The Death of Legendaries and APB's Economy?

[The Death of Legendaries and APB's Economy?]

9 minutes ago, Jukin said:

LMAO Already waking on the wrong side of bed LO, How funny, Make legendries untradeable, Rework pricing for JMB???? I BET. And Decrease the % on how often you when said legendary.SOUNDS LIKE A CRASH GRAB TO ME!!! LMFAO And theres a law? lmao if so I think we wouldn't have been able to do this for 7+ years. GL with your dying game. Calling it now

I don't recall anyone saying anything about decreasing the percent chance to gain legendaries from Joker boxes.

 

Also, everyone who seems to think there are no laws anywhere in relation to loot boxes, or "if there was a law then we wouldn't have been able to do this for the past 7+ years"...

The laws are fairly recent, and more countries are jumping on board, but they do indeed exist in various countries and some states in the US;

 

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/04/dutch-government-rules-some-loot-boxes-count-as-illegal-gambling/

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/04/video-game-loot-boxes-are-now-considered-criminal-gambling-in-belgium/

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?number=HF4460&version=0&session=ls90&session_year=2018&session_number=0

https://www.polygon.com/2018/2/13/17007830/hawaii-loot-crate-laws-ea-star-wars-battlefront-2

 

 

As far as the APB economy being affected: a big part of the economy USED TO BE the trading of designs for cars, clothes, symbols, songs, etc... if anything, that market would just pick up a bit to fill the deficit left behind by the removal of legendaires from the market.

You heard it here, designers. Jack up your prices.

 

EDIT: My autocorrect decided that "legendaries" was actually "legionaries"... nice

[If you like to rewatch the Q&A]

Until then, here is a super rushed and paraphrased transcript I typed in notepad while watching the stream live:

What brought your interest towards APB?
-(**silence - because Kemp had Matt's mic audio set to like zero**)
-Watching the slow death of the game was upsetting and we thought we could do something for it. I met Bjorn at a conference before and got to work with their team for a short time to see what was going on. 

I think the one that everyone is interested about: the anticheats and bans. Will you be making any new anticheats, and unbanning past players, and will they be broadcasted?
-This was the #1 question, and a bit of a heavy one. I think the community is super divided. Will we be changing cheat detection? Absolutely. We've been working the past few weeks with battleeye, and we believe they are the industry leader in client-side anticheat. They work with people like Fortnight and PUBG and such, and we are already 3/4 of the way through the implementation. But we think this is one of the most important things we believe to helping the game...
-We're keeping fairfight in the background, but we aren't using it for autobans anymore. In my opinion if we use this in conjunction with the other updates, it can help a lot. Battleeye will be added in the next patch to come out for the game.
-The last 2 weeks have been extremely busy with us, especially with GDPR and such. But one of the things I did was sit in on the customer support calls to help with the customer issues. We had some autobans with fairfight that were absolutely improper and weren't deserved. Knowing that it is really hard for me to leave those bans in place. However, I do wanna say there have been subjective and improperly enforced bans. So yes, we are going to unban a majority of the playerbase. Not all, because there were definitely bans based on things like credit-card fraud and other things. But specifically, the bulk of them banned for "cheat", we are going to give the community the second chance it needs. It's not going to happen immediately, because we won't do it until the anticheat is updated and the new patch with battleye comes out. But once it does, most of the playerbase should be unbanned.
-Bans will not be broadcasted. It's a super toxic practice. Banning is a failure, not something for us to be proud of. Its a loss of a player.
-If you are currently banned, you can now log into the forums, so even if you are banned in game, you don't lose access to the community. We are working on the banning policy itself and updating things for the future. We want to be fair and consistent about it, and make sure the bans are totally objective.

Can you give us a rough roadmap of what you're going to work on first. You've got a team in australia working on the Unreal 4 update, the old people from reloaded helping to migrate to Unreal 3.5, as well as other stuff. What's the main priority?
-After the anticheat, there's a lot going on. We are calling project one "infrastructure" where we rebuild APBs foundation. New customer support, forums, anticheat... an attempt to wrap up the cobwebs left behind by the old management. The next project is "unification", really completing the 3.5 version of unreal. A lot of stuff was made for console and not PC and vice versa, and its impossible for us to add new content to the game until we unify both. We are going to have an announcement in the next week or two to shed some light on how we'll do this, but we need to pull them together before any major updates. Beyond this, I want to work on critical game mechanics, and us taking a look at some longstanding issues with the game. After that, maybe a minor content update, perhaps a few weapons, outfits, etc... getting back into the content cycle of the game. And then finally major content, a new map and such...
-There are so many new pieces of content sitting at the 90% finished mark that were never finished, so we have decent hopes.

Will the ARMAS pricing being changed, and how? Prices have inflated over the years, and to get an account-wide weapon its taking $40-$50 for just one weapon.
-I spend a lot of time looking at this. I don't think the game is pay-to-win, but there is a stigma. However, I think that stigma exists for a reason, and in my opinion we need to go back and balance the cost of ARMAS. Some of the pricing is a little obscene, and I personally would like to bring that down to a balance so players don't feel so gouged. I think the stigma isn't that its pay to win, but that the prices are a little too aggregious. We have hired back one of the designers from the game and he mentioned that a few things are a bit squirrely there.

