MattScott

Hi guys, I'm glad everyone had a chance to read the Q&A transcript - thanks @SKay again for getting that done so quickly. I'm going to lock this but leave it pinned for a little longer. We will do more of these in the future. The intention is to mix up the hosts and get to more questions from the community. Thanks, Matt

Hi guys, I have already posted the official policy for nudity. APB is 18+, so our rule is no genitalia. But I can see the value of what the OP was asking. Unfortunately showing/hiding nudity would rely on accurate flagging. I appreciate the discussion. Going to lock this thread. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, Fixing threat is in our roadmap, and it’s one of the highest priorities. However it’s a bit more complex than Anti-cheat, so we took care of BattlEye first. The last time G1 tried to fix threat, a significant portion of the population left, so we want to come up with the right solution that actually fixes the problem without alienating everyone. Thanks, Matt

Hey everyone, It’s Friday night, so I’m going to post the current status of Customer Support. Hopefully many of you are seeing your tickets move along. Here are the current CS stats right now: - 3,159 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25. - 626 of them were players requesting unbans. We cleared all of these today - however if your account did not get unbanned, please respond to the first ticket you submitted. - 5,375 interactions back and forth on tickets. - 1,346 of them have been closed (this includes the 626 we closed for unban requests) - 1,087 are untouched. We continue to add staff to this department, and we have more new CS folks starting next week. Thanks, Matt

Hi Zeker, We have removed bans on thousands of players who were flagged by FairFight and a couple other select reasons. However we are still evaluating many thousands more that were not categorized properly, so there will likely be a second wave. We appreciate your patience. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I missed this thread, but we have approved the use of the Advanced Launcher. The developer was kind enough to share the code so we could make sure it was okay ahead of the patch. Thanks, Matt

Unbanning will occur after we lock servers tomorrow.

I'm not going to go into specifics, but we have considered this case and implemented safety mechanisms until I feel BattlEye is working at 100%.

I understand your frustration. Please know that we did a lot of analytics against the banned accounts to try and figure out a better way, but in the end it was impossible to make any 100% determination on whether someone actually cheated or not. We are not wiping progress, lowering rank, or taking away G1C / purchased items. This was the best I could do to equalize the economy and create a level playing field for returning players who may have abused the game.

We are unbanning players caught up in the KTTC and FFA issues. We aren't in a position to do refund anyone prior to Little Orbit taking over. But I will grant G1C to players who paid on or after May 10th to unlock their accounts. PLEASE be patient with Customer Support. We have just unbanned thousands of players, and they will be swamped even more than they are now. If you paid for an unban, please open a ticket and we will get you sorted out.

This has been removed in this patch as well.

We are no longer advertising bans. I'm going to ask for patience on this, because we haven't had a chance to really test this. However we have opened the Open Test World (OTW) to all players for resting. We are fine with players getting on and running configurations they want to test. We believe editing config files should be fine, but we're not 100%.

Good catch. I edited my original to post to include that we have approved use of the Advanced Launcher.

Hi everyone, Please see the update announcement here: https://apbreloaded.gamersfirst.com/2018/06/june-2018-anti-cheat-update.html Sorry this took so long to nail down on our end. We had to address many different issues internally to get ready for this patch - everything from upgrading libraries to bring them current to training a new QA team on testing the game. I know the radio silence and lack of clear date was frustrating for a lot of players. We will do better in the future of giving more of a timeline and heads up. EDIT: For clarification, players can still use the Advanced Launcher for the time being. The developer was generous to share the code so we could test and review it. We hope to incorporate many of these features directly into APB in the future. Thanks, Matt

