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Sophiie

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Posts posted by Sophiie

  4. Posted

    On 3/28/2020 at 6:08 PM, MattScott said:

    Hi Ketog,

     

    You raise some good points, and I think the answers are a lot more simple than you might expect.

     

    When we took over APB, we only had Reloaded as an example of how to run things. So largely we started by following their previous policies with some smaller changes. I also took a very conservative approach, because aspects of the community were very scary (ie. calling bomb threats to Tigg's home). For the safety of my staff, I chose to expose my identity up front, but that allowed everyone else at LO to remain somewhat anonymous till we got a better feel for things.

     

    Beyond that, we stepped into a very difficult spot. Towards the last couple years, Reloaded promised a lot of things and never delivered. Initially, we tried being more transparent with dates and things coming up, but most players responded either neutrally or negatively because those dates are often challenging to hit.

     

    This is really the only comment that confused me. I post every week about the Engine Upgrade - good, bad or ugly. I also post Customer Support stats every week. Those are areas where we are already giving 100% transparency. For the most part, I see those efforts as successful, so I am looking for more opportunities to continue doing that.

     

    Lixil lasted more than a year, and while she wasn't perfect, I think it's tough for a CM to "compete" with me. I try to get on the forums, twitter, Facebook, and discord as much as possible to stay aware of what is happening. I also try to respond when I can. We made some changes with SakeBee, so that he would have a clearer space to manage without me constantly jumping in. He's still new, but we are working on ways he can hang out with the community and get to know you guys better.

     

    I'm not going to defend RIOT. It had its benefits for my team, but we did it mostly because it was "low hanging fruit" that Reloaded had mostly finished. There were some hard lessons learned there.

     

     

    There are going to be a lot of opportunities for this coming up. But right now, we have to focus on the Engine Upgrade. It's blocking everything else, and a lot of the tasks for the Engine Upgrade are more "mechanical" to just getting it working like Live. However, the upcoming Beta will very much be work in progress. It will be a chance for the community to jump in and give us feedback, so we can make corrections.

     

    Thanks,
    Matt

    Hi Matt,

     

    First, I'd like to say thank you for providing technical insight as to why the engine upgrade is taking so long. It's long overdue and more than the folks at Reloaded Productions were willing to give out to the public.

     

    I'd like to preface what I'm about to say is largely opinion based on my experience with Reloaded, and not so much Little Orbit - I honestly haven't given the game that much of a try since you bought the game when Reloaded went under and that's largely due to the hybrid good/bad memories about the game from Reloaded's tenure with it.

     

    Let me first say that Tiggs' policies were some of the harshest in the MMO market. She policed members of the community who were unruly to begin with and those members were consistently baiting her into conversing with them. Those members of the community absolutely stopped messing with the game as soon as you introduced Easy Anti Cheat largely due to how effective EAC is as not only an anticheat, but as a spying tool on those unruly members who committed real-world crimes like calling in bomb threats. She did not deserve the harassment, but largely her actions as community manager and strict enforcement of Terms of Service ended up getting her into the generally disliked position she was in. This is not to say her policies were ineffective, but by publicly acknowledging trolls she made herself enemy #1 of the trolls. I don't blame you for taking precaution regarding protecting the rest of your staff, given that certain individuals were actively causing drama.

     

    For community management; you need the right person for the job. I can't tell you how many CMs I've seen that just take up the position, do nothing but schedule out events, communicate limited, filtered information from the development team to the public, and take a hefty salary for doing nothing of importance that you, as a CEO, can often do better and you would not need approval to release information. Whereas a community manager would often be left in the dark. As much as this community gives Tiggs a bunch of crap... Tiggs was unique in the sense that she filled multiple hats: she led the CSR team, she ran the community forums, organized two volunteer programs, and also played liason about pressing issues between the community and the development team.

     

    She was deeply ingrained into Reloaded's workflow and went above and beyond. Hell, a lot of people at Reloaded went from supporting roles to leading roles, including her. She went from managing customer support, to being the CM, and then a Producer later in the game's life.

