MattScott

Hi guys, I am reading these. Lots of good questions here. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I've seen a number of players who are frustrated at the extended delays with our support team. First, I want to acknowledge that we did send a cut/paste email to all the players who opened tickets in order to get unbanned. Many of them went to players who had been banned for cheating. Unfortunately some of the unban requests were for different reasons. It can't have felt very good to get a cut/paste email response that didn't even address your ticket. Second, it's clear that my staff was too small. We worked hard to get the new support portal up, but the number of tickets and types of issues far exceeded our capacity. Part of the problem is that my staff are still learning all the tools. They have three different systems they need to switch between in order to look up or correct issues. They are getting faster, but this is taking more time than I thought. Here are the current CS stats right now: - 1,689 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25. - 480 of them were players requesting unbans. Since we will be unbanning so many players after the next patch, we are not going to be responding to unban request until after that date. As I said above, if you requested an unban, you should have received an auto respond message. - 252 of them have been closed. - 957 are untouched. The vast majority of the current open tickets are players who can't access their accounts after G1 reset their passwords in January. These are time consuming tickets. My team takes a lot of extra precautions to double check many different data points in the account to make sure they don't accidentally allow someone to take someone else's account. Here is what we're going to do to fix this situation: Selali and his team are putting in extra hours over the weekends and try to bring the ticket count down. We have already hired twice as many CS staff to get ahead of this. We are looking for ways to optimize the CS training and tools to make our staff more efficient. Until I feel comfortable with our service level, either Selali or I will be posting these same stats every week on Friday evening before the weekend. We invite you to keep track, and hold us accountable. There should be no guess work. Hopefully we'll all watch these numbers go down and improve. I'm going to lock this topic, but feel free to discuss this in other threads. I just want a pinned area that we can add posts to it in order to keep the running tally. Thank you, Matt

Hi there, (My apologies for not posting this in Spanish) We appreciate all our players no matter what language they speak. Little Orbit has a history of translating their titles to many different languages. The situation with APB is a bit tricky. There are well over 600K words in the game. Typically translations cost $0.10 a word (or higher), so there is a fairly significant cost for each language we do. During the console port back in 2016, it appears that text changed significantly between both the PC and console titles. This caused huge chunks of text to show up in English regardless of the language you selected, because there weren't any new translations, so the decision was to remove many of the other languages. We are looking into how we can re-introduce localized text, but we need to figure out a long term solution for doing this that we can also maintain as new content gets added down the road. We have staffed many multi-lingual new GMs and Customer Support persons. We hope to support each community better in the future. As for your other questions, I don't honestly have those answers right now. Lastly for everyone else bringing negativity to this thread - give it a rest. There isn't an official Spanish forum, and the OP clearly stated this message was for LO. Thanks, Matt

Hi guys, Again, I think the OP has gotten enough answers, so I am going to lock this thead. But first, I'll answer this as definitively as I can. The Code of Conduct says: "Racial slurs, hate speech, threats, spam, and other forms of harassment will not be tolerated." The Nazi symbol and the confederate flag are two different issues: Displaying the Nazi symbol is illegal in some European countries where this game is sold. We are simply complying with the law when we find it used in game. The confederate flag is a question of intention. If you use it to recreate the General Lee from Dukes of Hazard - go for it. If you use it to harass another player, we will enforce the Code of Conduct. Personally I don't want to get caught up in legislating policy and making subjective decisions related to creative content. If something is reported by another player as offensive, then we're going to look at you're actions. Creating knowingly questionable content puts you at risk. If you want to take that risk, then you put the decision of your account's future in our hands and you should accept the consequences. Thanks, Matt

They are new district servers spread across existing worlds to help host more in-game players.

The new servers allow us to offload an instance here and there to help the servers perform better. But mostly we just need to keep pace with the growth.

Hi guys, The lag is a serious issue. We know it affects our players. I felt it was necessary to post my response here: Thanks, Matt

Hi guys, I have posted my response here. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Several posts around the forums have mentioned network issues and especially bad lag over the weekend, so I thought I would address this publicly. First, I don't want to get in the habit of blaming "DDOS attacks" every time there is a problem. Sometimes that's the case. And sometimes it's not. It's important that G1 and LO be honest with the community when we mess up, and when our systems are being effected by external factors. We did get an especially heavy DDOS attack on Friday a few hours after the Q&A that took a bit to recover from. We switched on mitigation, and we were able to weather the storm. While we are on mitigation, our servers simply do not perform well. However, the attacked caused a side effect issue where some servers were "up" but disconnected from each other in a way that prevented new districts from spinning up and existing districts from responding. It took the better part of the weekend for us to both discover and resolve all of these issues. Simply put, the initial lag was out of our control, and we have been on mitigation ever since which creates lag, but we also messed up and made the situation worse over the weekend. Please accept my apologies. We're a little new a this. Second, we take this game and our players very seriously. An apology would be meaningless if we didn't describe how we are going to fix the issues. So here is how we're moving forward. We now have a new DDOS solution that is being tested, and if we find that the results are solid, then the new solution will all but eliminate the kind of lag caused by the existing mitigation solution. I'm already sick and tired of talking about how DDOS mitigation causes lag. I never want that to be an excuse for laggy servers again. We did some brainstorming, and we started on some new networking layer changes that will help with DDOS vulnerabilities. These sorts of changes need to be thoroughly tested, but we are committed to making this more difficult. We have provisioned several new servers. The player concurrency has doubled since we took over, and we are expanding our ability to host districts and provide a smoother in-game experience. We are altering our monitoring to not only determine whether servers are up, but also whether they care actively increasing their concurrent player count and other important metrics that let us know things are running correctly. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, You guys can use the Advanced Launcher for now, and more than likely you will be able to continue using it after the next patch. Thanks, Matt

Lol. No worries. You’re help is much appreciated.

