Flaws

Gun testing in a special prototype test district or in the normal live game doesn't change the feedback players would give. It all depends on who is doing the testing, what their APB skill level is, what their knowledge is about the game and how biased they might be. So "testing" and this "data" are broad terms that, if tested by the incorrect crowd would lead to incorrect "data" that is being used for rebalancing. In the case of the N-TEC, most of the people who've already made their decision that N-TEC is OP in CQC will likely not change their stance and will end up giving the same data regardless of what they tested and if they even went to do a test of any kind. What we are talking about is factual experience that we have had for the years and years of the N-TEC being the way it was and being used in the live game against tons of different players with different tactics, playstyles and loadouts. We are not biased against it and if any weapon is truly in need of a nerf, we would gladly have it nerfed, even if it were the N-TEC. On top of that, I don't recall the community ever being asked to test the pre-nerf N-TEC to form any opinions prior to it receiving any changes. We were given an already butchered N-TEC that no one liked in a prototype district, they put the N-TEC on hold for a few months and then gave us another test for a slightly less butchered N-TEC and within a week or two they put it in the live game. Testing changes for a weapon does not really shed light on the current state of said weapon. But again, I don't think it would've ever made it to the drawing board if it weren't for the masses of people complaining about it. I believe in the 1st or 2nd Q&A, Matt Scott specifically mentioned that they've heard that the "N-TEC is a big one". As in, tons of complaints from people getting smacked by it. I never heard any high skill players complaining about it personally over my years and I would know about it. I rest my case as this thread is derailing.

Huh? Sorry, what data? Do you mean the endless complaining of ATAC and Remote Detonator mainers? That's not data. If you genuinely think that N-TEC dominated CQC that means that a) You've not used N-TEC much at all and b) You are a terrible CQC player. If you pit two equally skilled silvers one with N-TEC and one with OCA in a CQC battle, the OCA player will win every time. This example is exactly the same for trainee vs trainee and god tier player vs god tier player. Do you understand why this is? It's because the OCA (and basically every CQC weapon) was designed to be used in CQC and it dominates the CQC category and every CQC arena compared to any weapon from any other category. In even simpler terms: it is significantly easier to get a kill in CQC with a CQC weapon than it is with any other category. However, if you are unable to use that weapon correctly due to your lower skill level, you will fail and lose in situations where you shouldn't. Which means that the only reason the N-TEC "dominated" CQC was for one sole reason, that reason being the massive difference in player skill level. So when you pit a good player (N-TEC) vs a noob (OCA) in a CQC fight, the good player will win around half the time or slightly more due to their vastly higher skill level. Furthermore, if you swap them and pit good player (OCA) vs a noob (N-TEC) in a CQC fight, the good player will dominate not half the times, but 10/10 times due to not only having vastly superior skill but also having the adequate weapon CQC for the fight. Therefore the N-TEC did not need changes. This "data" is completely and utterly false. At this point I am beginning to question whether or not some of you are trolling on here because this is as simple as 2+2. Now let me explain why the ATAC needs a nerf because apparently that's also beyond people here. ATAC is an Assault Rifle, yet it requires much much less effort to get kills with than the average Assault Rifle in APB. If a weapon requires little effort to achieve what other weapons in the same category require multiple times that effort to achieve the same result = it needs a nerf. It needs some kind of downside. And the ATAC needs some kind of downside as it can laserbeam people in full auto at 40-50m with some RNG luck (I've posted gifs as proof of this somewhere before) and if not, it can still deal significant damage at that range. As such it needs a nerf to its bloom so that it can still do these things but through tap firing/bursting depending on the range which adds significantly more effort and skill required to achieve these things.

Basically, the whole reason the N-TEC was so complained about was the skill gap and players who are better playing it good enough to outskill silvers who can't hit the broad side of a barn with an OCA in CQC. In that situation, of course you'll get destroyed in CQC by a high tier player. Also, let's not forget that there are still people in the game and on the forums who claim that the N-TEC wasn't nerfed enough which is absolutely bizarre. The gun is in ruins and people still complain because they keep getting outplayed by it by better players. It's hilarious just as much as it is tragic (for the game mainly). More and more people will eventually leave (myself included at some point) if the weapon balance retains this trajectory and the game simply won't gain that many long-term players because there are games with much more fun gunplay than current APB has to offer.

No offense, mate. But its exactly thanks to people like you on the forums that weapon balancing has taken such an insane downfall. The game is only being hurt by this. Just because it was changed by LO who don't play the game much themselves (so they don't know any better) thanks to noob veteran opinions on the forums (like yours), does not mean that they're right. Not only with N-TEC but other guns too. I don't mean to offend but its just a fact.

I'm an APB streamer if anything lol

I don't think I've ever used up my entire reactions quota for a day to upvote multiple posts by the exact same person on the forums. Finally someone with common sense on here.