     

    Reloaded did in fact promise a lot and not deliver. There were a lot of behind-the-scenes drama that, quite honestly, is game-industry politics at its finest. Under the guise that talking about your game would hurt the 'intellectual property' of the game, Reloaded purposefully misled the community that the engine upgrade was further along than it was. There was also the whole idea that Reloaded shouldn't allow testers not under NDA, for the sake of hiding how far along the engine upgrade was. I realize they were in financial distress (public records showed as much) but withholding information from the public and not allowing these test builds into the public hands was very snake-y, and one of the major things I disagreed with and probably the community will disagree with, too.

     

    Continuing these trends, Little Orbit has made SPCT into its own clique once again for focused, NDA-gated testing, while the rest of the general public is left in the dark, except for a weekly news update - or people poking and prodding your patcher, as the trend was before. I don't know who has you by the collar-and-chain, Matt, but you really need to push these builds out to the public as soon as possible. Give people a timeline as to when they can expect these builds.

     

    I personally do not give a damn if the build crashes on an RTX card or not. Would you agree with me that pushing out these builds to the public would be the right move here? The public was constantly dismissed as unreliable at Reloaded despite having better QA for issues than any 'compliance testing' team would. There are countless people who would provide feedback on hardware the build works on. You'd be able to judge performance over a large variety of devices. There might even be, get this, a programmer or 10 lurking in the shadows that could even diagnose these issues *for free*, and you could push out a build to fix these high-end card crash issues.

     

    The notion that an 'unfinished game' would kill the hype surrounding the engine upgrade is based on falsehood. There are plenty of games in worse states than APB: Reloaded on Steam. The average consumer is used to very poor early access builds that crash a lot. As long as you keep everything isolated to a test server - is there really any downside to doing this?

     

    I speak from experience here; gating an undisclosed game to a select number of testers and then giving it out to the public and closing the old build's servers when 'you think' a build is ready is one of the dumbest mistakes that was made in the past. In fact, I bet if the game was given to the public alongside the actual release, the game may have been up and running still, collecting revenue.

     

    When people say they don't want to be in the dark, they expect someone actually talking to them, not just posting on an outdated medium such as a forum. Mediums such as Discord, Twitter, Twitch, Facebook Live, YouTube/YouTube Gaming, etc, are all great resources and modern, especially with everyone being home and able to watch updates. Schedule out times for your development team to show off videos, livestream new things they've been working on, and even just a weekly 'vlog' from you, Matt, would do a lot to restore faith in this community beyond what you have already done. I think at one point, prior to the engine upgrade, I had to stalk your Twitter for engine upgrade news including a video of someone playing the game on a PS4 devkit that was never posted here and eventually made its way to the other mediums I listed above.

     

    Furthermore, I cannot stress this enough, people do not believe progress unless they can put their hands on their keyboard and mouse and actually *play* it. Pictures paint a good image, but playing the end result is much more believable. And based on the Engine Upgrade thread, you are closer now more than ever to putting it in the public's hands.

     

    Matt, you've already proven that you're dedicated as CEO of Little Orbit. I cannot thank you enough for going this far. As someone who was, and still is, supportive of this game, its development team, and its community, you've been a godsend in a sea of prior end-user mismanagement.

     

    It's time to let the chains off and let us see the fruits of everyone's effort - RealTime Worlds, Electronic Arts, Reloaded Games, Reloaded Productions, Reloaded Inc, Little Orbit, The Workshop, Deep Silver and the countless volunteers  - that have all put their time on the line to make sure this game stays alive and fun. Let the floodgates open to 2.1's testing center. It's the only way to be 100% transparent with this community.

     

    (PS: I loved the concept of RIOT's ARG. It was a refreshing change of pace for a game that largely was regarded as boring with their content release cycle. I think the ARG was more fun than actually playing RIOT itself.)

    • Like 2

  5. Posted

    On 8/9/2019 at 11:30 PM, MattScott said:

    We are working on new systems so that we can remove JMBs entirely, but that is a much more tricky thing to remove from APB.

    Yes. We will be posting the odds on the JMB ARMAS pages.

