Flaws

It was actually a rather confusing statement many people interpreted in different ways. I for one thought that it was EAC that was dropping APB but then other credible sources have said otherwise. I would also like another post that makes it clear for everyone.

A warning would do nothing against cheating. Every player that uses any kind of hack or cheat is aware that they will be punished severely if they get caught and they are willing to take that risk and suffer the consequences. Regarding any hate speech and harassment it should be obvious that it is unacceptable and will be punished severely as well. This is what the Terms of Service (ToS) and the End User License Agreement (EULA) are for. Sure, some players might be unfamiliar with common rules across most online video games or they might "forget" in the heat of the moment, but that does not invalidate the rules or make you immune to them. There is definitely an influx of cheaters since the switch back to Battleye, that is undeniable. Battleye is simply an inferior anti-cheat compared to EAC but it really isn't as bad as you've described it, not yet at least. First, you need evidence to back up your claims of players "walling" or "botting". Any player can say anything and they do that, in most cases very uneducated players of lower skill level who are just suffering the poor matchmaking of the game, being matched up against high skill players who mop the floor with them. That is one of the most common sights in APB. Being able to jump-carry medium items is not a cheat, hack or any type of bot. It is an "exploit" of the game mechanics which you can do easily with just a mouse and keyboard, you do not need any type of software, cheat, hack, macro or bot to achieve and as such it is not bannable. Also, they cannot "carry the item faster than you can chase them" because the exploit only allows you to move the item at sprint speed, which you are already moving at while you sprint normally (and chasing after them). You cannot do this with heavy items anymore, you could do that many years ago but the best you can do now is pick it up and drop it so you skip just a little bit of space but you cannot efficiently do it in mid-air anymore. I wonder what you mean with "track you through buildings". First, if anyone is wallhacking and they are looking at you through a wall, you likely wouldn't know about that unless you can see their position and you can tell that they are moving towards you, pre-nading you or pre-firing you without having any solid knowledge about your position repeatedly (keep an eye out for Spotter, Tagger mod users and Firework Launcher users). Someone could be wallhacking and you would never know if they are experienced in the field. And if you just mean that players are shooting at you through walls, where they cannot deal damage to you, that doesn't help them in any way so I'm not sure what you're on about here. I do not understand what "bobfire bot" and "fasthandswap bot" mean. You cannot alter any weapon stats/values as they are server sided, even if you installed any type of cheat or macro, so you cannot make them fire any faster than you could with clicking it. Granted, that kind of clicking would require high mechanical skill, those players are usually just more experienced with those weapons. This isn't to say that there aren't players who triggerbot and macro said weapons, but they aren't as many as you claim there are. You can make a weapon such as the Joker SR15 Carbine fire really fast once you get used to the timing between shots in order to maximize firerate, especially with Cooling Jacket on it. This goes for every semi-auto weapon and even burst weapons such as the OBIR or OSCAR. Regardless, you mentioned that you came back for the Beta but you did not mention how long your break from APB has been. Perhaps you are just rusty after a long while of being away from the game and you need to re-learn some aspects?

Oh no, neither of the options are good. Did we already forget how bad the matchmaking was when we had no threat segragation and silvers got even more bullied by actual good players (not even dethreaters) meanwhile the good players just kept quitting for the day after 5 consecutive missions against bronzes and trainees because of how dreadfully boring and awful the game was? Absolutely no removing the already barely functioning matchmaking system. It will be detrimental to the game as new players will get deterred from APB 10x times more and so will veterans who just can't get opp that is worth their time. Keeping everything as it is is also a really poor choice because its only half-functional. Everyone is basically playing in the wrong districts and matchmaking is still messed up regardless. What we need is phasing + making gold more difficult to achieve, maybe even forcing some low golds down to silver when it comes to it, depending on how they scale it and make them work for gold after said changes have taken effect (if they have what it takes). Make all threat levels have players for them so the system can correctly indicate skill level. Now and for many years back, its been easier to be silver/gold than it is to be green/bronze and that truly speaks for itself. Gold needs to mean something and silver shouldn't indicate that you are simply bad, which it realistically currently does because you can't even get gold (no offense). Its really easy to be gold if you've played for years, assuming you don't play at sub 60fps stable or you don't have anything major getting in your way of course. We all know that there are golds and there are golds. Some golds don't even come close to scratching the surface of the amount of skill and experience other golds have and that is only one of the major issues.

Download my config and take a look at the localization folder. Its available on my twitch stream link in my signature. You can open up the files individually and edit everything using my config as a base and as a reference.

