The APB: Reloaded Community Global Tourney - Announcement and Registration

[The APB: Reloaded Community Global Tourney - Announcement and Registration]

1 hour ago, hotbot said:

Is this only for European players?

No, this is for all players.

[The APB: Reloaded Community Global Tourney - Announcement and Registration]

Just now, NotZombieBiscuit said:

Im dissapointed in you.

I've blasphemed. Forgive me for I have sinned

[The APB: Reloaded Community Global Tourney - Announcement and Registration]

Self-bump:

I forgot to port over the prizes that I had decided on. They're now added in.

[The APB: Reloaded Community Global Tourney - Announcement and Registration]

It's you and your mates against the world. Will you survive?

 

What is the APB Tourney?

 

The APB Tourney is a community organized event that will bring teams of three against each other. It will follow an e-Sports style system where a winner and loser bracket will be present (double elimination). It embraces the internally organized pug events that the likes of WASP and others have used over the years, and extended the invite to all who play the game. That's right, you, the reader are invited to participate. However this thread is about consulting what rules and regulations will be governing this tourney. Because having rules means we'll have fun. All of us.

 

EDIT: 

 

What prizes are there?

 

Seeing as I'm trying to give incentives, the prizes will come out of my own pocket. Subject to the gifting system coming back online, the prizes are:

 

1st place: Premium (6 months) for each player.

2nd place: Premium (3 months) for each player.

3rd place: Premium (1 month) for each player. 

 

This all comes out to 200 Euro worth of prizes.

 

What rules are going to be governed by the tourney?

 

Simple to follow rules, that's what. Having complicated, vague rules makes people be skeptical that an organized event be... well, fun. Below are the current draft of rules that will change depending on what the community wants.

 

Here are the current set of rules:

 

General Rules:

Quote

• All rivalries are to be left at the door. Respect the other teams.
• All players must form into teams of three, with a designated team lead for results gathering, issue tracking and feedback.
• At least one player per team (the team lead) is obliged to keep track of match results, match scheduling and match call-up. When a match is scheduled, discuss with the other team lead to determine server and optimal time to perform the match.
• All players must be on the Discord linked here: https://discord.gg/0vvD5JMX2TmDiM8y. You are allowed to communicate using the VoIP solution of your choice, however we need to have you all there to assign teams and keep you up to date with what's going on.
• Do not glitch or otherwise force the result of a match by glitching or griefing any item. Doing so will result in an immediate disqualification.
• The tourney will be split to Best of 3 and Best of 5 matches. Best of 3 for the play-offs, Best of 5 for the quarters, semi's and Finals.
• At the start of each match, a coin toss will be performed to determine who is going to be attacking or defending.

 

 

Rules of Engagement:

Quote

• Any weapon/vehicle/mod/equipment that is marked on the banned weapons list must not be used. They're banned as they are considered unfair due to various reasons. The inverse is also true; any weapon/vehicle/mod/equipment not banned is 100% OK to be used. Any question on specifics, please ask myself.
• Under no circumstance should the banned items be equipped and used. Doing so will equate to an immediate disqualification.
• Each player must have a primary weapon, whose category placement is unique in the team. In other words; each player must not have a weapon that is in the same category as another player on their team.
   

  To outline an example;

  Having a player with an NTEC, a player with an OCA and a player with a CR762 is fine.
  Having a player with an NTEC and a player with another NTEC is not fine.

 

• There is to be only one Spotter Modification per team. Using tagger Weapon Modification as a stack is fine, however no stacking of spotter.
• The rules of engagement is subject to change. Please keep a track on any changes to the rules of engagement.

Banned Weapons/Vehicles/Equipment:

Quote

Weapons:

• Any weapon that falls into the High Velocity Rifle category.
  
  I know this is going to rustle feathers, but the 
   
• Any OCA-626, or reskin of the OCA-626 (primary) that has modifications on it. A stock OCA-626, or reskin without mods is fine
• Fireworks Launcher/Flare Launcher
• Mountie 'Yukon'
  
  Until it's fixed, it's sitting this one out.
   
• Any weapon that falls into the Less than Lethal category (primary and secondary)
  
  While I didn't personally want this (LTL is fun and it's also difficult to do correctly) PIG + Any other LTL throws this out the window. Plus this is a pew pew. Not a stun stun.
• Any weapons that fall under the explosives category
  
  Because 140m OSMAW's are the worst.

