Spudinskes

Lol but he's right though XD

It's been over 7 years with no district queue.

I use AHK to automate joining full districts now. Over the course of nearly a decade having played this game I have probably lost hours of my life trying to join full districts.

What's pretty lame about the server merge is that characters, at the time of the merge, that had more playtime/created earlier got to keep their name. But that included people that bought namechanges for names of high popularity on the other server right before the merge. So while the character has more game time, the time of which the character had the name could have been as little as one day and would get to keep it after the merge. Character on Colby: Created in 2011 with ShittyName Day before server merge changed name to FamousName Character on Joker Created in 2012 with FamousName After merge the Colby player gets to keep FamousName. The Joker player is forced to change name, despite having the name for 3+ more years than the guy on Colby.

It would be decrypted on game/map load before being put into ram. Extra load time would be the only consequence when it comes to performance. I'm not agreeing to the topic, but I wanted to point out this misconception.

Have you played those games? It's pretty toxic if you aren't a god. even the lower ranked people still tell people to get off certain champions/heroes when they are slightly lower rank than them. And if they don't switch and don't completely frag out they get yelled at. Toxicity and being rude is not special to APB in the slightest. As for glitching, that's up to LO to fix them. It's the same way every other company handles glitches and unfair spots, they patch them out. APB likely isn't going to change how people act in video games, but LO has the power to prevent and punish abuse.

That's like every game with matchmaking out there. Every game has toxicity and APB is no more toxic than other games like CSGO, Overwatch, and especially LoL. Despite the "toxicity" and tryhards the matchmaking in those games are fine. There are tons and tons of new and nooby players taking a part of matchmaking. There are also other modes out there like open conflict. There are tools available for people that want to avoid matchmaking and threat levels.

I would have to disagree on allowing threat to be easily changed. It should require an adequate amount of games to lose or gain ELO by a meaningful margin. Off days happen to everyone, but it was way too easy to dethreat from unlucky streaks and gain threat from lucky streaks. A lot of matchmaking systems take consistency into account now a days. I would agree that people often threw less back in APB. A reason why could have been because more people actually cared about threat, people could actually see their threat increase, and top players had a reason to actually try and win. At the moment who cares about winning or losing because you basically keep your gold or silver no matter what happens because the ELO grouping is so large.

The topic is specifically talking about visuals. I never said the threat levels weren't underneath, the topic makes no mention of that. I don't see how that assumption could be made from reading it. You're thinking of abandoning ideas that may have consequences without thinking of ways to counteract those consequences. You don't purposefully limit the growth of a small business simply because it takes more management and resources to grow the business. You create a structure and plan to nurture healthy growth of the business, like structured management, checks and balances, staying on top of operating costs, etc. Don't drop an idea because there's some growing pains. Create solutions to overcome issues like "toxicity". For example Blizzard does a good job of combating trolls and throwers both in game and in Overwatch league by keeping players and professionals in line with meaningful consequences. https://gamerant.com/overwatch-penalties-competitive-921/ https://dotesports.com/overwatch/news/overwatch-player-dafran-banned-15126

I think we can all agree that with happy landings 3 we are all a bunch of apes jumping off buildings and bridges. I think the height it takes to disable sprinting after falling should be decreased. Right now there's like only a few spots in the game that are high enough to disable sprinting and they are all in waterfront. I think the height from jumping off the long bridge in financial to the ground is a good height to disable sprinting.

I think we can all agree that with happy landings 3 we are all a bunch of apes jumping off buildings and bridges. I think the height it takes to disable sprinting after falling should be decreased. Right now there's like only a few spots in the game that are high enough to disable sprinting and they are all in waterfront. I think the height from jumping off the long bridge in financial to the ground is a good height to disable sprinting.

A lot of games are designed to be fun, and one way a lot of players experience that fun is through competitive matchmaking. I don't think the developers of LoL, WoW, CSGO, and Overwatch designed a competitive matchmaking system if they knew a lot of players wouldn't enjoy that. Even if it introduces toxicity LO can take Blizzard's approach, who currently have a strict policy against it. People who are overly toxic get suspensions.

I'm not sure if you're agreeing of disagreeing with that first part. Let's not disregard an idea simply because there is an obstacle. We shouldn't disregard world Peace simply because there are a lot of systemic issues across the globe, for example. Why not appease both sides. Adjust the bell curve and reintroduce meaningful threat graphics.

Of course, first thing's first there needs to be a solution that prevents mission griefing from happening. Reporting is absolutely an inadequate solution as select teams may sometimes have clan mates log in (through a VPN) to alts to grief objectives and won't care if their alt account gets banned. Second is that missions really need to be rebalanced, somehow. Enforcer missions are harder since they have enforcer exclusive objectives like phone booths which are usually in the middle of the road. Meanwhile Crim's have some exclusive objectives are always in CQC. Third, crims are able to bribe crim contacts (pretty stupid btw, you should be bribing cops, not other criminals to lower notoreity) to reduce notereity down to 1 before every mission. Meanwhile enforcers can not bribe and are forced to either rejoin the district to reset or become P5 during the mission and be at a massive disadvantage.

