Frosi

If you want to participate in the 1.30 Beta please refer to this thread and follow the link to download the client. Happy Testing

That's a mix of using High Quality Health Hud, Bloom and the night time shaders and can be fixed by changing two ingame options, no configs required.

You can try the code "AMA2022" and see if its still active, it awarded you 100G1c

You can check out the VoD on Twitch, Matt will also upload a recording of the AMA to Youtube at some point.

What Matt posted above is a quote from the Open Letter that I have written, those aren't his words, they're mine.

It is not, the document was done as a passion project of mine but kept the fact that if weapon balance becomes a talking point and LO wants to do something about it in mind, That way I can submit the document in which case the wording makes sense. I won't go into the feedback much but I want to point out that both of you seemed to have missed that the RFP changes are a revert to how the RFP used to be when it was the go to pistol in the game and could reliably kill players on 40-47 meters. Also all these changes are subject to change, I don't have access to their tools, I have to do a lot of math for these and often have to guess how certain values interact with each other, many of these values are starting points to iterate from, not something to just ship to the live game and expect to go flawlessly. I agree that the Tommy gun needs some love, its a bit of an oversight that its not in the document but the first thing I'd want to do to it would be to move back to its old, static recoil which no one has the old values for so its hard to make a suggestion without actually providing stats. From there it would likely need a recoil reduction but still keeping the old values in mind, simply toning them down a little followed by buffs to its bloom as example. Not a typo, very much intentional, its an aggressive approach and that's why, if this would ever be an approach LO would want to take it would be tested in which case it'll be very obvious if its too strong or not.

The document hasn't been given to Matt, it wasn't linked in the letter at all however he has now seen it because I asked for permissions to make it public since players have been asking to see it to which he said yes so here is the document. https://docs.google.com/document/d/167-1L_hXaxFe9a2QMTbHfLsGONCVaEEem2pTP3le97c/edit?usp=sharing

I authored the letter and intentionally made the decision to make it anonymous, this way players aren't afraid to give their unfiltered feedback to some of the serious topics at hand. The overall amount of toxicity in the game coming from some players will also make players not want to put their name on something they don't know the outcome of. Here you go this was also entirely authored by me, almost all of these changes are my ideas and opinions, nothing is set in stone and this is nothing more than a passion project of mine. The changes in the document are balancing around the current state of the game and primarily focus on buffs to underused guns or some that were recently over-nerfed. Both, its usually easier to buff guns without taking mods in mind considering many of them don't exactly have a set of meta mods to use on them especially when it comes to red mods which tend to change a gun the most. For Meta guns, nerfs shouldn't entirely kill a certain mod on a weapon (I am aware that was the case with CJ N-tec as well as HB2 N-tec back in the day) but in many cases there's also not a huge amount of room for nerfs in areas in which a gun is over-performing, again using the N-tec as an example, lowering the RoF would've been an option rather than nerfing its bloom / jump accuracy although this change was tested in a public test environment previously and was received with even more negative response than a simple max-bloom nerf. Balance is so incredibly subjective and guns like the Oblivion or even DMR-AV existed in that very state for the longest time before people have figured out just how strong they are after another part of the game has been touched. With the exception of the DMR-AV nerf I want to say that none of the changes in the document cater specifically to one type of play, this is also largely helped by the fact that its almost all buffs to weapons that never see any use in high level play anyways. I honestly think that higher mechanical skill already wins you fights, aiming, knowing how to play around cover and so on, I know the suggestion of overall lowering the bloom / increasing base accuracy exists but that'd require a rework for more than half the weapons in the game so I personally don't see that as an option, if balancing a hand full of guns is an issue then I don't see how this is a possible path.

Now that's a really spooky idea

Its a known bug with Tokenize, you can fix it by disabling and re-enabling Tokenize on your G1 account page

For all I know Unreal 4 is very different from Unreal 3, so much that you're better off rebuilding from Scratch rather than trying to port from 3 to 4 as most if not all of your code will no longer be functioning, APB also runs a crap ton of custom code to the point where APB's version of Unreal 3 may as well be its own engine and use some Unreal 3 things on top of it. In short, Unreal 3 differs too much compared to 4 while 4 and 5 are similar enough to allow for Unreal 4 projects to be migrated to Unreal 5, although even that will take a lot of work. As to building from Scratch, there's a lot to APB, an extreme amount of background systems doing things that most players would never notice, rebuilding it would be such a huge effort that you may as well make a new rather than try to rebuild a failed game again.