    Hey Matt,

     

    Any status updates on the systems to remove JMBs entirely?

    Also, the Gold JMBs are missing their rates on the ARMAS page.

     

    • Thanks 1

  6. Posted

    22 minutes ago, MattScott said:

    Hi all,

     

    We've had two outages today - both deserve some explanation.

     

    The first outage was at ~10pm to midnight Pacific time.

    This was caused by unannounced maintenance with the circuit provider into our East Coast provider.

    By 12/19, we will have our backup circuit provisioned, so this shouldn't happen any more.

     

    The second outage was around 10am to 11am Pacific time.

    This was caused by a technician with our provider adjusting some DDoS rules that ended up blocking all traffic for a period of about 45 minutes while we tried to figure out what happened.

    We have made it clear that no changes to our environment can occur outside of our planned maintenance windows.

     

    Apologies,

    Matt

    Matt, I'd just like to say that these updates have been extremely helpful and that actually posting detailed technical explanations for issues is exactly what this community has needed for years. I know it's not your job as the CEO to communicate with the community, but I think I speak for everyone when I say that these are exceptionally well written, and I constantly link them to old Reloaded folks that I still talk to for an example of how to communicate with the community.

     

    Thank you.

    • Like 2

  7. Posted

    13 hours ago, Lign said:

    What have I just read? the point was that asking someone to do something better if he criticizes it is the dumbest argument. By that logic regular people are not allowed to review all movies saying it’s good or bad because they are not attributed to cinematograph(not producers, scenarists or actors) and obviously can’t make a better movie

    go review a movie then and stop posting dumb arguments on these forums

  8. Posted

    3 hours ago, Lign said:

    Asking someone to do it better is the worst and the dumbest argument I have ever seen. By that logic you can’t criticize anything in the world if you’re unable to do it better by yourself.

     

    So what you're saying is you can't do better - and when you can't, you call the argument that you're unable to do better completely dumb and a 'worse argument'.

     

    ok boomer

  9. Posted · Edited by Sophiie

    Hi,


    If you think you can do it better, spend the near-million dollars to buy the IP rights, and hire folks to do it instead.

     

    Sincerely,

    A person who had to read your wall of text.

     

    PS: Unreal 3 is outdated and you shouldn't do what I just posted. Save your BjornBucks.

    • Like 3
    • Thanks 3

  10. Posted

    Serious question.

     

    If all you're allowed to give is a receipt of acknowledgement on cheaters (which is completely reasonable, by the way) - then why even have internal standards on CSRs that delay ticket response times to the point where customers are waiting for more than 20 days on tickets?

     

    Back in Reloaded times, there was never a ticket queue of more than 150 per day with about triple the playerbase and judging from the forums about half the CSRs. Most of these complaints were about a players' banned accounts, lost accounts/login information scammed items (prior to the trading system) and technical support issues. In fact, by the end of a 8-hour CSR shift, there would be no more tickets and CSRs could actually get other things done.

     

    In terms of time spent on tickets, I'd say the most was on scam tickets. At most, a scam case could take up to 2-3 days to resolve - this was before trading was implemented under Little Orbit's tenure and required a lot of research. Scamming should not be handled by CSRs anymore, if they are still handling those tickets it needs to change with a secure trading system in place now. Beyond that, there wasn't really much back-and-forth between CSRs and players and for good reason. Copy and pasted responses do not allow for ambiguity between decisions you make as a CSR team.

     

    I have a serious question about this methodology: Why are you not allowing copy-pasted responses from Customer Support? There is nothing wrong with getting a pre-templated response. They didn't result in a loss of quality of the responses, the problem was largely with customers not getting the responses they wanted from customer support and that's where the majority of the complaints came from, not that they were copy and pasted - it's that the customers could not be helped. If anything, please let the customers know they can't get a response and clarify that they cannot get a response. Education of what customers can get information on is absolutely the key here, not disallowing copy and pasted responses.

     

    I mean, if you can't give someone an account's details because they can't prove that it's theirs, does it really matter if it was made by hand or a template to tell them that? Sure, it's more personal, but emotion isn't always expressed well in text. And there is plenty opportunity to be personal and courteous in instances where you can actually help a customer.

