Someone

It wasn't perfectly balanced but that doesn't mean it wasn't an interesting and unique aspect of the game.

WTF are you talking about? People can still spawn in fast cars actively being driven around, They just can't do it while it's being chased by an enemy which is what this suggestion is about.

A health buff but not a change from FWD to RWD? Whyyyy?

Why even have an economy mechanic built into using weapons and vehicles if it's not going to be used as another means of balance? The vehicle spawn and ammunition cost factor for nearly everything is off by a whole digit I.E. Vegas and OSMAW rockets should cost $1000 instead of $100. Non-mission activities such as mugging, ram-raiding, chop-shopping, witnessing, and impounding stolen goods/vehicles might need the profit per-item/action increased as well but I don't have the numbers for how much.

Imagine trying to make sense of a borderline incomprehensible argument. What part of "Invalid if enemy within 55m when under 55% of top speed" do you not understand? What?

When Mobile Spawn Points were first added, The game seen a huge increase in the number of gunfights between vehicle passengers and it was a really refreshing change to combat. Now due to the spawn becoming invalid if an enemy is within 55m of the vehicle, The game is back to the boring state of passengers rarely bothering to shoot at each other. It even reduced the overall amount of organic teamwork as dead teammates now are once again split up from living teammates when driving to an objectives with an enemy in proximity. In short, The "Invalid if enemy within 55m" rule should be changed to "Invalid if enemy within 55m when under 55% of top speed".

I recall using macros to make semi-auto weapons shoot at their maximum rate of fire being made a ban-able offense many years ago.

Glad I am not the only one who recognizes that the vegas is unbalanced.

It's good that they added the 4 slot version of the montane to contact progression but they really should have changed it from FWD to RWD while they were at it.

Nah it's the lack of willpower and manpower on part of the developers and its been that way for years.

Quake Live tried this and it was deemed a failure as advertisers pay for view time and players only spend micro seconds looking at in game environmental ads. Vehicle kits draw players in as they are applicable to player tradeable vehicles, If clothing kits could be trade they would have further appeal. Vehicle kits would be even more profitable if vehicles in general were so balanced with each other.

If your semi-automatic weapon can shoot as fast as an SMG, Why is it even semi-automatic in the first place?

Is it just me or is everyone miscalculating DPS? The usual formula of “attacks per second * damage per attack” does not conform to reality. It took making my own game and expericmenting with TTK as an idea to eventually figure this out but it's quite simple. Take two weapons: Machinegun vs Shotgun Machinegun rate of fire is 100ms, Damage is 10. Shotgun rate of fire is 1000ms, Damage is 100. Standard DPS of MG is calculated to be 100. Standard DPS of SG is calculated to be 100. I argue that that in reality the time between attacks starts exactly at the same time as damage is dealt. Meaning any weapon with a fire rate that is a factor of 1 second will have fired when the timer starts and when it ends. Therefore in the span of 1 second the Shotgun will have fired twice and the Machinegun will have fire eleven times, Making the true Damage-Per-Second of the Shotgun 200 and Machinegun 110.

It's very often that when a player types abandonmission, The active mission will find and match opposition due to the sudden change in team composition.

One value people keep forgetting about as a balancing mechanic for weapons is ammo cost, Sure many weapons share the same ammo but that is easily changed. Why can't weapons which are disliked for being too good become balanced by excessive ammo cost and weapons which are underwhelming become valuable for their profitability? Essentially what would happen is that good players gain a reason to handicap themselves against bad players who retain a means to level the playing field.

Maybe if ammo cost was used as the balancing mechanic its clearly intended to be, Players would feel great about forcing their opponents to burn money in order to win.

I agree that all weapons should just shoot at their maximum rate if the fire button is held down, Nothing would change except the steep learning curve being smoothed out. Any weapon which is only balanced due to the required skill to perfectly time manually firing each shot is too easily exploited by automation. Likewise any semi-auto which isn't good despite firing automatically is severely underpowered.

