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Beastie

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Posts posted by Beastie

  1. Posted

    Thanks again to everyone that participated in the Weapon Prototype A testing on Friday. It was incredibly useful getting to play against you all and getting a feel for how the weapon balance worked in a live environment.The hands on experience and your feedback, along with the data gathered, will help us make further changes. Below are the exact balance changes that are in the Prototype environments. If you've been keeping track of the OTW changes, these will be fairly familiar to you, though there are a few changes. We also are aware that the PvP unlock that's in the Weapon Prototype districts are not really suited to large scale playtests (it's in there to help testing with small player counts). We'll switch it off for later tests.


    Assault Rifles
    In general. The standard-ranged ARs have received a 5m effective range reduction across the board. Combined with an increase in the range of rifles, this allows rifles (and LMGs, to an extent) to shine at longer ranges where previously most players would just take an NTEC. Min Damage Range stays the same, so you'll see a more gradual falloff of weapon performance over distance. This also promotes taking Rifling if you want to increase your range (more on this in a bit), at the cost of reducing your TTK at close range. This affects the following: ATAC, COBR-A, FAR, Raptor, S1-FA, STAR. The AR-97 'Misery' has been switched to use the long-range AR ranges. 

    NTEC
    The NTEC is a fairly difficult challenge to tweak, as it's by far the most popular weapon in APB and thus any changes will affect near our entire playerbase, but it does need some changes. There are two effective ways we can go about this without drastically changing the feel of the weapon, so we're investigating both simultaneously and we can compare side by side.

    Test A - Increase the fire-interval of the NTEC very slightly (from 0.14 to 0.145), adjusting accuracy stats so the accuracy over shots stays the same. This helps increase the perfect TTK slightly so it's closer to its contemporaries. At the same time we also reduce the Magazine capacity a little, to 30. It has a very high Kill to Magazine capacity as it is (and a relatively fast reload), so reducing this helps in a few ways: It makes missing slightly less forgiving, it makes the choice of blue mod more interesting, and gives players another comparison marker when choosing to use the weapon over the STAR (which now has more ammo than it).

    Test B - Reduce the effective accuracy of the NTEC, making it a little worse in terms of pinpoint effectiveness than other ARs, giving space for weapons like the ISSR, LCR and AR97 to get a look in. This reduces the base accuracy of the weapon to 28cms at 10m (from 24) and the Marksmanship modifier to 40% (from 35%). It also decreases jumping accuracy to 18 (from 12) to see if we can reduce jumping spray at close ranges a little. Minimum accuracy is 'improved' to stay the same as in live (since it's a multiplier on base accuracy). With this test, we also reduced ammo in the weapon to 28.

    Rifles
    In the same vein, we've increased the effective range of non-carbine Rifles by 5m, giving them a bit more oomph at ranges where they'd previously fall off. This affects the following:, FFA, CR-762, OBIR, SBSR. This is also important as a lot of rifles were relying on Rifling to make them valid for long distance engagements, and we're moving Rifling to be more of a trade-off than it was.

    Shotguns
    The range-reduction we made at the beginning of the week on Live for Shotguns was a stop-gap solution to help reduce the problem while we look at further reducing the power of shotguns. Their now very consistent kill-rates at close range allows us to change them in other areas to reduce their power while still making them the best choice at point-blank. We can also start dropping the effect of the pellet bonus damage in some cases where it's resulting in the weapons being too effective (note that this has the side-affect of increasing their total damage, this isn't a buff when you consider the 2-shot requirement goes up).

    Strife Test A - Total Damage increased to 931, 2-shot pellet count changed to 11 from 9 (Reduces Pellet Scale to 0.926 from 0.933). 

    CSG Test A - 2-shot pellet count reduced to 16 (from 13) (Damage 40 from 70, Scale 0.97 from 0.9). Fire Rate down to 0.77 (from 0.68).

    JG Test A -  2-shot pellet count reduced to 7 (from 6) (Damage 85 from 140, Scale 0.95 from 0.82). Fire Rate down to 0.73 (from 0.68)

    Shredder Test A - Increased fire interval to 0.42 (from 0.37). This is a revert of a buff from the previous patch. We buffed it in a number of ways, this one was a step too far.

    SMGs

    OCA
    The OCA fire-rate buff a few years ago was a bit over the top, but it did need something at the time to make it viable (it was overshadowed at the time by every other SMG other than the Norsemen). As such, we want to pull back the buff, but not remove it entirely.
    Test A - 0.095 fire interval (from 0.092). Accuracy stats adjusted so that it's the same as the faster fire rate.
    Test B - 0.098 fire interval (from 0.092, very close to its old 0.1 fire rate). Accuracy stats adjusted so that it's the same as the faster fire rate.

    Note: In some cases where weapons that are derivatives (such as the Whisper), they use the stats from the base weapon for initial testing, so don't worry; we're not planning on removing their unique features, it's purely to avoid data-duplication while tweaking.



    Looking forward to hearing your feedback from the playtest .