Everything is allowed until the Engine Upgrade releases. Advanced launcher as well.

My point exactly. Which is why I am an advocate for reverting many of the weapon changes LO have done. The reason being that just because many of the lower skilled players say that X and Y weapons are broken it doesn't make it true. Any weapon could be in place of X or Y if the player wielding it is vastly superior in skill AND the weapon is commonly used by those high skill players. On top of that, those same lesser skilled players use actually relatively broken weapons (or weapons that are too easy to use) without realising that not only are they doing that but they are also being severely outclassed by better players with weapons that require way more skill and experience to use efficiently due to the skill gap. In the end it produces this big outrage by them, they go on forums, streams, reddit and such and complain about said weapon being broken meanwhile if they pick it up they wouldn't know how to handle it 1/100th the amount of high tier players. Essentially, it is the matchmaking's fault indirectly. Also, if you want a definition of what I consider broken or easy to use. Basically any weapon that takes way too little effort/skill/knowledge to achieve something where most other guns require multiple times that amount of effort to achieve the same (or more). That's largely the formula. Some current examples are ATAC, Manic, FAR (now vs the current N-TEC 5), AMG variants, HVR, JG (vs CSG), PMG (in its current state). I can go into detail about why each of those being the way they are currently is a problem in a game that may or may not become more skill-based in the future. A lot of players that I know and have/had kept contact with over the last 5+ years quit due to many of the decisions taken by the old and new devs. And it wasn't things such as who gets unbanned, who got to be an SPCT/tester (or whatever other meaningless crap people get butthurt about in APB) but actual key balancing decisions, things they've done to date or have yet to do (delaying way too long for simple fixes). One of the most positive changes in the history of APB was the bounty system and how LO handled it. It is impeccable how much better things are now, it does not punish you for being good at the game anymore. Also, yes I also want to help out new players and I talk to new players on a daily basis and teach them things. It's also why I have many spent hours to create and update my APB guide, so I can link it to people and make it easier for both parties. I'm close to clocking in 20k hours since 2010 (forum join date not accurate to when I started playing the game), although probably at least 5k are from Social. APB requires top tier reflexes, aim, high game sense and awareness, some prediction, some luck and experience with teamplay, tactics and how to push/defend points efficiently, meta loadouts. There are many factors and it's not a simple thing to learn on your own, you need good team mates to learn together or to have them teach you the ropes of advanced high skill APB play. Every even semi-competitive PvP game has it's meta loadouts, characters, items, abilities, etc. That's something you can never avoid regardless of how well balanced a game is. You don't necessarily need an official "clan war" mode, people have been playing arranged/scrims in APB in the gold districts for years, that is its only purpose until someone comes along to make it better. I agree that exploits, glitches and such are not competitive in any way but those players who do these things aren't the type of competitive I am talking about anyway. Those players are considered toxic silvers in EU and we pay them no mind. Besides, all of those glitches are bound to be fixed eventually. We also don't consider winning defense as a big deal at all due to how easy it is and it doesn't really show skill much. Aim is always good to be worked on. Again, if you don't feel satisfaction from winning against equal+ skilled opp then competing in APB simply isn't for you. Winstreaks never really meant a lot due to the matchmaking unless we're talking 30-40+ which can be considered a bigger deal but you'd need a solid team for that. I personally want 3 aspects to be worked on in APB by the devs. I want the comeptitive-oritended modes to be fixed up, polished, rebalanced correctly with input from the main players that care about them a lot who have the most experience with them. I also want the new players experience to be greatly improved, add a real visual training (like CS:GO's training course for example) which is forced on newly created accounts (not characters) which would also slow down rerolling cheaters in the process. I also would like more casual things such as player/non-player events to be worked on to be more fun and enjoyable. And it isn't impossible but it requires tons of work and help from the good-willed members of the community. Regardless, this thread is way off the rails and OP even got banned or whatever from the forums anyway so this is where I stop.

I've tried it multiple times and its worked for me a bunch of times. Doing it legit isn't worth the effort because the result isn't usually satisfactory but through macro + triggerbot it gets more consistent (not first hand experience however) and a real pain to deal with.

