Frosi

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.

While I can understand the frustration, it is not like this change is only for the worse. Yes, there will be awful matchmaking moments but I wouldn't say its nearly as bad as some people are trying to make it out to be, yes you will sometimes face incredibly talented players but at the same time you can also have those players on your team, sometimes it'll be one-sided in your favor and sometimes in the enemies, its not perfect by any means but its far from unplayable and more often than not you will still play against the same players you would've faced on silver districts, just because they're gold, doesn't mean they're good. On top of that, no threat segregation also means there are 3 to 4 districts to play on at peak times, if one district is stacked with good players, you can now opt into a different district instead to avoid situations in which you feel like you are outclassed more often than not, this also means that there is usually two Financials and one Waterfront districts which allows players to freely level their characters without feeling stuck because people refuse to play Waterfront, this for example is one of the few reasons I've been playing as of late, since it lets me level some of my other characters without having to constantly check https://will.io/apb/ in hopes that a Waterfront district is populated. Jericho has also seen a decent increase in player numbers (although still fairly low) which means that the change is doing what it was intended to do, while it causes some minor issues on Citadel, those issues have workarounds that work at just about any time of day other than the early mornings. In the end, I feel like a lot of people have had their mentality crushed by this change, a lot of players assume every gold they see is one of those golds that wouldn't be the ones they would've seen on Bronze districts and must therefore be gods at the game, this is wrong and almost every single Gold I've gotten as random team mates would've been better suited as a Silver player if Threat was better at judging player skill instead of arbitrary inflation to their MMR by doing objectives or collecting all sorts of passive Score gains which are no indication of player skill let alone how well they're doing.

It basically clears the system of all sorts of things that can happen while a server runs over the week such as Memory leaks, ghost processes and other things that could hinder the server from performing optimally.

The DB is now updated to reflect these changes. https://apbdb.com/changes/ (Its not showing the Frag grenade Max damage radius change, however, on the Frags actual page the value was changed from 4 to 3)

The intend is not to bring up the TTK across the board, its been this low for countless years and changing away from it will be as much of a bad change as making the TTK too fast as seen with the OCA prior to this patch.

While technically correct, this is a free to play games and these guns were monetized in the past, changing one gun into another regardless of how commonly used it is will upset players. There is no winning scenario here even if it seems like a logical or 'simple thing' to do. I don't agree with this at all, G1 meta while there were guns that aren't in the meta right now wasn't exactly great and IMO was a great example of what I mean with "guns that are unhealthily strong". Here are a few examples of gameplay that sooner or later was deemed frustrating. Being tagged by an 850 DMG HVR and having to wait 15 seconds to regen. PMG being the meta SMG by far due to its range which meant that sometimes fights would be decided by pure RNG as well as the not so uncommon scenario in which you got out ttk'd by a PMG on 20-30 meters, once again due to pure rng. Every mission having multiple N-tecs as it was the essentially the only usable AR in the game despite the others not exactly being bad on paper. The FAR is accessible on both Armas and through events correct, however, in the past that has not stopped a weapon from becoming the absolute meta pick. Old version of the CSG, Whisper, Trouble Maker or even Scout are good examples of this and none of those were available as part of an event either. Looks, sound or whether something is a starter gun or not does not impact the Meta because the Meta isn't decided by those stubborn to try something new for whatever reason they might have. The meta is outlined by those willing to play something new and match it up against the meta to see if it does well, an example here is the DMR AV which has been slept on for a while but was popularized after good players picked it up during the CET and did surprisingly good with it in an environment that matched some of the best players against one another, this is and will always be more meta defining than any gun sound, look or prejudice. Neither the STAR or FAR are good enough at mid range to reliably compete with the N-tec or the guns the N-tec can take on within its effective range. They are better in CQC but this tradeoff was not worth losing out on mid range capabilities. I feel like you contradict yourself in this statement, if the weapon in question (The N-tec) was made a lot worse then people would've steered away from it already or even back when it was at the 2.4 Modifier Cap initially many months ago which was also in an environment in which the FAR was even better than it is now. This isn't the case however, NONE of the weapons changed in this update have dropped in popularity by a noticable amount which is an indication of a set of changes that don't disrupt the meta but instead leave some room for new weapons that break into the meta. I'd argue it won't take long for weapons like the PMG or even Manic to see more of a use again while guns like the Cap-40 may not become the most popular but will at least have a decent chance combating an OCA. I agree here, over the past 10 years Shotguns have been re-iterated around the same idea of a 2 shot kill with a big delay in-between shots, this concept is fundamentally flawed as it plays into the idea of playing around corners / corner popping heavily for as long as the JG / CSG follow this concept they will always end up overpowered or flat out bad. Your last paragraph doesn't make a lot of sense as it revolves around the idea of the N-tec's CQC being killed entirely which isn't the case because if it was, people would've steered away from it back then and especially now. The N-tec will continue to be a dominant pick, however if you want to full auto it you now need to be closer to your target OR opt to burst it in 3-4 round bursts which due to its very fast recovery and extremely low recovery delay will always be strong regardless of its max bloom value. You could argue that you're changing the way the gun is played in CQC and how that is something 'bad' but I feel like players with a mindset like that are preventing themselves from improving heavily. G1 has allowed stagnant balance to kick in by not making changes, this has allowed players to spend years playing a weapon and making them believe it is fine that way but as LO took over the game the game has started to evolve and with it evolved the meta, however, due to the stagnant past of APB's balance players have often perceived these changes as an attack to their favorite weapon / playstyle, often not accounting for the overall health of the game for their own sake. To an extend you prove this point by saying that a worse player with a CQC gun can beat the N-tec, stagnancy has allowed for the idea of "my gun should beat this guy because he is a worse player" to fester when in reality he SHOULD have something going for him playing a CQC gun into a mid range gun, somewhat levelling the playing field, if you're the better player you can adapt to the situation and optimize the way of playing your mid range gun in CQC even after a direct nerf. If you find yourself in a CQC scenario against guns that you feel like the N-tec can't match in that very scenario then you can opt into using a gun that is better suited such as the ATAC or FAR for AR's or weapons such as the Carbine, Oscar or OCA much like in a different scenario you would consider opting into using a gun better suited for long range instead of the OCA you have equipped. The patch has been out for 3 days now and so far the meta has shown no signs of shifting, only time will tell but at least now they can actually focus on buffing weapons instead of having to pay attention to just whatever seems to be overperforming. In a game like APB the meta SHOULD always be evolving through continuous balance, if something is too strong it might see adjustments and if it ends up too bad as a result then it should receive adjustments to bring it back up.