 

Grenades:

• Low-Yield Fragmentation Grenades
  
  Sorry, I use them daily, and even I have issues with them. Spam ability being one of them
   
• Percussion Grenades
  
  I know this will be controversial, but having panic perc's is not on the controversial list; people dislike it
   
• Stun Grenades
  
  LTL is out of the tournament, thus Stun nades are as well
   

 

Vehicles:

• Seiyo Espacio (any variant)
• Nulander Pioneer (any variant)
• Patriot Vegas (any variant)
• Patriot Vegas 4x4 (any variant)
• Han CoyWolf 4x4 (any variant)
  
  It's torque overcomes the VIP torque deficit penalty
   

Equipment:

• Consumables (any variant)
  
  Yellow mods in other words
   
• Remote Detonator
• Display Banner
   

Modifications:

• As long as no other rule above is violated (Rules of Engagement or otherwise), all modifications are allowed.

 

Where do I sign up?!

 

You can sign up here: https://www.toornament.com/tournaments/1504676404951089152/information

Registration goes on until the 24th of June, 20:00 PST, with the games starting the week after.

Hey, I'm gunna stream it! Can I be added to the list of streamers?

Sure! PM me after you create the team, with team name and your twitch stream, and I'll add it

 

What Discord am I to join?

 

You can join the Community APB Discord: https://discord.gg/0vvD5JMX2TmDiM8y, PM me once you make your team.

This ruleset has been essentially copied from the tourney rules that @Kempington and @Vanille created with tweaks, so I'd like to thank them now for the suggestions as a base for this tourney.

 

If you have any questions, please let me know!

 

See you on the Battlefield!
SKay

[[OTW] - Ammo is not resupplied to the user during mission]

Description: Ammo is currently not being re-supplied to the end user during a mission under any circumstance. This happens for weapon changes, and for weapons equipped before missions

 

Game Version: 1.19.5.789497

Steps to reproduce:
1. Launch the game.
2. Enter any district, and either change weapon, or shoot some bullets and attempt to resupply ammo
3. Notice that it does not do this.

 

How many times have you recreated this bug: 3/3

Expected results: This shouldn't be happening. 

[The APB: Reloaded Community Global Tourney - Consultation Thread]

15 hours ago, swindIe said:

As long as the actual tournament takes place after the release of Battleye.

 

I always wanted tournaments like this in APB whether official or run by the community. Hope it's successful and we see more tourneys in the future

I've decided this should be the case.

 

The Tourney will start after the BattlEye patch.

 

15 hours ago, Annoyedb said:

Honest curiosity as to why certain weapon bans are in this list.

1.

Sure, they can be 'annoying', but that's not a reasonable explanation as to why the entire category is banned.

DMR: Sure, it will two shot you from 88+ meters away, destroy vehicles at an above mediocre rate, and is otherwise a stun gun when people duck in an out of cover too frequently for you to kill. Can this be annoying? Sure, but being two shot from that distance away is basically analogous to getting two shot by a shotgun. Getting killed less than that range would have been done significantly easier with a CR762, and let's be quite frank --is the more common situation.

Why not just pick up the CR762? 8 STK at 100m, has about the same vehicle stopping power as the silenced variant, and undeniably more versatile <88 meters comparatively.

I was going to break down the rest of the sniper rifles, but they all have the same issue. Their situations where they would have a competitive advantage (so aside from the player being outright better than you) is so niche that the argument for that rule starts to sound instead like, 'well, they can be annoying'. Why are these even banned on the basis of 'annoyance' when OPGL's, OSMAW's, and Rainbow Launchers aren't banned?

All of you have been around for a long time and I'm sure you can break down how other sniper rifles compare to basically any other 'weapon category' that could be used in the exact same way.

Except the HVR, which was probably the reason why this whole category was banned.

2.

Has something changed while I was away? Am I missing out on the 'current trends'? Is this rule here because you can't have more than one N-Tec? Or do people simply not use Raptors anymore?

My clear bias here is that I use rifles. Alot. They're the meta. They're ideal for exploiting the defender's advantage in nearly all situations and have a very good chance against 'specialized' weapons like sniper rifles and CQC weapons. I've never had a problem where a guy with an OCA was just ripping through me and my entire team consistently. You can consistently see entire teams of "just rifles" for a reason.

 

OCA-EW's are definitely the most 'safest' option out of every CQC weapon and strong in it's own right, but your reasoning stated is inconsistent with the fact that something like the Raptor or N-Tec isn't banned.