It depends on what kind of aim you want to practice. If you want to practice point and clicking then use sniper rifles, OBIR, OSCAR, pump shotguns. If you want to practice tracking - N-TEC, OCA, Carbine, PMG, FAR, Obeya CR762 are probably your best bets. There is a difference between the two types of aiming so you need to pick your weapons depending on which you want to work on. Regardless, I wouldn't recommend relying on APB to improve your aim all that much. If you want to get good raw aim you'll need to move your attention towards an FPS aim trainer of some kind, for example Kovaak's 2.0: The Meta on Steam. Raw aim > game-specific aim.

I've never had this issue before, not with APB footage and not with any other. I'm assuming that there is something off with the render settings or project properties. Though to me it looks like an MBL filter being applied on top. Maybe try some of the other presets Vegas has to offer and see if it still does it.

That just looks like you have some type of filter on top, no? If you just put a raw video file in Vegas it shouldn't darken it, at least it never has in my years of using it.

Which reminds me that the "Item not ready yet" red text should go away completely from the game and the indication for ability being on cooldown should just be a little flash/glow effect around the ability you are trying to use each time you click the button.

These sound good on paper, I've been asking for that 3rd change for a long while now. Not sure about the time and cooldown changes but we will have to see about those in-game. However, I assume that you just made it so it appears on top of the player model so if you want to check, you'd need to pan your camera up? If that's the case, we will need a more robust notification which appears on the HUD/UI itself somewhere which should also work for Firework Launcher markers and Tagger mod tags, at some point in the future.

Deleting accounts in games is never a good idea unless its for some actual serious security reasons where you want to disappear/hide your identity online etc. I highly recommend that you just take a break from the game like most of us do every once in a while and come back at a later date and give it a shot again. I know many players over the years who sold off their accounts or deleted them outright and ended up coming back, having to start over and thats no fun.

I'm not sure. I'm only speculating.

It being bumped to 40 (20vs20) players per district probably has to do with server capacity limitations that they have right now. Purchasing more servers just for 2 weeks of an event isn't really worth it. Not to mention them having to host the Open Beta which will surely take it's toll on their server capacity. Regardless, its still much better and more playable than 80 player gungames.

At this point I completely stopped reading the post because its all nonsense. This is genuinely the best event LO has made so far, finally putting gun games in the right districts for it (fight club) and reducing it to 20vs20 like it should be. I love the prototype mode because its a fun, refreshing mode that does things that we've never seen before. I am glad that they took the freedom to do that. The only issue with the framerate comes from the True Ogre because shooting it creates way too many particles but if they were to patch that somehow, there wouldn't be any fps issues. 80 person gun games were an absolute whackfest, I don't know why you or anyone would ever want to see that ever again. It was horrible, completely luck ridden, 0 skill requirement, it lagged more than anything in the whole game and the spawns were probably the worst part of it all. On top of that it only ran for an hour on weekends SOMETIMES. Now we have it on demand, it is much more about skill and less about luck (save for the prototype one, that one is just for fun and it should remain that way), and the lag only occurs during the prototype one anyway which can be fixed easily UNLIKE the 80 person gungames which cannot possibly be fixed or made fun in any capacity. I sincerely hope LO do not take your criticism to heart because it is clearly not even trying to be objective. It all just seems like the usual APB player salt that originates from other things and you decide to take it out on the game and whatever is happening in it currently.

Its probably not going anywhere anytime soon and by the time anything as good as EAC (or better) comes along for APB, it'll be far too late.

Nice.

cough CS:GO cough

The only problem is that APB is too old and too shit to have EAC's server side implemented, which is what would catch triggerbots easily in most cases. We were only running the client side and it was the best period of APB to date (regarding cheaters). Now we're back to a shitty client side which doesn't detect anything and is relatively easy to bypass. I don't believe you because I'm clearly seeing the slow but gradual growth of cheaters on Citadel. And even if "the triggerbotters are gone" (which they aren't), the tradeoff isn't worth it whatsoever because now we have semi-private full package cheats (aimbots, wallhacks, triggerbots, etc) that work flawlessly and don't get you banned regardless of how hard you're cheating with it. I've seen it with my own eyes, I know it for a fact.

That's such a terrible excuse. We already know for a fact that BE doesn't stop actual cheats like aimbot/silent aim/wallhack of all types and triggerbots nearly as well as EAC did. Without playing NA I can promise you that that's nothing but placebo.

We're slowly approaching the old days of ffbans without the ffbans part. It will take a bit more time for it to get that bad again but I've already seen more than enough both in-game and outside of it to know that we're going nowhere good. EAC was one of the key requirements for APB to make it into anything and its now gone for good. But its important to note that it isn't LO's fault for this as it was EAC that dropped APB and not the other way around.