Hi niblyv, We are doing our best, and I can appreciate your frustration. We are banning people, but not fast enough. I full understand that there is a rampant cheating problem right now. Some of this has been posted elsewhere, but I'll repost it all in one place here, and then I'm going to lock this thread since I feel it has run its course. - We finished with development and integration of BattlEye on Friday. - We all worked the weekend doing some initial rounds of testing, but we keep turning up bugs - specifically false positive bans. - I am reluctant to post exact dates on anything like this because (a) its our first patch (b) anti-cheat requires extensive testing and I don't want to get it wrong. I will post an update with an exact date as soon as I know what that date will be. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, This thread is now locked, but I want to follow up personally. My original comments still stand, and I don't intend to delete/edit them. However here is what happened after I made that post: - It was pointed out to us that Shini plays on Citadel not Jericho. This means we needed to check a different server's logs and the time of day in the logs is different. - We did find an issue, and we interviewed the GM. The GM clearly made a mistake in judgment. They saw some comments from Shini on the stream, and misinterpreted those comments to mean that Shini *wanted* someone to mess with them. The GM then took the liberty of "making the game more fun". Regardless of the good intentions, we have removed the former GM's privileges in-game, and they are no longer a GM. This player understands now that they crossed a line, and all parties involved are fine with the resolution. As a recap: - We are new, and we are going to make mistakes. - We will be transparent when that happens, and we will own those mistakes. Thanks, Matt

Hi guys, Let me step in here. I'm not sure how to answer this more clearly than Lixil already has, but I'll walk through this. 1) The first video looks like lag to me. It's hard for me to see when Shini was streaming exactly, but I know 4 hours ago we got hammered fairly significantly. NA servers have been on mitigation ever since. We do know that lag and teleporting happens during these cases. Teleporting occurs when a player's movement updates are sent out of order or lost by the server. For the player they move on their client, but the server eventually tells the client to reset in an attempt to sync and get packets flowing properly between the client and server again. A reset teleports the player back to wherever the server's last valid location was. If Shini's last valid location on the server was a spawn point that happened to be far away from the objective, then that is unfortunately, and we apologize for his bad experience in-game. I have already posted the steps we are taking to reduce the lag, and we are following those steps. 2) The second video is definitely speed hacking, but why is it assumed this is a GM? We've gone frame by frame in that video, and that's a newb shirt with no identifiable marks. Is everyone on this thread assuming that the first and second videos are tied together? That for some reason a GM would cause Shini to rubberband intentionally to interfere with their mission, and then that same GM became visible and speedhacked past Shini to troll him? I just don't follow the logic being presented here. 3) All GM commands are fully logged on our end so we can review them. I am well aware of the big debate over volunteer GMs. We are watching very closely, and in this case I can confirm that Lixil and her team saw this post and reviewed the logs. There was no hint of any GM abuse or speedhacking. Let me be as transparent as I can on this issue: - If a GM messes up, they will be punished and taken off the team. Period. - I feel like there is no value in hiding or covering up problems. We own them, take care of them, and move on. 4) Announcements This comment on this thread concerns me the most. This feels a bit extreme given that there is literally no basis behind the information presented in this thread. I have taken great care in what I have announced. Everything we talk about publicly has a plan that is being executed on. I have specifically not announced the BattlEye patch release date, because I can't be 100% certain when that will happen. It's our first patch and we want BattlEye to be bullet proof. I think Techdev is making the assumption that we had months before the acquisition to plan and get a bunch of work done first. However, that simply isn't the case. We were barely allowed to review code. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, We are waiting on Google to spider the new forums, and then those old links will change. Thanks, Matt

Hi guys, I've read this, and added it to our internal tracking system. I honestly have no idea where it fits within the roadmap, but we have at least one color blind person in the office, and several of these comments already came up. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Sorry, I missed this thread. We have disabled the ARMAS Gifting feature until we can get it fixed. It has been abused a lot in the last two weeks. Please bear with us. Thanks, Matt

