MattScott

Hi guys, We have rebooted servers to adjust after the attack. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I've posted on this issue here: Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Let's talk about yesterday a little. I just got back from Melbourne on Friday, and finally had a chance to get back in the game yesterday. A player alerted me that the game was running poorly, but we had been on mitigation, so I got on but wasn't sure what to expect. I started with Financial and started running around with the other player. You'll have to excuse my ignorance, but I had not actually experienced rubberbanding. Until yesterday. The game was literally unplayable, and I'm sorry for that. It's inexcusable. I'm sure many of you experienced the same frustration and terrible issues during your missions and attempts to play. I spent the better part of the day doing latency tests and pulling my dev and network team in on a Saturday to look at the problem. All total I played on 4 different servers across PC and PS4, and at one point I was on a server entirely by myself. The rubberbanding was just as bad. We finally decided it was better to quickly reboot the Jericho servers to continue testing. After the reboot, I got on again. I even played in a couple missions in green. (Yes. You may have seen me running around Financial and Waterfront. I got my patootie handed to me. I think I got one kill the entire time.) Here are a couple things I want to acknowledge from yesterday's research: Mitigation for DDOS causes latency.. maybe 20-30ms extra on Jericho. Less on Citadel. It certainly affects the game, but nothing like what I saw. We run real hardware not cloud servers. And while it's entirely possible that our servers aren't strong enough, after rebooting, the servers I played on ran great. In my opinion, this is clearly an issue in the server code, and my team is working through the server logs from yesterday to determine what happened so we can fix it. Unfortunately in our efforts to try and clear more support tickets, we had more of our GMs handling tickets. Going forward Lixil has re-tasked them all with staying in-game to help report latency issues, so we can quickly reboot servers is there are issues. I had something of a celebration planned for this week, and we're still going to run it, but given the circumstances I'm going to change that theme to something else. Ultimately we appreciate you guys for hanging in there. I'll post tomorrow with more details. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, It was just a quick reboot. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I was on earlier working with the network team to see what the problem is. We are rebooting Jericho servers now, and my team is looking at the logs. Sorry, Matt

Hi everyone, It's Friday evening again. Here are the current CS stats: - 6,282 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25 - 3,489 of them have been closed. - 15,388 interactions back and forth on tickets. - 1,542 of them are untouched. We completed our re-training this week, and some of that will continue into next week over the holiday. We added 3 more members to the team that will be immediately jumping into tickets for players who are unable to access their accounts. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, I can shed a little light on this for the OP. Fixing the lag and DDOS issues are complicated. There isn't a single silver-bullet-fix that can clear everything up, otherwise G1 would have done it ages ago. LO is biting the bullet and messing around in the underlying core network systems of APB. This affects everything you do in game, and changes require lots of testing. We have implement 2 parts of the lag/DDOS fix so far. One seems to be stable, but the other ran into issues in production this week and caused a bunch of problems which had to be rolled back. We will continue to push builds until things are running smoothly. Thanks, Matt

I derailed this thread. Locking this. You're welcome to discuss it further under my explanation.

See my explanation here.

Hi everyone, This one is on me. I spent the last two weeks meeting with a portion of the team for 12 hours a day to map out the future of APB: Reloaded. I got excited about some things we have been playing with, and I made a vague/not-so-vague comment in a thread that completely derailed it. I usually don't delete or remove forum threads, but in this case I've decided to do it, because the information I gave was poorly handled. Ultimately I shouldn't have said anything at all. Not because of the negative reaction that followed, but because I didn't provide enough information. My comment made it sound like Fight Club was being removed entirely and sooner than the new mode will be ready. I'll do better with information in the future. Here is where we're headed: - There is a new mode coming fairly quickly. I'll be posting more details as soon as possible when I get the final feedback from development, but I intentionally want to wait till we have completed work on the servers and lag. - Internally the new mode is being called "Riot". It will go to OTW long before we add it to production, and we can run it as a replacement to Open Conflict. - I'll take a harder look at Fight Club to create a better strategy for fixing the issues I have with it. Nothing is going to change without a lot more discussion with the community and testing. We are new, and I want to start adding new content, but that should never involve destroying anything that players are having fun with right now. Sorry, Matt EDIT: I went ahead and made the original thread visible for reference. I have locked it, just to insure that players don't continue to read it and panic.

Hi all, Just for clarity, I think we've designed something that fills the spot that FC was intended to from a gameplay / reward stand point. The problem with FC is in the implementation. It's using a small corner of an existing district, and frame rate will always be a problem till we fix it. Ultimately we'll let the players decide. If they really like FC and want it to stay, then I'm 100% fine with that. We can run the new mode in place of OC, but I'm super excited to get players feedback on something entirely new. Thanks, Matt EDIT: Nothing is getting removed till the new mode is ready, and we'll likely beta test the new mode long before that.