The Troublemaker was overpowered because of it's versatility. The OCA-EW is just strong for it's category. I wouldn't confuse the two.

3.

... Has APB took a drastic change while I was away? So basically as I see it 3 people can cycle the cooldown of Spotter. This feels like something that sounds incredible on paper, but nonviable unless you consistently have your points on the open streets. Doing this tactic assumes that all three people will have line of sight, the reaction time, the coordination, and the aim to 'spot' every player on the enemy team at all times. This sounds like a niche tactic that you just outright ruled out for whatever reason. And honestly, if they pull it off, they deserve it --it's not exactly as easy as outright killing the other team as you see them.

Which if you couldn't tell already, is my strong preference.

I wouldn't be surprised if the meta team that came out of this was just packing loads of ammo packs, lobbed concs everywhere, had a "semi-auto", a "rifle", and a "LMG" or "Explosives Weapon". Because that's basically how the game is skewed.

 

This is why the thread was created; to iron out these issues and discuss them in a fair, friendly manner. I'll answer them in points;

 

1.

 

I didn't give an excellent breakdown of the reasoning, but let me expand on the reasonings:

 

The HVR: It would've been banned either way, just because of the still constant issues that have plagued it, especially in pug's I've participated in and listened in on.

 

Here's one of the problems in video form (made by me):

 

The peeking of the HVR is one reason. QSing, being another.

 

The other Sniper rifles suffer from the same issue of being able to peek in CQC or mid when they realistically shouldn't be. The ISSR-B can very quickly peek and is also able to moonlight as an anti-vehicle rifle at any range. The DMR is the rifle I have the least issues with, but seeing as we're banning all sniper rifles... well... it goes too.

 

2.

See the rule on "one weapon per category, per person". The OCA-626 right now is untenable with the RoF buff it got. Adding mods onto it causes that untenable position to be directly threatening.

 

Back in the past, the OCA-626 usually went toe to toe with the PMG. Right now the OCA-626 outperforms it under nearly all circumstances. 

 

3.

 

Pugs pedal it constantly in 4v4's, not so much in 3v3's, but it can be done.  Hence why it was banned.

 

4. (the secret forth point)

 

Consumable ammo boxes of any sort are not allowed. Also I'm still on the fence of allowing only one deployable ammo box per side, so that'd reduce nade spam further. Also conc's while they're bad are not as nade spammable as low yields. They're extremely notorious for it.

[The APB: Reloaded Community Global Tourney - Consultation Thread]

4 minutes ago, Kewlin said:

I probably won't participate, but cool idea, hope it works out well. I have a few things that are confusing me about it though.

Why does the tournament start at best of 1? I get that it saves time and is easier, but APB is way too RNG for that, not to mention defender's advantage.

 

Why are all snipers banned and not just the HVR and ISSR-B? I don't see how the Anubis, Scout, or DMR are unfair.

 

What exactly do you mean by the wording of your OCA ban? Does that mean you can only use an OCA with no mods? If so, why not just ban red mods on the OCA instead? Are reskins fine? Why not allow the OCA-EW 626 SD NFCP3 as long as you have no mods? My personal suggestions would be to make the rule "OCAs and OCA variants are only allowed without red-mods, with the exception of the OCA-EW 626 SD NFCP3, but not the PDW-57 'Kris'. The OCA Nano does not count as an OCA for this ruling."

 

Why teams of 3 instead of 4?

 

Have you considered making your own defined categories? because as it is some of the categories are slightly bizarre, E.G. the SR15, VBR, and OSCAR don't play the same role as the CR762 or OBIR. Furthermore, if you're using in-game categories, are you using categories as defined by contacts or as defined by roles? (E.G. shotguns & SMGs as opposed to Pointman.)

 

This is why this thread exists; to allow for people to construct it as they see it should be. I'll answer each point individually.

 

I started it at best of 1 because if I were to start it at Best of 3, it might be a right age before we can get people to the Final stages. APB I'd argue isn't that RNG. Of course if a really bad mission comes up, then I'll ask them to start over again.

 

All snipers are banned because people find all of them annoying (mostly). This can obviously change if people think weapons don't need to be banned, but it was an initial response.

