Flaws

I haven't had time to test it extensively and I have not used any tools to track exact fps values so I'll just give some rough numbers. I'm averaging 230-250fps while driving around Financial, depending on whats going on in the area and the amount of other players present. In completely empty areas it would go up to 320+ fps while in very stacked places where lots of people are blowing stuff up, shooting and such it would drop to 150-170fps average. The boost in fps is significant across the board. Aside from things already reported in the thread I do not believe I have come across any other bugs and issues with the build. I saw people reporting that they were still getting RTX crashes but I have not had that happen after playing a few missions and driving around a bunch. The performance/fps hits the game takes should be looked at if possible. Restarting the game every time you swap district or alt-tab a bunch of times shouldn't really be a requirement. Last but not least, getting rid of the garbage collection stutters, if at all possible, should be one of the top priorities before this hits live servers. Additionally I would argue that if LO could create some kind of built-in benchmark that has several scenes of fights happening in different areas of each district where you can test different builds/hardware in the exact same in-game environments would be very beneficial to getting some concrete numbers. Vanilla/stock maximum graphics preset, native res 1920x1080, 280hz i9 12900k (stock clocks) RTX 3080Ti 32GB RAM 3600MHz Windows 10 and APB installed on an M.2 SSD

Having mouse wheel up or down as your weapon switch keybind (or one of them) is hugely useful as it allows you to entirely cancel the grenade throwing animation and delay timer: - Using the mouse wheel to swap weapons after throwing a grenade allows you to immediately throw a second grenade, whereas using a keyboard key will have a longer delay before you can throw a second grenade (first two clips). - Using the mouse wheel to swap weapons lets you cancel the long grenade throw animation and begin firing your weapon immediately upon the grenade leaving your hand (last two clips).

You can reload any gun while entering from the driver seat as well if you time it correctly (watch the ammo counter top right): The trick is to press your car enter key (F by default) when you are slightly further away from the door and then immediately hitting your weapon reload key (R by default) so that your character starts reloading as they are walking to the door. This is very useful for saving time and getting away from situations quicker, having your gun prepared to fire as soon as you exit the car the next time.

Nadehopping which allows you to cook a grenade while retaining full sprint speed by timing your jumps perfectly before the movement penalty of the fall kicks in as I've demonstrated in this video: Most reliable way of doing this is by binding your jump to mousewheel up/down and spamming it as you're about to touch the ground or using a macro. Useful for surprise nading someone, especially useful in DM/TDM and any other final stage where everyone sees each other through walls. Can be done infinitely if timed right, can be done forward, backward and sideways. Can be done on uneven surfaces as long as you hit the timing.

This is probably for the better all things considered. Does this mean that you will finally shift focus and fix the weapon balance?

Memes like this have nothing specifically to do with players "expressing opinions" in-game either about LO/APB or anything in general. A "potty mouth" stands for anyone who is using bad language in any shape or form. In APB, you can get temp banned for racism, sexism, harassment of an individual and so on. Players still do these things because they're used to the old G1 team who would let a lot of these things slide and LO won't so they whine when they get punished for it. I do not know who made this meme that you claim was banned but if someone went through the trouble of making this in the designer I would assume that they have written something a bit too wild in chat and probably got suspended for it. Unless you have confirmation from LO that this symbol is the reason they were banned, you cannot be sure. Detecting an experienced closet cheater is vastly more difficult to confirm for certain to the point of banning the individual, unlike someone just writing something objectively bad in-game which is plain and clear to anyone and can be punished immediately. Of course, there will be a lot more bans for being a "potty mouth" than for cheating. At the end of the day, that problem stems from the fact that APB has no server-side anti-cheat to analyze statistics for every player. These systems are usually automated and they would flag someone suspicious to be checked by the support team. Alternatively, you can submit video evidence from the suspect's POV (for example from a stream or video) to support where you can clearly see weird stuff going on like aimbot/wallhack. Aside from that, they seem to steer clear of banning people for suspected cheating even if its borderline blatant simply because the suspect doesn't cross a certain threshold in what they do and LO staff don't seem to play APB themselves so they cannot tell for certain even if some of us can beyond reasonable doubt. If you can't tell for certain that someone is undeniably cheating, you risk a false ban and that is something the APB playerbase is very sensitive to post-G1. You need to play your own game to be able to support it and update it properly with what it needs but APB is in such a poor state that no one on their team even wants to play it so we're stuck with what we have.

Basically, this. No one asked for it to be applied to EU and instead of letting us know about the technical limitations beforehand, they just went for it straight away. It threw EU into disarray and NA has only somewhat benefitted from it. Lower skill players are now trapped with the higher skilled players/cheaters and they are slowly but surely leaving the game at an even faster rate. This also dooms any new player from ever staying in APB from now on as they are more likely than not, going to get obliterated for a few missions in a row before they uninstall for good. I would advise you to accept that APB is doomed and no significant updates are ever coming to it until we see a working, stable APB client running on Unreal 3.5 (or higher) that looks at least half-decent and runs at 150+ fps on modern hardware. Highly unlikely, but its less than the bare minimum for this game to ever see any increase in population whatsoever, even in the 100s.

https://www.mouse-sensitivity.com/ Just set Aim to All, not Hipfire, because for whatever reason APB Hipfire is a premium feature of the website. Its essentially the same value however.

I'm not holding mine anymore either. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the game is doomed to certain death if this kind of treatment of it continues. No engine and no amount of marketing will save the game if the balancing sucks arse and isn't fun to play. If being good doesn't feel rewarding then no one will bother sticking with a PvP shooter of any kind. Simple as that.

It will probably remain off until they change the entire matchmaking system with the engine upgrade... I assume thats their "plan" at least but considering how long its taking the pop will drop even harder before any of that comes to fruition.