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  2. Posted

    Hello everyone,

    As you'll have noticed, we've placed the Weapon Prototype districts onto the live servers, allowing access to everyone with their live characters. These replace open conflict districts, and follow the same rules, with one additional caveat. To aid testing, we've also enabled PvP at all times for everyone, so you can shoot each other both on and off missions to help try out various weapons.

    To aid testing, and help us get some hands on feedback, there will be Developers playing in Weapon Prototype A on Friday 31st at 5pm GMT. This is 6pm British Summertime, or 10am US West Coast. This will be in the Citadel (EU) world. Join in and ready up to have a chance to play with / against us.

    The following weapons are different in the Prototype Districts:

    Assault Rifles in general have slightly lower range (apart from the Misery, ISSR, NTEC7, NTEC5-Scope and the LCR)
    NTEC has different stats.
    Shotguns have different stats.
    Rifles in general have slightly higher range (other than the OSCAR, VBR and the Joker Carbine)
    OCA has different stats.

    We'll go over exactly what's changed after the playtest.




     

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  3. Posted

    Hi Everyone.

    Below are what we've changed in the current version of OTW. One of our main goals with this balance pass is to try and get weapons focused more within their intended ranges. Shotguns are currently a bit overtuned and dominate close up (where as previously they were rarely used in favour of SMGs due to their relative inconsistency).  Likewise Assault Rifles (particularly the NTEC, but also in general) tend to push a bit too much into the range of Rifles, making Rifles for the most part seen less often than other categories. A lot of the changes here are somewhat experimental, and in this case we expect a fair few of them to be reverted entirely, but it's worth playtesting them to see if they're viable. We should also point out not to expect any of these changes to go live at any point soon, we want to do a lot of testing on these over the course of the next couple of weeks, and only release ones we are sure are ready.

    This new forum section should be used as a space to provide feedback on these changes.

    Assault Rifles
    In general. The standard-ranged ARs have received a 5m effective range reduction across the board. Combined with an increase in the range of rifles, this allows rifles (and LMGs, to an extent) to shine at longer ranges where previously most players would just take an NTEC. Min Damage Range stays the same, so you'll see a more gradual falloff of weapon performance over distance. This also promotes taking Rifling if you want to increase your range (more on this in a bit), at the cost of reducing your TTK at close range. This affects the following: AR-97, ATAC, COBR-A, FAR, Raptor, S1-FA, STAR.

    NTEC
    The NTEC is a fairly difficult challenge to tweak, as it's by far the most popular weapon in APB and thus any changes will affect near our entire playerbase, but it does need some changes. There are two effective ways we can go about this without drastically changing the feel of the weapon, so we're investigating both simultaneously and we can compare side by side.

    Test A - Increase the fire-interval of the NTEC very slightly (from 0.14 to 0.145), adjusting accuracy stats so the accuracy over shots stays the same. This helps increase the perfect TTK slightly so it's closer to its contemporaries. At the same time we also reduce the Magazine capacity a little, to 30. It has a very high Kill to Magazine capacity as it is (and a relatively fast reload), so reducing this helps in a few ways: It makes missing slightly less forgiving, it makes the choice of blue mod more interesting, and gives players another comparison marker when choosing to use the weapon over the STAR (which now has more ammo than it).

    Test B - Reduce the effective accuracy of the NTEC, making it a little worse in terms of pinpoint effectiveness than other ARs, giving space for weapons like the ISSR, LCR and AR97 to get a look in. This reduces the base accuracy of the weapon to 28cms at 10m (from 24) and the Marksmanship modifier to 40% (from 35%). It also decreases jumping accuracy to 18 (from 12) to see if we can reduce jumping spray at close ranges a little. Minimum accuracy is 'improved' to stay the same as in live (since it's a multiplier on base accuracy). With this test, we also reduced ammo in the weapon to 28.

    Note: The Scoped variant is unchanged in testing. If we actually make any changes to the NTEC, those changes will carry over.

    Rifles
    In the same vein, we've increased the effective range of non-carbine Rifles by 5m, giving them a bit more oomph at ranges where they'd previously fall off. This affects the following:, FFA, CR-762, OBIR, SBSR. This is also important as a lot of rifles were relying on Rifling to make them valid for long distance engagements, and we're moving Rifling to be more of a trade-off than it was.

    Shotguns
    The range-reduction we made at the beginning of the week on Live for Shotguns was a stop-gap solution to help reduce the problem while we look at further reducing the power of shotguns. Their now very consistent kill-rates at close range allows us to change them in other areas to reduce their power while still making them the best choice at point-blank. We can also start dropping the effect of the pellet bonus damage in some cases where it's resulting in the weapons being too effective.

    Strife Test A - Effective Damage increased to 903, 2-shot pellet count improved to 8 from 9 (Reduces Pellet Scale to 0.926 from 0.933). 

    CSG Test A - 2-shot pellet count reduced to 15 (from 13) (Damage 64 from 70, Scale 0.935 from 0.9). Fire Rate down to 0.8 (from 0.68). Effective Range changed to 1000/1750 (from 750/1750). This gives the CSG a little bit of its range back, but requires better accuracy, and takes longer to kill, helping distinguish it more from the JG.