Even if we look past the horrible weapon changes that are completely disconnected from reality, the switch to an inferior anti-cheat which lets players cheat blatantly for weeks/months on end concerns all of us equally. I don't see APB going anywhere without a good anti-cheat considering that cheating has always been one of the top problems in APB. I've already seen enough this past week to know where we're heading again. Anyway, I do not want to derail the thread but I just think that hoping for new districts is unrealistic at this stage. Not to mention that Financial and Waterfront were made by completely different people, a decade ago, who had a very different vision. If LO were to start work on a new district it probably wouldn't be of the same "aesthetic quality" (for a lack of better wording) as the ones we already have. It is too big of an undertaking considering all the other problems that are plaguing APB that require quick response. I've said it before - both us and them needed to focus on the most urgent issues and not on "racing district", "social minigames" or "new map" etc. There would be time for that later if things ever even got to that stage.

I wouldn't get my hopes up for APB considering recent changes.

BattlEye We're doomed.

I was clearly talking about ARs and jumpshooting with ARs. The only exception to this is if you are 85 and they try to land 1 lucky shot to finish you off at mid-range but that is extremely situational. Which brings me to another point: Many silvers actually take cases like that (where you jumpshoot for 1 hit to finish someone off) and like to say that the N-TEC's jumpshooting is broken (or in most cases they call me a cheater for it). If you genuinely take examples like that and put them forward as to why a weapon should be nerfed, you don't deserve a voice on the matter. Fucking period, this is indisputable. I read people like that like an open book, they lack any type of awareness of their surroundings in-game. This is just plain wrong. Actual good players never advocate for anything broken to remain in the game. And I don't mean your NA """good players""", but actual high skill players like we have on EU (very few of them still around nowadays). You seem to be desperately grasping at straws here. The differences in the relevant stats between N-TEC (post-nerf) and FAR (for mid-range, which is strictly what we are discussing here) are so tiny that it doesn't realistically make a difference during gameplay. HP dmg: N-TEC: 185 - FAR: 175 Per Shot Modifier: N-TEC: 0.65 - FAR: 0.60 Recovery Delay: N-TEC: 0.070 - FAR: 0.085 Recovery Per Second: N-TEC: 5.00 - FAR: 4.00 Some stats aren't even fair to compare to post-nerf N-TEC due to how badly its been butchered but I do not have access to exact pre-nerf N-TEC stats which were even closer. But this alone is enough to show just how identically they perform at mid-range. So when I say "about as good", I only say that because the gun isn't a reskin and the stats aren't 1:1 but they are extreeemely close to the point where that difference doesn't matter. Your "key difference" and your "statistical fact" right out the window. But honestly, like @Abduct / Devote said, this discussion with you genuinely feels like a waste of time, unfortunately. No offense but I'm not sure that I'll bother responding to you further, depending on what you bring to the table.

You didn't see any comments about it's CQC capabilities? What about every single noob that keept complaining about jumpshooting, you know, the main feature that was supposed to get nerfed on the N-TEC all along? Jumpshooting is a strictly CQC ability for ARs, its where all the noobs kept getting caught lacking. No, they kept it's mid-range capabilities for the most part, that also took slight a hit. The CQC capabilities didn't get "nerfed", they got destroyed. It was never that good in CQC (against any actual CQC weapon) and now its relatively useless even to what it was prior. Think of it like this, if someone with OCA doesn't hit you enough times to drop you before you can kill them with an N-TEC - they will die regardless of how good or bad the N-TEC is in CQC. Makes sense, right? What doesn't make sense is taking those examples and using them as your main argument for why the N-TEC is broken. Its laughable but its exactly how the N-TEC got nerfed regardless because LO don't take skilled players' opinions seriously enough. Except it will be, if selfish silvers with no aim keep crying on the forums enough like with the N-TEC. LO need to understand that a silver complaining on the forums doesn't understand the game and it's depth enough to know what really needs to be changed for the better. Almost all of them are looking after their own interest and thats the vast majority of players who can't see past their nose and can't think objectively about things. Its the exact same thing with the cheater situation. There is an entire group of APB players who live in their own fictional world where everyone is cheating even during EAC's reign of terror on cheaters. There are """cheater investigators""" on here who are nothing more but silvers disguised as people who know what they're talking about yet they haven't the slightest clue. The same thing applies to weapon balance and everything else. This is why other games carefully pick out who is in charge of what and who has a say in what. If you just listen to the common player, every game would be a disaster and that is where APB is currently headed. And yes, every game which is even semi-competitive has it's meta and thats a fact that you cannot change regardless of how well you balance things. It is simply unavoidable. The best you can try to do is make the less popular weapons stronger and balance them around the strongest meta weapons, not the other way around. But this is the problem with APB, G1 kept shoving guns with random.org stats in the game, making everything more of a mess and now its up to LO to try and balance all that. But if you're balancing a game which already has a good meta that has enough versatility in it, you don't go breaking that in favor of the lesser weapons. You buff the lesser weapons and make them more usable. Don't fix what isn't broken because that has never worked for any game company ever. That is how you piss off your core playerbase until people start leaving. We've seen it many times with other games. And I disagree wholeheartedly with anyone who wants to try and argue that jumpshooting and other arcade shooter mechanics shouldn't be a part of the game. I'm sorry but this isn't CS, this isn't a game where you can 1-tap people in the head for an instant kill. APB is based on mobility and movement even with ARs, that is where the skill comes from. Being able to move around quickly, dodge bullets, maneuver your surroundings to get cover, to get the drop on someone while they are unprepared, to push when the time is right to sync up with your team mates and so on. That is what makes APB fun to play, not sitting still with your gun so it doesn't bloom to the skies the moment you move an inch. If APB turns into that then it instantly loses it's charm and uniqueness combat wise. Anyway, you keep contradicting yourself by selectively ignoring the fact that the FAR plays the same as the N-TEC and does the same things about as good, yet you are saying its perfectly fine to be in the game. Now you are saying that the player experience would suck because of things like jumpshooting, meanwhile the FAR and STAR both jumpshoot better than the pre-nerf N-TEC, let alone current N-TEC. Please pick something and stick with it, this is getting old.