     

    I'd be extremely curious as to what lead to the decision to do this.

     

    On that subject, customer service is a bandage for a faulty product. Every time you can deal with something programmatically, you definitely should.

     

    As a customer, if you had asked me to submit a support ticket like as stated in this news post:

     

     

    ...I would feel extremely insulted that the issue could not be resolved by the game's developer or publisher automatically. There is no reason that people should have to submit a support ticket to get something like that. If I was in the developer/publisher's position, I would immediately rectify this by resetting the trial flags for each account affected. You have the transaction logs with third-party (and definitely first-party side) so the data is available, it's just a matter of acting on it to make good on issues like these.


    Matt, please consider going easier on the CSRs so that APB: Reloaded does not suffer from these CSR wait times. They do not deserve having to put in additional work to satisfy the complaints of the vocal majority forum trolls which account for 5% of all active accounts. Additionally, neither does the playerbase.

    • Like 1

  11. Posted · Edited by Sophiie

    On 9/16/2019 at 12:16 PM, a Pair of Socks said:

    Is Little Orbit trying to cut out toxicity by cutting our ability to talk to eachother over mic ingame???

    This is Fortnite and were not 12 year olds, quit babying us.

    Speaking of things that are 12 years old, The implementation is about 12 years old for Vivox in APB.

     

    The issue of Vivox not working has historically been a political and technical reason. It costs something like $45,000 a year for APB to run Vivox across all platforms.

    The SDK APB runs on is a very old version Vivox. It hasn't seen an upgrade in a number of years. Also, Vivox has to make special versions of their network topology for APB, and it's a pain in Vivox's patootie every time it breaks. Vivox has created an updated SDK but it hasn't been worth the monetary investment for Reloaded or Little Orbit to update it, as the newer SDK integrates mostly into UE4 and not UE3.5, and there's a lot of functionality changes behind the hood.

     

    So much functionality change, that it'd almost be financially not viable to dedicate a programmer making $75k/yr or more to fixing it. On top of that, there's actually cost-savings opportunities for using another service besides Vivox; or better yet removing it entirely in lieu of people making their own discord channels. Even better, Little Orbit could save $10,000-15,000 on operations cost by removing it from PC. There is very little benefit from having VOIP in APB native to the game client especially if the implementation doesn't work 90% of the time.

     

    The VOIP landscape has changed drastically with options like Discord and other gaming-focused VOIP solutions like Xbox/PS4's native party/chat system.

     

    Imagine what LO could do with it gone. They could hire 1/4th of a programmer, or 1 more community support team member.

     

    It's time to kill Vivox for good, especially on a platform where there are alternatives to it.

  14. Posted

    Just now, Acornie said:

    Anyone who's been keeping up knows a 'hub' server with different action district regions was planned, I just thought it was very much further in the roadmap. So yes I'm still right; a traditional merge wouldn't happen 

    This is a traditional merge, though. Names will still be conflicted, all characters effectively reside on the same server, etc.

     

    The underlying tech hasn't changed drastically, yet. Just the physical locations of the servers.

    Also, can we name the new server "Union"? It's a huge running gag with APB.

     

    #bringbacktheonion

    • Like 2

  15. Posted · Edited by Sophiie

    2 minutes ago, koIaman said:

    Why not wait until you guys implement the phasing system? Or is this part of the phasing plan? Wouldn't this be a little irrelevant once phasing comes around since the plan is to place you in a match based on your ping and location? A little confused.

    This is likely preparation for phasing. It's easier to phase similar-ping players into a district with similar ping than it is to match them on a world, which is currently impossible if you're an NA player playing on an EU server, for example.

     

    By having everyone on the same server, it would be very easy to figure out where people should go.

  16. Posted · Edited by Sophiie

    37 minutes ago, TheMessiah said:

    if people from north/south america and east asia start playn on our european server prepare for lag fest..

    giphy.gifgiphy.gif

     

    That's not how server-based latency works at all...

