mtz

I personally believe this is not a question you should be asking. You should not flock to whatever is "the most OP" - you won't improve by choosing your arsenal based on the severity of the balancing issues it has. Instead, try out different weapons and make up your own mind. You can follow the example of other people - for starters, a lot of players use the N-TEC due to its insane versatility - it was born and bred to be a viable choice in most situations. Making yourself depend on a weapon because it's overpowered equals using a crutch. And you will feel how much of a crutch it was when it gets nerfed. Fight Club is... hardly what APB is about. It's essentially a killbox. A place which you enter to get yourself a mindless shooting session. I understand that you may like it, but from me personally, I advise playing in regular mission districts. FC is fast-paced and easy to die in, which in my opinion does not give you enough time or opportunities to learn the weapons. Plus, you'll help the community at large by filling up spots and thus making sure that other players also find missions more easily! Recoil control and aiming are acquired skills. In my opinion, you should challenge yourself by using weapons you might not be good at. If you never use them and instead pick whatever is overpowered at the moment, you will never get better with them - because you literally will not have used them enough to know how to use them. Almost nothing on the Armas Marketplace is "pay-to-win". You will not get a straight up advantage over others by using Armas gear simply because Armas sells reskins and sidegrades. They are guns which have their own unique traits and characteristics; expecting them to just play the game for you is a bit silly. Please don't take this post as an attack - I'm trying to provide you with advice that will help you in the long run. It's always tempting to just pick the easiest option, but if we do that, we never improve. If you want an answer that's more to-the-point, I could recommend the N-TEC 5 for reasons mentioned earlier in the post (i.e. high versatility, high potential for weapon modding), the OCA-EW 626 (in my opinion it allows for more leeway in CQC than the JG-840), and even the starter weapon, the STAR 556 (slightly less versatile than the N-TEC 5, but more reliable). Keep in mind that I'm not an expert player - if someone has a better idea about this, feel free to correct me!

I think logging in as Matt Scott is just an easter egg instead of an actual part of the ARG. I doubt that a real person would be put in this narrative as an in-universe character. Especially when we consider that the /big-smile subpage only appears if an attempt is made to log in with the username "MattScott"; other usernames just respond with "Incorrect username or password." in red text.

...why am I now expecting anti-vaxxers to become the plot point as to why the virus will spread in the city? please let that be the case, it'd be just as amusing as that "anti-vax scenario" expansion for Plague Inc.

Gumball offers Criminals the same thing. Then he mentions he doesn't actually have a sister. Then he "offhandedly" mentions that he has a dog.

I agree - there is a slight problem with introducing new characters. In my opinion it's mostly because the hierarchy had been escalating with every single contact so far. Enforcers move through recruiters, officers, managers, executives, commanders, ending at the highest-ranking agents; Criminals move through low ranking patsies, fixers, gang lieutenants, mafia bosses, ending at those-behind-the-scene. If my memory serves me right, Lynette is "merely" part of Orlenz's pack (Orlenz', Chiza, Darryl) and Lucas is Michael Simeone's right-hand-man and bodyguard. Not exactly fitting or compelling backstories.

I understand the reasoning behind that idea, but I don't think these characters should ever be put into gameplay. Luke Waskawi is supposed to be the man behind the scenes, basically controlling San Paro's entire criminal underworld while being safe and hidden himself. Mayor Jane Derren herself isn't exactly in control of anything - she only enacted the City Security Act, allowing borderline vigilante groups like the Prentiss Tigers to flourish and enabling Praetorian Corporation to expand their influence into San Paro. Arguably, Aletta Cadagan is already the person with the most power in the city. She has military experience in warzones all around the world, is referred to with fear by other characters (Kaspar Danko himself regrets bringing her to San Paro), and is apparently sitting on enough military ordnance and authorization that she can casually mention plans to "[drop] a million dollars worth of artillery fire onto New Cross and [call] it an accidental misfire from an offshore destroyer", all just to end San Paro's crime problem once and for all. What I mean is, you can't really escalate the hierarchy any further - and the people whom you could consider "at the top" (Waskawi and Derren) aren't supposed to put themselves out there anyway.