The FAR is almost the same as the N-TEC in every way it can be. The mag size is that of an N-TEC with MP3 on it which some EU players use anyway, it is irrelevant. The difference in bloom recovery is completely insignificant as it allows you to do things with the exact same efficiency as you do with the N-TEC, at the exact same range, with the exact same amount of shots (if you are actually good with the N-TEC, you would know this). It has better base accuracy and it has all of the CQC capabilities that the N-TEC had - but enhanced. Where exactly is this "nothing like the N-TEC" coming from? You not wanting to admit it? The STAR isn't good for anything besides spraying which is why its the noob gun and also looks and sounds horrible. There are plenty of reasons why players still run N-TEC (or any other gun) instead of FAR: They are trying to re-learn the N-TEC because they've always enjoyed it (me for example); They don't have access to FAR because it is too grindy or expensive for them; They don't want to use it despite it being a pre-nerf N-TEC because of its aesthetics and because it looks and sounds like a Toys-R-Us blaster (me again for example); They never used the N-TEC to begin with so why would they hop onto another N-TEC-like weapon anyway? And no, it wouldn't be like the VAS-C2 'Trouble Maker'* (C9 is an OCA). There is a huge difference between N-TEC/FAR and C2 because the C2 was mainly abused by the same silvers who use ATACs to get to gold to this day. It was never abused by skilled players at least on EU, we all despised it just like every other broken gun thats only purpose of existing was to turn bronzes into golds. That whole argument is invalid because it is a different situation altogether. The FAR isn't broken, it isn't a gold maker by any means so why even entertain the idea of comparing the situations? The CQC abilities were touched because thats what all the silvers cried about. No one ever said anything about the mid-range capabilities, thats only you alone on that train. The gun is a mid-range weapon - its supposed to be good at mid-range, especially in the hands of a high skilled player. You're too stuck on how the FAR isn't as good at mid-range as the N-TEC but in reality it actually is just good enough for that slight difference between them to be rendered insignificant. The FAR is simply underused because it looks terrible, sounds terrible, it is much less accessible to most players (as it is a F2P game) and overall why bother when the N-TEC exists - its the iconic AK and its one of the first guns you can grab and its the most fun weapon in the entire history of All Points Bulletin. The intent was to make the N-TEC specifically worse in CQC as to shut up and satisfy the crying silvers that spend money on Armas for ATACs and JMBs in hopes to get broken legendaries to carry themselves to gold somehow or to dethreat and bully trainees with them. Different strokes for different folks. I would reply to your reply towards @RespectThis but he summarised it pretty well. I am not complaining about the FAR at all, I am showing you the hypocricy among you and the noobs that you guard and that is the fact that everyone just wanted the N-TEC specifically gone because it was popular, because it was fun and took skill. Skill which none of the people screaming "NERF N-TEC" had what it takes to acquire and no offense but I am certain that that applies to you as well otherwise you wouldn't be on the wrong side of the table. Not because they actually had any idea what was wrong, why they kept getting beat by it, who beat them with it or the math behind why or how they wanted it nerfed. They just wanted "NERF", meanwhile not only are they abusing easy weapons so they can somehow keep a fragile gold threat level but also ignoring other weapons which perform the same as the N-TEC but are simply underused. Now it is up to us to pick up the next best thing and in a few months there will be threads about nerfing the next weapon and so on and so forth until everything is ruined and nothing is left of the little leftover fun of APB Reloaded. I'm sorry to break it to people on this forum but changing how guns work won't make you a better player and won't save you from the local high skill player who mops the floor with you every Saturday evening.