Those vehicles could be viable for player acquisition if spawn cost was actually used as the balancing mechanic it's clearly intended to be. If a slot-less and rent-only Benkz Mhuller M1, Balkan Kolva, and Balkan Ambulance respectively cost $500; $10,000; and $3,000 dollars to spawn then most players would look elsewhere even if all other vehicles spawns was multiplied by 10.

Randomness is the only thing that eliminates personal skill from the equation, Fighting when the odds are stacked against you doesn't eliminate personal skill from the equation. The mechanic already exists! Are you going to tell me that money serves no point in the game and there is currently no relationship between the cost of equipment and its relative performance? How have your issues not included XP? By your definition APB as a competitive PVP game should pare everything down to personal skill which would include access to every piece of equipment. What weapons currently in the game would give a player enough of an advantage to consistently win against an equally skilled but differently equipped opponent? Are those weapons ARMAS exclusive? How does making these superior weapons more expensive to use make them better? Why should gameplay around Crime and Enforcement be so pointless? It's been a core part of the game since the games inception, before it was a F2P game, and before the current dev team touched it. Why shouldn't it possibly matter how much time a player spends doing non-mission activities? Social doesn't print money, You had to do something well enough to make a player part with their cash. That would become even harder if money was more important to gameplay. Unless you were just saying that my words were illegible, The criticism that an idea "makes no sense" is ambiguous and nondescript without anything to specify it. You didn't/haven't explained how this is a problem. What reason do players currently have to use ISSRA over the NTEC? How will those reasons go away when the ammo they use suddenly costs 10x more? No it hasn't, The game couldn't have moved away from that "ethos" when it hasn't been able to move at all. The cheap vehicles wouldn't be considered underperforming if the more expensive cars didn't always give you their moneys worth of performance. Buffing the the "bad" vehicles into usefulness is impossible without harming gameplay dynamics and making everything feel and play the same. This is just mathematically wrong. Adding an ammo type for every weapon and balancing each with unique ammo costs is less work than balancing every weapon's equip time, magazine size, ammo count, reload speed, range, damage, rate of fire, recoil, damage fall off, running hipfire spread, walking hipfire spread, standing hipfire spread, crouched hipfire spread, crouched moving hipefire spread, standing aimed spread, aimed walking spread, aimed crouched spread, moving aimed crouch spread, and probably more I am forgetting. Which method is easier and which is more sustainable? Buying consumables outright so you can use them at will or altering how you play the game so you never run out in the first place? Would you say one player is being rewarded and the other punished or are these just equally valid ways to play the game "competitively"?

It seems like an obvious thing to have had in the game since the start. However, No one agrees what combat in APB should be like which means no one agrees what the balance of area denial weapons should be.

Competition does not equal equity of equipment and certainly not in a game like APB. XP is not irrelevant in a game with progression, Just because its been so long since you had anything to unlock doesn't mean its not a core principle the game is built around. No metaphor, I am pointing out that the correlation of increasing difficulty between "duration of effort" & "intensity of effort" is a natural consequence and not an imposed punishment. A player skilled enough with cheap weapons to overcome an enemy's skill with expensive weapons is rewarded with significant gains in profit, How is that not skill rewarding mechanism? So you think new players should get access to OSMAW and OPGL? According to what you say there is no point to PVP when the game actively prevents new players from playing exactly like old players. Why does an idea need to "make sense" and what exactly is the problem with the weapons you stated? That ammo cost from weapons of the same type but of different characteristics would influence player choice? My bad I had thought of the Packer Vaquero and not the Nulander Pioneer, I never thought to compare these two completely different class of vehicle. Within 300 meters the Mikro and Vaquero will win any race against any other vehicle, Their acceleration allows drivers entering the vehicle to escape grenades before they explode. Buffing all of the underused vehicles so that players choose to use them is pointless in my book because that would make them all equivalent and thus boing to drive. The only way to balance all of these vehicles without removing all the characteristics that make them unique is to make the price-to-spawn an important characteristic. Its not a leftover feature of the game, Its an underdeveloped core principle of the game. If they are meant to underperform then why do you want them buffed into equity so that players use them? Most weapons are already mostly balanced through their other characteristics, Making ammo cost an important factor just balances the difference that remains. Players don't earn enough free consumables to make it a self-sustaining process, They have to buy the consumables to make them a staple in their gameplay.

