Frosi

I would assume that its a different program than that of the other players that got banned for using an overlay like such to make symbols, regardless, its an unverified source that hooks into the game client and can therefore be super easily picked up as a cheat or malicious software by EAC, they have whitelists for a reason and players that run such unverified programs will always run the risk of being banned in any game.

No Matt is not telling bs but if you paid any attention to previous statements and then the roadmap this year you'd notice that the scope of the contacts has changed, saying they aren't ready doesn't mean that they are months and months away but rather that they do not reflect the current state they want them in for release (whether that's a complete re-imagination or just a few items they want to add is up in the air). I highly doubt any work has been done on them in the past months as the developer is focusing on the new matchmaking update. Matt's previous statements would also imply that the work on these contacts have been done on the engine upgrade which has since been scrapped which then means that you would have to back port it all and test it again.

They are not ready and as other users have mentioned above, current matchmaking doesn't exactly allow returning players to have a lot of fun so to retain those newer players the new matchmaking is required to hopefully massively decrease the amount of unfair matches they are thrown into for a better experience.

Overlays aren't inherently banable, I've been using HudSight as a crosshair overlay as the devs of the program specifically stated that its whitelisted by EAC, Matt has also stated in the past that THEY THEMSELVES as in Little Orbit will not stop you from using crosshair overlays aslong as you aren't editing gamefiles to get them as they know its a common feature request for the game and there's also nothing they can do to stop you from using monitor based crosshair overlays or even taping something on your screen. There's a russian overlay to design symbols that has been causing players to be banned by EAC and while those players are crying foul, the program itself lights up as malicious on like 40+ different antivirus scans on virustotal which would imply that the program does a lot more in the background than just draw an overlay on your screen which makes it shady as hell. Players are in charge of their own accounts, this also includes not running malicious software on your pc that hooks into the game and should therefore never run anything that isn't specifically stated to not cause conflicts with the Anti-cheat, also I am pretty sure the thing Matt said was not about overlays whatsoever and was also related to the reintroduction of BattlEye so it has NOTHING to do with EAC.

Yea just do something illegal, doesn't matter am I right?

Not just that but I doubt there are even many ppl (if any) in the apb community that would be able to work on the game outside of possibly clothing / balance / map changes. The games code is written in a deprecated coding language as well as heavily modified to the point where it may as well be its own engine and not Unreal 3.

64Bit? EAC? And hopefully soon the new matchmaking.

Matt has mentioned that the roadmap is quite ambitious and that they will not get everything on it done this year and while development is definitely on the slower end the current developer that is single-handedly carrying the games future on their back is working tirelessly on the new matchmaking system which the game will need to keep those returning players for when the new contacts drop for example. I would personally like to see more balance to be done, especially buffs to all the crap guns to keep the game more fresh while other things are being worked on but if said balance comes at the cost of the dev not being able to work on matchmaking then that's likely just not worth it. Hopefully all these sales allow them to expand the team in the near future to accelerate things. At the end of the day they are very aware that APB has many issues and that one dev isn't going to be able to solve them all in a timely manner, they need at least another 2~ people on the team, including someone that understands the game in and out if they wanna turn things around, until that time comes I'm just happy that Secrets is working so hard to keep this game alive, without them we likely wouldn't even have a game to play right now as Matt mentioned in the past that they should've just shut the game down until they managed to fix many of these issues and cut their losses till then.

No, it works like every legendary on the contact, you pay 2500 JT and get a 7 day lease version together with a 5% chance to get it permanent, this chance is not additive, its 5% for every attempt until the 21st attempt at which you are guaranteed to get it permanently.

That sounds like you don't have steam open and that's causing the login screen to stutter as its running checks to see whether steam is running or not. This has always been a thing but 64Bit seemingly made the stutters worse but is it really an issue that needs immediate fixing? Don't have that whatsoever. As for your other points, yes, the game is not new player friendly right now and LO is very aware of that but they also know that nothing is gonna change that until they revamp the FTUE (First time user experience) which they have plans for in the future, for now its about keeping the game playable for those that want to play it and threat segregation will not exist under the new matchmaking system anyways which is in active development and should hopefully also allow for stricter matchmaking for those players of low mmr so they don't get matched against veterans with thousands of hours.

