MrChan

Nope. #OPGLLife

Voted Option 4. Honestly, anyone who does otherwise is playing a different game. Option 1: This isn't working as R255 Greens and the cohort of players who deliberately drop to Silver threat to play on Bronze districts demonstrate. The game isn't exactly newbie friendly as is, having xx420NoScope69xx who should be playing against veteran players stomp all over Bronze district doesn't help. And any game needs new players to remain viable. Option 2: This was tried. People will tell you that Golds couldn't get matches and had to dethreat to join lower threat districts, but at least for Obeya, this is a fib. You could get matches, people just didn't like who their matches were against. "BAW!!! These QSing tryhards who run with the item are able to match my QS and running tactics!!! Unfair! I want to win all the time!!" However, Obeya at the time was regularly over 1500 players. Even post LO and BattlEye, we don't have those numbers on Citadel & Jericho. It's also problematic for off-peak players or cross-threat teams and clans. So it's almost certainly not going to work now. Option 3: This will not solve a damn thing, and will be seen as a punishment for having high threat and will encourage more dethreating. That leaves us with: Option 4: Rework the threat system. Anything else is a sticking plaster. I'm not going to get into the mechanics of who should be what threat level, because I think our views of the skill distribution in the game are all coloured by what threat we are. As a Gold, I might think there's as big a gap between me and a top player as there is between a low Bronze and me, but that mighn't be necessarily true. My main suggestion is that threat would be best off hidden. Still there match-making in the background, but not visible to anyone. Not the most popular idea, I expect, and as much as I'd like to go back to a graduated system so I can track my own progress, the trade off in terms of both threat obsession ("Get outta my team you mere Gold 4 insect, I'm trying for Gold 10, I can't carry you!") and easier tracking of dethreating isn't worth it imo. With threat hidden, people won't decide their match is unfair before a shot is fired. You can't look at a Silver and instantly start trying to get him to TK you so you can kick him cos you don't want Silvers in your team. You can't track your intentional threat loss. You can't complain that you 'shouldn't be Gold' and then dethreat because you don't know that you are Gold. Want to go to a Bronze district to stomp lowbies? Oh wait, you can't. Because you can't see which districts are Bronze threat. Of course for this to have a chance of working, there'd need to be a much greater effort to put similar threat players in the same districts so you get multiple different opponents instead of the same team or a couple different combinations of the same 7 players repeatedly. Enforced auto-join would ideal, but I don't think there's anyway to stop it accidentally dropping you in a nearly empty district once in a while, which rules it out. Maybe if instead of seeing every instance, it only showed you the three instances of WF & FN nearest you or your team's threat level that you could then pick from. (This assumes our recent pop increase will be sustained, obviously - if we go back to pre-LO levels then we might as well just ditch threat, cos there's no way to make it work with so few players) This would also stop people moving from district to district until they find one with the most low threat players to stomp on.

Effectiveness should be measured in terms of the number of people you see hacking, not how many people are banned. I've only done a few FC rounds so far, but there's been a noticeable drop in "intensity". So it's definitely done something. BattlEye has nothing to do with dethreating though, so I'm not sure why you're talking about it here?

Why don't you just learn to time your shots with a semi-auto instead of looking for crutches?

Oh come on.

APB$ are kinda meaningless unless you're buying legendaries from the marketplace. There'll be a week or two of frustration involved in rebuilding your reserves. JT might hurt if anyone was close to having enough for a Vegas 4x4 before they were banned.

This should be good.

"Nice" would be an understatement. At what point did you become an omnipotent being?

