Flaws

Make some of them reskins of others that they are already almost identical to, like I suggested in my previous post. We don't need 4-5 different ARs that are almost an N-TEC but are very, very slightly different. There are simply way too many guns to balance while also trying to keep each of them different in some way and the game doesn't need that. What we had during G1 was better for the reasons I stated in my previous post. We had multiple strong weapons in each category and you would see them get used mostly equally. You could only make an argument about the N-TEC 5 being overused (instead of also having the FAR be used along with it) but that was only the case because the N-TEC 5 is free and available very early on from contacts while the FAR used to be an event only weapon and it had a full priced Armas variant. That, paired with the fact that the N-TEC 5 simply looks and sounds way nicer made it the definitive AR, plus it had reskins (of higher quality than the FAR) making it way more appealing overall (I believe this to be objectively true). And regarding the STAR 556, while it is a decent starter gun which you can mostly spray with, it is still the "starter gun" and as such most people would automatically assume that it is relatively bad and will want to immediately swap to something better. I'll also have to remind you that many players do use the ATAC variants as well as the Raptor which are also assault rifles. You mostly see the N-TEC at high levels but lesser players tend to struggle with it so they opt in for something easier to handle such as the ATAC/Raptor or simply not an AR altogether. Close range is currently vastly JG/OCA dominated while long range is mainly DMR/DMR-AV and the occasional Obeya rifle because HVR and OBIR got nerfed. It used to be that CSG, PMG, HVR, Scout, OBIR were just as viable in their respective categories but that is no longer the case. It has been getting more and more stale while unpopular guns aren't really becoming any more popular (yeah, save for the DMR). Instead, some popular weapons are slowly falling out of favor because "well X popular gun is shit now, might as well just use Y popular gun from now on" and I've seen that a lot recently. When you make a weapon worse or a lot worse, people will naturally steer clear of it and look for the next best option. For example, RNG is frustrating and only takes away from the enjoyment, it does not add to it. In the end when everything blooms out to hell people will just cease to have any enjoyment from the game and leave. Shotguns have always been overpowered due to APB being third person but never on the scale of the current JG. The current JG is the top CQC pick for everyone right now. The only people who pick SMGs (almost always OCA nowadays) instead are players who prefer to give up some of that power in favor of more fun gameplay elements like tracking instead of point and clicking (which is subjective for everyone of course). As such I believe that shotguns in general need some kind of rework, like someone had the 3 shots to kill idea which we never really saw being tested out or talked about all that much. There is only so much weapon diversity you can have in a game that isn't played exclusively for fun but instead for some form of competition. You can have 3 maybe 4 different weapons in each category which differ to each other at most and even then there will always be 1 or 2 which are the top picks at highest skill level in their category. And thats why I think that merging some of the weapons will at least make use of their skins while simultaneously make the overall balancing process significantly easier by lowering the amount of factors that need to be taken into account when any change is made to any weapon. I also think that most people who already own a lot of these unique weapons that came from Armas or from the Joker Store will not be particularly mad about it since their purchase would now be more viable than before. You say that gameplay becomes too frustrating when certain weapons are too strong and you are right. I will once again give an example using the N-TEC 5 because it is a good example. What used to be the case was that you could outplay a lesser player who had a CQC weapon with the N-TEC in a CQC situation if you really had mastered it (jumpshooting included). Now with all the spraying (bloom) nerfs to it it is basically being forced to lose out to a CQC weapon even if it is being wielded by a worse player. You are essentially creating an artificial barrier and thus reducing the skill ceiling of the weapon. You can't shoot slower in order to compensate for bloom in close range because CQC weapons have faster TTK anyway even if you're minttk-ing with the N-TEC so you're losing out even harder if you do that. The only option is to chance it and spray while being a sitting duck (pretty low chance of success) because jumpshooting with it has been severely nerfed unless you're hugging the enemy. The N-TEC was never good at pushing a CQC player, especially of similar skill level. If you tried to jumpshoot, you'd get minttk'd in mid air because you're stuck in a falling arch which is always 100% the same and any experienced player can track it perfectly. If you tried to push a corner on foot you'd get minted even faster becuase thats what CQC weapons are designed for. The same thing happens if you pit the N-TEC against a Carbine or an OSCAR, both of those have way more mobility because hipfiring is their strong suit which made them harder to kill at close and mid range for an N-TEC user. Now its even harder because you also have to shoot slower with the N-TEC (due to all the bloom) while also tracking someone who has maximum mobility, while you have little to none yourself, being forced into ADS. So yes, gameplay is indeed very frustrating when certain weapons are too strong in comparison to others, especially when it doesn't have to be the case and it didn't use to be. The same logic applies.