Basically this. APB has a lot of guns and no one is talking about making all of them viable in a competitive environment and be able to compete with one another, it is simply not realistic. However, there's also the problem of stale gameplay caused by having too few guns sit at the very top such as you mentioned. It isn't fun facing the same hand full of guns over and over especially while attempting to play something that isn't one of those select few weapons. The other issue is what is a good "baseline" and what isn't (insert baseline joke here). Having a meta is fine, but if said meta is unhealthily strong within its own vacuum then that hurts the overall gameplay, this was seen with the OCA prior to this patch and its INCREDIBLY low ttk of 0.62 with CJ3. It wasn't fun to play against and it was so unreasonably ahead of most other SMG's that it was nearly impossible to buff other SMG's to compete as well as doing so posing the fact of creating even more unenjoyable weapon options to go against. Think of the OCA nerf of a change aimed to bring it from 110% strength back to 100% strength, something still very strong but not to the point where it hurts the overall gameplay. This patch (so far) has not shown signs of weapons that were adjusted completely falling out of the meta, instead, what appears to be happening instead is a bunch of lesser used weapons popping up more as players are experimenting and giving more things a shot which is a good thing. Also something Little Orbit is hopefully very aware of is that shotguns, in particular the JG and to an extend also the CSG pose the very same problem of being so incredibly strong due to APB being a third person shooter and the ability to maximize the amount of time behind cover in which the enemy will not be able to return fire. However, shotguns over the years have proven over and over to be either overpowered due to being too consistent or worthless because they weren't consistent at all which means that the past 9 or so years of attempting to balance shotguns has basically done nothing and always ended up with one of two results. Diversity is key, there will always be a meta but once those guns exceed a certain strength then no amount of buffs to underused guns will make them playable in comparison while keeping the gameplay from becoming too frustrating.

I want to say that they are aware of this issue as its been probably the largest bug in the game for many years, however, don't expect it to be fixed until the Engine upgrade releases. As for your claims about it lasting longer, for all I know it can last for a few seconds until I assume a server side check kicks in, however, the players themselves will also fix it by crouching as this resyncs their position and hitbox due to them changing the size of their hitbox on a server side level, however, despite all of this I don't think this is an easy bug to squish and if they were to do it now it would likely break a bunch of other things but I sincerely hope that they look into this bug and fix it for 2.2 prior to releasing it.

