Flaws

You don't need to buy ammo.

EAC? Haha, I wish.

It used to make the OCA Whisper have an invisible model which was fun. Now it just displays a default Whisper :I

Good players enjoy fun guns that require skill to use at maximum potential. Silvers don't like good players. That is the only problem

I don't know if I feel like having the exact same discussion as we did a year ago. I disagree with most of what you've written and I think its the view of a player of lesser skill (nothing wrong with that), especially the N-TEC comment. I lack interest in the game nowadays to argue about these things again, especially considering that LO refuse to listen anyway. The population numbers speak for themselves.

Yeah and how did them not listening go for them? We went from having more options that were viable in the meta to like 2-3 and with each weapon change patch the population dropped more and more and we're now here with people quitting left and right for good (in addition to all the other problems with the game and the engine upgrade progress). There is no way to achieve such balance between so many guns where all of them remain viable and used equally as much. Whats more important is to make the meta more diverse similarly to what it was before LO started fiddling with weapons. We had a decently stable meta that people liked before LO started toying around with it. In their attempts to diversify it more, they made it tons more stale. JG became broken for years and still is, then PMG got buffed and OCA got nerfed so it was nothing but JG/PMG all day, every day on every tryhard every mission for months and months. Then we got an OCA re-buff but we lost the PMG in the process so now its JG/OCA instead. Meanwhile the shotguns have barely been touched since they completely butchered them originally where JG is an absolute monster and CSG feels like a nerf gun. The N-TEC (the one gun that requires most skill in the whole game that is able to compete) got like 300 needless nerfs while other "GGEZ" weapons like OCA/PMG/JG got buffed to the point where you don't need any other weapons at all. The HVR got butchered and is now just broken at range but boring as hell to play. You know, at least it was fun before. OBIR got a huge nerf with the bolt timer on it which only makes the game slower and more boring. RFP got executed mercilessly, head clean off medieval style. That gun is dead in the water. The only good things that have come out of LO's weapon balancing are things like the COBR-A and maybe the Misery which got buffed. All in all, their nerfs have been horrible to the point where they kill a gun and their buffs are meh at best with a couple good ones. Before any other changes happen, they should revert 90% of what they've done first and start from there. And most importantly, stop being so stubborn with reverting weapons. The game is on the brink of dying completely and potentially shutting down for good, they don't have the option to be stubborn and not listen to the right people anymore.

I've barely been following this thread as I didn't realise that its still active but I'd like to elaborate a bit on the current situation we find ourselves in. Easy Anti-Cheat was easily the best thing that had happened to APB in it's entire history. The game had never been more playable until that point. I used to play for hours on end every day and I wouldn't meet any cheaters or I'd see one every 2 weeks or like one a month. It was an absolute blessing considering that cheating is one of the top all-time problems of APB. That period was the best and most playable under LO, especially prior to some of the brainless weapon changes that came to be during that time. We swapped back to Battleye while knowing full well that Battleye is a significantly worse anti-cheat and that it does not meet the requirements of APB. I mean, we had it literally right before changing to EAC and we knew that it didn't work and it still doesn't, we had originally upgraded for a reason. I've heard multiple different versions of the same story of why the switch back happened exactly but thats beside the point. Battleye is extremely slow and seems to lack a lot of the protection that EAC provided. An anti-cheat needs to be much faster in detecting cheaters and BE simply isn't able to keep up. This becomes clear when you notice how long it takes for rage speedhackers and silent aimers to get banned. It can take up to a week which is just astonishingly bad considering that there isn't even a fraction of an attempt to hide their cheats and a single glance by any living human being can tell instantly what is going on. This simply wasn't a thing with EAC. You wouldn't see those certain russian rerolls on EU that play on a brand new trainee account every week with nicknames you cannot possibly even begin to attempt to pronounce who minttk and obliterate everything in their path with just a stock N-TEC 5 and FBW either. The reason an anti-cheat needs to be fast, especially in such an old F2P game is because you cannot permanently stop a person from making a new account and logging in to cheat. IP bans and HWID bans are useless as most of the experienced, dedicated cheaters (both ragers and closets) know how to bypass and spoof all of these detections and head right in. EAC had what APB needed for the most part and we pretty much threw it away and paved way for the old cheaters to come back, who btw started popping up practically instantly on day 1 of being back to BE, going full force. Unfortunately, I cannot name any names but if you play in EU silver districts and pay literally any attention at all, you know them. Now think of how long it takes to detect an experienced closet. Well, we still have a whole bunch playing actively on EU who are going full force on their mains (and even tend to stream it) and don't seem to be bothered by BE in the slightest. All in all, the situation seems to only be going downhill from here. It feels like we're one foot in FFbans territory again but without the false manual banning by corrupt G1 employees and without the forum which documented and advertised every ban with comments on it, that also had ads all over it in order to pretty much profit from APB toxicity and from people with nothing going on in their lives who tried their best to ruin other people's lives through doxxing and other illegal and immoral means. Thanks, whoever the creators of that cesspool were again, I'm sure you made some money off of everyone else's suffering. At the end of the day, I firmly believe that if LO had the option to overpay for whatever services EAC could provide to APB it would have still been a much better business decision long-term instead of switching to an anti-cheat that just doesn't have what it takes for a problematic game such as APB. Of course, I don't know the exact situation or differences in pricing, etc. But I feel like that was a part of our saving grace and we just flushed it down the toilet. TL;DR: EAC > BE