LO has contributed significantly more to a stale meta than G1 ever did though. LO made the JG the single best shotgun and best CQC weapon and thats been the case for nearly 3 years straight now. Under G1 we had the JG, CSG, OCA, OCA Whisper, PMG and all of them were viable depending on playstyle. Now if you're playing at top level you want to pull out a JG and sit on corners which is the most boring CQC gameplay has ever been. The same goes for weapons like the FAR as well which was technically a better N-TEC 5 even before the initial nerf of the 2014 N-TEC 5 but before LO made it accessible for Joker Tickets it was way harder to get your hands on it so everyone naturally went with the classic AK-47 looking gun (not to mention that it looks and sounds much better than both the FAR and STAR) and thus it remained meta for all these years. They ruined long range as well because before you would see the heavy HVR, Scout, OBIR and Obeya rifle in play now its almost exclusively DMR-AV at high level because it is the most efficient after everything else got nerfed to shit and it blows up cars in 3-5 shots because they forgot to nerf AV weaponry accordingly when cars got turned into wet cardboard. I'd say that G1 made a mistake many years ago when they listened to players complaining about them constantly making reskins of weapons and started trying to make unique new weapons instead because we're now stuck with all these other guns which don't really have much of a place in the game yet they all need separate balancing on their own further complicating a matter which LO can scarcely handle already. There need to be bigger, core changes to a lot of those weapons and I'd say that converting a lot of them into reskins of some of the main meta weapons would absolutely be the way to go. For example, why do we have so many assault rifles in the game? You only really need like 3 and the rest should all just be reskins of these 3. Base 3 would be N-TEC 5, FAR and ATAC (this wouldn't apply to legendaries). STAR becomes a FAR reskin, Frenzy becomes an N-TEC reskin. Misery probably shouldn't even be an AR to begin with, I'd make it an Obeya reskin. Even if you want to keep some uniques like the ACES Rifle, you could but you can still cut down significantly on balance issues by merging many weapons that are practically identical but have some super slight differences just for the sake of calling it a different weapon. I would love to have more movement mechanics in APB, this is why I love Apex's movement and gunplay so much. I've been a jumpshooting advocate in APB for years now because it makes the game way more fun and its the kind of mechanics that made this game good to begin with. But LO seems to think otherwise in how they nerf almost all kinds of movement and force you to be a sitting duck with basically every weapon. Instead of going towards fun, arcadey gameplay (which is what APB was always intended to be), we're headed towards boring CS:GO type gameplay where you can't move an inch if you want to hit the broad side of a barn with an AK-47 (N-TEC 5). The more RNG they throw into the mix the more they kill their own game. The only way to salvage this atrocity is to revert everything to pre-LO state and not touch it until the engine upgrade is fully released and even then, get someone who actually understands and plays the game to do these changes. Swallow your pride and your ego and admit that you've failed at your job because your game is on its knees because of shit like this (among other things).

I love how some mod felt the need to hide/delete my clown face gif reply to the N-TEC changes. Not that I'm surprised in any capacity but its a really bad look for LO so you're not doing them any favors. The unfortunate truth is that there is little left to give in the way of feedback to such hilariously bad changes that are somehow still happening 3 years down the line after I've spent so many hours giving feedback on the N-TEC and explaining exactly why throwing more RNG at it (or in fact any other weapon in the game) won't solve anything and it isn't a fix for anything. It is clear that whoever is behind a lot of these changes has little to no idea about how the game works, especially at high/top level play. I've written way too many posts about weapon balancing and they've been largely ignored in favor of "ntec op nerf pls" posts so I just feel like a simple is in order at this point. Oh yeah, good job on fixing Med Spray and nerfing grenades. Only took you like half a year or however long its been to change a few values. Its been 3 years since the JG became the most overpowered CQC weapon in APB's history but thats still there somehow along with all the triggerbotters using it 24/7. Really makes you wonder how long that one will take. At the end of the day it is your game and it is struggling for dear life while you're choking it out of it with all this bs. The customization won't carry APB for another decade.

People change and people grow, believe it or not.

