Flaws

Care to elaborate? I have the nicknames I want without the need of a name wipe. But I know how it feels to go on a game you are new to where all names are taken like ESO or SWTOR for example, or even WoW Retail. Finding a nickname can take twice as long as making the actual character so I am looking out for new players.

Oh yeah, I am sure that there will be a market for that. There are certain nicknames that some APB kids would kill for. Figuratively (or not).

I don't see how you're going to prevent abuse unless you apply some really weird and strict rules. Everyone is free to create new accounts and new characters as it is a Free2Play game and nothing should prevent that. However way you restrict it, a lot of innocent old/new players will get hit one way or another by it. You can't restrict certain accounts from using those newly freed names based on some criteria since everyone should have access to the new name pool. You can't restrict the amount of characters/accounts a player can have/make for a bunch of reasons. You can't limit those names to renames only either because that kills 70% of the reason you are doing this, which is, new players having good nickname choices available. You most certainly can't go around banning people because they make new characters/accounts and don't play them, that's absolutely off the table. You could put a cap on how many characters an account can make per day/week/month that use names from the freed up names pool but that's really questionable in itself and people with many accounts won't be stopped anyway as a F2P account has 2 character slots by default. Restrictions or not, one thing is absolutely certain - name wiping is an absolute must, a lot of people might hoard a lot of good names but it will be nothing in comparison to how bad that situation is currently after years of people taking nicknames and leaving the game for good. It will absolutely be an improvement with or without hoarders. Besides, no amount of hoarders can really take up THAT many nicknames as it takes time to create an email and then an account and is bothersome and you'd really need to dedicate a lot of time to come up with names to save and not that many are as dedicated. Most people just want up to 4-5 names at best and that's even a stretch.

Thank you! We desperately need changes to all shotguns across the game.

Won't replacing IR3 with HS3 on Fang render the standard RFP superior due to less accuracy loss while hipfiring in CQC? Thought about replacing it with like IR1 or 2 instead? I agree that it's bad design to give it IR3 but it also shouldn't have to necessarily fall out of relevancy like most nerfed weapons do in APB when the next best thing suddenly outshines them.

That's why it's an assault rifle, that's how assault rifles work They are supposed to be usable at most ranges to an extent, just like the N-TEC is. It doesn't excel, but it's good enough to hold it's ground from close range until a certain long range distance, it's that way in every game. The same way as assault rifles get outgunned by weapons that excel at thier respective range in every other game too. It's the choice of the players whether they want to cover a specific range or they want a more versatile choice that requires more effort over covering a single range effectively with less effort. The N-TEC is solo friendly but if you roll 4 N-TECs in a team, you won't get far, not against another team of the same skill level anyway. They could have OCAs/Shotguns, marksmanship weapons, snipers and all of those are capable of outgunning the N-TEC if they are decent players.

Because that's the sole reason why anyone whines about the N-TEC. That example goes for almost every weapon, not just the OCA. Everything can shred the N-TEC at it's respective range, the N-TEC is versatile but never excels at anything more than it should. If you lose to an N-TEC where you shouldn't, that's your fault, not the weapon balancing's. It's very simple but somehow hard to understand for people who blindly screech that the N-TEC is overpowered and needs nerfing.

Because they listen to bad players and cater to them for some reason, which is why we also have incredbily overpowered shotguns right now (as if they weren't overpowered enough originally). It doesn't have anything to do with the New Glory. The N-TEC is balanced just fine but since it's quite good when a good player masters it and utilizes it against a noob, it suddenly becomes "overpowered". We've seen this before in APB. I wish we could see a skill based APB in the future, not further casualising it from how bad it already is. It's kinda hard to get the truth about the N-TEC across without hurting someone's feelings in the process on the forums, but the truth is the truth. Nerfing every weapon that you can't face won't solve the skill gap issue for you. Neither does being able to tap fire silvers away on your own with the N-TEC mean that that's all there is to the weapon. A competitive game isn't supposed to cater to the casual players, but to the high/top tier players and lower skilled players need to strive to become better, that's the whole point. Like I said before, if you are dying to an N-TEC in close quarters while using an OCA, over and over then that's your fault and yours alone. That's just one example but examples are infinite in this regard. Edit: It is amusing to see short-sighted people on these forums who don't realise that even if the N-TEC gets nerfed, high skill players will pick up the next weapon on the line and they will demolish about as much as they did prior to the N-TEC nerf