    JG Test A - 2-shot pellet count reduced to 7 (from 6) (Damage 100 from 140, Scale 0.897 from 0.82).
    Shredder - Increased fire interval to 0.42 (from 0.37). This is a revert of a buff from the previous patch. We buffed it in a number of ways, this one was maybe a step too far.

    OCA
    The OCA fire-rate buff a few years ago was a bit over the top, but it did need something at the time to make it viable (it was overshadowed at the time by every other SMG other than the Norsemen). As such, we want to pull back the buff, but not remove it entirely.
    Test A - 0.95 fire interval (from 0.92).
    Test B - 0.98 fire interval (from 0.92, very close to its old 0.1 fire rate).

    Rifling
    We reduced the effectiveness of Rifling on live while we made some mechanical changes behind the scenes to be able to change it on a percentage basis, and this is the first test of this. Rifling (the OTW test variant) now increases range by 5,10,15%, followed by an absolute increase of 1, 2, 3 metres. This means it works better on longer range weapons, but at least has some effect on close range weapons (where the absolute increase has more of an effect). On average, Rifling 3 increases Shotguns by 4.5m, SMGs by 7.5, Carbines by 8.25, ARs by 10.5 (9.75 in prototype), Rifles by 10.5 (11.25 in prototype), LMGs by 13.5 and Snipers by 16.5 (essentially removing max range for them).

    Cooling Jacket
    We're also testing to see if adding the Cooling Jacket effect to Burst Interval as well makes sense. It provides an interesting counter-option to rifling for burst weapons, though notably right now Cooling Jacket is essentially all benefit for Burst weapons and no downside, so that'll need some thought before we go further with anything in this area.

    Financial Weapon Prototype
    For the purposes of making testing easier, we're running some slightly different rules on the Financial testing districts. The big difference you'll see immediately that everyone is PvP unlocked at all times, allowing you to easier test weapons in various circumstances. You can run missions in there as well, but be aware that players outside of your mission will be able to interfere. It's also essentially an open conflict district, to avoid any matchmaking issues with low player counts.

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  5. Posted

    7 minutes ago, Tobii said:
    I still feel like the range is fine but the damage is a bit over the top.
    As I mention above Tobii, these changes aren't meant to be final by any means (and I agree with you). We know from the previous round of testing that the Shredder wasn't too powerful with a shorter range, but in a better state than its previous live iteration, so this is a change we can make in a short amount of time while we look at longer term solutions.

  6. Posted

    Hi Everyone,

    Following up on Matt's post here:


    As Matt mentioned, we're going into another round of testing over the course of the next few weeks, and we'll be working with you all to both find balance for the shotgun changes (which were a little OTT) and also some tweaks to other weapons that we didn't cover with the previous test cycle. Since this is going to be a longer test period, we don't want to leave the game in its current situation for that length of time, so have some tweaks to shotguns in order to bring their ranges down somewhat. We know these changes are slightly blunt, and these weapons / mods will be receiving different balance changes in the test districts as we find a better position for them.

    The OTW build currently up contains the following changes:

    Rifling changed to 2.5m, 5m, 7.5m (from 3, 6, 9).
    CSG: Range down to 7.5m/17.5m (from 10m/20m)
    JG: Range down to 7.5m/15m (from 10/20)
    Shredder: Range down to 20m/40m (from 25/45).

    To reiterate, these changes aren't necessarily what we're planning to keep in the long term, they're short term fixes while we improve the items through OTW testing.

    These changes are available in the all non-prototype districts on the OTW client and we'd appreciate any feedback.

    Note: There are other changes in this build that are part of the setup for the A:B testing. These aren't going live this week. You can ignore them for now, I'll discuss them once these changes are tested.

     

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  8. Posted

    Hey all, here are the changes we've made to balance in the 1.19.6 patch. 

    New Weapon - Showstopper
    The showstopper is colby's newest sidearm, a revolver firing shotgun shells that reloads a shell at a time. This is a close-range weapon that can devastate a target point blank or finish off wounded stragglers. 

    The Showstopper is currently available through Joker Distribution and will be making its way to Armas soon. 

    Shotgun Changes
    Shotguns now deal more damage with the first pellets per shell that hit the target. The amount of front-loaded damage varies based on shotguns, and provides shotguns more consistency, as you can partially hit a target and still do considerable damage. This also requires us reducing the range of shotguns in order to stop them doing extreme damage outside of those ranges.