That was always one of the (in my opinion) bigger themes in APB's lore. "Enforcers versus Criminals" is a big simplification of what is actually several corporate fronts playing the violence and turmoil caused by Luke Waskawi's killing of Mayor John Derren to their advantage. Praetorian Corporation is a Private Military Contractor - even though their goal is to eliminate crime in San Paro, it certainly won't hurt them if their mission takes a bit too long. The Effigy magazine plays the population of San Paro with the headlines they publish, graciously funded/influenced by corporate money. I'd say the Joker Corporation is the biggest beneficiary of the crisis in San Paro. They source ammunition to both sides of the conflict (Joker Ammunition vending machines), sell their original weaponry (Joker Gunworks brand, giving us things such as the CR-5 and the SR15 Carbine) - and if we assume that Joker Distribution front in Social is part of the lore, they also serve as a distributor for other companies, middlemanning in the sale of guns and cars (for example, Charge and Nulander). Now that RedHill is joining the fray as a corporation... we could see some stuff happen. More than just the Riot Mode, hopefully.

HoooLY crap, man. I don't know what this is about, but I'm really liking this teaser. Wonder if this means more lore development, or just a new in-universe manufacturer to integrate new content more seamlessly. Either way, me likey.

On that note, there is a similar situation with the Raptor SRX Mikro (2,587 G1C) and the Cheetah M2 Mikro (2,441 G1C)!

There's no denying that /cointoss was an exploit, but I wouldn't say it was a 100% negative thing. One of the upsides was letting people leave missions with teammates who have been griefing the team in previous missions. In my opinion, a good solution would be to allow players to leave missions at a cost. The cost should involve more than lowered mission rewards - it does not punish players who are already R255 and thus have nothing to progress anymore. Perhaps a fixed timeout period from participating in missions altogether or something, going by the logic that if the player is leaving a mission, they have a solid reason which won't let them play anyway. This is mostly an anecdote instead of an actual proposition from me: a Multi Theft Auto server I used to play on had this system where rewards for participating in races were tied to, among other things, the amount of participants. A player who left the race would get a 30 minute timeout from joining new races, and on every consecutive offence the penalty would be doubled (1h on 2nd offence, 2h on 3rd offence, 4h on #4, 8h on #5, and so on...) . It mostly taught people the lesson, but there were still some people who would get several days worth of a racing ban.

Inspired by the compliment from @MattScott himself, and by the opinions on the forum that the character in the "Message from Matt" image could've been improved, I (with assistance from people who have come to my Twitch stream) have created a lookalike of the man himself in APB:R, the aptly named CEOStuntDouble! (Down to the trademark scarf!)

Now I kind of wish I had kept that character unchanged - he's back to his regular, boring, non-MattScott-lookalike appearance. Still, the look shouldn't be too difficult to remake, considering there's the real-life photo and the image of my version to work with

More or less, I agree with most of the things said here - except for a couple of points. I have to disagree. A better option is to fix the existing threat system; redistribute the existing ranks among players. Some will fall down to silver, some will climb the ranks from bronze, some will feel upset about their threat level changing - this is inevitable, but necessary. We've been there a couple of times and it's never been a good idea - at least not if the proposed vehicles were to be player-owned vehicles (as in, replacements for the existing cars like the Calabria etc.). Maybe (and this is a big maybe) they could be experimented with as deployables, though I'm unsure about how they would operate then. Each player should only be allowed to have a car as their player-owned vehicle, as motorbikes or skateboards or anything of that sort would make them be a disadvantage to the team. Compare a motorcycle's cargo capacity of 0 to that of a car, which can go as high as 25, and you have a clear answer as to what will be the most used and the most efficient option available. I, uh... I get that you said these ideas might be a bit crazy, but this is a tiny bit too much. I personally appreciate fellow enthusiasts of mapmaking, but APB simply would not benefit from such things. APB does not operate on a lobby system - we connect to pre-established instances instead of creating our own instances whenever we want. Similarly, letting players host their own sessions with their own rules and mechanics would open a gateway for money/standing grinding. This is a bit of a blanket statement. What exactly do you think remains unbalanced in APB? Your thread would benefit from pointing to exact things you think would need changing. --- Other than the things I mentioned above, I'd say that we do need some new things to happen after the Engine Upgrade becomes fully released - and some of these things are mentioned in this thread.

Every Tier 1 contact requires total standing of 7,500 to max out. Every Tier 4 contact - 180,375 to max out. Every Leader - 288,750 to max out. Every Specialist - 716,300 to max out. Pray tell, how do you imagine this would work? As in, how would you execute the part with boosting/skipping? Are there any limits to who can be skipped? How many skips can be bought/used per character/account? Would the price vary depending on which contact is meant to be skipped? Doesn't this essentially remove half of the game (R195 -> R255) if someone pays to skip their Specialists? Hard pass from me. I get that APB's monetization is largely "pay for convenience", but taking it to such an extent feels like a bad idea.