Probably because to most players the N-TEC starts and ends with "tap fire hurr durr" which is wrong. That is the main reason you get slaughtered by high tier players who play N-TEC against you and these pointless weapon changes are the result. No offense to anyone, it's just what my years of experience are telling me. Also, how can you say that the N-TEC has big spamability when we are talking about the OSCAR which doesn't even lose accuracy with IR3 on it...?

Because the N-TEC has more potential at range, not because the OSCAR is "harder". OSCAR really isn't hard at all, there is a lot more that goes into the N-TEC over the OSCAR.

Wrong. The OSCAR is one of the easiest weapons in the game to use. It requires little to no aim skill as it is point and click, it has basically no recoil to it, there is no accuracy loss, it has incredible range once you put IR3 on it (which gives it no downside) and you never have to aim down the sights even at like 50m which gives it insane mobility. Compare all of that to the N-TEC, which has more potential at range, less potential at CQC and mid-range as you have to aim down the sights and use cover to play it efficently and it requires you to control your aim more than any other weapon in the game.

This. In the cases with a lot of the meta weapons is just the massive difference in skill level, not the weapons being overpowered or "too good". High tier players will demolish lesser players with anything at the end of the day. Crying for a nerf won't solve the skill difference issue for any of them.

I went and played around with the N-TEC on both prototypes, shooting at a wall of course because both districts were 0-0 but with changes like these, that's all it took to see they are big no-nos. Prototype "B" is a massive no-no, outright forget about it. Reducing the firerate on N-TEC would kill it just like back when you changed Improved Rifling and everyone went to the CR762 for the time being because it already has bigger range and it fires faster with Cooling Jacket on it. I also fail to see how lowering the ammo capacity is going to change anything significantly. I am very against ammo changes on any gun in general. I main N-TEC 5, sure. However, I can use any other weapon in the game equally as good and I can switch (before anyone comes to my reply with that invalid argument). The N-TEC 5 is one of the very few weapons that actually require learning to be mastered, I talk to new players constantly who stray from the N-TEC because they find it challenging to use. This is the reason why I've picked to main it, because it requires a lot more than just focusing on one thing, it combines all the meaningful mechanics of the game (recoil control, fire rate control, aim tracking targets instead of point and click, using cover in a smart way, knowing when to push and when not to, etc) into one versatile gun, yet even when you do master it, it still will not outperform any of the other weapons in their ranges. SMGs and Shotguns beat it 9/10 times in close quarters, Carbine and OSCAR can destroy it in mid-range unless it is played smart from cover and I won't even mention how long range weapons rip it at actual long range. Also, jump shooting is not an effective enough strategy to deserve a nerf, considering that it is only good if you can take someone by surprise meanwhile the rest of the time you will be stuck in a jump-fall pattern which is always exactly the same and easy to counter as long as you have a monitor and mouse. On top of that fact add the fact that the N-TEC is an RNG fest the moment you lift off the ground so you are at an even bigger disadvantage. Nerfing that is unnecessary. How about, instead of penalizing good players who know how to play APB, we start penalizing all the players who abuse weapons like the AMG, the True Ogre mains, the explosive weapon mains, Showstopper users, remote detonator users and so on and actually make the game skillful and fun instead of outright killing all weapons that require skill and learning and overall lowering the skill ceiling of the entire game? The same people who are most likely the reason we are even getting an N-TEC nerf to begin with Reducing the game down to W + Left Mouse Button will be APB's undoing, especially if it wants to be any kind of competitive in the future. You should really stop listening to people who don't understand the game well enough to know how to balance it. This is the reason we have been stuck with broken shotguns for so long, the weapons that take as little skill as clicking the recycle bin icon on your desktop are now the most rewarding in APB, as if they weren't rewarding enough before.