Threat 15 was a really cool way to highlight top players but was sadly removed by G1, as well as leaderboards. If you don't know what Threat 15 was, it was the maximum possible matchmaking rank achievable in the original APB. You would generally have to win 20+ missions in a row at threat 14 to achieve 15. When you got threat 15 you were treated with an awesome logo and you would appear on the map to all players with that logo, similar to P5 and N5 (but awesome looking). This resulted in awesome rivalries where teams of threat 15 crims and enforcers would deliberately join each other's districts to try and dethreat the other back to 14. Other times it was cool to have flocks of players come visit you. I'm not sure why G1 removed it but this concept of awarding players with a special rank exists in so many successful games that involve PVP matchmaking. For example in CSGO there's global elite, in LoL there's Challenger, Gladiator in WoW, and in Overwatch there's top 500. All these have a special appearance to them that easily distinguishes the top players. They also require you to be in anywhere from .01% to .05% of the top players in the game. Right now threat is pretty boring and makes it hard to distinguish a regular gold player from, for example, a top .05% player. Reintroducing the threat 15 mechanic in some fashion would be a great way to keep competitive players interested. Having a leaderboard that lists out all the threat 15 players (like Overwatch, LoL, and WoW) would also be a cool addition and could serve as a hit list for other players (massive ELO boost if they beat them). What are your thoughts? Obviously there are things in APB that should be fixed like faction imbalance and griefing. But let's assume they will be fixed and just focus on the idea itself. Let's have a discussion going.

/pop would not need to be removed, as long as the streamer doesn't type /pop then the streamsniper won't know which district to go to, assuming search is removed and adding friends requires requests. /who really doesn't need to exist. The only thing I can think of is to check if a GM is in the district or something like that but they can just get a logo on the map similar to P5 and N5.

Threat 15 was a really cool way to highlight top players but was sadly removed by G1, as well as leaderboards. If you don't know what Threat 15 was, it was the maximum possible matchmaking rank achievable in the original APB. You would generally have to win 20+ missions in a row at threat 14 to achieve 15. When you got threat 15 you were treated with an awesome logo and you would appear on the map to all players with that logo, similar to P5 and N5 (but awesome looking). This resulted in awesome rivalries where teams of threat 15 Crim's and enforcers would deliberately join each other's districts to try and dethreat the other back to 14. Other times it was cool to have flocks of players come visit you. I'm not sure why G1 removed it but this concept of awarding players with a special rank exists in so many successful games that involve PVP matchmaking. For example in CSGO there's global elite, in LoL there's Challenger, Gladiator in WoW, and in Overwatch there's top 500. All these have a special appearance to them that easily distinguishes the top players. They also require you to be in anywhere from .01% to .05% of the top players in the game. Right now threat is pretty boring and makes it hard to distinguish a regular gold player from a, for example, top .05% player. Reintroducing the threat 15 mechanic in some way would be a good way to keep competitive players interested. Having a leaderboard that lists out all the threat 15 players (like Overwatch, LoL, and WoW) would also be a cool addition and could serve as a hit list for other players (massive ELO boost if they beat them).

The old menu was so clean, had a good theme, and was quick. Who thought the current "dramatic" music with delayed loading was a good idea? Although the old menu could have had the DJ scratch sound turned down a tad.

You will be able to choose which district type you want to go to. Not being able to choose what type of district you'll join is indeed an absolutely horrible idea. I thought it could be safely assumed but I'll add it to the OP.

A queue system that players can join that will evenly spread players as best as possible. This system would aim to have healthy (60+) player numbers in all districts rather than a few full districts and several empty ones. Players can choose which district type (financial, waterfront, Aabington, etc) to queue for. System creates new districts if the number of players in the queue reaches a threshold. Players still have the option to join specific districts, which will have a queue as well Another option is to just have district specific queues.

Can you guys bump player count to 100 while you're at it too? And when will district queues be implemented? Hopefully a queue that sends players across all districts, so we have several 60-100 pop districts rather than a few 100 pop and many sub 30 ones

Just applying the idea to stationary objectives is good enough imo. If its a vehicle objectice at least you can blow it up and have if relocate, and hopefully have teammates ready to drive there. Im sure they dont need to go through and hard code each objective in each mission. There's probably a template and the objective locations are randomly picked somehow. That is entirely possible, but the original idea alone should be enough to fix objective griefing for the most part, which is way to easy atm. If they have to look for another empty car to push with their car then it's a lot more effort and requires a lot more precision and forethought.

I'm sure when the original developers were designing APB they didn't consider objective griefing a core aspect of the game. Like I said I'm all for keeping collision for the majority of the game, but let's not give it the ability to stop missions which is another large aspect of the game. It doesn't require you to be a streamer to be a target due to rage or vengeance. I can see players griefing in a green district (if there were players in there) because they think the other green has to be cheating.

The fact that a player outside the mission, who isn't n5, can completely stop progression of a mission shouldn't exist. If objective griefing could only be done through some obscure method then I'd understand. But objective griefing is so incredibly easy that it should really be fixed. Also while you may never run into these types of people, others do. I know a lot of people that get hackusations and due to how easy it is to grief, and the nature of the toxic community, there is a higher chance that they get griefed by the accuser(s). For example, I've run into pre made teams that know who I am and will go out of their way to kick one of their teammates in discord and have him grief for them, and then also call for more backup. Even if the griefer is recorded, he may have only done it for one objective and maybe for only ~12 seconds after finally wiping his teammates. The recording would probably be considered unsubstantial evidence and the griefer wouldnt get punished. That's ignoring the fact that the characters are just rerolls. So they couldn't care less about what happens to their accounts. But anyways, the damage has already been done. The griefer caused my team to lose. Have this happen to you every day and it's incredibly annoying.

The technology is there, and like I said my idea would be for in-mission active stationary objectives. At least for vehicle objectives you can blow it up and have teammates ready to go to its respawn. I think a toggle would be a great option, however you have people that are worried about not being able to pit manuever or crash other players. Really I want an idea that would satisfy both sides. Let people crash into whoever they want, but also guarantee (not report and wait hours) that griefers are not able to park themselves ontop or infront of stationary objectives.