Hi guys, Spoiler: I am going to get rid of Fight Club and Open Conflict. Besides the awkward FPS problems, I don't feel either of these are fulfilling their role in the game at all. We're 100% focused on cleaning up the lag and server performance right now. But as soon as that's done, and the game is playing smoother, then I'll announce the new mode that will be replacing them. EDIT: FC will stay in until we fully release the new mode, and we see a significant drop off in FC players. Apologies for upsetting anyone. My excitement got the better of me in this post. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I regularly scan through this thread, but I've been posting my updates to some of these issues publicly. We're all focused on lag/DDOS issues before we jump into any more content. But this thread factored into my recent Roadmap update. Thanks, Matt

Hi guys, We have performed an emergency patch to address the disconnect issues. Can you let me know if the issue is improved? Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I like this idea, but it doesn't honestly solve the core problem of why people want to join the most populated servers in the first place. At the end of the day, it shouldn't matter what server you join - except for what kind of district you want to play in. Players should match with any other player currently in any instance of their same district. This would significantly improve your matches, because the server can choose from a much wider population. Unfortunately we need Phasing to make this work. Phasing is the ability to throw away the network layer and rebuild it without unloading all the level assets. That isn't supported in Unreal 3.0. So we've put this change as soon as possible after Unreal 3.5 launches. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I'm seeing three different issues being discussed here: 1) Random disconnects (reported by the OP) We are experiencing heavy DDOS issues, and that will cause disconnects as well, so this is tricky to diagnose. If you weren't getting disconnected before, and you are now, then we likely need to look at something. The timing is too suspect with respect to the latest build, so I'll assume that's the cause. Please PM me any details for what you're doing when you get disconnected, and I'll send those to the devs to investigate. 2) Kicks for disallowed programs This comes from BE. These will always be accompanied by a message within five minutes of joining a district. Right now the majority of these are for Auto Hot Key style programs running on the system. We need to get a pinned post up in the Technical Support forums to help players with this issue. 3) Being forced AFK while actively doing something in the District This is another issue we need to look into. Can someone PM me with details surrounding specific actions that seem to trigger this? I'll forward them to the devs to investigate. Thanks, Matt

This is generally where we're heading with a couple differences.

As a direct reply to the OP: In my opinion dethreating is the symptom of a larger problem which is low populations to match against. Today, we have the highest concurrency in the game in over a year, but we're still only matching you against the 40 other players on your server. We should be matchmaking across all districts - not just the one you happen to make it onto. We are working to fix this but it will take some time, because we can't implement the solution I want till we get the new 3.5 engine upgrade out the door. In the meantime, we are also working on a new mode (as opposed to Fight Club or Open Conflict) for players to engage in that will help them be able to practice tactics, weapon switching, map knowledge, and other skills while giving them a better experience. I'm hopeful that mode can go live before the 3.5 upgrade. We'll see. Thanks, Matt

This has gotten as far as it's going to go. I'm going to close this off now. Thanks, Matt

With all the new systems in place, we are re-evaluating how /report should work. I still want a way for players to flag behavior that can give GMs people to spot check. TL;DR - We are going to reimplement /report so it actually benefits the system with information we can use. We currently only kick for AHK. You should be fine. I couldn't have said it better myself.

The initial temp ban period allows for us to review the offense and determine whether to convert it to a permanent ban. If the system started crazy banning people for no reason, and my team was too swamped to keep up, then we know those bans would only be temporary and self correcting. Fairfight is still active. We have just disabled all the messages.

You wont get banned for those. You do get kicked though. We are working on making that error more understandable. BattlEye need to pass us a better explanation.

Hi everyone, I've seen this topic floating around the forums, and it's time to set the record straight. We are banning for hacking and cheating. The goals of our cheat implementation are: To eliminate cheaters and hackers from the game, so that regular players can enjoy themselves To avoid inaccurate bans for cheating and hacking To avoid having to mass unban players ever again This last goal is crucial. Unbanning players resets the balance of the game. I felt it was necessary based on my own research, but only because I didn't like the previous subjective banning implementation. Here are some answers to avoid any miscommunication of our strategy: We only ran BattlEye in observation mode for about a week after it first launched. This was just to review data without triggering any potential unfair mass bans. The bulk of "easy" cheats or AHK programs simply don't work with BattlEye. (NOTE: If you're getting kicked from APB then disable any Auto Hot Key programs. They are not allowed in APB). We have three different systems that can ban a player. These are *mostly* escalating temp bans that get longer and longer the more you get flagged. Here is the important part that makes sure we achieve all three goals I outlined above: My CS staff gets real time reports on the temp bans. We use that initial period to review each case and determine if we want to make it a permanent ban. I can tell you right now that 100% of the bans we've reviewed were made permanent. I am not proud of banning. I've already spoken on this topic a lot before, so I'm not going rehash that here. We will not name and shame banned players, and we will not provide numbers on how many people we have banned. Thanks, Matt

I am VERY interested in adding new languages.. however there is a lot of text in the game. Typically localization rates are $0.10 a word, and we have more than 400,000 words which means $40k per language. I think right now, I want to focus on working through the contacts and progression to make sure we've locked in the content we want, and then we'll start the process of translating. Yes. But I didn't list it because we need to identify where the art went and make sure the UI system is still supported. Once I have all the moving parts nailed down, I'll add it to the Roadmap.

Hi everyone, For the most part, I really enjoyed reading this thread, and I want to personally thank those players who took the time to offer advice or tryto answer the OP’s question. To the OP, I appreciate the honest open question. It raised a lot of good points. I did mention the matchmaking and threat systems in the Q&A, and they are big priorities (although not as big as lag right now). Changes are coming. Thanks, Matt