    These changes are (old values in brackets) :
    SG-21 'Strife' : Initial Damage 80 (45), Damage Total 858 (945) Range 7.5-15m (15-25)
    CSG : Initial Damage 70 (31), Damage Total 614 (651), Range 10-20m (20-40)
    DOW : Initial Damage 80 (41), Damage Total 471 (492)
    JG : Initial Damage 140 (66), Damage Total 700 (792), Range 10-20m (20-30)
    NFAS : Initial Damage 80 (41), Damage Total 381 (492), Range 10-20m (20-30)
    NFAS-Ogre : Initial Damage 50 (41), Damage Total 432 (492), Damage Total Range 10-20m (20-30)
    Shredder : Initial Damage 100 (49), Damage Total 482 (441), Fire Interval 0.37 (0.42), Range 25-45m (20-40)

    HVR Changes
    The HVR now has a reduced damage when firing with low accuracy. When accuracy is at unaimed accuracy or lower, you now do 280 damage. This increases up to fully accurate, where you do 850 damage. This helps us reduce quick-shooting and lucky hits from the hip at point blank range.

    Other Weapon Balance Changes
    AR97 'Misery' - Increase damage to 240 (from 200), Decrease recovery delay to 0.25 (from 0.58). This improves tap fire ability significantly. Decrease increment of Yaw Recoil Curve, meaning it ramps up less harshly. Removed minimum yaw recoil. Should now recoil more gently right and left.
    COBR-A - Removed Accuracy curve completely, using linear drop instead, Recovery Delay of 0.204. Recovery Per Second of 9.5. Removed minimum yaw recoil. Should now recoil more gently right and left.
    ISSR-a - Lower recovery delay to 0.335 (from 0.35)
    SWARM - Reduced horizontal recoil by 33%., Double recoil time to 20ms (from 10). Given the fire rate is 18ms this means that the gun never stops recoiling when you're firing full auto, making for a smoother, less jarring recoil., Walk Modifier 1.75 (7), Accuracy Cooldown 30 (20).
    SBSR (Rifle) - Gives it a unique recoil pattern that's significantly less harsh than the sniper variant. Base recoil halved to 1000 (from 2000)
    H-9 'Curse' - New Recoil Pattern. Same vertical recoil as before, but significantly reduced horizontal recoil (-35 to 23 from -118 to 118, now pulls slightly to the left).
    S-247 'Oblivion' - Walk modifier set to 0.25 (from 3), Accuracy Cooldown to 30 (from 20 default), Resupplies 10 rounds at a time (up from 5), Can now switch weapon during refire timer, Increased Damage to 325 (from 285), Decreased Reload time to 2.75s (from 3.2s).
    NCR-762 - Switched Crosshair. Uses existing assets but simplifies, stops overlap and removes top and bottom elements. Remove Movement Accuracy Recovery curve. Adjusted recovery rates and overall shot modifier caps to compensate. Will now never get more than 1-shot's worth of recoil away from full accuracy. Significantly increased the effect of the pershot modifier reduction as you fire. Increased Fire Rate to 0.735 (from 0.77).
    STAR 556 'LCR' - Fire Interval 0.27 (from 0.32). PerShotModifier 0.525 (from 6).
    Scoped Ntec / Ntec 7 - now correctly uses the scoped assault rifle effective range. 

    Rifling
    Changed downside to... - Reduces Fire Rate by 6, 12, 18% (ranks 1, 2, 3 respectively). This change also affects burst interval. Increases upside to +3, +6, +9m range (from +3,5,7).

    We understand this is quite a controversial change, but felt it necessary as rifling didn't have much of a downside, resulting in a lot of weapons being forced out of their niche by weapons that should be lesser ranged. This provides players the ability to make their assault rifle act more like a rifle (for instance) but at more of a cost to its close range effectiveness. The fire rate decrease can even be seen as a buff in certain situations as it forces a level of fire rate control you would otherwise have to do manually. Naturally we'll keep an eye on this and tweak further if necessary (and will be reviewing all preset guns with rifling). 

    Joker Distribution
    A number of weapons have been added to the Joker Store. These are:
    AR-97 'Misery' JT1
    AR-97 'Misery' JT3
    FAR 'Vanguard' JT1
    FAR 'Vanguard' JT3
    Raptor 45 'Hawk' JT1
    Raptor 45 'Hawk' JT3
    AMG-556 'Stheno' JT1
    AMG-556 'Stheno' JT2
    S1-TIC 'Rabid' JT1
    S1-TIC 'Rabid' JT3
    SWARM 'Killer Bee' JT1
    SWARM 'Killer Bee' JT3
    R-2 'Harbinger' JT
    Showstopper JT
    SBSR 'Coroner' JT1
    SBSR 'Coroner' JT3
    SG-21 'Strife' JT1
    SG-21 'Strife' JT3
    H-9 'Curse' JT1
    H-9 'Curse' JT3
    S1-NA 'Manic' JT1
    S1-NA 'Manic' JT3
    S-247 'Oblivion' JT1
    S-247 'Oblivion' JT3
    SBSR 'IRS' JT1
    SBSR 'IRS' JT3

    Adjusted cash requirements for the following weapons:
    N-SSW 74 JT1, N-SSW 74 JT3, STAR 556 'LCR' JT1

    Other Changes

    Added increased fire rate description to Double-Drum mag modification (purely a text change).

    Fixed bug with 'Yukon' Mountie variant that allowed it to fire incredibly fast from the hip.