Updating APB to anything past 3.5 would mean having to rebuild it from scratch and rebuilding APB on newer versions of Unreal with a medium sized team would likely take many years before they have anything that they can show / play. In other words, not feasible unless you're a massive publisher and don't care about income while the rebuilding happens.

I am extremely sure that new engine was fixed on the new engine, even at 300+ fps.

I'm not a super knowledged guy when it comes to game engines but here are some basic answers to your questions 32Bit is VERY outdated and has many restrictions that clash with modern day technologies, the most basic result of moving to 64Bit will be not being bound to ~4GB of RAM anymore, allowing the game to use more ram if possible which can be used to optimize the game whether its load times or garbage collection. Nvidia cards released as or after the 20 series cards have new memory which in APB's case causes "out of memory" crashes, this will be fixed on 64Bit. There will be a performance increase across the board. Assuming they manage to backport the tools unreal 3.5 provided it'll also help with faster development. There's no date yet but I doubt LO would want to rush this IF the update itself succeeds internally, there will likely be a lot of inhouse testing done by their Quality assurance team as well as SPCT before they head into possible Open Beta tests and the eventual release. For all I know this is an "under the hood" type of upgrade, us players will likely not see any significant changes to the games looks. If they manage to backport modern tools it should hopefully increase the efficiency and speed at which they can update the game whether its new content, balance or bug fixes. Better performance, better options for them to fix issues about the game, possibly introduce means for them to utilize graphics cards more rather than mostly relying on fast single core processing power, better tools for them as well as more options for external tools such as anti-cheats.

Plant bug on Phone booths is usually not placed on the phone booth but rather on the wall behind it (this is why your character often walks a bit to the side when trying to do it from the front), this means that if the wall is thin enough you can do it through the wall from the other side, this is rather helpful cause most Phone booths are in wide, open areas that are easy to defend.

I'm assuming they're going to try and backport some of the things they did on 2.2/3.5 ahead of releasing 1.3, I think the plan is to also backport the tools that 3.5 would've provided which means making new content should hopefully be easier and not like jumping through hoops at every step. While I personally think the meta is in a good spot except for very few outliers I do think there need to be improvements and I'm not just talking about buffs to the dozens of weapons that just cant compete. Weapon stats need to be communicated to players much better than the bars we currently have and hopefully that should also be an easier task to do on 1.3. I'll attach a concept I did in like 5 mins in ms paint (xd) below but ideally the bars are replaced with actual numbers for important stats that could also change dynamically depending on the mods you have on the gun such as IR increasing the effective range from 50 to 57, Three point sling decreasing the equip time etc. As with 3.5 and 2.2 I think that LO is well aware that this is likely their last shot at a big increase in player numbers, if it fails, they'll have to work their way up slowly by making the game better one update at the time much like No Man's Sky did so ideally they actually release 1.3 in a state that has a bunch of QoL improvements, updates or content that actually makes a large chunk of returning players stick around as that'll accelerate the games potential revival. I think every player that actually still cares about the game should encourage LO to do so, taking an extra month or two getting these QoL updates in in an attempt to make returning players stick around should be well worth it. I might look into making a thread in the future when 1.3 is getting closer to release asking the community for feedback and potential QoL changes that LO could implement, I already have a document with suggestions for this that I've been updating for a while myself that could then be updated with the communities ideas and forwarded to someone at LO. If you have ideas now and don't want to wait feel free to poke me on the LO discord.

The engine can go beyond what the current cap is but its hardly advised because it'll break other things such as making sliding even worse or new bugs entirely. Sliding was never an issue on 3.5 however so assuming they somehow backport whatever fixed sliding I could see them unlock the fps on the 64Bit client.

If they had a date for when the post from Matt is coming they would've mentioned it, they simply wanted to let people know that something is coming and that APB is still on Matt's list of things to work on which breaks the complete silence we had in the previous months.