Hi guys, Sorry for note being better about communicating the patch notes for the weekly maintenance. We removed ARMAS gifting because it has been abused quite heavily over the last two weeks. Until we can sort it out, we've taken it offline. The focus of the maintenance has been adding more servers for districts as the player base grows. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Edit: 06/02/2018 It's now been about 3 weeks, and I want to take some time to speak directly to the Fallen Earth players. First, I know there have been lots of questions asked on the forums. I have spent some time reading many of these, and I found them intricate, well written, and virtually impossible for me to answer right now for reasons that I'll explain below. I also want to acknowledge the many players who have reached out to me offering help or detailed walkthrus of some of the issues plaguing the game. That kind of detail helps. I've been in-game a little messing around with specific mechanics to familiarize myself with some of what has been talked about, and I'll continue to get up to speed. Second, I don't have a long term plan or roadmap for the game yet. I'm still in the investigation phase. So instead I thought I would write a short post to talk about where we're at and what we have to work with, because I think that will guide how we proceed. The codebase for Fallen Earth is split into three parts: - The original Icarus engine and tool set used to build and maintain the world - The Frontend client / updater - The Backend servers Let's start with the Icarus Engine and tools. Unfortunately, there is some code missing here. We have one developer who has been slowly reverse engineering the missing pieces just so we can get the tools back up and running. There has been some progress, and we obviously have the output from the engine, which is what the servers operate on. So in theory the tools could be entirely replaced some day. But the editor itself doesn't work right now. Next the Frontend client. We have all the code, and it is theoretically possible for us to patch the game or the updater. However this code is significantly old. It requires tools that are more than a decade in age, installations of old libraries, and very customized windows installs to even build everything. It is a matter of time before current operating systems wont be able to run this client. We need to think ahead and start migrating to something much newer and maintained. This means a complete rewrite using the framework of what has been built as a roadmap. The challenge is that we also don't have any of the source art files. No 3DSMax files. No PSDs. No high rez textures at all. We have reached out to the original dev team to see if we can get these, but in their absence, we will need to create these files from the data that ships with the game. This is not at all ideal, since these files have all been compressed or down rezed to work. But it will at least be a starting point, and it will give us an idea of scope for the art, so we can assess how extensive it will be to rebuild. Lastly the Backend client. This is in the best shape. The developer who is currently assigned to the project has been able to piece everything together so that each server can be rebuilt and redeployed. I think this is where we can make the most short term improvement to the game by fixing bugs and exploits. Ultimately we will still want to migrate these systems into whatever the new framework is so they can be more easily maintained. Where do we go from here? Please don't read this as Little Orbit giving up, or even us being discouraged. I knew most of this before we took over GamersFirst. I just want to share where we are at, and that it's going to take some time to provide a clear roadmap of how we're going to rebuild. From there, we can look at the design and possible changes down the road. I am still looking to schedule some time to answer as many questions as I can with players. I'll have Lixil post that update when we get a little closer. Edit: 06/15/2018 This week was E3, so I didn't get a lot of time on Fallen Earth. We have been able to extract the compiled game issues from the main data file. We have been able to get about 40% through re-organizing all the C++ code. The main problem was that several core libraries were copied and included several times. It's impossible to know which version is the most up-to-date, but it's clear they aren't all the same. So we've started moving everything into a new repository with each library referenced and only included once. We still have to do this for all the server code and some of the front end code, but we were able to get some of the tools recompiling this way. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, Lots of discussion here. Obviously things got a little off the rails. I want to acknowledge the players who have had bad experiences with non-employee GMs in the past. This is something we will need to manage going forward. I think we've reached a solid understanding of what Lixil intended with this post and the reaction from players. I'm going to lock and unpin this now. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I appreciate the OP's sentiment, and we are doing what we can with the existing tools in place. The next patch with BattlEye is very very close. I'm going to lock this thread, because I don't really see any further value in it. But I hope the OP will give us another chance down the road as things improve. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I really enjoyed reading this thoughtful discussion about why players have stuck with APB. It's one of the first entirely non-toxic threads I've seen on the new forums that made me smile, because I got an inside view into the game from the perspective of some older players. Thanks to the OP for not only posting the topic, but then prompting more people to answer. And thanks to everyone who engaged to give honest and open answers. Matt