 

Any stock OCA-626 and stock OCA-626 reskins are allowed, and the Nano is fine. The wording was intentional. Also all mods were banned because even culling all red mods wouldn't solve the main issue that the OCA is too powerful for it's own good. Mods exasperate the problem mostly.

 

Teams of 3 are the most rounded solution. Teams of 4 are too large for missions in my humble opinion, and teams of two are too small for most missions as well. It was the best compromise I could make.

 

Yes, my own defined categories are still being drawn up however. I wanted to get this out in good time to allow people to deliberate the core points, so that they could get a good rule-set in time. The idea is to separate shotguns and SMG's, and the SR15/OSCAR from the CR762/OBIR.

 

[The APB: Reloaded Community Global Tourney - Consultation Thread]

It's you and your mates against the world. Will you survive?

 

After a year of pondering "would it be worth doing this?", and with the recent acquisition and revival of APB, the inaugural APB Tourney is being formulated. I hope to make this a recurring theme, with fun and games paramount and at the forefront of organizing this. This Tourney will have premium prizes that I will give out of pocket, so it's also got some incentive to participate.

 

What is the APB Tourney?

 

The APB Tourney is a community organized event that will bring teams of three against each other. It will follow an e-Sports style system where a winner and loser bracket will be present (double elimination). It embraces the internally organized pug events that the likes of WASP and others have used over the years, and extended the invite to all who play the game. That's right, you, the reader are invited to participate. However this thread is about consulting what rules and regulations will be governing this tourney. Because having rules means we'll have fun. All of us. No-one likes to be OSMAW'd from 140 meters away.

 

What rules are going to be governed by the tourney?

 

Simple to follow rules, that's what. Having complicated, vague rules makes people be skeptical that an organized event be... well, fun. Below are the current draft of rules that will change depending on what the community wants.

 

Here are the current set of rules (subject to change):

 

General Rules:

 

1. All rivalries are to be left at the door. You are all friends here, so have fun.
2. All players must form into teams of three, with a designated team lead for results gathering, issue tracking and feedback.
3. At least one player per team (the team lead) is obliged to keep track of match results, match scheduling and match call-up. When a match is scheduled, discuss with the other team lead to determine server and optimal time to perform the match.
4. All players must be on the Discord that will be set up for the Tourney. You are allowed to communicate using the VoIP solution of your choice, however we need to have you all there to assign teams and keep you up to date with what's going on.
5. All players must be respectable to each other. It's all for fun, please treat each other with respect.
6. The tourney will be split to Best of 1, Best of 3 and Best of 5 matches. Best of 1 for the play off stages, Best of 3 for the Quarter and Semi's, Best of 5 for the Finals.

 

Rules of Engagement:

 

1. Any weapon/vehicle/mod/equipment that is marked on the banned weapons list must not be used. They're banned as they are considered unfair due to various reasons. The inverse is also true; any weapon/vehicle/mod/equipment not banned is 100% OK to be used. Any question on specifics, please ask myself.
2. Under no circumstance should the banned items be equipped and used. Doing so will equate to an immediate disqualification.
3. Each player must have a primary weapon, whose category placement is unique in the team. In other words; each player must not have a weapon that is in the same category as another player on their team.
   
   To outline an example;
   
   Having a player with an NTEC, a player with an OCA and a player with a CR762 is fine.
   Having a player with an NTEC and a player with another NTEC is not fine.
    
4. There is to be only one Spotter Modification per team. Using tagger Weapon Modification as a stack is fine, however no stacking of spotter.
5. The rules of engagement is subject to change. Please keep a track on any changes to the rules of engagement.

Banned Weapons/Vehicles/Equipment:
Weapons:

• Any weapon that falls into the High Velocity Rifle category.
• Any OCA-626 variant other than the stock OCA-626
• Fireworks Launcher/Flare Launcher
• Mountie 'Yukon'
• Any weapon that falls into the Less than Lethal category (primary and secondary).
   

Grenades:

• Low-Yield Fragmentation Grenades
• Percussion Grenades
• Stun Grenades

 

Vehicles:

• Seiyo Espacio (any variant)
• Nulander Pioneer (any variant)
• Patriot Vegas (any variant)
• Patriot Vegas 4x4 (any variant)
• Han CoyWolf 4x4 (any variant)
   

Equipment:

• Consumables (any variant)
• Remote Detonator
• Display Banner
   

Modifications:

None yet.