If its an .ini file you are allowed to edit it, mousefix, hold crouch, toggle sprint and most graphical changes you can do are all done in .ini files which are the files the game changes when you make changes ingame to your sensitivity etc. They can set minimal values for these like how they did back when ppl set their Particles to 0 to turn them off entirely, this does not work anymore so instead, ppl are using .upk edits to remove things like grenade explosion particles, muzzleflash etc, this is absolutely not allowed. If the muzzleflash removal if done through .ini files it should be fine because it follows LO's rules, however, I believe all ways to do it through .ini edits has been fixed by G1 and ppl are editing the actual unreal package files to remove it. The nofog shader is weird in how it operates, its technically considered a shader but doesn't behave like what is traditionally considered as a shader edit in apb since it does not require bloom to be enabled to work. Long ago, within the first year of LO's takeover I personally asked Matt if the nofog shader is something they ban for and was given the answer that they do not ban for it but plan on fixing the ability to remove the fog at some point and I believe they even did so with the events which kick you if you are using certain versions of the nofog shader although it doesn't work for all. So I would very much consider it as a grey area and they could change their mind on how they handle it at any time.

I think that's a fair take to have but in the end there's just no doing right with the APB community, ppl will always find something to be negative about and I genuienly think he simply wanted us to know that he's still there and APB is still on his map of things to work on and that we'll hear more soon.

I'd imagine that if they had a time frame for Matt's post they would've announced it in the post last week, never once did they indicate that the post is coming within the next x amount of days, they simply let the community know that the concerns have been heard and Matt is making a post in the future.

They are not, .ini edits are basically all that is permitted officially although there are some grey area edits like the localization ones and Nofog shader, however, .upk files are a whole different story as these are used to remove muzzle flash or other explosive particles and therefore are not allowed to be edited.

Probably less than what we currently have after a few weeks of reverting to those changes seeing as it removes a lot of skill that comes with having to control your gun from the game and the fact that the majority of players nowadays NEVER experienced RTW even, let alone this very early itteration of gunplay.

There need to be weapons balanced around new players, average players and the best of the best, balancing around just one will leave the game frustrating for the rest and on top of that a lot of top players think very one dimensional with the goal of turning APB into some sort of competitive game, no bloom, laser beam guns and supposedly "high skill" requirement. In a world in which the game was balanced around top level players guns that are aimed to be entry level guns for newer players will not even get close to be able into whatever the 'top players' decided should be the meta. Meanwhile SPCT has housed some of the best and most experienced players in the game that all have their fair share of ideas amongst other things. I've read your recent posts and its becoming increasingly obvious that you have some sort of grudge against the SPCT because they aren't adding wall running, crouch sliding or recoil patterns to the game, let alone reworking 100+ unique guns, to someone that actually understands a fair share of the inner workings of APB, comments like this have about the same value as "Add horses" or "Add motorbikes". Everyone is allowed to have their ideas for the game but the second you attack those that have been giving non-stop feedback, making them aware of issues as well as using countless hours of their free time to help the game in any way, shape or form then your argument immediately becomes a whole lot less valuable as it shows that you are not able to have a proper discussion. We test patches, we don't ship them. Did I say that? I think I explicitly stated that something like 1/5 current missions will have an unbalanced factor in them and that the system is far from optimal. The best of the best are absolutely farming other players, this has always been the case, the skill gap between a 'Gold' and a top player with 10k+ hours in the game is so massive that even with segregation, most golds just ended up getting farmed by top tier players. What figures did I leave out exactly? Because G1 decided that it is okay to let Golds join Silver districts without reducing their rewards gained (like how it used to be) I'm gonna bundle these two together cause I find it funny how you imply that I'm alluding that Bronze servers are healthy compared to Silver ones, both play a massive part in the games downfall, Silver districts see terrible matchmaking because of the massive gap in skill between a player the game considers to be of gold threat and a veteran with 10k+ hours in the game who can easily 1v3 a bunch of low mmr golds. Meanwhile on the Bronze server you have dethreaters car surf with Osmaws, Volcanos or any sort of AV and just farm new players in their trashy starter cars, this is equally unhealthy if not worse than what is going on in Silver districts. There are multiple issues as to why new players can not get settled in APB and LO is aware of that, however, those are issues that they require 2.2 for to solve. LO that turning off segregation would make things even harder for new players but seeing the other issues I just mentioned they still decided to go through with it so the CURRENT playerbase can play and for the most part enjoy the game until the Engine upgrade releases. Longer matchmaking and for the best of the best even less chances to face a team equal of your skill. Also do not forget that this change was meant for Jericho, not Citadel, they are well aware of the issues and even said themselves if they had the option to they wouldn't have turned off segregation for EU. You blame other players playing the game, with and without a premade group for 'killing' the game and then suggest something like this, whats next, ban all gold players?