The fact that you think so means that you don't understand the situation APB was in at the time. I can speak about this because I saw everything it lead to and I've experienced it first hand. Players were being targeted for harassment because of FairFight bans which had a high probability of being false positive manual bans and weren't deserved in the first place. Players got doxxed, their private pictures leaked and posted all over FFbans, their relatives were harassed, players were DDoSsed and so on and so forth. G1 employees got their share of the pie as well. Some of them were doxxed and they even had death threats sent to them. Just like I wrote to Eviltara, its very easy to be ignorant of targeted harassment online when you have not been targeted yourself. Add to that the fact that the very owners of the game were the ones who set things up that way and let the players tear each other apart for the sake of protecting their fragile egos for years. Most of the people who camped the website on a daily basis and made insane "investigations" on FFbans in an attempt to ruin people's lives because of an APB ban (which is likely false to begin with) were all mentally ill in some shape or form. And do I even need to mention the fact that there were running ads on the ffbans website which were generating revenue for the owners of the website so in reality they were making money off of APB's toxicity and mentally ill playerbase? No, this is the worst thing that has ever happened to APB and it effectively killed the game due to the incredible amounts of toxicity it introduced to it. Everything was based around ffbans and who was banned/how many times. And lets not forget the amount of mentally ill people who cheated and got purposefully caught over and over again just so they can get attention in the community. There have been many names over the years which only became known because they've been on FFbans. Positive or negative attention doesn't matter to these sorts of people, as long as they get any at all. Most of us here hate cheaters more than anything but cheaters don't deserve to be publically doxxed with their home address, phone numbers and their relatives becoming targets because of a ban on a video game. No one does in fact, no matter what they've done simply because it leads to nothing good. It does not fix the problem. The only thing it does is it lets silvers feel better about themselves because daddy G1 manual bans the same group of people over and over again to make you think that the anti-cheat works. APB is a game with a small community and it always has been. There is always bound to be drama and tension between players in such a small community. Giving players such a huge incentive to be infinitely toxic to each other is a recipe for doom for the game. All of this is the reason LO did away FFbans and public bans in general and this is the only way to go with this game. If a player is cheating then they deserve to be punished by having their account permanently suspended and thats that. They don't deserve to have their lives ruined or to be scared of consequences for their relatives over their game ban. If you think that they do then you're simply being immature and a part of the problem.

People who still somehow keep saying that the FairFight era was good have no idea what they're talking about. Its easy to be a silver who'd never even be suspected of cheating (let alone banned) and watch better players get banned publically. You get to feel better about yourself and you live in your own little bubble where you think who everyone who kills you twice in a row is cheating while you can't even hold gold yourself. Granted, there were justified bans but when they would just ban people at random they're bound to eventually catch some real cheaters by accident. But then there were actual blatant ragebots playing for months or years under FF on the same account. Me and many others have known that FairFight didn't work and FF bans were not to be believed for years before LO came around to prove it, due to the fact that most of those bans were manual. A lot of them were repeated bans on players they "suspected" but had no real evidence on (myself included). Its just that you don't truly see it until you get targeted by it yourself. Me and many others were targeted but most people didn't believe us. Now you have the new owners of the game telling you that we were right all along but the little bubble is still too comfortable to leave for a lot of people. Also, you need to realise that just because you don't see the bans publically doesn't mean that they don't happen. Just because you don't see something with your own eyes doesn't mean that its not real. Now you just simply don't have the comfort of feeling good about yourself when you see X player banned who beat you 2 days ago. Lastly, I want to address the whole controversy about people getting their FFbanned accounts back. There is no reason to be mad about that because APB is a F2P game and if people wanted to keep cheating after LO (and a lot of them definitely have come around to cheating again eventually) they can keep making new accounts or buying accounts with R255s on them full of Armas items and we will all still have to deal with those players. Which account they play on or what name they have really makes no difference.