Weapon balance will always be ongoing, and yes, I would also love to see some buffs to underused weapons like the Norsemen, ISSR-A, LCR or even the SBSR Rifle / Sniper. The list goes on, however, if you want to make these guns viable with things such as the OCA, Cr762 etc existing in their current state then you will have to buff them to an extend in which they will likely feel overpowered or simply unfun to play against, much like the current OCA. After this patch, there shouldn't be anything that is massively over the top which leaves much more room for diversity and also make it easier to buff weapons without running the risk of making them overpowered just to fit in a meta in which weapons are unhealthily strong. As per usual, every player is very much welcome to give their feedback and provide suggestions for weapon balance changes. APBDB and the new version that is still in development gives you every stat as well as working range curves (on the dev db). If you want to make suggestions with values then you can do so freely. APBDB Dev DB These should be updated on the DB at some point, keep in mind its ran by a community member, not Little Orbit.

The OCA is the best SMG by far and is incredibly easy to use, even completely new players can shred with an unmodded OCA so if you can't kill with an OCA then thats a player skill issue not a weapon balance one, also Nitro was not changed in recent years, everyone can do wheelies just how they could in 2014.

Conflicting names are the issue, its been stated multiple times now as well as that their approach has changed, however, as you should know they are fully focussing on 2.2 so this new approach is likely not being worked on until later. People care about their names and G1's solution during their first set of merges did not work out and honestly just felt like a system that coinflipped who got to keep the name so why risk further community outrage by sticking with the old system. Also not to mention that "just merge the servers" isn't a black and white solution either, players will play with higher latency than usual, not everyone is going to like this, causing further complaints such as "why do I have to play on EU servers to level up waterfront" and so on. The old merge code wasn't flawless either, both major merges they did had multiple accounts wiped off data, something they had to manually restore and merge over again. In short, yes a merge would do some good things but will also cause further issues, some of which you can anticipate and others which you just can't, its a monumental task that they will not want to tackle now. Appreciate the game for what it is, we all know its not in a good state but with everything you do on this engine you are treating symptoms, not actually addressing the issue as to why these issues are becoming a thing in the first place.

Shield= Still exists. Radar Tower = Disabled until they have time to fix the thing from quite literally working. P5N5 = Still exists just not to the point where ppl outside of your mission can influence it. Med Spray is getting a needed adjustment, no one ever talked about removing it, if you like to play with broken things and feel extremely powerful, I suggest PvE games, especially ARPG's instead of PvP Shooters

Somewhat, I am not 100% sure on this but I believe its a Beta version of Unreal 3.0 which is also heavily modified. There a ton of custom code here that barely holds the game together, this is also why in Matt's Engine upgrade posts he keeps mentioning needing to be familiar with APB itself, not with Unreal Engine. Well first of all, the tools are 32 Bit which complicates things quite a bit, I'm not a programmer but I can imagine that if they were to code things on the current engine they would struggle to even get it to work and on top of all that it would likely mess up a lot of unrelated things in the game. With every patch we've seen something completely unrelated broke, first we saw this with being able to damage your own vehicle from the passenger seat, then by Vandalize storefront objectives being bugged and then stuff like the Radar Tower bug or the bug that makes HUD elements disappear when you switched characters, both which haven't been fixed yet, likely because the cause for this is something unrelated and it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. In short, the current engine is a mess, likely because its very dated, running on 32Bit tools and has a ton of custom code to it. If they were to add some of these systems now they would also have to port them over to the new engine which will then bring its own set of issues because things will likely not work and you have to sit down and fix it yet again, basically doubling the work you have to put in. On one hand if they did these sort of things the current game could be in a better state, on the other hand it would have likely caused other things to break. One thing I haven't touched on is Engine limitations, these are things old G1 employee's kept mentioning so take this with a grain of salt but it could very well be that APB's engine is basically at the limits of what it can handle from both a literal and technical standpoint. The vehicle editors and vehicles themselves are and I quote "by far, the most complicated thing in APB", it'll likely take a ton of time and a dedicated person to sit down and learn how to use the thing but because of all the reasons above, I don't think that sort of thing is something they want to do right now, likely because the switch from 32Bit to 64Bit could make things easier as well as all the other things about risks of breaking things and limitations I mentioned above. I hope this clears some things up, keep in mind that I have no experience with game engines, let alone APB's engine so take all of this with a grain of salt but these are some of the things both LO and G1 kept mentioning so I've tried to piece some things together in my post.

