Genobee

^ this. Stuff is still missing from the new engine. Plus it still needed a whole bunch of tweaking last I recall. Both in terms of performance and other miscellaneous problems. Have a look at the console version for an idea people. Should give you a rough idea of just how much they need to resolve before pushing it live for PC.

Butcher skin is probably coming back. Plus a new version of the gun game and new mode for Halloween. Not happy with that skin making a return like this, but yeah. *is done being a salty b*stard*

So in short the attempted changes went over poorly with no clear way to resolve it. Fair enough. At least you were up for admitting that. Though I'm not looking forward to the same old meta once more, but eh. Now what I feel like was part of the problem here is that the changes weren't really fully baked. There were unintended consequences that were sadly quite easy to overlook. There's a vast number of guns in the game with an absurd list of variants ontop of the fact. Which brings me to my question: would it not make more sense to try out more potential changes and allow the players to further discuss the potential outcomes? You did this before, but it was short lived and only had the one route really taken into consideration by that stage. It seemed like it was all but set in stone. Why not instead take a more open approach where the players can help shape things in a greater sense? I still say your internal metrics should be the main focus. Yet the longtime players around here are going to be aware of things that charts just aren't going to show. I guess I don't feel the right balance has been struck quite yet. Heh. In more ways then one.

Founder here. I don't like to talk about it

Believe it or not that was the plan! There was going to be an event centered around the gun changing hands once upon a time in APB's history. Sadly it never came to be. Was a really fun concept that I'm still a bit disappointed over. See then they'd need some kinda gimmick for those guns. Which is a problem in the case of mine. It doesn't have anything special besides the skin going for it. Unless one of the new devs wanted to go with the old plan to troll me. Swap the audio out for something obnoxious and drop the projectile speed way down. That'd probably be an amusing gun for people to play around with. Not too terribly functional though, but eh. On a more serious note: plz no

I really don't think you understand how big of a change this was. The previous version of the joker ticket store had overpriced guns with often no mod slots. Now the store is a standardized 500jt for a basic version of a weapon. Then 1000jt for an open slot or better preset version of it. It's easier to maintain, and holds far greater value. Not to mention there's a substantially larger pool of weapons to select from.

I also recall that being a nice kick in the teeth. That was the reward for a contest where you had to be top 15 on your server for kills, and it got handed out to everyone just because. Fun times. So happy they made a special prize I went out of my way to grind for utterly meaningless. Sorry. Had to get that off my chest. Anyway! I don't know. Having special or exclusive items kinda helps keep things fun. Getting a reward that is limited or otherwise not obtainable again is a very sought after thing. Have a look at Fortnite for a great example of this. Guess what the most popular skins are? Ones you can't get again. Epic Games certainly seems to understand that there's something to be had there. When they brought back an old skin (skull trooper) recently people complained. So do you know what they did for people who had it originally? They got an exclusive version of it to make up for it returning. A similar gesture would be really nice here.

I'm going to wait and see how things play out. So far the changes have been a mixed bag, leaning towards good. However it's the engine upgrade that'll make or break them. The rest of their changes are tiny by comparison. On the bright side they seem to genuinely care. That's not something APB has had going for it since RTW. I mean the old dev team used to too, but they weren't allowed to do anything. The higher ups were just in it for ways to squeeze every last drop of cash from APB's lifeless corpse. That doesn't seem to be the case this time around.

Heavy barrel really needs to be redone to begin with. The modifcation is all but useless. When something is only considered useful in a few select edge cases it's not in a good state. And asking them to balance an entire weapon type around something that needs work as a whole seems.. pointless?

I'm just worried with how much bad blood there is between gamers and that name. It's got a very tumultuous past to put it kindly. I'd still imagine that'll make it harder to rope in anyone burned in the past. They won't want anything to do with that name most likely. I don't know. Maybe it'll be fine. Maybe I'm worrying too much about it.

Not too keen on the idea of making a special skin even more trivial than a certain ex-community manager did. The rest sounds like it'll be a nice shakeup to the usual mission or fightclub monotony.

My guess is boredom. Not a whole not has changed in a while around here. The engine upgrade and other big changes are still probably a few months out. So might as well discuss the small tweaks to death.

You are right about the PMG with CJ3. It statistically should not have any negative effects on the weapons performance. I've updated my post to reflect that. That's what I get for replying in the middle of the night without thinking things out. Beyond that I still do not agree however. It may be easier to deal a larger amount of damage if there's only a window to land a shot at best. Beyond that the OCA is more forgiving and consistent within normal SMG ranges. Then at the tail-end even the PMG starts missing shots. Plus missing a shot on the PMG incurs a much steeper penalty. Making me wonder why that's being cited as a positive for the gun? I don't know. I can't even call the PMG the "noob gun". The OCA has in my eyes always held that title for being one of the easiest and least difficult weapons to play with. The PMG always felt like it required a marginally higher amounts of skill.