Read my whole post. Only some do, like I explained. Quality of life isn't advantage. You don't and thats one of the reason they don't ban for particle removals even with reports. In fact, they don't ban for anything other than shaders until the engine upgrade comes out - which btw is barely configurable. Not even close to what current APB is like.

Most configs in APB don't give any significant advantage over other players. Its mostly performance based or convenience/quality of life features which should've been in the game from the very beginning. I was originally going to give an example with my own public APB config and list all the features it has but I figured that might be against forum rules. The only configs which do give an advantage and I personally consider to be cheating are particle removals such as muzzle flash, explosions, smoke and fire. While its true that removing them greatly improves performance on any machine, it is also cheating as you gain much greater visibility than everyone else. Aiming without muzzle flash is 10x times easier than playing with it enabled. And then imagine a car exploding or a concussion nade blowing up and theres smoke everywhere, but for you there is no smoke so you can see everything and everyone perfectly clear and aim them down. Those are the only types of configs which give you an advantage and are cheating. Of course, its nothing like aimbot or wallhack but its still a big enough deal in a lot of situations. Also, shaders are bannable in APB if reported with evidence (due to what was showcased by rooq in that video), however, crosshair overlay programs are allowed 100%. I have checked and confirmed this personally with the right people, although I do not use any custom crosshairs myself. They do not give you an advantage if you know where the center of your screen is. Macro is a whole different thing though. It can give you an edge in more than one ways such as lowering recoil substantially and allowing you to max rate of fire any semi/burst weapon. Macros are already strictly prohibited and bannable if detected. But they are hardly that big of an issue in the face of the many aimbots, wallhacks, triggerbots, silent aims and speedhacks that plague this game since the switch back to Battleye from Easy Anti-Cheat. When you have this big of a cheater problem in a game, things like configs for more performance and mission stage descriptions are nothing but laughable as "problems".

Maybe. But actual positive changes to things like performance (instead of just simple bug fixes) should be enough of an incentive (assuming there was even that). The differences from Beta 3 to Beta 5 are so insignificant. Less and less people will bother with downloading the future Betas because of this.

Love the game, got like 30h on it already. If you're talking about Jericho - yeah, that server is dead. But Citadel still sees like 500 people during peak time. Late night/early morning APB pop is not what you should judge it by. That is always very low.

I had that problem once when I installed Borderlands 1 which installs its own older version of Nvidia PhysX and broke my APB. What fixed it for me was simply launching the regular APB updater/launcher which patched it to the correct one again. That's my best guess, assuming you haven't tried that already.