Yea players being in charge of who they play against sounds great, its not like half the ppl you play against as a good player are just gonna instantly dip out of the mission. At the time of disabling threat segregation EU hovered around 300-400 players during peak times and the average amount of players has gone up because players were able to play the game late at night, something previously only available to players that were able to join bronze districts. EAC has not made any negative impact on performance for me and any other player I talk to whatsoever, if anything the performance seems better compared to BE. Maybe those players shouldn't use a program that lights up as a virus on 40+ different Anti-virus scans on virus total, just a thought. Plenty of other options than using some self-made tool that seems to be a lot more than just an overlay judging by the scans. Its pretty clear you have little idea of what you're talking about let alone game development and try to make excuses for what seems like a gross lack of knowledge / understanding of the game. People would be willing to enlighten you if you were to ask nicely but not if you make posts like these.

The new matchmaking system will basically work like threat segregation did but in a more dynamic way which will then allow for matches to happen even during low-pop times although with less accurate matchmaking. As of 64Bit the game is no longer limited to 4GB of ram, this combined with a fix that has been made relatively early into the 64Bit update being live has made it so garbage collection has an additional trigger which is when the game has to load the respawn screen such as when you just died in a mission, therefore, many configs have opted to completely turn off garbage collection meaning it no longer happens during active gameplay and only during the respawn screen.

LO has already mentioned that the new matchmaking comes first as it is basically a requirement for when they launch new contacts as it should help returning players get into more even matches so they don't just quit the game again halfway through leveling the contacts due to poor match quality leading to frustration. They are aware that the new matchmaking system may not work as intended and therefore may only be a slight improvement at first but when new content comes to the game then that surge of returning players will boost the games pop and hopefully this time be allowed to stay.

Probably best to keep it up so players are aware they're not the only ones running into this issue. Players can also hop onto the LO discord as they're usually pretty quick to comment on any ongoing issues in the discord. https://discord.gg/littleorbit

They are aware of the clients crashing and are looking into it.

Honestly a good question, I know for a fact that these are all the changes done to the gun, my only guess would be that the marksman modifier has a weird interaction on burst weapons but no, to my knowledge nothing is being ommitted/forgotten here. I disagree here, the hipfire penalty from HS3 is much more noticeable than the max bloom of IR3 ever was, not to mention that the benefit gained from HS3 is extremely minimal and sorta puts the Fang in a niche where those who always fire it in marksman may prefer the Fang over the regular RFP while those that still occasionally hipfire it may prefer the regular RFP. But I seriously want to emphasize how minimal of a improvement HS3 is to the marksman accuracy, you'd have to actually pay really close attention to spot which one uses HS3 and which doesn't if that sort of info was not given to the player as part of a test and I do think that is a good thing for a premodded Pistol as in this case it creates a niche and choice between the regular RFP and the Fang where as even IR1 on the Fang would be a direct upgrade to the base RFP and while much less extreme would run the same issue the RFP had when it was nerfed into an unusable state. Whether it requires testing or not releasing something potentially overpowered is never a good move, especially for a game with a P2W stigma, its best to undershoot the goal and do a follow up buff rather than overshoot and end up having to nerf it, not to mention that the dev doing these changes only has 5 hours a week so there's little room to iterate meaning that if the goal was to make the RFP really strong and fit right into the meta then no RFP changes would've made it into this patch. This way they can make the gun better instantly without running the risk of it becoming overpowered and then observe its performance in the Live game and consider a small, risk free buff that may be squeezed into next weeks 5 hours dedicated to game balance. I also want to seriously emphasize the risk of only paying attention to a weapons stats to determine how effective it'll be, by that logic the OBIR with its very long ttk would be one of the worst guns in the game but we all know that that isn't the case because of how effective one can play around the burst interval when there's cover involved.

Radius at Ten Meters is the base accuracy of the gun but also affects the marksman accuracy as the marksman modifier is a negative multiplier to the value set as the Radius at Ten Meters. Walk Modifier decides how much accuracy the gun loses / gains when walking, this primarily affects accuracy when moving while in marksmanship mode, anything above 1 means it loses accuracy, anything below 1 means it gains accuracy when moving while in marksmanship mode. Ramp distance is the effective range of the weapon in which it deals its maximum amount of damage every 100 equals 1 meter. Minimum damage range is how many meters it takes for a weapon to have its damage fall off to its minimum value outside of its effective range. So if the Ramp distance on a weapon is 1000 and the Min damage range is 1500 it means that the gun deals its maximum damage within 10m and by the time it hits 25m it has reached its minimum damage value which is usually 30% of the base damage.