That is precisely the problem I had encountered when I thought about the score-to-tickets thing - the uncertainty about how "valuable" score can be, or really is. The issue only gets complicated further when you compare this to Daily Activities, which involve a single task for an increment of 5 tickets. Capping the amount of tickets that can be "squeezed" out of the system every day wouldn't be such a bad idea either. A cap of 100 JT sounds fairly reasonable, as it means a weekly cap of 700 JT. Compare it to Fight Club's total possible rewards and you have a fairly similar payout. You could even fiddle around with the concept and perhaps set different caps for districts; perhaps this could entice people to play in the less populated Waterfront. Kind of like a "District Heat" or something like that - for example, playing exclusively in Financial lets you reach a cap of 100 JT per day, but additional 20 JT over the limit can be earned by playing in Waterfront. While admittedly a band-aid solution for Waterfront's issues (which need to be tackled at some point), it could help people level up the contacts in the persistently-unpopulated district. As I've hinted in the original post, I'm not a fan of Fight Club, so I support anything that incentivizes gameplay in mission districts.

I'd like to preface the post by saying that I don't want to push these suggestions - first and foremost, these are ideas that I'd like to put forward and hear some feedback, since, after all, discussing is what the forums are for. Perhaps I'm not seeing some issues and such. And obviously - this should go without saying - in no way do I consider this an urgent issue. It's one of those things that can wait with possible implementation/action for after the Engine Upgrade is out. --- Joker Tickets are kind of in a weird spot at the moment. They serve as a secondary currency (and as one of the three currencies in APB, the other two being APB$ and G1C, although the latter isn't exactly "in" the game), but they don't really see too much use. I can't remember the last time I saw someone use JT-tagged weapons or the timed leases of R195 items. The medium-sized resupply box sees even less use in my experience. This results in a situation where people get this currency but never really spend it on anything. 1) Review the item selection available through Joker Distribution. The way I see it, there's not enough unique gear available through the distribution point in Breakwater Marina. While the option to lease Armas-only gear to experiment with the guns before buying them is a nice idea, I feel like the investment is just not worth it. Very often the guns differ in their performance depending on the mod setup - which requires the player to invest ~1000 JT and a couple of thousand APB$ for the slotted version of a gun and also actually have the mods they want to test. Granted, the mods will stay when the lease expires, but it's still a test run that requires you to grind tickets for several days in advance. Orange mods suffer even further because of it, as they are still stuck behind the cooldown difference (premium cooldowns are 50% shorter) and aren't always useful. Arguably, the cosmetic items aren't in such a bad spot - especially the customizable ones (High-Heeled Pumps and the roof billboard for Dolton Broadwing, although for some reason it's Crim-only). I like that model of distribution, though it almost makes me think why they're not just included in their respective stores/kiosks. 2) Review the role of the currency itself. APB$ lets you purchase typical items - weaponry, vehicles, clothing, modifications. G1C lets you purchase exclusive items of various kinds, which are mostly cosmetic. How do Joker Tickets factor into this situation? What sets JTs apart from the other two? What makes them unique? What justifies their inclusion if we could just stick to two currencies? It lets you buy... a lot of things and yet nothing that would fit anywhere else. Weapon skins, player creation spotlight items, character titles, vehicle kits, etc. This very lack of specialization could be used to the currency's advantage. Once again, the ability to buy leases of items normally only available on Armas is a good idea - but very often it comes with the dilemma of whether we are comfortable with spending a hefty sum of tickets only attainable through grinding for literal days, on an item which we don't even know if we will be able to make good use of. The relative difficulty in obtaining decent amounts of JTs segues into idea #3... 3) Allow for alternative methods of acquiring Joker Tickets. I've had this idea of letting players obtain the tickets in a new way - connecting the mission scores with JT acquisition. This will allow players to acquire considerable amounts of JT without having to spend hours on playing the cluttered mess that is Fight Club. I would like to propose two options of handling this idea: Option A is to make every full 1000 points in a mission equal 1 Joker Ticket - this incentivizes good performance and teamwork, as negative behaviour in a mission takes away a player's score. Negative amounts of points would not drain JT from a player, to prevent griefers from forcing teamkills and further "punishing" players who actually put effort into the game. Option B is to make every 1000 points in a mission count towards a JT reward - the difference from Option A is that this model would count much like a contact standing meter. In other words, under Model A, a player who gets (for example) 4905 points will get 4 Joker Tickets, the 905 leftover points not serving a purpose. Under Model B, the 905 leftover points will carry over, meaning that another Joker Ticket will be given to the player after 95 points are obtained in the next mission. Of course, the 1000-score-for-1-JT part is just a rough estimate of what I think would be a fair amount. Perhaps there are people who think the exchange rate should be different - either higher or lower. --- I look forward to any feedback. I'd love to hear other people's opinions on the subject of Joker Tickets; I personally believe that the Tickets are in need of a couple of revisions, but I'm open to having my opinion change.