     

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  10. Posted

    Thanks SKay. This is a bug with the showstopper primarily, as it's essentially acting a little like a pump action shotgun. It's somewhat intended on the pump shotguns, when you switch to a shotgun it has to rack if there's no shell chambered, and a freshly initialised weapon by default doesn't have a shell in the chamber.  This parts a bug, we should definitely fix that, but it can also occur on pump action shotguns if you fire and switch away before you rack a new shell into the chamber, which is intended.

    Naturally this shouldn't apply to the showstopper at all, being a revolver (the cylinder snap animation is mechanically a racking anim), so there's a bug there.

     

  11. Posted

    2 hours ago, Kempington said:


    The only thing I can't really discuss is how often the LCR will whiff at 60m away. But considering that it has a 74.88cm diameter crosshair at 60m, the only thing we need to know is the diameter of the player's hitbox. I have a feeling it might be around 60cm or fewer, but I don't know this. Simply put, you're more likely to land shots @60m with an N-TEC than you are the LCR.
    
     

    FYI the collision diameter is 68cm, or essentially 83 when leaning and face on to the shooter.
    If it helps further calculations, the height is 91 standing, 60 crouching and moving (standing on the balls of your feet), and 53 crouching and stationary.
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  12. Posted

    Now we're closer to what we're happy to push to live, our next iteration only has one set of variations over the latter, labelled Weapon Prototype E. These are based on the previous C test stats with some differences, listed below. Rather than the Weapon Prototype District D District, we now have the Weapon Control Group District, which has the stats from the current live client, to allow us to test the stats we want to push live against those that actually are, and ensure they're improvements without going too overboard. The goal here is to end this test with changes that will end up with an improved weapon experience all around on live, even if we have to re-visit some of the weapons later to add a bit more oomph (it's no good having 'better' stats sit on OTW for months while we iterate, leaving the live servers less fun).

    These changes are:

    Rifling
    Adjusting Rifling mod, reducing downside and improving upside. This is now +4, 8. 12 m range (rank 1, 2 3 respectively), and -5, -10, -15 % firerate / burst fire interval. There was a bug where the burst fire interval was only applying on ranks 1 and 2, so we've fixed that as well.

    I've also added a set of weapon mods with no rating requirement that will be sent to players on OTW. This is one each of the rank 1 and 2 mods that would unlock through the roles, plus a few each of the rank 3 mods.

    Weapon Balance

    CSG - Test E: Added 5m to the effective and minimum range (15m effective, 25m min) from the C stats.
    Anubis 'NCR' - Test E: Making some further tweaks to crosshair. Centre dot is now smaller and always white, so easier to focus on. Pulling in side elements a little.
    Shredder - Test E: Increased range by 5m (25m effective, 45m min). Increase Fire Interval to 0.37 (from 0.42).
    Adding Test Balance for STAR-556 'LCR' - Test E. There are only 3 variants of this weapon, all preset, and two of them have Rifling on them, which proportionally affects them quite a lot, given they're very slow firing as is. As such, this testing variant that has a slightly faster fire rate (0.27 vs 0.3) and adjusted pershotmodifier to ensure that the accuracy still performs in the same way (PershotModifier 0.525 from 6). Note: this means the PR1 and PR2 versions fire very slightly slower (but gain additional range from the upgraded positive of rifling) and the Old Glory fires slightly faster than before.


    Text Fixes:
    Double-Drum modification: Updated text to mention the increase in fire-rate that the ogre has (purely a text tweak for clarity, the effect has been on the ogre for years).
     

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  13. Posted

    Thanks so much to everyone for the initial testing on the OTW weapon balance, and the feedback you've given across the forum. We've had enough data to make some initial changes, though again this the changes we've put in are not final, and some weapons that haven't received changes may still be adjusted (we just don't have enough info yet to make further tweaks). With that in mind, here are the changes we've made in the latest patch.

    Testing Methodology

    For the most part, we're happy that the changes in the first pass are improvements, and don't overpower the weapons (other than the shotguns, more on that later). We've generally picked one of the two sets of stats from the A/B test, and applied these to both C/D versions. From here, we adjust the C variant further, allowing you to compare the new tweaks against the version from the A/B test that we've chosen. This is quite important as we want to ensure if we hit a sweet spot of balance we don't just keep iterating for the sake of it, so having the previous test to compare against is very useful.

    We also have enough initial data from the Weapon Prototype districts that we're happy to open up testing of the rebalance on other districts. All districts that aren't weapon prototype districts now default to using the C balance set.

    So first, I'll go over which of the previous weapon sets are now the base set (used for set D).
    COBR-A: Test A 
    Mistery: Test B 
    ISSR – Test B 
    CSG: Test A chosen
    DOW: Test A 
    JG: Test A 
    Strife: Test A .
    NFAS: Test A 
    NFAS-Ogre: Test A
    Shredder: Test A
    Apoc Death: Test B
    Showstopper: Test A
    HVR-762: Test B
    Apoc Curse: Test B
    NCR: Test B

    You can see the values for these tests here:



    Shotguns
    I mentioned above that the Test D variants will be the previous test values as a comparison. For shotguns, we're breaking this somewhat as it's clear that for the most part the shotguns needed a range reduction across the board. For that reason, in the D stat set we've taken 5m from the effective range across the board on all of the shotguns.