If it releases in the state that we've seen in the Open Betas recently it will only speed up the game's death. Sure, there will be some old players coming back just to see it due to the long wait time alone but upon seeing how bad it is - they'll leave and likely never look back. This is APB's last chance for a reason and right now it doesn't look good at all. In fact, if APB remained the way it is now on this old engine it would survive a lot longer than if they release the engine in it's current state. The current APB 2.1 builds are a lot worse in many ways. At least in current live APB the players that come back to play it every now and again know what to expect, they know how it performs on their PCs and they've come to terms with it. On the current new engine builds that will not be the case. A lot of the problems come from overblown promises by LO and Matt which could not be kept, whether purposefully or not is not for me to say. Back when LO purchased G1/APB they told us that the engine is almost ready to ship but here we are 2 years later and the latest build is unplayable regardless of how powerful our gaming rigs are. Ridden with bugs, terrible lighting and poor performance. Had they just told us that its going to be a while before we get anything decent due to RP's slow progress on it, people would be more lenient about the game. LO rode the hype train wrong and its backfiring. The hype was there already with just having another company purchasing the game which more or less meant that APB's lifetime is being extended by at least a few more years or so. When you hype up something you do yourself a great disservice as a game dev. You put tons of pressure on yourself and your team during development and then when it finally sees the light of day its just a disappointment to many players. In APB and LO's case this was done by claiming that something as big as the engine upgrade is right around the corner and talking about all the great features and improvements it will bring to the game. A lot of us started dreaming big of what APB could become within the next 2-5 years of LO's acquisition but somehow 2 years later we're in almost the same spot, with some improvements of course, but the core game and its issues have not truly changed or improved a whole lot. I could go on and on but thats already going off-topic from OP's question.

Nah, they need to listen to the more competitive players because APB is a competitive PvP shooter. It needs to cater to competitive gamers who would play the game and compete in it. Those are the ones that would keep a game like APB alive. I've said it before: newbies call APB "poor man's GTA" and thats because it literally looks like knock off GTA. It was advertised badly, as if its a casual alternative GTA, which it isn't at all. It needs to embrace it's potential of being one of the best third person competitive shooters, whilst also having some casual aspects like designs, community events and other side activities. It can be so much more if only someone actually puts the effort in. They will lose even more if they try to cater to casuals because why would you play knock off GTA when real GTA is so accessible and it does all the GTA stuff so much better than this game ever will? It makes no sense. APB has a unique base that needs a lot of work. It needs to be advertised as a competition oriented PvP shooter which it is at the end of the day. It gathers the wrong crowd. Casual players are good to have but not as the main portion of the community for a PvP shooter and definitely not the main group to cater to. The players that invest a lot of time in a game are also coincidentally players who take it at least semi-serious and they are a lot more likely to drop money on said game than any casual passer by who is just hopping F2P games on Steam/Xbox/PS.

The game has been where? Past 2k players average? With a good, solid engine which gives everyone decent performance on hardware thats a decade newer than the game itself? With perfect weapon balance and with a decent anti-cheat? No, it hasn't. Not even close. Ever. The closest we had was the anti-cheat with EAC and that was only half-way since they never managed to implement EAC's server side protection and now even the client-side is gone anyway. Things like weapon balance aren't ever just decided once and for all. These are things that take time and many attempts which is why they should only be handled by experienced players of higher skill level and not "the majority". Not every noob should have a say in game balance regardless of their community status. Yeah, when they screw up the weapon balance, people will come back to ask for a fix for that. Just because they changed something because people wanted them to doesn't mean that they've done it right the first, second or third time. LO is to blame for listening to the wrong people for 2 years now for multiple decisions. There will always be players raving on forums about this and that but at the end of the day you need to be able to differentiate who is right and who is wrong as a game developer, especially after dealing with the same people for 2 years. You need to have a vision for the kind of game you want to make and know what the right decision is for it and not just take random silvers' opinions and mash them together to see what happens.