Why should it be convenient for players to utilize the best weapons and vehicles all the time? Why should we assume what it does for the game is good? Players still earn contact reputation even if they lose, They would only lose money if they chose to risk outspending their earnings for winning/losing the mission. Playing for performance is to sprinting as playing for sustainability is to jogging, Its hard to win a marathon by sprinting just as its hard to win a dash by jogging. Losing a race against someone who has the skills to sprint through an entire marathon when you can only jog is only punishing when you chose to wager money on it. OSMAW and OPGL are very good at what they do and which no other weapon can even emulate, New players have long complained about having to fight players with these weapons. A weapon's type doesn't just determine how viable it is in any given situation but also how it changes the performance of your teammates and the map's meta. Rifles are tier 2 because they can compete with weapons that can potentially outclass them while outclassing weapons not as flexible as them. Submachine guns are mostly tier 1 because they can't compete outside of short range, The Submachine guns that can use tier 2 Magnum ammo instead. As CQC weapons Shotguns have many inherently large advantages over Submachine guns, Which is why Shotgun ammo is tier 3 and most SMGs use tier 1 ammo. High-velocity Rifles are tier 3 ammo as they outclass anything they can outrange and their shorter range pitfalls are more easily compensated for from a players sidearm. Machine guns such as the SHAW and its like use ether tier 2 Rifle ammo while the ALIG and its clones use tier 3 High-velocity Rifle ammo. I don't understand the supposed performance differences between the Pioneer and Mikro, They drive differently but not enough for me to say one was better than the other. Do you think players should have a reason to consider using lower tier vehicles, Or do you not care that conservatively speaking players never buy and use 60% of vehicles in the game? Outside of pointlessly buffing every vehicle into equivalency, Increasing the cost to spawn is the only way to make lower tier vehicles viable choices over the popular high vehicles. Most low tier vehicles perform quite well even compared outside their tier, But the cost disadvantage for using a high tier vehicle is too low to affect the player's choice when it should. Making new types of ammo for every weapon and balancing each with its own price would be less work than adjusting every characteristics of every weapon until they're all "balanced". Imagine what problems the game would have if consumable items like Med Spray cost $200 instead of $2000 and you get an idea of the effect cheap ammo and vehicle spawn has been.

