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Please share if you've seen any innovations in recent anti-cheats. Resident programs which use signature-based detection are worthless, yet it's been the main strategy for most anti-cheats since forever. First program to load into memory wins. If you can load first, then you can hide or spoof data to the monitoring program.

This video is hitting bullseye on balance points. But now I'm wondering: Is it preferable to have a perfectly balanced game? Or a game with good player retention? It is a well known practice: Players are more likely to invest themselves (both in time & money) if they think they already are invested. a.k.a. the sunk cost fallacy. Progression & unlocking are giving a pragmatic goal to new players and makes them more likely to stick. Let's say you are the developer. If you were to remove all "negligible PvP advantages" tied to player progression, would it actually do more benefit than harm? From the video's point of view, the "investment time to reach an even playing field" also happens to be a barrier to entry.

It all seem so easy when spectating from a passenger seat.

Sounds about right. Thanks Kewlin for saving my post data before the old forum server went AWOL. Medspray only skips the regen delay part. Which means regen rate is 62.5 HP/sec It would take 8 seconds of uninterrupted regen to get back half HP (500). Without any CA, it would take 2 seconds... It would be super simple to balance medspray: Either remove it (consumables are a bad concept in a PvP game anyway) or adjust the regen rate on use to 50 HP/sec , regardless of any green mods worn.

It's not going anywhere, but at least it's not going nowhere.

What if I told you the engine rework would help in dealing with cheaters? BTW the main reason why matchmaking isn't fair is the low population pool. Can't really fix it without more players.

Being able to trigger health regen at any time is overpowered.

To be fair, APB was tagged as EOL ever since the downfall of the Edinburgh studio. It was clear they would sell the IP in the future. Tiggs, a community manager, ended up co-producer when they moved overseas. When you let a CM become producer, it shows how unmanned and drifting the G1 ship was.

That's pretty much the bottom line. It's pretty hard to make a truly "fair" game when in reality, nothing is. I'm just wondering which areas PvP players will want to compete on in the future. Reflexes? Strategy? Aiming skills (prediction, tracking, flicking)? Quick adaptation? Team synergy? APM? Creativity? Aiming will stop being valued amongst players if no games are able to ensure a fair competition online. The line between good players & cheaters is becoming increasingly blurry. We're seeing MMOs where writing macros or bots scripts are part of the game. Already, many cross-platform games gave built-in aim assist to console players, while allowing them to compete with the hardcore PC crowd. The devaluation of human aiming skills is progressing very rapidly. It's pretty sad too, because aiming is instinctive & highly rewarding. I still think it's very doable to design a fun game where integrity is a main concern. It won't stop the eternal game of cat & mouse between detection/cheaters, but if you properly hide the cheese good enough, the mice won't try as hard to reach it.

You can use a bigger hitbox / aim assist to level the playing field. You can try to create certain situations where FOV/proximity-based aimbots are not the best solution (Ex: An ability which creates 3 wandering copies of a player, adding a shield ability for lures, etc.) You're right about this, it can be a double-edged sword without a proper death replay and players can judge certain abilities "bad sportsmanship". The first to load in memory wins, so you would need to monitor everything at the BIOS level. I don't have high hopes for a "white room" OS, since it requires manufacturers to adhere to a convention or a single type of hardware, and really limits extensibility. You also want developers to be able to freely produce & release software. Closest thing would be computing the game remotely, client sending player IO and responding with pre-rendered frames (like Google Stadia, Nvidia Shield), but unless we get something like quantum internet, players would drown in input lag... Pretty sure someone could try to use computer vision to create aimbots for those too...

EAC is not a magic solution either. No anticheat is perfect, and there's just too much money to be made for 3rd party cheat sellers. It's better to design your game in a way where cheat benefits are negligible. 1. Servers should never send information to the client that should not be observable 2. Always validate the client actions before processing them 3. Limit the potency of aimbots (For example, APB has no headshots) 4. Add functionalities that allows non-cheating players to gain "cheat-like powers" (Ex: ESP abilities, grenade lob and rebound prediction, optional aim assist) APB is "legacy software", which means alot of work to correct #1 & 2. FairFight statistical analysis was good, but its existence allowed to fine-tune settings to "believable human performance" levels.

I always hated the predatory JMB business model, but keeping these as free rewards for future events might be a good idea.

Just redeemed them. Nothing was out of the ordinary. I didn't know you could get 1 open slot variants lifetime weapons (HVR, Joker carbine).

I've read Matt's pretty good blog post, and it got me thinking about JMBs. What will happen if I redeem these Gold Power Mystery Box? Are the random rolls still in place?

Slow and steady progress is all I desire for 2021. No need to choke the dev teams with our expectations. Revamping a game with the scale of APB is no small task. A new year blogpost would be nice.

The difficulty & scale of the task changes nothing. If it doesn't happen now, it will happen later on. The survival of the company & the game is always on the line. Either you can or can't ensure stable service. Not advocating for criminals, but do not expect any mercy from them.

While this may suck, take it as an opportunity to strengthen your systems. We cannot NOT expect these kind of misbehavior. Just wondering, what kind of attack is it? What are the requests sent? Maybe find a way to prioritize traffic from "established connections" (even though we are using UDP). Sometimes I wish ISPs would be responsible for authentication of users, and assign us all a static IPs...

The fact that APB is such a large-scale & unsafe project is what safeguards it from being outclassed by AAA studios, but still, I hope we manage to release an update and gain traction before it becomes obsolete. The rest of the industry still moves forward while we've been stuck at crawl-speed for a decade.

It will attract new and old players, but that won't make them stay.

You cannot prevent this kind of problem. It gets even worse with time. With time, games become inevitably less popular. The players that tend to stay are those who are the most invested. This, in turn, accelerates the CCU divide between new players and vet. You can try to counter it by advertising your game, or by adding a "Newborn nursery" server, to swaddle & train noobs before unleashing them into the wild. The new matchmaking won't prevent noobs getting curbstomped if the playerbase is 90% veterans. A positive experience for the first matches is paramount for player retention.

The changes in this patch are pretty good. If you play a map of corners like Asylum, shotguns will be OP because they are "in their environment". The level design is more to blame than the weapon here. Shotguns are intended to be played alternating in-and-out of cover, to maximize their high instant damage / exposure time ratio. SMGs are intended to be played as a single, direct CQC rush. Now, combine third-person camera, a map of corners & shotguns, and you've got yourself a nice recipe for widespread corner-camping. "Lame but effective" corner-camping has been the cornerstone of the meta in this game for a long time now, no matter the weapon or the map. You can bluff a primed grenade on every corner you meet to mitigate that, but I'd suggest you get a shotgun too.

Add a feature to namechange to a randomly available username for free? That way you get to skip step 1: "a" -> "B" (placeholder name)

It's good to identify flaws and want them corrected, but still, if you like APB, you should count your blessings. It's a miracle this game is still open despite the lack of revenue. The game may be becoming obsolete. However, it never had a better "player-focused" management than under LO.

First, you must learn to code in C++, then, you must learn about computer science and gamedev stuff , then, you must spend alot of time understanding the code other people wrote, then repair or improve it. As a solo person, that would take you a couple years, for sure. Also, I'm assuming you have the free time and resources to sustain such endeavor full time. It's a miracle someone is even trying. The only thing that was worth salvaging, IMO, are the customization features (symbols, clothing, music).

APB has trained me to grow a thick skin and I am grateful for it. I don't care about the removal, but I'm wary about progressively "gating" the game experience. Teaching people to properly channel their emotions is the real solution, not protecting the "entitlement to feelings". Disliking something & harassment are different things.