I knew that it would end up like this the moment they announced that we were forced to go back to BE. The short period that we had EAC's client side (not even the server side) was the most playable APB's been in many years. EAC was the one thing that could've at least kept the game going. I saw a certain private stream on a random discord server of a player ragehacking in Baylan on the same day as BE's return. This is the main reason why I've barely streamed the game for the past year. I can't even turn on my stream without every closet lowlife coming out of the woodwork to streamsnipe me (not that they need to try too hard, considering that there is only one single silver district to play on nowadays). The Engine Upgrade will not solve the cheater problem on its own either. Without serious anti-cheat measures, the fate of the game will not change and this has always been the case. It originally lost most of it's leftover players during the FFbans era (2014-2018) with G1's shenanigans and them somehow deciding that its a great idea to make every single ban public, in a game with such a small community where half of it are immature egofiends of some form. We were already down to ~600 average players on EU in May 2018 when LO picked up the pieces. Most of the EU silver district players here should recall what absolute hell it was to play APB towards the end where you'd face multiple full premades of cheaters back to back non-stop. FF was useless and G1 had given up on investigating cheaters completely. Bans seemed very random, most of them were manual (as we now know for a fact), and somehow certain players were able to ragehack for months or even years on end in some cases, somehow the anti-cheat completely ignoring their perfect aim and accuracy but then also re-banning certain people who were either not cheating or wouldn't go as hard even if they were, which still makes no sense however you try to stretch things. A lot of players seemed to think that APB was dying due to lack of content but that is only somewhat true. Most players that still played have largely enjoyed APB for its combat mechanics and the more competitive players would come back for more for years on end, very few of us still today. Bottom line is that the biggest issue has always been cheaters and they have actively been killing the game for half a decade now. You can only hold onto players' dedication to keep the game alive for this long, until there is nothing but aimbots fighting aimbots and you having to deal with it to be able to play APB in any capacity. Anyone would leave at that point. And don't even get me started on weapon balancing which has been completely butchered by LO and whoever thought that making the game unplayable as a solo player was a good idea. You know, at least when we had cheaters during FF we also had decent weapons and cars to outplay cheaters with if we were skilled enough. Now we got that taken away but the cheaters are still here. I used to think that soloing was bad before but, boy, was I in for a treat. APB has become progressively worse and worse for the solo player and catering entirely to premades 100% and that is all due to improper balancing and lack of vision on LO's side. Imagine that for one or another reason you don't have people to play with or maybe you only have one friend who also still plays APB and all you get are full premades of four who play APB all day long, half of them probably having at least one closet cheater in their group at all times. A lot of them running at least one OSMAW/DMR-AV and concs which completely obliterate cars now after the nerf (because somehow they decided to nerf cars but not all anti-vehicle weaponry.) Who would want to even try when you already know that you've lost from the very first second of the mission?

I used to argue the same against the entire idea of getting rid of threat segregation in general. We had a short period where we saw the effects of having none and it was quite detrimental to the population but in the case of NA's current state, which is quite reminiscent of Han, it might be the only option for the time being.

I second this. NA should have had it's threat segregation turned off over a year ago now, at least until the supposed merge with EU happens after the engine upgrade releases. Its only making matters worse for whoever is left still playing on that server.

It does not risk your account otherwise I wouldn't do it myself even, let alone spread it and claim that it is safe to use. That is the whole point of me talking to them about every single file I put out there and use myself, so that no one's account is at stake. Professionals don't usually do that unless its an external kind of thing such as a beginners guide which I've also created for APB and they've officially endorsed it on their official discord server in their APB resources channel. The rest are less sought after and usually only by people who know what they are doing (people who would know where to get configs from instead of the official LO website). My config does not contain any particle removals such as grenade smoke, fire, car explosion particles, muzzle flash particles removal, etc. Those are not allowed by LO. I do not use them and I do not distribute them. And yes, those I consider to be cheating as well.

No. I assume its because they don't want to distribute anything with a player's name on it. What I meant to say was that every type of config and file edit that is available in my public config ZIP file is known to them and approved as okay to use. They know exactly what those do and they are all considered okay until the engine upgrade comes out officially to the live version of APB. If you feel like any of it is cheating then that is your own opinion on the matter. To me it is not impactful enough to make a big difference. Also, if you're scared of it containing a virus, I also include VirusTotal links on my discord server each time I update it. I'm the safest option to get configs for APB (second to LO themselves of course).

I have no knowledge of this and none of the people I've talked to about it do either but it sounds plausible.

Actually, you cannot repack APB's UPK files to be used in APB because they use an encryption which only LO can do. The rainbow conc file is a really old file from some really old APB client which just simply still works due to the encryption being the same. I don't wanna go into detail because we are already scraping the bounds of the forum rules.

Everything included in my public config is approved for usage and distribution by LO themselves. I've asked them about every single thing included with my config ZIP file and have received approval for each. Configs that were disapproved of I have excluded. Mind you, this is only true about my newer config versions, not my original ones from 2017 which are also now outdated and will likely not function properly anymore anyway. I've never seen my entire config being approved on there personally and haven't heard of it before. Regarding the Rainbow Concs/OPGL nade glow, I've been allowed to distribute that too so that wouldn't be a reason for it.

Those are called localization configs and you can grab mine from my twitch channel page. It has exactly what you are looking for. Also if you need more help, DM me on the forums/discord because discussing game mods/configs in threads is against the forum rules.