No. Not at all. We all always wanted APB to prosper as much as possible and unfortunately it never went there due to poor management and other factors. APB only had one good period of like half a year or so during EAC which is when the game was decently playable. Afterwards, we not only lost EAC and went back to Battleye but weapon balance got butchered more than ever to the point where gunplay is no longer fun. Put these two together, more cheaters coming back and unfun gameplay. Population starts to drop more and more as people move on to better games. How is that the players' fault? Then eventually we see a bunch of engine upgrade betas which are advertised as the game's future which look abysmal and are barely playable compared to the already shaky normal game with it's shaky performance. Since its been 2 years since LO's acquisition of APB they've made very little progress so people are getting disheartened more and more so they keep leaving, everyone for different reasons. You seem to be missing the point entirely. We don't want "more and more endlessly". We want vital, baseline things in order to keep the game at least semi-enjoyable and then work it's way up to grow and get more population. More population = more money. More money = extended lifetime for the game. That's what game devs generally would want for their games too so there is nothing wrong with wanting more when what we have is so little. We get frustrated with LO because of the often bad decisions they take and the time they take to work on the engine and game improvements in general. If you're satisfied with what you have that means that you are no longer growing and no longer improving which is bad for everything in life. Especially when things are in such a poor state already.

That is so wrong on so many levels. Even when things weren't perfect before either at least we had more players to play against. Those 80 players in the district cycle around all the time and aren't stagnant. Nowadays they are. Also, we had better weapon balance before too. We had EAC at one point which was amazing compared to any other anti-cheat APB has had. Saying that if we aren't satisfied now, we never will be is a joke.

In terms of "suggestions" I'm sure we all have hundreds. I myself have a lot of quality of life suggestions but the problem is that they are extremely far out in the future. Those are relatively minor things that would only add to the experience whereas all the things you've listed are major problems that are extremely important for every single player that touches APB. Those need to be dealt with before anything else is recommended or suggested by anyone, let alone worked on. If things started genuinely picking up I would surely stay with the game but now that the population is continuously dwindling and the game itself becomes more and more boring and annoying to play (due to facing the same groups every minute, every hour, every day, every week) people will only keep leaving. We saw it happen on NA and now its happening on EU, the last "sanctuary" for leftover APB players. I've not really even played at all this past month because theres no reason to and because I have better things to do. The engine upgrade betas spell disaster for the future of the game meanwhile people's tolerance of current APB has been diminishing by the month. New players wouldn't like current APB due to matchmaking (mainly) as well as some other areas of the game that are dated or just don't work very well. APB 2.1 is even less presentable so that will not lure any new players in who want to get into a game enough to drop money on. APB is still being called "poor man's GTA" in the newbie circles and thats for a good reason, as untrue as it is realistically. Who wants to play poor man's GTA when you can have real GTA which does the GTA stuff better? I don't want to be needlessly harsh on LO but this is legitimate criticism and things need to really turn around rapidly if we want APB out of the gutter.

I don't remember having to switch to HVR due to someone QSing (unless I wanted to). And HVR at range still functions all the same so I still need to switch to it in super long range spots anyway so how is that any different? The car gameplay affects the HVR how exactly? It affects it the same way as it affects the OBIR, you sit in your car, you drive 80m away and get out to get an easy kill. That whole tactic in general is broken but thats a core part of the game's problems. N-TEC was perfectly fine, it was the weapon that should've been the center of all other weapons to be balanced around but instead they busted it and now its a shadow of its former self. We had a fun mechanic in jump shooting (with other ARs as well) which is now gone so we're stuck on the ground like we're playing CS to get a little bit of accuracy. Fun gone. Also, using forum threads to back up your argument isn't really valid considering that its the forum threads by silvers that got the weapon balance to be as bad as it is today and you know this. Also, I don't remember anyone ever asking for a carbine buff at all? I feel like it was fine before but I don't necessarily disagree with the change. There was more diversity in the CQC category for sure, thats undeniable. But you're also contradicting yourself by saying that tryhards stick to OCA/N-TEC/HVR (which is true) and that is certainly less diversity than before. Like I already said, back then we had at least 4 weapons to pick from in CQC - not the best diversity but better than now. Now we've cut it down to 1 or 2 (JG/OCA). For range we see less OBIR now due to the latest changes to it so its mostly HVR and maybe Obeya. For mid-range theres still the N-TEC, Carbine, OSCAR which have always been there. Instead of increasing diversity, they shrink it. The problem with weapon balance in games is that something will always be the best, top choice for every situation so whatever they do, they won't be able to get it right. Huge gaming companies struggle to get it right for the entire lifetimes of their games, let alone LO with the amount of weapons RP added. If anything I think that some guns should be converted into reskins to ease balance a bit. The problem gets worse though, when you take the few good guns in the game and butcher those too and everything feels crap, unfun and the whole point of the game is gone out the window with it. You could say that people would stack HVR QS or N-TEC but that certainly took more skill than shotguns ever will. We complained because we had no idea just how much worse it could become. The population numbers speak for themselves, the more LO touched on the balancing, the more good players left. Each update was a hit to the population and now we're at an all time low again with basically no good players still playing the game anymore due to their frustration with weapon balancing and the engine upgrade being unplayable.