Its crazy that you name four things, three of which require the first thing you mentioned. APB needs the engine upgrade for any meaningful change to happen, this includes new content and system overhauls. No one in their right mind will advertise the current game but what they can do is fix background issues unrelated to current engine work, things that are minor and easy to merge over such as Weapon / Game balance and this is exactly what they are doing, if the engine upgrade launches and the game is an unbalanced pile of trash then you have yet another thing to do while you also work on fixing Matchmaking and adding new content.

A lot times a weapon is simply underpowered and needs a buff, but there's plenty of weapons that are close to being meta but still lose out to the current meta consistently. While I agree that buffing should absolutely be the focus, there's certainly weapons that are holding all the other weapons in the game back by simply being too strong. A great example would be the OCA right now, its not exactly fun to play against but it is the best SMG in the game and makes most of the other SMG's look bad in comparison. So often it is best to start by identifying issues with the weapons that are sitting all the way at the top because if you simply keep buffing eventually you'll get to a point where almost every gun will feel problematic which then makes for an unenjoyable experience overall. Once there's is nothing super broken in the game you can start looking to bring everything at the bottom up gradually, I've been very vocal about this every time I stream and I already have plenty of possible buffs ideas and suggestions written down once LO comes around to look at some of the guns that are simply lacking but with a player population that is dwindling slowly every month as we all patiently wait for the release of 2.2 they are in a spot where they will likely want to address the guns that are overperforming to make the current game less frustrating to play while also allowing for some of the 'borderline meta' weapons to be played to create at least a bit of diversity. I am crossing my fingers that this set balance will go better than the other ones which might encourage LO to have someone spend some more time to slowly fix things bit by bit. There is so many guns that could be made at least usable with just a small buff here and there, some of which have already been in the game, such as the LCR rate of fire buff during the IR Nerf period which happened to work pretty well and actually make the gun playable. We've seen that these major balance patches often do more harm than good so I am really hoping for a smaller but more frequent approach to changing weapons.

Pretty much this, people assume crosshair color based triggerbots are the only way to do it which just isn't correct at all. This change will do absolutely nothing except for removing a part of APB's game design which will only punish your actual legit players because the cheaters will go to the next best thing and on top of all this you are designing your game around cheaters when there is other solutions that punish cheaters themselves, not your actual players. At the end of the day, if we had an actual Anti-cheat we wouldn't be having this discussion and while BE is doing its job at keeping away the Shaw-copters for the most part, subtle things like Triggerbots, macros, low fov aimbots, silent aim etc aren't being caught and it's only going to become a bigger issue the longer it stays like this. So instead of designing the game around combating cheats and mitigating exploitable game mechanics that could be used for cheats, the answer is a proper Anti-cheat that can catch these subtle ways of cheating, not changing the game itself.

Its essentially just preference, in theory there is a slight advantage to it as you can do insanely quick peaks by letting go of crouch and then pressing it again after firing a shot but thats about it. This happens if you are crouched and are walking off of something that makes your character stand up, it essentially just inverts the bind but you can fix it by pressing Spacebar once.

You need both T3 Contacts in an organization maxed to unlock the T4 contact. So in this case you need both Bonita Benjamin and Grayson Fell.

While it is somewhat possible to negate vertical recoil it is impossible to completely remove recoil from the game through means of macros and since APB doesn't exactly have a lot of recoil on most guns or guns with heavy recoil that is primarily vertical I didn't mention it.

Macros are tools that automate gameplay for you, in APB macros are most commonly used to automate the tapping / rate of fire of semi-auto guns essentially turning them fully automatic as the macro does the clicking for you. This is also against the terms of service and will result in account bans as it is considered cheating.

Its literally the same thing? Except for the fact that you don't run into the situation where you accidentally shoot which is something a lot of people do when they use LMB rather than X.

The benefit to this is carrying the medium item at sprint speed as you always pick it up shortly after you jump so you keep your sprint speed momentum and its essentially the same as being able to sprint with medium items in terms of speed. And no, people would have to be really bad to have to macro this as its one of the easier muscle memory based tricks you can do in the game as you essentially just alternate between F to pick up the item and X to drop it at the right time, even with macros you would have to time it properly so there is little to gain from it.