    For the test C variants, the following changes are made (Previous test values are in brackets):

    Strife Test C : Effective Range to 7.5m (15m). Min Damage Range 15m (25m)
    CSG Test C :  Effective Range 10m (20m), Min Damage Range 20m (40m).
    DOW Test C : No Change (it needed a buff, and this gives it one. Note that this means that the C variant has a further range than the D variant, so this still provides us two data-points to compare)
    JG Test C : Effective Range 10m (20m), Min Damage Range 20m (30m).
    NFAS Test C : Effective Range 10m (20m), Min Damage Range 20m (30m).
    NFAS-Ogre Test C : Effective Range 10m (20m), Min Damage Range 20m (30m). PerRayDamageScale 0.94(0.81). Damage 50(80). This puts it closer to its original form, with a damage reduction overall and a slight damage bonus if you hit 7 or less pellets).
    Shredder Test C : No Change (Same as DOW, it needed some love).

    Other Weapons
    Showstopper Test C : Damage 88(75). PerRayDamageScale 0.818 (0.85).
    Showstopper 'Thunder' mod:  Reduced Fire rate reduction to 35% (50%).
    S-247 'Oblivion' Test C : Walk modifier 0.25 (1.25)
    SWARM Test C : Walk Modifier 1.75 (7), Accuracy Cooldown 30 (20). This is a fairly major buff to see if this neglected gun will work well if we move it towards a walk and fire style LMG. 

    The remaining weapons we're either happy with the balance of the chosen data set, and want to see if they play well over the weekend, or we aren't entirely sure what more needs changed, and are looking for more data from financial and waterfront before making further decisions. We're feeling the ISSR and NCR at least will potentially need more tweaks, and the Misery needs careful examination to ensure it's ok, but I'm happy to leave the current stats over the weekend to get a better feel of what, if anything further needs done.

    Oh, and I realised I've been using developer terminology quite a lot here. Apologies if it's some of the language is a bit obscure. The main one that might be confusing here is Accuracy Cooldown, which is the rate at which your accuracy regenerates from movement modifiers (so when you stop running, walking, etc). The higher it is, the faster you have full accuracy after standing still.

    Now, here's two other major tweaks I've made that are related to these balance tweaks...

    Improved Rifling

    This mod's always been a bit of a funny one. In a lot of cases, the downside has no effect, so it's purely a great mod to put on most guns. While previously this had very limited effect on Shotguns, now it will be very, very good on them. Too good in fact, essentially making them mid-range weapons (we all saw what the test A/B shotguns were like). To counter this, I've switched the downside of the mod from increasing the Shot Modifier Cap to something a bit more drastic. Fire rate. When I first had a look, the plan was to implement this as a shotgun-specific downside, but having more of a think, it could make sense in a more general fashion. The reduced fire rate (9/15/21%) can actually be a help to a lot of weapons with more control of recoil and accuracy degredation at the cost of minimum time to kill. It's certainly worth a test overall before we make a decision on whether to limit the effect to shotguns only. It'd be worth testing across the board, as it'll affect how a lot of weapons lose accuracy. This also affects Burst Fire Interval, so it does affect the burst fire rifles and pistols as well (*cough* Fang *cough*), and it may affect some weapons a bit worse than others (if we want to go this route, it's likely the LCR will need a buff, since 2/3 of the LCRs have rifling built in, and it's already a very slow killing weapon). The fire rate decrease is also quite heavy, so we may want to tone it down (or improve the rifling range effect). We'll see what the feedback is like.

    Mountie SF9 'Yukon'
    Finally, when adding the new rifling effect for testing, I came across the Yukon bug (fire rate increase of the mod affecting hip fire), so I've fixed that while I was in there. I mentioned previously that this patch is primarily for improving weapons, but considering it's an error that was easily fixable, it made sense to fix that at the same time. This does mean it has an effective full-auto fire rate nerf from 0.045 (which is what it bursts at) to 0.078 (the actual fire rate of the base weapon).

    • Like 18
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  14. Posted

    Hi, I'll be writing up a larger post on this in another balance thread,, but I should mention my reasoning behind this 🙂 

    Rifling has always been a funny one, on a lot of weapons it has basically no downside as they aren't designed to hit their maximum bloom (Rifles, Shotguns and Snipers primarily). With the changes to shotgun mechanics, we're now balancing them partly on effective range (rather than just ray-spread), and thus Rifling goes from being a fairly negligible mod on them (no downside but only a tiny poking upside) to actually being a major benefit. Due to this, we need a downside on Rifling that will affect shotguns.

    At the same time, the general concept with weapons for the most part is closer range = faster effective TTK. It's not the full truth, a lot of other things apply, but it's a general concept. As such, a longer TTK seems a good trade-off for longer range. It can also be seen as a slight improvement on some weapons, as the additional handling you gain from a slower fire rate may allow you to full-auto in situations where you'd otherwise have to tap fire.