You see something that should be changed, banned or un-banned? Reply, and get people to rate up your post! Popular upvoted posts will be seriously considered. Of course this ruleset has been essentially copied from the tourney rules that @Kempington and @Vanille created, so I'd like to thank them now for the suggestions as a base for this tourney. I will also consult as many people as possible to get the fairest ruleset. Or as fair as I possibly can get.

 

As long as it all goes well, the registrations will open on the 11th of June and run until the 15th of June. The Tourney will begin shortly after.
 

[Launcher does not correctly detect DirectX Versions if user machine is running D3D12]

5 hours ago, Winter Shyvana said:

Yes! Finally something i can help with.

Follow these steps and your problem should be fixed:

Go to your installation folder. In my case, it's C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\APB Reloaded

Open TPI folder

Edit the TPI.xml file and delete the following section:

Save it and start APB.

 

7 hours ago, RubyGee said:

If you use the Advanced APB launcher, you can bypass game files verification and therefore avoid another installation of DX9

 

7 hours ago, ElectroStingz said:

Hello,

Are you saying that each time you run the game it tries to install DirectX?

If I perform a clean install of Windows 10 and try to use my saved steam library this seems to happen. To resolve the issue I download the Gamersfirst installer, install APB and it seems to workl afterwards.

This is an issue with how the Launcher in of itself is programmed; it's not correctly verifying the Direct3D version running is a supported version. I'm not looking for workarounds, it's not the place for that kinda thing. I also just launch it directly anyway

[Transcript for the APB Q&A Session One]

 

This is the the transcript of the Q&A in its entirety, that happened on Kempington’s stream here between himself and Matthew Scott (the CEO of Little Orbit). The video can be found here.

 

This transcript was co-written by myself (@SKay) and @Kevkof, and we’ve made every effort in making sure that it is word for word what was said during the stream, with emphasis on relevancy to the question asked. If we have missed anything at all, please do let us know and we’ll do our best to add it in. The questions that are posed by Kempington himself are marked “Q”, with their answers (from Matt) marked as “A”.

 

To give an example of how the transcript will be laid out;

Q: So will we get crumpets as a consumable in APB?
A: It’s an unknown at this point. Mainly because there are bigger priorities on the table. While we wish that we could give England’s favourite snack that goes with their cup of tea, really the bigger picture needs to be addressed.
Q: TEA!
A: Sorry Kemp, I'd rather have a coffee.

 

Q: What sort of brought your interest towards this game? You have a sort of outside perspective?
A: Even though I have limited experience with playing the game, it is unique. While it is hard and not the average shooter, not being a clone of Counter Strike for example, I thought honestly that it didn’t get the attention it deserve, and we didn’t want to see that happen. My biggest fear would be that we’d announce these changes and that no-one would really listen, but clearly that hasn’t been the case.

Q: The anti-cheat system. Will you be making any changes? 
A: This was the number one question. I think the community is super divided, especially the second part of the question. Will we be changing cheat detection? Absolutely. We’ve been working with Battleye, and we think that they are the market leader in client-side anti-cheat. We’re already three quarters of the way into the integration. The reason why we set this date was that we could get something concrete in place before announcing it, and also to allow the new support system to gain traction. But we think that this is the most important thing that we could implement to immensely help the game. We also mentioned that we’re keeping FairFight, but without doing auto-bans. The system has not been tuned for a year, and wasn’t being updated while the company was struggling. In my opinion with FairFight and Battleye, which will come in the next patch we put out, will be the ideal solution.

Q: Will there be unbans? Will it be a full reversal or partial reversal?
A: This is such a divisive issue. These last two weeks have been extremely busy for Little Orbit, especially with GDPR. What I did was sit on the customer support calls and worked through issues. We had FairFight auto-bans and I sat on the line with customers and logs, and we can clearly determine that there were improper bans. Those bans shouldn’t have been in place. It’s really hard for me to leave those bans in place. But I do want to say that this could raise issues of “oh these cheaters are bad” but specifically the bulk of the cheating bans are going to be reversed; the community is going to get a second chance. We’re not going to unban all players, for instance players committing credit card fraud, but we’re going to unban the majority of the bans. It’s going to be quite a bit of work trying to get the next patch out, but once that happens, and we get the updated FairFight with Battleye, there’s going to be unbans.