Not everyone who starts APB is bad at shooting, Like they have never played a shooter before. I completely disagree that ramraiding and mugging heavily favoring Criminals over Enforcers, Farming empty servers does not compensate for always getting ambushed and losing work. A major reason why non-mission activities are not found to be engaging is from contact missions being profitable enough that it makes these activities feel like a waste of time. Which means Criminals pretty much always raid solo and rarely to play the game of cat-and-mouse/hide-and-seek/risk-vs-reward that made it interesting. Factors for crime such as the bounty system at Notoriety 5 is currently disabled and the Notoriety/Prestige intra-mission system which was a core part of the game cycle is also gone. Meanwhile Enforcer players rarely even look for raiders, car jackers, and muggers let alone mange to witness them because so few players do those activities. Most Enforcers also don't know you can impound stolen cars for easy money on any populated server, But contact missions make it feel like a complete waste of time. Simply make free ammo for the default guns if it turns out that bad, Even if the default guns didn't get free ammo players always easily earn ammo money. Just mug people or impound some stolen cars and you'll have your lunch money for ammo, Increasing profit on activates is also an available option. Hand grenades would be a bigger money sink than ammo, But people have wanted grenade spawn gone for a long time and this could solve it forever. Right now players only fail to make profit on a mission because they hadn't completed any objectives or earned any medals, The only time players lose money in a mission is due to demerit medals. I gave ammo costs for 4 types of weapons which showed the difference in scale between cheap and expensive ammo. I also stated that more types of ammo should be made so each weapon can be balanced for its cost-of-use. The default weapons are not so bad that they cannot compete with guns of the same type, In fact the FBW is considered one of the best sidearms in the game. The default car isn't the only vehicle that is free to spawn, Increasing the cost to spawn vehicles encourages players to preserve a vehicle the more expensive it is to spawn. It would make Remote Detonator unappealing to use with a high tier vehicle and encourage players to park high tier vehicles with mobile spawn more conservatively. Right now players don't usually consider buying lower tier vehicles as their one advantage (cost to spawn) over higher tier counterparts isn't sufficiently influential. Whatever gains a player is maximizing by using the most effective weapons and vehicles which are the most expensive to use depends on what they are doing. With contact missions the player is trading mission profitability for enhanced capabilities to earn contact reputation through better performance. With witness missions Criminals and Enforcers have different perspectives. Criminals don't lose profitability using the expensive equipment as long as they don't get witnessed, While Enforces trade profitability for enhanced capabilities. Again, In the very first post I stated that creating more ammo types would allow further refinement of balance issues found with specific weapons. Though that might not be at all necessary as one might think, Ammo could already be for guns what tiers stand for when spawning a vehicle. Even based on current cost-per-round basis weapons could be split into tiers like vehicles: Pistol ammo and Machine Gun ammo is the cheapest meaning any weapon that uses it is tier 1 ($0.09/$0.13) Weapon that use Less-Than-Lethal Pistol ammo would be tier 2 ($0.25) Weapon that use Rifle and Magnum ammo are both tier 2 ($0.33/$0.40) Weapon that use Generic Less-Than-Lethal ammo would be tier 2 ($0.50) Weapon that use Shotgun shells and High-velocity Rifle ammo tier 3 ($0.80/$0.87) Weapon that use Flares, 40mm Grenades, and Hand Grenades make up tier 4 ($5-$15) Rockets are their own tier like how the Mhuller M1 is when chop shopped/impounded. ($100/$50) Machine Gun and Pistol ammo should be renamed to "Long Pistol" and "Short Pistol" ammo respectively, Many weapons that use it should be changed to use another ammo type. Even if ammo prices increased 10x I don't think those weapon would break when they switched ammo type because its another means to balance these various weapons.

How often are new players losing because they are not using the best weapons and vehicles in the game? I say not that often, At most they have the wrong weapon for the situation. Again, New or bad players can always profit during missions because the default guns are free and use the cheapest ammo while the default car is free to spawn. Old players having mounds of cash is a problem all MMORPG games face and the only way to solve it without resetting the economy is adding a money sink. If I was asking for an increase to weapon rental cost you would have a point as players would be forced to "get their money's worth" out of a rented weapon to not throw money away. Making the ammo more expensive means players don't lose much money from having a wide arsenal, But over reliance on weapons which are best-in-class requires compromises. Ammo type and thus cost does not have to be the same for every weapon within a class, It's a trivial and small change that adds another characteristic to balance weapons. Armas weapons don't have free ammo and the cost of weapon rental isn't high enough to create a big difference in profitability. What permanent Armas weapons save is a players time as they won't have to grind weapon ranks to have a 3 slot weapon, Filling up those 3 slots then becomes a money sink itself. Honestly a bigger issue for P2W is the money and symbol complexity bonus from premium accounts.

Making weapons in APB a potential moneysink as a means of balancing them is not comparable to Counter Strike in any way. A match in Counter Strike is zero-sum because it has no persistence while contact missions in APB are not zero-sum. Losing the "match" but making money is a viable game choice in APB because there is persistence with money and contact reputation. Witness missions on the other hand are zero-sum because the only thing on the line is money earned within the district. If a moneysink was a bigger part of gameplay meta then there would be more competition in the marketplace for such easily made items and people would be less willing to spend so much for them. Not that it matters if you happen to successfully make huge profits selling infinitely duplicatable things on the market place, Nobody forced the other players to give you their money and time.