You are the one talking shit in your OP, don't try to put it on me. Telling you to leave the game is a perfectly valid response to what you wrote.

Excuse me?

Precisely this. Feel free to make yourself scarce

I've reported the same person multiple times over the past year and I'm pretty sure no recoil is not allowed.

I heard about this and I was certain that something more than just the usual file editing was being done with this launcher. Thanks for clearing things up.

Because there are multiple people on APB who see literally anything from me on the forums and proceed to downvote it no matter what the content of the comment is.

This is really old info, a lot of players use this and this should be made an official feature in the in-game settings of the game, along with hold crouch. Having to hold down shift in a game where sprinting is absolutely mandatory and there is no stamina is pretty dumb.

You'd need to be more specific about which items you have in mind. Some can and some can't.

Most of the meta weapons. (secondaries included)

One more question: How will conflicting nicknames that are both active be handled?

@MattScott I think that these changes are very good, but I still have one large concern regarding nicknames and that is the amount of taken inactive names. I still think that before you do this, you should do a massive namewipe for all nicknames that were not merged during the 2015 server merges. All these players who will be forced to change names when the names become forced to english PLUS when the Citadel and Jericho merge happens there will be MANY MANY MANY MANY nicknames that overlap and people will have an incredibly low pool of acceptable nicknames to pick from as all taken nicknames on both Citadel and Jericho will blend. If you think that it might be unfair to them, you can send out warning e-mails to all those accounts. I personally believe that if those players have not merged their accounts at all (aka they have not logged into the account once since 2015) then they won't care and if they do, they can have a timeframe where they can login to secure their names (say 30 days) prior to this new upcoming merge. I think that this is not only fair but also a necessity, especially with any influx of new players who will want at least half-decent nicknames. Having to use really ugly, terrible names where they have to replace letters with numbers or adding more numbers at the end will deter a portion of incoming players and some Internet celebrities such a streamers and others who come to try the game might want their well known names in-game as well. Those are just examples, there are many instances where this is relevant. EDIT: Thank you.

And yet again the APB community shows just how pathetic and despicable it is and chases new players away in more than one ways. I love how there are self-proclaimed "golds" and "veterans" who've written in this thread who are unironically trying to justify what those idiots did to that streamer. I can't tell whether such delusions are funny or sad or somewhere inbetween. You are making up random irrelevant crap to try and justify veterans chasing away new players who haven't had the chance to even spend 10 hours in the game. There is no justification for what they did, for making a new player rage quit. First of all, I was one of the people in his chat, spending 1-2 hours of free my time to explain the game for him and I saw him quitting live. I've personally written the most detailed up-to-date guide for beginners and certain monkeys are going around undoing all of that to get some attention. You are an idiot if you think that this can somehow be justified. I talk to new players on a daily basis, teaching them how to get into APB and what do you do? You write literal garbage on the forums all day long that legit no one gives a single f*** about and never has and I bet you probably complained about the game having low pop a few times too. You damage the game directly and you sh*t all over others' time, effort and work for a bit of pathetic attention. Second of all, some of you seem to be too short-sighted to see the whole point in why this is bad on a larger scale. That person is a streamer twice the size of the average APB streamer and he is also friends with another streamer who is of similar size as our current biggest APB streamer and is even a professional at another game (I am referring to the guy that was playing with him and trying to get him into APB). You can't sh*t out "he was t-bagging therefore he deserved it" unless you are completely inept at seeing the bigger picture. We need new players and more of those will come from streamers who have audiences. If they start bad mouthing APB further right now, right prior to an Engine Upgrade coming up, it's going to deter players as an engine swap does not make the community any more friendly to newbies. When you see this sh*t live on stream or when you hear about it from a friend who's seen it or heard about it, are you going to want to play a game as blatantly toxic as this? You need to understand that in order to get business, the game needs players, ALL PLAYERS. Whether they t-bag, they curse, they act edgy.. ALL OF THAT is IRRELEVANT. I've been here since 2010 and I always think that the community can't get worse and yet here we are. Good job, you know who you are.