I did see in the stream, someone was mentioning the keys that were passed out and were the cause of a number of bans. We will be unbanning those players, I know they were linked to some credit card fraud and some other things. Again, looking back over the logs, looking back over that situation, I don’t think we can hold those players accountable. Obviously it was a murky situation, but they will be included in the unban. I honestly think that that sort of policy of in theory if you commit credit card fraud yourself and you need to bring your account back to balance, we understand that, that's the right way to handle it. You need to pay for something that you got and it's already on your account, you need to bring it back to balance. This case was such a different scenario, it wasn't handled well. So for me, look, I apologize to those players. Not all of them are scott-free or innocent, many of them knew at the time they were trying to collect these things and exploit. But it wasn't handled well by Gamersfirst.

Q: Will bans be broadcasted?
A: No. It’s a super toxic practice. I view banning as a failure; it’s not something to be proud of or to enjoy. We lost a player and it’s our fault when it happens. We have done something in the meantime; even if you’re banned in game, we’re not going to ban you on the forums. We’re going to be doing some tweaks and utilize temporary bans. My commitment to the community is that we are going to clean up the cheating problem in a fair and good manner.

Q: Moving on to the elephant in the room, what is Little Orbit’s rough roadmap of what you’re working on first?
A: So this was #2. I tend to group issues a bit, and there is a lot going on at the studio, we got people working on various stuff. I’ve found a new project called “Infrastructure” which will improve the entire spectrum of how GamersFirst work, a rebuild of the foundations. It’ll involve improve the communication that goes both ways. It began with getting the new support system online, implementing the new Anti-Cheat, and ending with clearing the cobwebs with our first patch. “Unification” is our next project, which will involve completing UE 3.5, which will unify the code bases that will allow content release to begin again. Unless we unify the code bases across all platforms, it’ll be impossible to I think beyond, we have UE4. We also want to look at the long standing mechanical issues that have been in the game. Get back into the content design and workflow for the game. Beyond that would be major content, involving a new map and a new mode. It is quite far along the content that has been in development, just been sitting there waiting to be released.

Q: Will the ARMAS pricing be changed? And if so, how?
A: It’s interesting, seeing as I have spent time looking at it. People are divided on the opinion of what APB is, some say it’s P2W, and some don’t. I don’t think APB is P2W, but there is a stigma. You could give the best weapon to the worst player, and the worst weapon to the best player, and the best player would win every time hands down. APB is a game of skill. The weapons don’t make that big of a difference, however the stigma does exist for a reason. I do think we need to go through the pricing and change it, as it is a little obscene. I’d like to bring it down to a price that players don’t feel gouged. It is a little bit too egregious and expensive. We have hired back one of the designers from the game, to help us with factoring more weapons in game and balancing.

Q: With the upcoming changes to CoC and ToS, what areas will be scrutinised with most?
A: I think first and foremost, you’re going to see us around. I think having GMs in the game being present and talking, it shouldn’t be a big scary thing. We should be present. We should be there. We should be running small little events. Nudity is great, but it has no place in our game game. Why would you bring that in? It feels inappropriate. It’s something that we don’t want to see in the game. However other than that, it’s going to stay the same. The creativity in this game is beyond outstanding. While we do have to moderate the symbols, I do want to encourage the players to knock themselves out and get designing. I love all of the crazy things they do with the symbol. I think that if we’re present and in game and paying attention, the problem should solve itself. We’re looking to get GM coverage on all servers as much as we can, hopefully all the time.

Q: What will you be doing to tackle dethreating, and if so how? And will there be changes to the threat system?
A: This is definitely one of those systems that fall under the “Critical Mechanics” segment earlier. The threat system has to be altered at a minimum, or if necessary, scrapped and started over. There’s just a fundamental flaw at tracking your progress over such a short timeframe. To be able to bring your threat down quickly should not happen, and should take much much longer. We see this as an exploit in some ways, if it is an exploit it should be dealt with. If there’s an exploit then it should be on us to fix it. Shame on us for leaving the exploit in for so long, that it has a name and people can look it up.    

Q: Will there be livestreaming dedicated to future Q&A’s, dev live streaming? Would there be something like a Dev Blog?
A: I love this idea. I think it’s fun to watch the process, but I also think it’s a great way to show progress to the community. I plan to do more open letters and VLog’s, where we can show to the community the progress we’re making with new features.

Q: Will the original login screen, with previous music make a return?
A: I actually had the track on loop from Youtube. I am a big fan of that screen. I would have to look at the music rights and see what we have currently. While we can’t truly guarantee getting the old music back, I’d love to see that screen with that music come back. I also think we don’t need a loading screen to a loading screen.

