after we look at the QA results from this week's testing. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I can appreciate the OP's frustration. Dethreating and match making in general is a problem in APB. This is not an easy problem to solve. G1 made several attempts that either didn't work or made damaged the game worse. We will immediately move to fixing this issue as soon as Unreal 3.5 is launched. We need some of the new engine capabilities to implement the solution that I think the game needs. I'm going to lock this thread. I think we've explored this screenshot and the topic presented by the OP enough. Thanks, Matt

Here is the Reddit link that I found: And this conversation on our Fallen Earth page: https://www.facebook.com/fallenearthgame/posts/10156637591676209 If you go a couple comments in, a player talks about this same story. Thanks, Matt

Seems like it has been an ongoing issue because the previous staff made us aware of it.

Hi there, For the OP, we have received multiple complaints with PaymentWall. We are looking into a different provider now. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, We had a string of customer support issues with tradable premium / gifting premium. Nearly all of them are cases where a buyer pays for the premium and sends it to someone. They redeem it, and then the buyer claims credit card fraud. It creates a really bad support nightmare. So until we can sort that issue out, we have turned it off. Sorry, Matt

My apologies. We have had multiple complaints with them since we took over.

Hi all, I was checking through Facebook and came across a story, and then I was catching up on reddit and came across the same story. In both cases the poster related that they had come back to Fallen Earth after a lengthy absence, and recently they had participated in a role play rescue mission. The group had to rescue a player from a prison, and after they did it, he gave out rewards. First, I want to thank the poster for sharing their fun experience. And second, I want to personally thank the organizer of the event. Right now, you guys are making Fallen Earth what it is. It's great inspiration for the team. Thanks, Matt

Interesting that you should mention that. We are actually looking at new options to reduce our use of PaymentWall.

Hi everyone, Busy holiday week for us. Many of the staff were off on the 4th, and nearly everyone had extra work prepping and running the week long event. We've had more support in-game watching server performance, which takes away from our CS time. However here are the current CS stats this week: - 7,088 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25 - 4,233 of them have been closed. - 17,886 interactions back and forth on tickets. - 1,592 of them are untouched. Even with the downtime, we still cleared nearly as many tickets as we received. That's a lot more than we cleared last week. I hope everyone is having fun in-game this week. Thanks, Matt Edited: Bad grammar

Edited the main post to clarify that while the shotgun change is broad, the sniper rifle change is only for the N-HVR 762.

Hi all, We will be putting these changes on OTW soon for players to test. This system is updated every time you boot APB. We also make small tweaks to our own internal systems every patch. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, In the spirit of transparency, here are the changes we are implementing for weapon balance in the coming couple weeks. The development has all been done, we are just testing internally to make sure things work as intended. To start we have two general changes to the Sniper and Shotgun categories: 1) 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. 2) 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. Now for the smaller tweaks to specific weapons: 1) AR-97 'Misery' (Apoc Famine) Improve damage to give it some overkill, and improve the tap fire ability. 2) COBR-A Remove the accuracy curve and improve accuracy recovery rates. 3) ISSR-a Low recovery time for accuracy loss, so you can wait less time after taking a shot to fire again. 4) 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. 5) SBSR (Rifle) We want to give this weapon a unique recoil pattern that's significantly less harsh than the sniper variant. 6) H-9 'Curse' We want to give this weapon a new recoil pattern that has heavily reduced horizontal recoil. 7) 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. 8) NCR New crosshair (from existing asset). Removing the accuracy recovery curve that the HVR has. Thanks, Matt Edited: added clarity on weapon names mentioned in comments.