Like I explained to PingOVER9000, it seems that you don't understand what a competitive mindset is about in general anyway even outside of gaming. It's not about competing for in-game rewards, it never has been. Refer to what I replied to him and he understood what I was talking about. It's only about improving and winning, it's not about in-game rewards. Considering that you are a casual player who hates on anyone who takes the game seriously, of course you wouldn't hear that from anyone as you aren't friends with anyone like that. I hear that from most people who quit the game that I've been in contact with for a prolonged period. On top of that, if you want to tell me that all your friends who quit because of "the players cheat" and "glitch" and "the matchmaking sucks" don't care about competing you are very wrong. If you don't care about winning and competing, none of those things would be an issue to you. You're just there to "have fun", right? You don't care about winning No, no one enjoys losing at anything ever and there is no fun in that. And you being pissed off about how X and Y need a nerf or a change is further proof of that. So you want to tell me that the people who want to win don't care about the game? Mate, all you are doing is contradicting yourself. The players who play casually and just "have fun" usually care less about the game. The people who spend the time to get good and win care a lot more exactly due to that. They spend a lot more time on the game than anyone. Being competitive isn't toxic, it isn't bad in any way even if we (especially you on NA) have some very bad actors there who make it seem so. We've discussed this before and I explained that competition varies a ton between EU and NA and you've acknowledged it. The "toxic trash that only cares about competitiveness and winning" chased away your casual friends because of the matchmaking, because those players could not compete with the people who take it seriously. That would do the same for every single game out there regardless of how competitive it is or isn't. If they didn't care about winning it wouldn't make a difference to them. It's the matchmaking (for veterans) and the new player unfriendliness the game has (for new players) that chased away "the lifeblood" of the game. The game is not fine, mate. It needs so much work and it's only just beginning with the engine upgrade.

I suppose you don't understand the real competitive mindset in games in general. No one plays CS:GO, LoL, Dota, R6S or any competitive game to get content or in-game rewards. It's all for satisfaction from playing good and improving, winning and so on. It has nothing to do with in-game rewards. If we're talking Esports then it's monetary rewards and cups but that's it. It's all about improving and winning. None of the good players in APB care about standing or APB$ or Joker Ticket rewards lol. They want to play better than the enemy team and win. That is the satisfaction. Not everyone understands it, I have enough casual gamer friends to know that they don't get it and that's fine. It's the main reason I play most games at all, I play most games competitively.

Wait, what are you saying? Obtaining the items required to even play the game competitively is not competing itself. It's what comes after you obtain said items when you play against other competitive players. Items are not in any way connected to competing.

Yes, because I happen to be knowledgeable about things and I happen to watch Twitch as well (no naming and shaming)

Car missions shouldn't exist to begin with (not in their current state at least).

This is exactly why I cut my paragraphs. It's completely pointless for me to write anything further to you because of how deep you are in your own "understandings" of the game from a casual perspective. Simply a waste of time. When someone is highly skilled in something that means that they understand it fully and have mastered it to it's core. They are automatically more educated on the matter and know better than the rest, otherwise they wouldn't be regarded as good at it. That's a fact for every single thing in the world, it's really not that difficult to grasp. It is clear as day that APB was and is intended to be a competitive shooter where players COMPETE to WIN or LOSE missions in a Player VS Player environment, where there are THREAT levels which determine what your skill level is (albeit flawed currently) and is a lot more about combat mechanics than it is about sandboxy realism like GTA is. I don't get how anyone can imagine that APB was meant to be casual when it so strongly leans on it's arcadey gunplay, movement and overall feel. If APB really was casual it would never have players taking it so seriously as to try and compete in it. No one competes in GTA (at least in any serious shooter game sense) because that game is actually casual and serves other purposes but APB isn't that. If APB was casual, it would look very different from what it is. Whether it manages to uphold modern competitive standards currently is meaningless because it is an old game which was never properly finished, bugs weren't squashed for years on end due to development issues but it is clear that it was originally planned out and developped with competition in mind. It has so many competitive elements in it. Some things need to be fixed after the engine upgrade, all weapons across the board need a rebalance including grenades and vehicles need to be made less tanky if this game is go anywhere. It needs to cash in on how unique of a competitive game it can be instead of trying to be a shitty GTA clone which will get APB nowhere. GTA already exists and it does what people like you want it to do, much better. Furthermore (mainly for everyone else reading this), I want to weigh in on a part of the casual community which are events (player and non-player created), car shows, customization, the Social District (and any upcoming features/minigames for it) and so on. Those are amazing to have in the game and should remain in the game. What I am against are the actual competitive oriented modes (such as missions) be left in such a sorry state as they are now. Broken weapons, RNG to the skies, extremely stale meta and choice of effective loadouts, overpowered tanky cars, grenades that 85 you, players' cars out of your mission colliding with you being able to grief you and ghost for the enemy team, horrific matchmaking, new player nightmare and so on. That is mine and most good players' problem with APB, not the other casual aspects.