Q: Will you be addressing the poor performance of the Consoles?
A: Absolutely. I want to openly apologise to the console players, we posted the letter and we did all these conversations, without realising that the forums are split. The console players couldn’t really participate in the forum where we were talking. We’ve merged that with distinction to the platform. For the consoles, the optimizations are long overdue. As part of the unification and critical mechanic processes, we will go in, look at the code and see what we can do to optimize and make the game run better. There’s a fair amount of issues I’d like to fix there.

Q: Are there any further extensions to the friends and ignore list?
A: In fairness to that team, there is a cost to storing that list. It can’t be infinite. Charging for more slots, it’s already a problem that breeds toxicity, and then you’re trying to monetizing that, it feels like the absolutely wrong approach. I think what we’re working towards is increasing the slots, without people having to pay for it. The ignore and friends list should be there for everyone to use, in protecting yourself in the game.

Q: What do you think of the Bounty system, and will there be any changes to it?
A: This is part of the Critical Mechanic process, things we need to look at. This and maybe one other element where if you’re in a mission where players stand in front of you and sort of grief you, I think the idea of people interfering with an already challenging time for players (missions) shouldn’t happen. I think the heart was in the right place, but it needs some tweaking or re-design to eliminate the feel bad moment. It is something that we’re hoping to look at, making a little tweak and level out the game experience.

Q:  In the distant future will character server transfers be possible?
A: Let’s give some context, character server transfers are problematic. They are problematic from a technology standpoint, what happens that I’ve seen when you transfer a character from server to server, is because the characters are so heavily customised there’s loads of opportunity for things to go wonky. For the character to literally come over looking different or some of the customization or some of the symbols be missing. It is a very very nuanced process so it’s not something we typically can just open up. Not yet. We’re going to work on that system. I’m a big believer in allowing as many people in the community to play together.I think that right now the community is very fragmented and certainly with respect to Han, that is a low population world server. We are absolutely looking at trying to help them, if only for the moment. I think Gamersfirst needs to take the bullet on mishandeling where those servers went and slowly killing that population. In the near future, now it’s not going to be the next thirty days, but hopefully in the near future we’re going to give all of the Han players the ability to migrate to Jericho and play with other players. The russian server is a bit of a challenge because there’s some unique things those players have so we have to balance that but I would love to see in the future an open sort of character transfer system, that maybe you can’t use it all the time or it has limits around it. But I would love to see players be able to congregate and have a great experience. It cannot be any fun playing on Han right now, where you’re playing the same 25, 26 people over and over and over. 

Q: So the point is: Do you plan on sort of looking to make a proper trading system into the game or is it even possible?
A: This one is tricky, I’m going to answer both ways. I would love to solve this problem. The fact that you can scam a player is absolutely a problem, you shouldn’t be able to do that. We should have enough infrastructure in the game to properly have the item held and the money held and that transaction should all happen at the same time. The problem that you run into is that once you create a secure trading platform you get into other issues. Which are third party sale off site and you end up with people using your system to transfer money and goods. Certainly when we get into the consoles, Sony and Microsoft very much frown on that so we have done it in the past, we know some of the pitfalls. It is the system I want to fix, but we just need to be very careful about how we do that.

The biggest problem is when you have a free to play game where people can come back and reroll and you have a trade system, let’s say a secure trade system, it opens up a lot of credit card fraud. So with the other games we’ve done we locked the trade system to a certain level to make sure that you have been playing the game for a while and that new people can’t just come in, charge a credit card and then immediately trade everything off of their account, which is systemic. We helped another company with a game that they had, I think, 12% credit card fraud. We were able to go in and modify systems and put in trade locking and smother things that brought that down below 1%. So this is a case where the coding is not the problem it more the system design to make sure it cannot be abused.

Q: What kind of things do you want to look at, maybe implementing or improving to kind of bring the competitive scene in to its own fruition in the game? I know it’s a tricky one.
A: I will say this, I can’t actually answer that question on the stream. But I can say this: We are in active talks in working on this. This is something I think would be great for apb, it was designed for it. I think there’s a lot of players who would want to see a more competitive environment, so I’ll just leave it at. You guys can all point back to the stream and go “oh, that’s what he was talking about” if it happens, if it doesn’t you can say “Oh that’s nonsense”.

