Genobee

I don't recall a time when criminals had access to a special stun of any sort. There were plans in place for an equivalent that neither RTW or G1 ever got to do. Though that wasn't a stun to the best of my knowledge. Are you sure you aren't thinking of the debate surrounding weapons like the DMR stunning instead of killing with HB3?

I beleive it was due to the large number of gifting chargebacks and the resulting costs in both time and money needed to sort them out. That plus getting a second gun for dirt cheap. Gifting a friend the character bound then "upgrading" to the account bound for a small fee was a big problem I imagine.

Multi-part issue if you ask me. The area they chose to move the merged NA server to is notorious for having all kinds of networking problems. Secondly they forced large swaths of their community to play with substantially higher latency. Both Colby and Joker had a massive population that was from other regions. Those two locations just happened to work as great middle-grounds for a lot of players. They forced all of those people to either quit or tolerate extremely laggy gameplay. For many of them re-rolling wasn't even an option. They had too much bound to the NA servers to simply up and leave. I really wish they didn't force that on us. I remember a lot of people fighting to keep the servers separate. Some even suggesting they invest in finding a better solution (my favorite being regional districts, IE: central login server with districts spun up in each region). There were other ideas of course. Point is that I don't really recall anyone being overly fond of the idea from the very start. Yet old G1 forged ahead. One of the largest mistakes they could have possibly made. I remember Jericho almost immediately having a smaller population than Joker did on it's own.

Easier to get attention for. To be frank it involves something sexual and is quite visual. It isn't one of the worst by a mile. What it is however, is a means of getting more attention for cancer research in general. I don't give a rats arse which one it is they "sell" people on. Long as it hopefully ends up helping people beat cancer. Although I don't deny for a minute that there are specific methods of treating breast cancer that do not apply to more dangerous types. That is a peculiar issue resulting from breast cancer getting the majority of the focus in media. However a lot of the research can be applied to other types of cancer. But that circles back to the very first thing I said; it's sometimes hard to get people to care about cancer. A lot of folks ignore it until it effects them in some personal way. Breast cancer however is able to invoke a response in people outside of that more readily. Letting a little bit more be done to fight other types that might otherwise not get anything extra.

Actually I believe that is easy, relatively speaking of course. When a change is made to a gun in a patch it'll alter it for everyone. They don't have to manually sort through inventories or anything crazy in this particular case. Alter the associated table, and when the patch goes live all is well (barring bugs! Which who the hell knows with APB. For all I know tweaking presets results in car spawners vanishing). Problem is that also opens up a whole new can of worms. What if someone doesn't have the modification that was removed to slot back into it? What if they don't meet the rank requirement to equip the mod that used to be stuck in it? Besides the thing is.. why would they change it? I'm kinda with you on how they should handle it. We know what we bought. We willingly chose to go for guns that couldn't be modded. That was our decision to make. Maybe if they are feeling super generous they could look into it.. but eh. There's a slew of problems introduced with them doing it. Moreso than with simply balancing guns. Even what I feel like would be the more "reasonable" option has a lot of technical hurdles to it. Which would be to offer a discount on the open slot variant to owners of presets. Of course I'm still not convinced they should do anything. So. Eh. Done spewing out general nonsense.

Holy hell I didn't know you were back (did you ever leave APB?)

One thing I immediately noticed is the drawback for burst weapons is virtually non-existent compared to other guns. That probably needs to be looked into. If they really want to keep the reduced rof they need to get modifications applying that behavior correctly to those.

Agreed. So far it's certainly not bad. There are other things they need to look at of course.

One in a JMB I'm betting. Seems about par for the course, no? Probably still the biggest moneymaker by far. Couldn't really fault them for keeping at that in that regard at least. Not that I'd like to EVER see another JMB. Never-ever-ever-ever-ever.

Last I'd heard that was still considered a bit iffy, and had been shelved. This was ages ago of course, and it was during a different point in the games history balance wise. With different people making those calls. So I suppose it isn't too shocking someone else who came along later had a different opinion on it.

That was all kinds of annoying. Wish they'd stuck to their word.

That was back when the 'Old Glory' wasnt supposed to be sold due to balance concerns. At some point along the way that went out the window.. and yeah. It's out in the wild now. No putting that cat back in the bag. Besides it has been struggling to hold it's own in a lot of cases these days.. so.. eh. At this stage I just can't see the harm in it.

