It's my first post, but I had to on this topic, I'm a bit worried about the direction apb could take in the future.
Dear LO, Matt Scott and APB Community,
I believe the Creators of APB had a clear Vision about the "Soul" of this Game, I don't think they had no other options the time they coded it they wanted a such deep community driven experience which APB is.
They did introduce the threat district system for a reason, in my eyes to regulate matchmaking and to form deep bonds in its community, like friendships and rivalries.
To my APB is meant to be a fun chaotic experience where you get deep In merged in its Gameplay and in its Community.
If it's a good or bad experience is regulated by other factors.
Take WoW for an example, they did go with a system called sharding.
Is it a good system? Well, for Server performance yes, but for the Community that's a no.
It doesn't felt like a whole community anymore, more like a "sharded" one.
I name this example because cross districts, remind my of that sharding system, which was also a reason I did lose interest in games with similar or related systems.
I bet not so few remaining APB players have the same feelings about cross districts.
If cross districts are enabled, it would scatter known people, which are not in the own group across districts making the possibility of running into them rare it would feel pretty isolated.
The Cross District would at least weaken if not shatter the bonds in its Community, other problems like loading between matches and so on, were already addressed before, so I don't want to go deeper into them.
We have enough games that aren't any fun anymore nowadays, apb is thankfully in how is feels unique, that's not only thanks to its customization but also the way how it handles its community concept, it's more old school, then modern isolated life sucked out every man for them self stuff.
If a player comes online and sees their many known people in that one district, lets joins for a fun experience with them, but cross district will destroy such things and yes then for example a streamer could say they're harassing me when they can choose the district. As sayd it's not the fault of the threat districts more like the lack of effective measures against cheating, griefing and toxicity.
A system that weakens a such fundamental thing as society is not a solution for a problem.
And think over it when the cross district system decides which player should be matched with another one, what prevents a good player playing poorly til the system decides to let him battle against weaker players, there will be always a way to bypass a system.
If LO updated APB to 64bit so that a server-side Anti Cheat System can be reintroduced and did penalize toxic behavior and griefing more intensely by Moderators or programs that watch over the chat activity/life gameplay and offer a support in which cheaters and toxic people are reported and efficiently punished,
what would make apb a very fun experience again and would attract new players to and former players back to APB, if that goes hand in hand with Advertisement campaign to bring
new people in, I would bet only a very minor part of the community or even no one would even want something like cross districts.
Especially not if LO would, improve the threat district system.
Here are some possibilities, if they are good, is debatable.
Make it harder to assume how high a threat of a player is, give dethreating a cooldown in time and/or played matches, like after a player went from silver to gold they cannot dethreat before some time is passed and an x ammount of matches are played.
Options could be, the dethreat timer could then for example only start to go down if that ammount of games are played or the timer will only partially goes down and stop when no x amount of games are played for a time period.
Like, a 7-day detheat timer stops to go down if not at least 3 matches are played every day or a 30-day timer stops if less than 7 matches are played in a week.
The dethreat process can be set up to be very mild or very hardcore depending on the current need for it.
Even if they make multiple accounts they wouldn't be able to play with their main account for endgame progression on lower threat districts and even those new accounts would then become gold and at that point those would be also locked out from bronze or green districts too.
If the parameters of dethreating are set up correctly, it would become a very annoying and tedious process to dethreat an account and would significantly decrease the timespan high skill players would be able to play on low threat districts, which could become an afterthought.
I really care for apb and I hope LO will carefully think over implementing cross districts and see the possibilities of the system what the creators had decided for and in case we would have a healthy player base again how it could be improved further if it is still necessary.