Q: More importantly, are you looking towards potentially reintroducing the Refer a Friend system and if so, do you plan on making changes to it and as sort of a direction here kind of towards letting the player who was invited also get some rewards for playing with his teammate that invited him.
A: I love the idea of a Refer a Friend system. I think you have to be delicate with these especially in these kinds of games because they can easily unbalance things if those rewards are too much. At the heart of it we need to regrow the audience for APB and so it’s absolutely something we want to do, honestly it’s not something we’ve put a whole lot of focus in yet. We’ve got so many other things to get right, certainly on the roadmap is the effort to building mechanisms that incentivise our players to help us grow apb.

Q: Are we going to see any changes to Joker Mystery Boxes? Whether they'd be removed or the chances written out and clear as crystal.
A: This is very complicated issue. Obviously you've mentioned the legality of loot boxes. We’re taking a hard look at what's happening in Europe around this. Certainly there's US legislations being built, I am personally a fan of how the Netherlands are handling it. In that they're being very specific on the timeline to be compliant, the ways you can be compliant and their goals in who they're protecting. So basically the Netherlands is saying you can have lootboxes, you just can't make the rewards tradeable. Because the minute they're tradeable it becomes gambling. People are now paying money to get a huge reward that can be traded away for monetary value, I think that's a simple solutions. We've already started to unfortunately take the rewards from the loot boxes and make them not tradeable. Which means we're in compliance and we don't need to change that system. It may mean that we also need to bring the price down on them. Or we need to make some adjustments to our economy, but I think it’s a good system in a game, and as much as people have railed against this monetization mode, I don’t envisage this going anyway anytime soon, however I think we need to be fair with our players.

Q: Shaders and certain configs, will they be allowed back into APB?
A: I feel like that this would be a super slippery slope, to say we’re gunna allow custom shaders or changes to the game. Now having said that, I do think we need to make these options available in the game, we need to put them in. We need to allow players to change the colour of the crosshair for low accessibility, and low processing reasons (Editorial: He meant low processing power.). That’s something that we should be putting in. While we appreciate the community doing the leg work, we feel it should come from our side, because it’ll not only look better, it’ll come from us, it’ll work properly and won’t be flagged by our anti-cheat. It’s a slippery slope to say “sure, you can mess with the components of the game”.

Q: Weapon balance, do you plan on making changes in the near future?
A: The HVR has come up a lot, especially from reading the forums. I think personally, I think that the weapons are fairly well balanced with exceptions of course, but for the most part they’re balanced. I feel like they could be a lot less balanced than they are currently. I’d rather make a couple of little adjustments here and there, where we could remove one bullet out of a casing(Editorial: he meant magazine) so you can get one less shot off. I think that some of these things could just be tweaked a little bit. Of course, others need a little bit more adjustment. We are up for a weapon balance, we think a weapon balance is long overdue. Just go through the whole thing that we don’t have a HVR that fires a sledgehammer!

Q: Are we going to see daily events and seasonal events?
A: We are admittedly behind the gun. I would love to do daily events, I’d love to see better quality holiday or special events. It is a little further down the roadmap, we want to get a better foundation in place, but it certainly is on the roadmap.

Q: Are you related to Barry Scott?
A: I will never tell ;).

[Happy Birthday SKay!!!]

1 hour ago, iodyne_ said:

 

Skay, you still rockin this char after all these years? or have you updated your look...

Still have that as a character customization tab 

I may have upgraded it since the last you saw of me though. I look a bit more red.

 

Well... when I say a little bit of red...

[Happy Birthday SKay!!!]

3 minutes ago, Lixil said:

Happy bday Skay!

 

Also moved this to the correct subforum.

 pls no. You're helping them meeeeeme on me!

[Launcher does not correctly detect DirectX Versions if user machine is running D3D12]

Description: The APB Launcher does not correctly detect DirectX Versions if the user machine is currently running DirectX 12, and will attempt to install DirectX 9.0c as a fail safe. This can take a minute for the system to pass.
 
Steps to reproduce:
1. Have a machine that is compliant with D3D12 standards (and has DirectX 12 currently running).
2. Launch the launcher.
3. Notice that it hangs on installing DirectX when you have a DirectX version greater than 11.
 

19:20:31 11372 DirectX install started.
19:21:14 11372 DirectX:9.0c (June 2010) install complete.

How many times have you recreated this bug: 3/3

Expected results: This shouldn't be happening. 

 

(also first!)