    With that in mind, I implemented a straight up fire rate decrease (it effects burst interval as well) as a downside for rifling across the board on all weapons. I'm somewhat worried that some weapon is going to break with it on, since accuracy and fire rate are intrinsically linked, but it's worth an experiment.

    This may break things, so we may restrict it purely to shotguns, but the OTW is for testing, and it's interesting enough to try out. 🙂 If you see anything that feels a bit wonky with it, let me know.

    Oh, and I know this will make some presets a bit worse, especially the LCRs, so if this goes through they'll need a buff to compensate.

    • Like 4

  15. Posted

    17 hours ago, Speedz said:

    Hello @LO_Beastie

     
    this might be a bit offtopic since this thread is more about the current changes to the weapons on otw, but something that always interested me is how the curves for damage drop offs are being calculated. A quick example with the formula would be very appreciated, in case you got some time ofcourse.
     
    It varies per weapon. A lot of our weapons don't use effective range curves at all, and these just lerp between the minimum and maximum percentages over the distance. Weapons with effective range curves aren't calculated with a formula, but instead use Unreal's curve system to physically draw points on a graph. We define an X/Y point and a tangent, and Unreal stitches them together to make a curve.
    For the most part we use flat tangents (they're normalised, so we don't specify any weighting), so the curves tend to be simple ease in/outs. This results in a more gradual ease at the start and end of the damage reduction, so you don't feel such an immediate impact when your weapon reaches its effective range limit. Here's the assault rifle's curve as an example:

    97WTrrP.jpg

    The exception to this is the rifles, which tend to have a more exponential drop off (ease in, but drop more dramatically out), like this:
    53cwvVT.jpg

    Note the little white handles to allow us to change the tangents. 

    So to answer your question, there's unfortunately not an easy formula I can give you to calculate range drop-off as they're tweaked by hand (and I'm not aware of what system Unreal uses to generate these). The shotguns all linearly interpolate btw.

     
    • Like 3

  17. Posted

    2 hours ago, Tobii said:
    @LO_Beastie any chance I can get my hands on the pellet damage that you've used in your graphs?
     I kinda just eyeballed it in the ones I made so they might be very inaccurate.
    Sure, right now the shotguns have the following values (blue values are live, with the pellet value unchanging)

    TbjT6UT.png

    Sorry that it's a picture, just by far the fastest for me to grab, and I'm busy getting the next iteration of stats ready. This is the data for the graphs I posted earlier (the CSG is currently being shown on my graph, hence why it's grey in this image).

    Pellet damage is calculated with the formula Damage*Scale^PelletsHitNum. Of minor note is damage is calculated as an integer, so floor any values that formula throws out.
    • Like 1

  18. Posted

    15 minutes ago, SandyBitch said:
    @LO_Beastie mind giving it a try to keep the stats for jg and csg for 1 - 2 days at the current live  servers stats? To let us see, how the shotguns perform with the great server performance? I would love to see, how the perform, when servers actually working properly
    All of the districts currently running in OTW other than the weapon prototype ones are currently running live stats, so if you log into the OTW you can drop into any of the other districts (including a normal Baylan) and see how they perform.

     
    • Thanks 2

  19. Posted

    1 minute ago, Lign said:

    Btw, I'm wondering why you don't touch ntec, it's the best weapon in the game with insane accuracy at jumpshooting and 60m+ by tapping. It has been meta for too long imo.


    This patch focuses on positive improvements to weapons rather than reductions in their efficiency (with the exception of the HVR-762, which we needed to look at sooner rather than later). We'll be looking into making further tweaks in later patches, likely including reductions in power of several weapons.
    • Like 1

  20. Posted

    3 hours ago, Kempington said:

    Oh lord. The shredder's range now.. that'll be interesting.

    @LO_Beastie are there any plans to spin up a financial and waterfront District for these weapon changes on OTW? It's nice to get a general idea of the changes on the guns in Baylan, but I feel proper run throughs would work better in missions. See where the shortcomings are and where the changes benefit the weapons.


    Not for the current OTW patch, though I'll set up the data for next patch to be able to. The Prototype Baylan districts give us a fairly representative sample of combat for rough and ready testing, and provide a much faster flow on feedback. I prefer using them for the initial pass as it gets me the data/feedback I need very fast, then switch primarily to Financial / Waterfront testing once we've narrowed the stat changes down to what we think might be closer to viable balance to fine tune in an end-user environment.
     
    3 hours ago, Tobii said:
    @LO_Beastie does the shotgun changes apply to ALL shotguns? Shredder, Ogre, nfas, ETC?
     I am a big fan of the Shredder. But it's hard to use cause of the same issues that the CSG/JG have.
    It does currently affect all shotguns, though the Automatic ones to a much lesser degree.