Could you name me a few examples? I know a bunch of recent changes (namely the N-tec one) haven't been received all too well by the 'top players' as they think it adds more RNG to the game. The game shouldn't be balanced just around top players neither should it be balanced around just the average player, it has to be a mix of both so striking that would be ideal. If you think top players enjoy farming new players / lesser skilled players then you are wrong, speaking from my own personal experience, it is not fun to go up against players far below your own skill level and to me there has been a noticeable decrease in missions where I feel like I'm playing against players close or equal to my skill level. This might sound bad when I say it like that but for the average player, this should mean that more missions after the change will result in matches containing players that are average in skill. For every mission I have that is unbalanced because of me, there will be 4-5 other missions that are balanced in return, is it great that 1/5 currently running missions has an unbalanced factor in them? No, not at all, but the upsides in my post above still stand, there are more districts and the game is playable far longer throughout the day. This is an example of what I mentioned above where it isn't exactly fun for the top players to play against new players either so they will try to have some fun by going FBW / .45 only, this also makes it a little more fair for you as their kill pressure goes down noticeably but a lot of players won't see it this way because their mentality has been crushed by this change. All in all, players need to start thinking to themselves what is really going on, there have been 2-3 Bronze districts at peak times and ONE Silver district as well as ONE Asylum / Baylan with mostly Gold players in them. Now, if we break that down into actual data it is going look something like this: https://i.imgur.com/tBEXOAv.png Obviously, data like this is very complex and fluctuates a lot but we can get a pretty good idea of player threat percentages by doing this. We see that up until threat segregation was removed up to 40% of players that took part in any of the PvP districts were considered gold, however, only 34 to 31.1% of those would play missions at the time. Now that districts are no longer segregated will change but the majority of players will still belong to either Silver or Bronze threat and I myself, while playing have seen A LOT more Bronze / Silver players than I saw Gold players. Another thing is that Gold, as a threat is relatively easy to achieve by inflating your MMR through doing Objectives or other passive score gains, you can achieve Gold threat with zero kills on your account given that the majority of your missions are attack missions and you are doing objectives or are near them when they are finished. This means that while some players might be considered gold, more often than not they will still be below average or at best average at the game but have simply gotten a couple of attack missions in a row in which they did objectives and managed to achieve an above average score by doing so. In short, just because they are gold doesn't mean they are good, let alone unbeatable, most of the Golds I've had in missions were consistently getting beaten by high rank silvers and could not stand their own whatsoever. Another thing to talk about is that the better players (Who will usually play on their Max rank characters) will always prefer to play on Financial as its the district with the better design and combat flow overall. Waterfront still has good players playing on it but they shouldn't be as common, another thing is that there are 2-3 instances of Financial at peak times meaning that if you want to play Financial, there are multiple ones to choose from, some of which might not house as many Golds or top players. Don't think of this post as some sort of justification for the change, while there are upsides there are some apparent downsides to it, I know a lot of people have been upset by this change but its one that aims to keep the game sustainable for the foreseeable future and I want to say that they will change things back to normal the second 2.2 launches. What this post really aims to achieve is an attempt to calm people down a little and explain to them that they are still far more likely to face Bronze / Silver players than actual Gold players that are above average at the game. I urge those that look at Golds and think that they are much better than them to take a step back, start to ignore threat levels and actually see how those players play first, if you afk against most golds you face you will be surprised that most of them really aren't that good and even some of the best players can be beaten with a little bit of teamwork.