Weapon balance is the only thing RP was better at than LO (aside from their scummy episodes like the random ATAC buff and the Troublemaker era to make a quick buck off of the noobs). LO's balancing has been bad and I can confidently say that back when HVR QS and broken Yukon were still a thing the game was way more fun than the boring, meta-slave fest we've had since LO's very first shotgun changes until present. We had way more diversity than we do now even though their idea of balance is to have diversty - which they've repeatedly failed at, especially in the CQC category. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it - revert everything to pre-LO state aside from the Yukon firerate fix and maybe 1-2 other things and start slowly and gradually from there. And most importantly stop listening to people who are Gold 2 (and lower) on their main accounts in-game since this is how we got here. CQC category example: Pre-LO you could pick JG/CSG and OCA/PMG in CQC and they would all work fine. Now we've had two mini-eras: JG/PMG and currently JG/OCA. From 4 we went down to 2 (arguably to 1 of the two for a lot of people). Weapon balance is one of the main reasons for the game's population dropping over the past years, you know, right next to the bad engine upgrade betas. Boring meta where you absolutely need to pick the exact gun in the category to be able to compete against lil Timmy who has a towel covering his chair to soak up all his sweat from point and clicking with JG all day long (or just triggerbotting since thats still a thing, largely thanks to Battleye being next to useless). I have to agree here. I think that instead of nerfing anything, all guns should get an accuracy boost across the board as to reduce RNG which everyone hates universally. RNG in general is one of the biggest problems of the game mechanically and nerfing weapons by increasing their bloom is only making matters worse and the game more frustrating. Also jump shooting should see a bit more utility instead of it being removed as APB is supposed to be an arcadey, fun shooter and not Counter-Strike. I legit had more fun being able to have HVR QS and HVR jumpshoot fights against other players (even cheaters) than dueling with JGs on corners for an entire mission.

Then those people don't know the first thing about competition or competitive experience in shooters.

Basically this. I'd rather not have them release it within the next 2 years than release anything even remotely close to what we found in any of the open betas and I think I can speak for the majority when I say this.

This will hardly keep anything fresh lol Either way, I assume whenever they decide to do the next Joker Store update.

Every game's management has full access to logs of who logged into every account at which date, exact time with physical location data, IP addresses, HWIDs and other kinds of fingerprints. Excuses such as that won't hold any water if the evidence shows otherwise.

I was referring to the high tier/high skill meta where HBF is still good if you car gameplay carefully and armored engine paired with steel plating allows you to get away from tight situations a bit easier before your car catches fire. Armored engine has saved many stages. I can somewhat see that being useful but I'd rather not get damaged as much as I normally would in the first place. They're both useless at high skill. Slower fire damage does not help you at all since your car is already out of commission and is of little to no use to the mission. Chassis Strengthening is too niche of a thing to waste a whole slot on, it will barely be a relevant factor in gameplay. Equip Pioneer/Espacio for those missions and keep good blue mods on instead with 15 cargo slots. Cars, just like guns, should be swapped around depending on the mission variables. I usually give insight on meta loadouts as those are the most relevant ones. If you're not playing meta then you can use whatever.