Looking at the video the accuracy difference between the Fang and base RFP isn't major, in my testing I actually had to go back and double check if HS3 even has any effect on the marksman accuracy cause it wasn't immediately obvious since its such a small difference. The goal wasn't to show its effectiveness within 13 meters but rather compare the accuracy and bloom of the two versions, the latter plays a huge part in how burst guns end up feeling to use. The goal of the video was to show that the OTW version of the RFP can be refired faster without blooming out to absurd levels (for a burst weapon) while providing better accuracy on the move too, this version feels a lot better to play. When the patch goes Live tomorrow we'll see how it does against the .45, in my experience it did quite decent due to being able to do quick lean peeks and going back to using cover between bursts (Marksman corner popping). I don't think it'll be as good as the .45 overall but I do think that it has a much better time fighting .45's than the current RFP does. The goal of these changes is to put the RFP back into a place where it feels good to use and it certainly achieves that, whether it is good enough to be meta within its effective range is something that will show in the coming weeks and then LO can decide whether they want to keep it where it is or do a follow-up buff like they did with the Fr0gs in this patch.

I think you're looking at the Live version? That version has noticeably more bloom and the Fang makes it worse since IR3 increases its max bloom where as the OTW versions seem to recover more accuracy before being fired again as well as the Fang starting out with slightly better accuracy so it helps mitigate bloom a tiny bit.

Because like I mentioned above these changes are a revert to the RFP that people liked and felt vastly superior to play and the first playtest of it immediately showed that its an insane improvement over the current RFP on Live, I understand your concerns but I think you should play it on Live and then report back on how it feels. I was also given permission to record a video to show off the difference between the current Live RFP and the one on OTW that is using the changes mentioned above.

It says in the announcement that they are saying farewell to the Beacon map with this patch too so yes, Asylum is coming back. It does yes! And as you've already figured out, these changes to the RFP revert it back to its original state that was considered overpowered, however, there's two changes to prevent it from being OP this time around, one being the reduction in effective range from 40 to 30 meters and the other being that the Fang no longer has access to a mod that serves as a flat upgrade to the gun as this meant that the RFP's were borderline impossible to balance because in many cases the base RFP would've been useless compared to the Fang cause it has 7 meters more range with no downside. After this change the Fang is a little more accurate when aiming down sights at the cost of losing accuracy when hipfiring so if you prefer to hipfire the RFP then the regular RFP's are a better pick.

No Anti-cheat will keep cheaters out, that's not really what their goal is, companies like Epic know that their Anti-cheat measures will get bypassed no matter what they do, hence why the interactions between Cheaters and the Anti-cheat is an endless cat and mouse game, Cheaters will bypass the protection and then its up to the Anti-cheat to figure out who is cheating and how they are doing it to begin with at which point the Cheaters get banned and the protection measures updated to detect that form of cheating through whatever way they were doing it. BattlEye was simply too slow, it took ages to get even someone as blatant as a speed hacker banned, where as EAC the last time APB used it was MUCH faster at figuring out who is cheating and who isn't, this is what really matters, why would anyone stop cheating if they can cheat for months undetected and when they finally do get banned they just do it again on a new account? It'll take a few weeks to really see how effective EAC is this time around but seeing as there's been many cases of players complaining about being banned for doing nothing while openly advertising cheats in their discord bio's (lol) tells me that EAC is at least doing something.

As a long term player that still plays it'd be nice to have a reason for clans to be a core gameplay feature, however, for APB to have a chance at surviving the game needs to do a complete 180 turn on the new player experience, this includes a new tutorial, better matchmaking and even things such as easier access to at least some mods and slotted weapons, without new players playing the game and generating LO income its going to be hard to justify further developing the game seeing as player retention has already shown to be an issue after 64Bit release. You can hardly call it avoiding the questions when there's no answer to them, if its not on the roadmap LO posted at the start of the year you shouldn't expect it to happen anytime soon as their priorities are elsewhere.

While those things would be nice to have they are not going to be what brings back and more importantly keeps players playing the game, their next step in development is Matchmaking/Phasing which is going to be a huge undertaking and something they have to get just right so I'm sure they'll communicate plenty about it to make sure what they are doing is in line with what players want.

There should be more extensions I agree but even G1 has stated multiple times as to why it is currently not possible as they were running into severe engine limitations with Inventory space related to weapons. There's a chance 64Bit fixed this but if it were that way then I think they would've given out more inventory slots already so I assume that the issue still persists and they are looking at other things first before fixing a niche issue that only affects a small amount of players in the game right now, there's also clever ways of fixing this sort of issue such as making reskins actual skins for weapons rather than a separate gun in your inventory.