Here are the standard defenses for dethreating: 1) I only do it because Silver district is full of hackers. 2) I only do it because Silver district is full of tryhards. 3) I only do it because I shouldn't be Gold (as if it's any sort of bar anymore) 4) I have loads of Bronze friends I wanna play with 5) I only use the account I dethreat on when I'm high / drunk I'm sure someone will be along to parade them out shortly. Imo, whilst some of them may be factually accurate as standalone statements, they're all just ultimately excuses. People just wanna stomp on players who are so inept that they barely qualify as mammals. As for policing it, it's down to whether or not it's possible for Little Orbit to extract someone's threat history, and see a repeated pattern of massive threat drops followed by gradual rebuilds and then act on it. Another option is for LO to make a judgement call that someone can't legitimately be R255 and still Green without dethreating and have their GMs manaually sanction such players when they see them. (Although that wouldn't pick up the more rampant "dethreat to barely inside Silver and then hop on Bronze district" problem). In terms of sending in meaningful evidence, you'd probably have to record multiple missions with the same dethreater. Of course, that would just paper over the fact that threat is kinda broken. It doesn't excuse dethreating for one second, but atm, threat as a mechanic in APB is in exactly the wrong place for everyone. It's not detailed enough for it to matter to people interested in it for prestige. Visually, as a Gold, I have the same threat outwardly displayed as the best players in the game. But behind the scenes, the numbers are different. (And the skill level is definitely different.) So there's no bragging rights to be gained by having high threat, since they'll just appear the same as someone who is barely Gold. But at the same time threat is detailed enough that people can track themselves tanking down to the same threat as the average carrot so they can exploit its function as a matchmaking mechanic. They're going to do something with it as per the Q&A, just no word on what yet. Ultimately, if threat is to continue to exist and be a matchmaking mechanic in APB, I think it needs to be hidden. Or least a system whereby you can only see your own threat (and not that of other players, or the district) implemented.

Stop saying things that make sense.

Considering the Magna Carta that most people revere as some sort of cornerstone of 'Common Law' was repealed 82 years after it was written it doesn't really matter.

No that wasn't the point I was making at all. Not even slightly.

And you're just trying to be a contrarian by saying you don't care so you can look like hot shit who's better than everyone else. 13 posts since August 2014, but you decide to pipe up when there's a busy thread that's tangentally related to a prominent player to say how much you don't care? Yeah, sure buddy. Y'know, if we're going to strawman each other, let's do it right, ya?

To be perfectly honest, probably never. They've inherited a flaming dumpster fire full of screaming wasps. They'd have to do something monumentally stupid to be culpable for making it worse, imo. If it dies, it'll be a case that LO couldn't save it rather than LO killed it. Given the state it's in, I can't really bash them if they can't save it. Of course, I had reached the point of apathy and acceptance with G1 and was fully expecting the game to be wound up in the next year. So I'm not mentally invested in the game in the way I used to.

Interesting, wonder how it appears to other players.

GMs shouldn't mess players in missions for the lulz. That is not their job and will only antagonise the playerbase. Of course if a GM did actually did it. There isn't definite evidence for that.

Just fyi, that doesn't actually amount to knowing it was a GM for certain. Sure, that we know of, no one's speedhacked smoothly before. But no one hacked into Air Control (previously only seen as part of Devlar) or abused the unstick command to teleport out of danger before Goat did it. It doesn't mean Goat was a Dev or GM. It just means he was the first one to do those things. As I said, someone may have found a way to access GM commands without being a GM.

Given some of the stuff that people have managed to reverse engineer it's not impossible someone's managed to compromise the GM commands.

Normally when someone speedhacks in APB they teleport from place to place. The only time it's ever appeared smooth is when the Devs used to do it years ago (Omochabox was the last I remember doing it in district for funzies, and she's gone a long time). That's likely the basis for the GM accusation. Personally I don't consider myself educated enough to have a definite opinion on it.

Why are people blaming the volunteer GM programme? It hasn't actually started yet, has it?

Well, I thought we wanted open communication and lots of info on what's going on? We can't have it both ways. If we want LO tell us everything they can, and then they so happen to tell us something that makes people go cheat crazy as they shoot their sticky loads whilst they still can before BattlEye comes along and cuts their jacobs off, then that's part of the deal, imo. And again, I'd dispute that it's any crazier than it has been for the last 18 months or so since PB was turned off.

But if they hadn't said anything about FF or BattlEye you'd have people going: "WhERe's tHe CoMmuniCaTIOn aBoUt thE ChEAting ProBLem?" Simple fact is until they've had time to actually FIX the game, people are going to cry no matter what LO do.

I checked that just now and my new character was insta-Gold. Now I did decline the game's offer to send me to a district for the tutorial. Maybe it sets you at T if you do that.

Once you have threat on any character on your account, aren't all your characters assigned a visible threat level rather than a T? If you create a new character it'll go straight to your threat level anyway.

He's not a problem, he's basically never played in a district where threat is used. If he started doing so, he'd get (somewhat) representative threat within a few missions. Green R255s are more of a problem. If they wanted to play normally again, I wonder how many matches they'd play with the threat system rating them as cabbages before they'd be assessed as being about their actual skill level. Well in so far as threat can represent that. Really think that part of any threat/mm solution should include hiding of threat and enforced district auto-join (assuming they can get it to not drop people in empty districts). Think that would ameliorate some of these issues.