I had started writing a couple small paragraphs replying to each of your points but I remembered that I've already done this way too many times and it is pointless, so I deleted all of that. I disagree heavily with basically everything you've written. I mean no offense but this just screams that you are a casual player who doesn't really understand APB beyond a surface level or how it's played at high level at all. You don't understand the gripes of trying to be good at something and have that something be ruined by horridly unbalanced loadouts and incredible amounts of RNG which allow way worse players to win entire matches against you. Not only is it unfun, unfair but it is irritating and frustrating to no end. I can't think of a single person who enjoys losing and has fun when they lose unfairly. That's not how you manage a game that wants to be competitive, no one will want to compete in a game like this save for the handful of players who still do today who are leaving one by one slowly but surely. Unfortunately, the people who are the least knowledgeable are always the most vocal hence the constant shouting on the forums to nerf this and that to LO, in effect, ruining the last remaining fun of the game for the type of players they should be focusing on, in favor of the people who just want to play GTA with good customization, which APB is not. They never shout about the actually broken weapons that they use on a daily basis to scrape a few kills per mission so those guns remain untouched, meanwhile the actual fun, skill-based, competitive oriented weapons get shoved in their grave. Why? Because they get outplayed by better players using fun and skillful weapons instead of a broken "W+LMB=Free Kills" type weapon therefore those weapons are at fault. Instead of trying to get better themselves, they prefer to go on the forums and cry and whine and shout after a loss in-game. I do not want to support those players and I disagree with catering to them. At the end of the day, it's mainly the matchmaking's fault for the downfall of the weapon balancing. If those same players had to deal with others of their own skill level using N-TECs, OCAs, PMGs, JGs, CSGs and so on, they would never say a word about any of those weapons being any type of unbalanced or in need of any kind of nerf. Trust me on that, I know it.

EAC is both client and server side as far as I know.

The secret is macro and triggerbot together so it is as consistent as possible.

Because all of the people attempting to do it without cheating it and automating it in some way suck horribly at it since it is not feasible to do legit therefore it isn't a plague. Although it should be fixed as that kind of thing shouldn't exist in the game to begin with.

You're missing the point of what I am saying. By making changes to some of the key weapons in the game without touching the other weapons in their categories, they have set things very off balance. They don't need to change everything in order to make everything a mess. Like the SMGs, the ARs, the shotguns. The SMGs and shotguns were not tweaked all together at the same time so we now went from having more top tier options such as OCA, Whisper, PMG, CSG, JG down to just PMG and JG in one fell swoop. The OCA is a watergun compared to the PMG, the CSG regs occassionally meanwhile the JG 2-shots people at 50m (not actual distance) even when you aim away from the enemy. The HVR got it's quickswitch mechanic taken away but the actual problem with the HVR persists so it's not satisfactory whatsoever. Almost all good players agree that the N-TEC got dealt a bad hand, especially considering that none of the other ARs in the game were touched up on, with the FAR and STAR having the exact same glaring features (some call them "issues", I call them fun gameplay mechanics) that the N-TEC got nerfed for but they remain in the game, as well as the ATAC which is just incredibly broken. The Manic is beyond broken and people have been waking up to that on Citadel, the AMG LMGs still exist in their original form and so on. After all these changes, none of the weapons feel fun anymore. You can't pick between a few guns in each category that all work well. You now must pick that one gun that is still viable and all the others are paintball guns. The game has become more stale than it's ever been and it's making me miss the weapon balance times as far back as when HVR Quickswitch was meta because god damn it, that was still 300x times more fun than the shitshow we have now.

I'm disappointed that nothing was learned from previous gun game events (Autumn Assault included). You could've simply repurposed one of the already existing fight club gun game minigames and ran those in more districts instead of running them in Financial and Waterfront but alas. Still the same unfun, luck based, laggy, unplayable mess. You should've at least increased the rewards slightly to make it more worth people's time. Throwback to what I had written in April:

If you want to stretch your resolution, you go into your Nvidia/AMD control panel and look for anything related to aspect ratio and change those settings.

As long as you've taken most of the criticism of the last gun games and improved on the mode, this should be good.

Nades need a nerf/revamp across the board anyway, they are way too efficent and define fights way too often instead of shooting your gun which should be the primary method of killing people. It is too easy to do and it's made the game extremely stale over the years. You don't really get such efficency from nades in any other shooter (one that attempts to be competitive on any level at least). They need to be good enough to push corners but not good enough to 1-shot people every single engagement just because you pressed the nade button. Honestly, even reducing nades to 1 (2 for low yields) is already a decent solution. The problem with a nade nerf is that it needs to come along with a car gameplay nerf so that things are kept in line (and they aren't even in line right now due to how tanky some cars can be).

The entire weapons arsenal in APB needs a complete rework because it is currently an absolute mess after the last few weapon balance related patches. Everything is off balance, nothing works as it should and we are only stuck with even less options to pick to be able to compete at high level than before. The mistake was that they went and changed the OCA without touching the PMG. Regarding SMGs, they need to either revert the OCA back or nerf the PMG to be more in line with the other SMGs. I personally support reverting most changes back to before LO touched anything as it was still more balanced (save for things like the Yukon) and then move on from there with slight changes to some weapons such as the HVR. Most of the changes that we've seen so far have been pretty bad as whoever is doing them doesn't have much (if any) experience with APB's gameplay.