Any chance of Jericho being moved to the east coast? Back when there were east and west coast NA servers the east coast one had a far higher population. Partly due to players from Europe choosing to play on there. After the merge that kinda went out the window. So did the servers population. Not really much to be said there aside from how rapid the decline was. Practically overnight it plummeted to levels that were about half of what the east coast server was. That's not a good total for a server that was supposed to combine two populations. Haven't really seen it recover since, at least not in any substantial manner. On a semi-related note: I'd kill for the game to one day use a global login server, with regional districts. Allowing people to play with one-another as they pleased with reasonable pings throughout the whole experience. Would certainly allow for more diverse matchmaking at the absolute least with that larger pool to choose from. Wishful thinking of course, but you know.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the buffs planned for the low tier weapons isn't going to make a whole lot of difference in many cases. The 'Misery' for example has an absolutely pitiful setup going for it. Long TTK, average everything, and poor recovery. Fixing the tap-fire for it plus some overhead is nice and all.. but then it's just an Obeya CR762 with worse stats still. Sure it's automatic with a few extra shots but it has no real niche. It just kinda exists to be different for the sake of being different. It needs some kind of area it can excel in. That's where a lot of these guns suffer. You have kings like the N-TEC 5, OCA, etc. They do it all. So well in-fact that the specialty guns have no need to be around. Those guns overtake practically everything, even at it's perceived purpose. This might be a step in the right direction, but at the same time I think it is applying a band-aid to core problems with balance.

I really want to add to this conversation, but I can't think of anything that hasn't been said already. Yes there are guns that cannot be reasonably (or if at all) obtained through standard gameplay. Some of them offer advantages over the ones you can gain access to. That is a problem. However the top tier guns are indeed completely free and absolute beasts. IE: OCA, N-TEC, N-HVR, etc. Then again it really wouldn't hurt for them to provide more means to obtain content. Namely through simply playing the game in some capacity or another. Whether it's random rewards, some kind of new contact unlock, etc. Hell I wouldn't even mind some APB$ joker boxes available through the joker ticket store. In-fact I'd kill for another gold sink. That's something this game needs desperately. Kill two birds with one stone there. Edit: ability cooldown reduction for premium seriously needs to go. This is coming from someone who has always had premium. It just isn't fair. That one there really shouldn't be any debate about.

Somehow I'm always shocked at how fast things get weird around here. I mean, they always do, every time.

I'd like to say yes, I really, really would. Buuuut at the same time it'd break so very many things at the moment. Currently being caught out in the open for even a brief moment at slower then normal speed is enough to result in you dying a horrible death. Plus the mission timers are exceptionally short in many cases. From my viewpoint they'd have to crank up the timers or wait until a proper revamp of missions. Maybe even wait until some tweaks can be made to sections of the maps. Really turns into quite the mess the more you think about it. Bleh.

I don't really see why they shouldn't go for it. There are both grenade launchers and a rocket launcher available through joker boxes. Why not have the standard ones available for direct purchase at this point. Is there a suggestion thread about it anywhere or anything like that?

Kinda-sorta. Seems to follow the logic pretty much every UE3 game out there does of utilizing 2 threads heavily? Then the rest is just some light stuff. Could be wrong of course. I can't say I've bothered looking into it too much.

Just for the sake of helping you fully verify it here's what the Little Orbit CEO said:

There's the 'Volcano JC' at least? Then again I totally understand if that doesn't count to you for multiple reasons.

First off I have to say that I really like the idea. Secondly.. I'd be lying if I said there weren't some major issues here. Your list of banned items is hard to read, and the reasoning seems arbitrary at best at times. Following that up you've got a massive problem where a huge chunk of the community may not be able to participate. Finally rounding it all up you are hinging your prizes off the gifting system coming back in time. I'd definitely have a backup ready to go on the off-chance it doesn't pan out for whatever crazy reason. Again, I like the idea. I hope you can make it work. I just feel like there are a lot of problems that weren't addressed before this was thrown out into the wild.

Sounds about right. Dropping the max for the UI texture setting to 1024 should do the trick I believe.

I don't mean to be that guy but the 'Scepter' is an alternate model Scoped N-TEC. Same stats and all that.

Can't say it even really crossed my mind that some of you guys in certain regions wind up paying an insanely disproportionate amount. Which is only compounded by the prices being overly high to begin with. Ouch. Just.. ouch.