Our intention is to build in support for what it does by the time the new engine upgrade is ready.

Hi there, Please accept my apology. We messed that up. The network was hit hard on Friday from a sizable DDOS attack, and we checked everything afterward to make sure the servers were all online. Unfortunately while the PS4 districts showed as online, they had lost their connection with each other, which prevented players from entering them. Sincerely, Matt

Hi there, This was a mistake on our part. We had a significant issue on Friday after a sizable DDOS attack. We checked all the servers to make sure they were online, but several of them had lost connectivity to each other. Sincerely, Matt

Hi there, I am sorry about that. It was an oversight on our part. We were informed some districts were down, and we fixed a couple others, but simply missed that one. You can read my full post at the bottom of page 2 about the issue: Thanks, Matt

Hi all, Good to know. We are attempting to merge the PC codebase onto the XBOX. Hopefully we can get that in for you guys. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, The consoles are on a completely different codebase than the PC. We are going to be staggering releases across both console and PC in order to combine both of those into a single codebase running on Unreal 3.5. So you will see updates, but not on the same schedule as the PC. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I can assure you that there is no intention of removing any districts from any regions or platforms. We are new at this, and this was a mistake on our part - pure and simple. Here is an explanation of the issue: On Friday, we experienced the largest DDOS attack during the time we have owned APB. That knocked out access to the game for several minutes till we could get mitigation up. We corrected that, and did a round of spot checks to make sure everything was up. Unfortunately we failed to notice the several servers were up, but their connectivity to other servers was broken. We made more corrections, but it appears we still missed some console districts. I'm having the engineers go back and check connectivity on all the districts across all the regions / platforms to make sure everything is online. My apologies. Sincerely, Matt

Hi all, Just a note to say that we are working with the author of the Advanced Launcher. He has kindly made the code available, and we'll make sure there are no conflicts with BE. It isn't our intention to take away the tool. We just wanted to make sure it didn't interact negatively with the anti-cheat. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I think this thread has had enough discussion about the OPs concept of turning video into Little Orbit to help ban cheaters. We are happy to look at video, and it some ways if we see enough of the same name, then we know to pay more attention, but video alone is difficult to use as evidence to ban. Viewing a player and seeing a "snap" is not necessarily an indication of cheating due to the way our camera works. Seeing as players have already deleted some of the content, I'm going to lock this thread. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, A lot of good points here. This is a complex, and I need to do more research on possible changes - if any. But I appreciate the feedback. Thanks, Mart

Hi everyone, Whew. Go to sleep for a couple hours, and come back to this. I’ve read the comments, and I think we have discussed this enough, so I’m going to lock this thread. With respect to racist content or hate speech, we aren’t going to be able to say any more than we already have. That’s what we have GMs for. We have stated that hate symbols are not allowed. If you’re running around Social provoking other players, clearly you have poor intentions and you’re abusing the creative freedom we are trying to preserve. You will be banned. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, This is another topic that I think has been speculated on too much. We are not changing Joker Boxes or account locking legendary rewards for the vast majority of players. For context, during the Q&A I mentioned the Netherlands and Belgium laws that have declared loot boxes as gambling. I think some of my response was taken a bit further than I intended. Currently only Netherlands residents are limited from trading rewards, per their government's laws which are very explicit in requirements and the June 20th deadline. In my opinion the Belgium legislation is both vague and unenforceable. Additionally, EA has also declared they will continue with Loot Boxes: https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/09/ea-loot-boxes-are-gambling-heres-more-loot-boxes/ So we're just going to sit tight and wait. If there is a required change, rest assured that we will design an economic replacement for this mechanic. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, These are all fair points. Please see my response. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, The topic of nudity in-game seems to have gotten quite a bit of debate since the Q&A, so I'll elaborate my thought process. My initial policy was not based on Little Orbit's history of kids games or some prudish attitude. Quite the opposite, I expressly said that on a personal level I feel nudity is great. My decision comes from the ESRB standards. Even M-rated games are not allowed to show nudity, and the game is available on XboxOne and PS4. http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.aspx#rating_categories However after giving it some thought, these ratings are only for the XboxOne and PS4. Currently our PC population is separate, and I can't imagine them ever getting mixed due to the vast difference in controller vs. mouse/keyboard. So moving forward, we will stick with the previous G1 policy stated here: https://apbreloaded.gamersfirst.com/2012/04/genitalia-and-bigotry-drawing-line.html Thanks, Matt