Lets hear why its wrong then.

Let me preface this by saying that I do not intend to offend or devalue anyone, not LO, not the SPCT nor the players. This is simply constructive criticism and a reality check which Little Orbit desperately need now more than ever before their game is forced to shut down. Please don't take personal offense by anything I've written here. I cannot speak confidently about lowering or increasing TTK as that'd need extensive testing but I liked most of G1's balancing. I liked having less bloom with the current TTK and I think that most good players were fine with that. And yes, I am talking about the good players who put the most effort and time into learning the game and have the highest winrates and K/D ratios because that is, objectively, what makes a player good at a PvP game. And specifically in APB, due to its low population and high % of cheaters, I'd say that reputation also plays a big role in who should have a say on the matter. As in, that they should be widely recognised as a good player throughout the community (not just simply "popular" or "well known" as a name). And believe me when I say that I mean no offense to lesser players (yes, even if you are low-mid gold) but objectively, the high/top players should have the loudest voices in regards to balancing in every game. I want to stress that you're no less valuable as players but the people who've put the most time and effort in a game will understand it best and will know what needs adjusting better than anyone else. That's just the truth of it. Little Orbit have taken the wrong approach of catering to lesser players however, which inevitably hurts the health of the game in the long term. In fact, we are currently seeing that happen in Apex Legends where Respawn have announced that they will be removing a movement mechanic called "tap-strafing" because it is a high skill ceiling mechanic and requires hundreds of hours to master to be used at its maximum potential. All of that in an attempt to cater to more casual players who would likely spend more money on cosmetics but will not have the time/willingness to sit down and master such a mechanic or skill. This announcement insantly became a sh*tstorm on twitter overnight, becoming their most retweeted tweet of all time and it was 90%+ super negative backlash on the decision. We're seeing the exact same thing happening here, starting from the N-TEC 5 and then looking at other weapons which are being dumbed down more and more in favor of players who cannot/do not want to try to keep up with the highest level. The quality of the gunplay in APB is deteriorating at a rapid pace and the fault lies with management and who is being allowed to make changes to it. I also find it fascinating that its been 3 years of total and utter balancing failure and they've yet to change who is in charge of it or who they take advice from. I am willing to bet that not a single employee of Little Orbit really plays APB and they rely solely on the advice of the people who've won the popularity contest that was the SPCT recruitment when LO restarted the SPCT program again. If you haven't noticed, the majority of the SPCT consists/consisted of people that were talking to Matt the most when he joined the unofficial APB discord server back in the day regardless of how active they are in the game or how qualified they are for the position. Then more people were invited based on just being (mostly) liked in the community and not on actually having something to provide to the game. It seems to me like some of the SPCTs (not all) are only really in it to wave around their badge and feel high and mighty because they've been chosen but they don't actually know what is best for the game. They are in this unique position where their voices matter more than the rest of the playerbase and they are able to shape the game more the way they see fit than what the game actually needs. Again, not everyone in the SPCT is like this, but some of them definitely are. The SPCT needs carefully picked out high/top tier players who would be in charge of balancing and then the rest will be set to different tasks where they are the strongest. And if the fault doesn't actually lie within the SPCT then that's probably even worse because I'm willing to bet that no one that works at LO is exactly an APB enthusiast who's taken it upon themselves to become really good at the game on their private account and then be the one dealing with balancing behind the scenes. Bottom line is that balancing should be mostly reverted to what we had before LO started fiddling with it, except for things like the Yukon firerate fix and HVR damage nerf and it should remain that way until the Engine Upgrade is done, working and released with a proper build.

I supported the removal of threat segregation temporarily and only for Jericho because their silver districts were completely empty and golds couldn't play the game in any capacity. However, according to the post they made about it, the threat segregation ruleset applies to all servers. At that point this change is not worth it because Citadel still has enough players to fill both a silver and a bronze district. We already saw what no threat segregation does when there are enough players, back when there were some server issues and they were forced to turn off threat segregation for a while. We had probably double the population still back then. New and lesser players were getting stomped all day long by better players while said better players were mostly bored out of their mind. All of that combined with excessive matchmaking times just makes it for a dreadful experience for most people. They should've told us that they couldn't change the ruleset for a single world only before going through with it. It simply isn't worth it because the population will now tank even harder and I don't expect it to rise again for anything. It would only be beneficial to NA due to its extremely low population numbers currently, but it is detrimental to Citadel and that trade off isn't worth it. It is worse for the game in the long run.

Cause almost all of them are on EU during peak hours (EU evenings, especially during the weekend). Even the NA cheaters are on EU because there's no one to cheat against on NA anymore unless you like making a new account to play in the bronze district every time you wanna get on APB.

Taking into consideration that APB is a PvP shooter which is played competitively (as in not just purely for "fun", but most commonly with the desire to win), the meta should always be optimized for high/top tier players because those are the players who will always maximize the potential of any weapon (out of the entire playerbase). Lesser players will then have to grind (focus on using) weapons until they learn them and get better and better instead of having kills handed to them for free. There should be no weapons that are too easy while being highly effective and there should be no weapons that have had their skill ceiling artificially lowered. The current state of the N-TEC 5 is a perfect example of artificially lowered skill ceiling (due to its extreme bloom and reliance on RNG), while the current JG is a perfect example of a weapon being far too easy while being, not only extremely effective but in fact, the most effective in the entire pointman category (due to how forgiving it is to missed shots, as well as corner popping). These two examples alone speak volumes about how horrible the current balancing is and thats just scratching the surface. A lot of what they've been doing has been throwing more and more RNG at weapons, trying to fix a problem which cannot be fixed by RNG. We should be moving in the opposite direction instead, making weapons more reliable and skillful and less relying on RNG and luck.