And vastly overpowered because players using grenade launchers will have no fear from damaging teammates, thus spamming nades even more viciously at the enemy whilst their teammates are also pushing them with no fear of taking damage from said nades. They would become useful because it would become even easier to use explosives than it already is and even more unbalanced for the opp. Suddenly, OPGL will become meta in every premade match up and thats not something you can balance by nerfing grenade launchers because it wouldn't make a difference.

One can dream... EAC was the one single thing that made APB properly playable.

Revert weapon balancing to pre-LO state across the board. Its the only way.

Not to mention that disabling friendly fire will allow everyone to spam nades freely on top of each other with no downside for their team which will be an extremely overpowered strategy. Imagine having a close range 1v1 and suddenly getting naded but the enemy doesn't take any damage from it because it was his teammate's nade. Or someone pushing your corner while his teammate is nading the corner, essentially exploding the nade close to them but only you take damage from it. Friendly fire is essential to the game's balancing.

Getting rid of premades will make almost all of those players quit the game. Most players who don't have friends to play the game with consistently have already left the game for this and many other reasons. Its a population problem and there is no solution other than to get more players into the matchmaking pool. Yes, it is extremely frustrating and matchmaking in APB is more unfair than ever nowadays, with cheaters and premades (and premades of cheaters) around every corner but not letting people group up will only drain the population even quicker.

A lot of these threads are just beating dead horses at this point but in short - EAC definitely. APB has not had a more playable period than during the EAC period in its entire history as it had the all time lowest amount of cheaters across the board. And keep in mind that it was just EAC's client side alone. We never even got to utilize the server side which would have probably cleaned up 99.9% of the game. Every other anti-cheat that we've had on APB has been a royal disappointment as they just don't cut it. Nowadays we have even more rage hackers running around for months on end and nothing is being done about it even with tons of reports with proof (some of them even streaming the game/uploading fragmovies on YouTube), meanwhile BE itself doesn't catch it since its all private cheats, lots of macros and triggerbots which also don't get caught by BE for the most part. It genuinely is reminiscent of the FF days in terms of freedom for cheaters. And yes, I am sure BE is catching a lot of amateur cheaters upon login with some poorly made cheat but that amounts to nothing when they are probably the ones coding it in the first place and were simply caught on a throwaway test account. "BE has banned so many accounts" doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things because there are closets (and rage closets) running around Citadel constantly, barely ever being caught and having to reroll/buy new accounts where they proceed to do it again for another 6 months+ unphased. Its tragic that almost every time I see someone playing arranged matches/scrims on stream nowadays its just Hack vs Hack with at least 1 cheater (of any capacity) on each team.

Just use a low graphics config which turns down most things but keeps characters and cars high quality so you can see designs, which are the only important part. You can try my config which is just that (its on my twitch stream page). Or use the Advanced APB Launcher to make your own. Its the only fix for RTX crashing until the engine upgrade comes out. Not true. They fully approve of the Advanced Launcher and they even host a download for it on their website.

You already have a version of the new engine on consoles (Unreal Engine 3.5) and its the only reason the game runs on consoles at all to begin with. The original work on the engine upgrade was started by G1/RP many years before Little Orbit came into the picture. The problem is that they just did a really quick and crappy job of it just so they can release it and get some quick money off of new console players. The PC version of APB (which runs on some beta version of Unreal Engine 3 with tons of in-house/homemade scripts and modifications to it implemented by Realtime Worlds) would never run on consoles. And thats why they rushed it out the door for consoles and left PC on the old engine. What Little Orbit have been trying to do is pick up whatever progress G1/RP did on the engine upgrade and make it actually work and run properly on all platforms, PC and Consoles. The general plan is to get APB to run on the exact same engine build on all platforms which will make it significantly easier to work on and implement new features and fixes. Which means that console players will also be getting the final product of the engine upgrade and you will have pretty much every piece of content you might've been missing for some years now that PC has. I imagine that public testing is only done on PC because its significantly easier to organize things and then grab the needed feedback and results from said testing on PC. Once its ready to go it will come to all platforms. To my knowledge the console version of APB runs pretty poorly right now and has plenty of bugs but all of these issues should be ironed out once they've finalized their work. The engine upgrade is crucial to APB's future on all platforms. I recommend that you take a look at the APB 2021 Roadmap and the Tracking the Engine Upgrade thread where Matt Scott highlights the progress on the engine upgrade if you want to get technical with it.

Whats the point in using the regular https://apbdb.com/ when https://dev.apbdb.com/ is so much better in every way and even shows damage curves? Why do we even have two?

No reskins exist of the STAR. Similar are N-TEC and FAR.