With the changes to the code of conduct and terms of service, what is your stance on things like in-game nudity and such?
-You're gonna see us around, I think some players already have. GMs will be in game, present, talking to people. Maybe running events or monitoring things. As for nudity, its great, but theres no place for it in the game. Our stance will remain the same there. What I do love about the game is the creativity, which was another big draw to us for the game, and while we do have to moderate those symbols to prevent hate or offensive things, we really do want players to knock themselves out otherwise. 

Dethreating is something talked about in the community. What are you going to do to tackle this, and are there gonna be changes to the threat system.
-Yeah this is definitely one of those systems we're going to include in that critical mechanics phase of change. It will either be fixed or scrapped entirely. In general, if an exploit exists, we should be trying to fix it

KEMPINGTON HAS TO PEE
-Oh ok i'm going to take a look at the twitch chat while you're away I suppose
chat immediately floods with 900 miles of spam

Moving on; will there be a livestream dedicated to devlogs or community updates or future Q&As?
-I love this idea, absolutely. I think its fun to watch the progress, and its a good way to keep the community updated. So we plan to do more vlogs or open letters or things to show what we are working on.

Will the original login screen, as well as some of the previous musc make a return? Its all about the phresh.
-The old login is great and im a big fan of it, but I need to look into the music rights and see if its even possible to do. But as for the new one, I don't think we need a loading screen for a loading screen...

The poor performance on consoles may need to be addressed.
-Absolutely, i'm going to openly apologize to the console folks, because we have been doing all of this conversation on the forums and I didnt even realize that the console forums were a split and different forum. But yeah those optimizations are long overdue.

The toxicity in the game goes from one stage to another; one solution to this was to SELL EXTENTIONS OF THE IGNORE LIST. With this in mind, are there going to be further extensions to friends and ignore lists?
-In fairness to this team, there is a cost to storing that info, it can't be infinite. But charging for clots is just monitizing on other people's toxicity. So we'd like to work on increasing that, but not making you paying for it. 

A system that has been neglected with the game has been the Prestige 5 system. This can happen in the middle of a mission, leading to you losing that mission. What do you think of it?
-This is another one of those critical mechanics we want to look at, similar to outside players being able to grief missions and stuff. That needs to be looked at and worked on. It was a cool idea, but it really needs some tweaking and a redesign to eliminate the feel bad moment of having it.
Will character server-transfers be possible in the future?
-They are problematic from a technology standpoint. Because the characters are so heavily customized, there are lots of oppurtunity for something to go wrong. So we want to work on it, but not just yet. The community is very fragmented, especially in regards to HAN and Nekrova, but we want to give all of the HAN players the ability to migrate to Jericho and such. The russian players is a different story so we need to take a look at that, but we want to help players congregate with each others.

If you get a Joker weapon, you can then put it on the market. But for clothing or cars, there is no proper way to gaurantee that a trade will happen. Do you plan on looking to make a proper trading system, or is it even possible?
-I would love to solve this proble, but it comes back to the fact that someone CAN scam a player. That's a problem, and it should be something in the game that we take care of. The problem is once you make a secure trading platform, you come into other poblems. We've done it in the past, we know some of the pitfalls, but we want to look at it for the future. The biggest problem is when its a free to play game with the ability to reroll, it opens up a lot of credit card fraud. The coding isnt a problem, its more of the system design itself allowing for exploitation.

What do you want to look at in relation to the competitive scene for the game?
-I can't answer that on the stream, but we are in active talks and working on this. I think it would be great for APB, and some players would like to see a more competitive environment, but that's all I can really say.

There was a system a while ago to entice new players into the game, a referrel rewards program. Is this going to be reintroduced or changed?
-I love the idea, but you have to be delicate with it, because it can easily unbalance things if the rewards are too good. But, we do need to regrow APBs audience, so its something we want to do. It may be on the roadmap.

Joker mystery boxes; are we going to see any changes to this thanks to GDPR?
-This is a very complex issue due to the legality of it, and there are some legislations in the US being built. The netherlands has a pretty good system in place, which we means we would have to make items from the loot boxes untradable. The boxes arent going away any time soon, but they will be changed.

Low config shaders. Will you be allowed to have shaders that do this, or ones that change the crosshair, or third party shaders to tweak performance or post processing?
-It's a slippery slope to say we will allow them; I also feel like we need to make these options available in the game. Like color-blind crosshairs, or low accessability settings, that should be on us, and we appreciate the community for stepping in. But I think that should be on us. 

Is the "advanced APB launcher" still going to be allowed?
-We're going to take a look at it and run it against battleye and such, and make sure it won't get people banned before we say it's ok for people to use. 

Weapon balancing. Do you plan on making changes to the weapons, shifting the meta, tweaking the HVR...
-Yeah that's come up a lot, I spent a lot of time reading the forums, we just brought on an old designer who worked on the original systems... I think the weapons are fairly well balanced, and I think they could be even less balanced, so i'd rather not damage that balance. So if we do tweak anything, they will be extremely small tweaks, but we would have to go through the whole thing, and maybe add in an HVR that fires sledgehammers at people.

Will we see daily and seasonal events in the future?
-I'd love to see them, and its terrible when the whole system becomes stale and seems like the same thing on repeat, but its down the line for us and not a super high priority.

Are you related to Barry Scott?
-I will never tell.