I get why you brought up the PMG, but it's also not really the focus of anything right now for a reason. Meanwhile the OCA is the center of attention because it is an absolute monster. You can bring the TTK down to .61~ with no real downside. Versus the PMG's .7 and CJ3 just puts it at .65 above the OCA's stock TTK. The only real advantage the PMG has is marginally better accuracy (3cm at 10m), +5m dropoff range, .10s faster reload, and a better kill to mag ratio. Sounds like a lot. It just isn't enough to put it on par with the OCA in most peoples eyes it seems. That comically fast TTK on the OCA is outpacing all of those upsides.. that's not good.

I wouldn't go so far as to say sabotaged. What probably happened is someone up top in G1 had very little interest in pursuing those types of changes. So what we got was something to quiet us angry bastards down a bit. Just to show us that their way was the better bet. Not to truly test the waters on whether or not there were other ways to approach the games effective TTK. I believe that is why the bugs remained in that test until the end. In my person opinion I would still strongly prefer them to investigate bumping up the effective TTK slightly. We all know the games design doesn't exactly facilitate an ultra low TTK (damn did Dopefish put that nicely). Not sure why they are so intent on fighting mechanics deeply ingrained into the game. Rather than working with those aspects to further improve the main gameplay loop. Hell, I'm willing to be money there'd be more room for the niche weapons out there if they did that. Gives more wiggle room to do something with them. Rather than how it is now where a lot of guns could simply poof from existence and no one would really notice.

RTW's vision was to go for a fight club type setup too you know. That was decided rather early on in the games life. Problem is G1 never got around to seeing that all the way through either. We had a chopped up test version of asylum that sadly never got finished. It's in a very awkward state to say the least. Many of the planned features simply had to be axed for the time. I'd love to see them go back and at least try doing a little bit more with it. The original version of it had so much more to offer visually than the torn up version we see now for starters.

I don't know. I was a big fan of the original TTK to be quite honest. Never really enjoyed the G1 style of it all. Just never meshed well with the other aspects of the games design that seemed to be left as-is back when all that was changed. Missions, level design, etc. It's a mess regardless, and it's quite short these days. Not really sure where the idea of a long TTK is coming from. Most guns in APB kill at about the same pace they always have?

Wonder if they couldn't let us trade weapons for G1C if not a full on Steam trading system. Wouldn't mind either or.

I don't believe so? It's only 2pm PT time if I'm not mistaken. https://time.is/PT

You've got a very interesting view on the balance changes. I'll give you that. That said I'm split on what I think about it. Some of it makes a lot of sense then out of nowhere you'll jump to saying things like the 'Ursus' is a straight upgrade to the N-TEC. Whereas what I typically hear is that the N-TEC is a more reliable choice. In-fact I rarely see anyone utilizing it that has it anymore. The N-TEC has remained the go to. If your point was to say that it's viewed as being better simply due to rarity, then it wasn't conveyed very well. Moving on to what you said about the N-TEC's widespread usage: it isn't just free players utilizing it almost exclusively. A lot of players that own multiple guns find themselves moving back to the N-TEC as their main choice. There's a reason for it. It slams the other guns into the ground then laughs at them. It's a total beast when compared to every other AR. Some come close, yes, but they just can't match it. Cost or difficulty of obtaining things just doesn't factor in with some of the really high skill folks. They've been around long enough to have gotten multiple other options for free or outright bought them. They choose the gun because it is the best. Your observations about modability and versatility I have to agree on. It ends up being a jack of all trades with very little in terms of downsides. Anyways thanks for posting this. Kinda feel like LO isn't getting enough feedback. More discussions on it the better I say.

They always struck me as a worse ALIG. Heavy recoil with worse damage all-around. Nothing like a .8s TTK on a gun that throws your aim off your target constantly. Tried to find a use for them but they just aren't really worth the effort. Not unless they get some kind of tweak I think.

^ this. They never got around to fleshing out content for them.

This kind of honesty is still very alien to me.

how do you know he's new You have a point. Also it doesn't matter how long people have been around. Look at me I'm an idiot at best and I've been around since the RTW days.

It would be playable.. but don't expect much beyond that. It comes in at the very bottom end of the spectrum in terms of GPU power (GT 1030 equivalent). For CPU heavy tasks it does okayish. The low core count really works against it there. Might be better off saving up for a while then buying some parts. Unless you absolutely feel you need something right now.