Personally, I would love everything (or most items) on Armas to be accountbound, but I understand (or just get the feeling) that it may not be profitable, since there's no incentive for players to spend money again that way. Still better than x-day leases though ('cause c'mon, I'm not going to spend so much cash on something that will expire in x days regardless of whether I'm actually in the game or not) - in the case of weapons, they should all be sold as characterbound and accountbound. I think that a nice alternative could be, for example, a 50% discount on characterbound items already owned by the account. Buying things for 3 characters would, in a way, turn into a "pay for 2, get 3" kind of deal.

gamers rise up To the defense of all those people, there's like only a handful of good hairstyles for female characters. The rest... that's just how fashion works. People see a style of clothing that they like (for one reason or another) and they'll also want to wear it themselves.

I don't think we should really care about realism in a game where there's no momentum when leaving a moving car, kevlar is a perfectly normal thing to have implants of, and halfbricks can be hand-thrown for over 100 metres. 30 seconds of completely disabling an area from safe passage is way too harsh for anyone who would be forced to pass through the fire/gas just to get to the objective. Don't forget resupply units allowing for just popping tear gas/incendiary grenades over and over. Thanks for yet another insult instead of argumentation, by the way. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

I was going to say that you could've created the same post without insults, but without the insult it wouldn't contribute any more information anyway, so there's that. I guess we can't have nice things and we always have to be condescending pricks to one another. Even taking the usual mission length in APB into account, 30 seconds is an absurdly long duration. Hell, even in CS:GO (since it was brought up) incendiaries only burn for 7 seconds - and that in itself is enough time for a lot of things to happen. Adding the perspective that there could be multiple grenades in play (if we allowed more than 1 to be carried on a player), they could be resupplied from various sources, and that multiple team members could carry them, it would be entirely possible for the defending team to completely shut down all access points to the objective with just the grenades, since passing through would cause damage... ugh. Also, I can't imagine an incendiary grenade with such fuse time, personally. In my opinion, ideally they'd activate upon impact with a surface, much like in CS:GO.

Well, uh... that's kind of a vague thread, since it doesn't say much other than just the idea. Care to elaborate a bit, OP? Any specific ideas about the alternate grenades? Y'know, something about their behaviour, "fuse" length, cloud duration, damage they would deal, stuff like that.

As for me... I dunno. I've only actually checked the site now - and I don't think I'm a fan of the current layout. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that there's not a lot going on with the site right now, and there's only one image really available for display. Still, I'd love to help with this little project somehow, if it's possible.

I'd definitely love to see something like that. Kind of reminds me of those "TF2 starting pages" you'd set as your Steam Browser mainpage so that you'd get an instant hub for all links you'd be needing while playing the game or sitting on trade servers.

Must've taken a note from all those times when we played together and I bitched about how I don't even need the combat benefits from Premium and I'm only interested in the customization aspects ',:) Wholeheartedly supporting this idea. I've never really thought to myself "man, I wish I had premium so I could earn a bit more money in the game" - my only real complaint has always been the super-low symbol layer limits. (Seriously, 3 symbols vs 50 symbols to slap on clothes? That's almost 17 times as much!) Allowing people to save a bit of money by opting into the only aspects of premium they're interested in - people who already have premium don't lose anything, people who don't have premium may be more interested in buying it; that's a net gain for everyone involved if you ask me.

I honestly don't know which option to choose. Yes [...] has (to me) that slight connotation that I'm entitled to getting the skin. Which I'm not - it was an event reward first and foremost. Not a guaranteed thing. I've wanted to get the skin for the sake of completionism, but I don't think I really need it. No [...] isn't the option for me either. Keeping more and more things exclusive is both a good and a bad thing. Good, because it incentivizes people to make an effort to get unique stuff. Bad, because it's still content that'll only be available for the chosen few, while everybody else is pretty much locked out of it. It's kind of tough to entirely submit myself to this label. I don't care. still isn't what I want to say. It is an issue that should be resolved, so that LO can move on to improving the game. Showing a lack of care helps absolutely nobody. For the sake of contributing to the poll, my goes for the first option, because I think that it would be a net gain for the vast majority of the playerbase - however, I genuinely don't mind any of the outcomes (speaking for myself, of course).