     

    It's not a peer-to-peer game. Servers will pretty much run at the same tick. The only ones having latency issues on EU servers would be NA players, and even then, it's not that bad - the major barrier for this was always the database logistics and who gets to keep what name. It's purely a political issue.

  17. Posted · Edited by Sophiie

    GMs can't accurately detect cheaters anyways by 'sitting in a district'. Even with a spectate, you can't tell if someone is just using a wallhack.

     

    The issue has to be solved with detection and a learning algorithm that eventually flags cheaters into the same matches together, and isolates legitimate players from them without even letting the cheater know that they are being soft-banned. Not only will this improve the game for legitimate players, it will require zero intervention, can be integrated into existing solutions, and will allow illegitimate players to have the illusion of their hack working and to contribute financially to the game.

     

    Also, it's very important to never announce you are doing this sort of thing if you implement it. Just take my idea and do it.

  20. Posted · Edited by Sophiie

    44 minutes ago, CookiePuss said:

    Uhh... Vanille is quite skilled when it comes to APB.

    I can assure you that you have NEVER seen him in a bronze district.

    I haven't seen him in a bronze district because I am not silver. Hard to see someone that's not in a district you can enter~

  22. Posted

    3 hours ago, Alani said:

    the way the net code is for apb 

     

    no

     

    it wouldnt work

     

    u forget apb was made in a time where regional servers were the only thing lol

    Regional servers were never a requirement by the developers for any game. It's a technical design choice made early in the game's development, normally if the engine they are working with turns out to have unbearable netcode, they launch the game in a region. You can still have - get this - EU *district* servers and NA *district* servers.

     

    Launching the game in other countries is normally done for political reasons, not technical reasons.

  23. Posted · Edited by Sophiie

    4 minutes ago, Acornie said:

    Yes, they have already considered this, it's been quite awhile but Matt has stated the idea to have a unified server with action districts in different regions was their plan in the future, but a normal ol' merge is obviously a nono (and why that is doesn't need to be elaborated upon).

     

    I personally look forward to a one 'world' system, if it ever comes, being on Jericho the marketplace is not exactly poppin'

    Delaying a server merge will only delay the inevitable; at some point names will have to be resolved. They are engrained in too many systems (friends, ignore list, character profile XML blob, ownership to be able to customize clothing, etc) and the GamersFirst backend for ARMAS. There are no other issues preventing the merge beyond having a working server topology.

  24. Posted · Edited by Sophiie

    5 minutes ago, Clandestine said:

    Matt said that their ultimate goal is to have single world server and matchmaking will be threat/ping based.

    That's great and all, but why not do it now if that's their ultimate goal with the engine upgrade?

     

    I am very well of Dedicated Automatic Matchmaking (DAM) and how it works on consoles and how it will work in the engine upgrade. That being said, it would be a quality of life improvement for the players now and in the future to have the worlds merged prior to the engine upgrade. And I can almost guarantee that DAM won't come until the upgrade. This would be a quality of life adjustment before the upgrade and will set up server topology to make the transition to DAM easier.

    2 minutes ago, Seadee said:

    but you wont get that, you will get a district with random people in that you definitely don't want to play against, exactly the same problem that has plagued the game from day 1.

    I'd rather have a district with people to play against than having no districts at all available of the type I wish to play in. What aren't you understanding about "some people cannot play the game at certain hours to progress"? The issue isn't matchmaking here, it's that there are no matches to even matchmake into.

  25. Posted · Edited by Sophiie

    9 minutes ago, Clandestine said:

    This is shooter not MMO RPG. On top of it we have very low TTK and every ms matters. I can't even imagine playing games like ESO with 200.

    See that's the thing; having options is better than not having options. If you re-read my post, I already addressed this: EU districts and NA districts as opposed to EU worlds and NA worlds.

     

    The latency to the server most commonly occurs at the district server / UE3 level, not the world server level. Your client is hosting a local Unreal 3 game instance until it hits a district server anyways, and the district server abstracts your connection to the world server - there isn't actually a connection being made to a world server except to authenticate into a district server. The actual communication between world and your client is done via engine-level packets to the district server.

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