    You can see a list of all the tweaks we've made here: Though if you want to skip to the question you just asked, there's a list of each shotgun's values here: https://imgur.com/a/ikTa1LL





     
    • Like 1

  21. Posted

    Hi everyone,

    Now that you've all had a chance to test the A and B variants, here's the list of exactly what's changed. I'll list simple stat changes first, then the exact mechanical changes to the HVR and the Shotguns last (since that's a bit longer form). I'll go into the Showstopper in a different thread. 

    Please don't use this thread for feedback, instead use the threads CookiePuss has created here: 

    and here, 

    These changes are not meant to be final in any shape or form. Instead, they're meant to help us bracket where the guns need to be, and we'll keep providing A and B variants that get closer and closer to each other until we're happy to push one of them to Live (or revert them entirely, or go a different route).

    Tweaks
    Below are the initial changes in each AB test for the weapons we’re looking to balance on our initial pass.

    Apoc Famine
    Improve damage to give it some overkill, and improve the tap fire ability.

    Test A
    Increase damage to 220 (from 200)
    Decrease recovery delay to 0.45 (from 0.58). This improves tap fire ability.
    Remove Yaw Recoil Curve.

    Test B
    Increase damage to 240 (from 200)
    Decrease recovery delay to 0.25 (from 0.58). This improves tap fire ability significantly.
    Decrease increment of Yaw Recoil Curve, meaning it ramps up less harshly. Removed minimum yaw recoil. Should now recoil more genly right and left.

    COBR-A
    Removes the accuracy curve and improves accuracy recovery rates.

    Test A
    Removed Accuracy curve completely, using linear drop instead, Recovery Delay of 0.204. Recovery Per Second of 9.5.
    Removed minimum yaw recoil. Should now recoil more gently right and left.


    Test B
    Fire interval improved to 0.16 (from 0.17)
    Reduced Recovery delay for accuracy to 0.155 (from 0.2). Lower than the fire rate.
    Decrease increment for PerShotModifier curve to 0.05 (from 0.1). Essentially takes double the amount of bullets to reach the max bloom per shot at full auto.

    ISSR-a
    Lowering recovery time for accuracy loss, requiring you to wait less time after taking a shot to fire again.

    Test A
    Lower recovery delay to 0.335 (from 0.35)

    Test B  
    Lower recovery delay to 0.32 (from 0.35)

    SWARM
    Note: the SWARM has both left and right variants, which are identical other than inverted recoil. For testing purposes, we’re only duplicating the left variant (so right-recoiling versions will instead recoil left on OTW).

    Reducing horizontal recoil amount. We're also investigating increasing the time it takes to recoil to slightly slightly higher than the recoil time, making the recoil smoother.

    Test A
    Reduced horizontal recoil by 33%

    Test B
    Reduced horizontal recoil by 33%.
    Double recoil time to 20ms (from 10). Given the fire rate is 18ms this means that the gun never stops recoiling when you’re firing full auto, making for a smoother, less jarring recoil.

    SBSR (Rifle)
    Gives it a unique recoil pattern that's significantly less harsh than the sniper variant.

    Test A
    Base Recoil Pitch halved to 1000 (from 2000)
    Added unique weapon curve (rather than using the Sniper variant with a lesser increment)

    Test B
    Base Recoil Pitch halved to 1000 (from 2000)
    Added unique weapon curve (rather than using the Sniper variant with a lesser increment)

    H-9 'Curse'
    New recoil pattern that has heavily reduced horizontal recoil

    Test A
    New Recoil Pattern. Same vertical recoil as before, but significantly reduced horizontal recoil (-35 to 23 from -118 to 118, now pulls slightly to the left).

    Test B
    New Recoil Pattern. Same vertical recoil as before, but significantly reduced horizontal recoil (-35 to 23 from -118 to 118, now pulls slightly to the left).

    S-247 'Oblivion'
    Attempts to make the weapon a lot snappier when using it as a fire and reposition weapon. Heavily improves snap fire by improving time it takes to gain accuracy after moving, and allowing you to switch during refire timer.

    Test A
    Walk modifier set to 2 (from 3).
    Accuracy Cooldown to 30 (from 20 default).
    Resupplies 10 rounds at a time (up from 5).
    Can now switch weapon during refire timer.

    Test B
    Walk modifier set to 1.25 (from 3)
    Accuracy Cooldown to 30 (from 20 default).
    Resupplies 10 rounds at a time (up from 5)
    Can now switch weapon during refire timer.
    Increased Damage to 325 (from 285)
    Decreased Reload time to 2.75s (from 3.2s)

    NCR
    New crosshair (from existing asset). Removing the accuracy recovery curve that the HVR has. Adjust how accuracy regeneration works (simply removing the regen curve means that its unique effect does basically nothing).

    Test A
    Switched Crosshair. Uses existing assets but simplifies, stops overlap and removes top and bottom elements.
    Remove Movement Accuracy Recovery curve.
    Adjusted recovery rates (4 from 6) and overall shot modifier caps (1 from 1.65) to compensate. Will now never get more than 1-shot's worth of recoil away from full accuracy.
    Increased the effect of the pershot modifier reduction as you fire.
    Increased Fire Rate to 0.75 (from 0.77), allowing the player a bit of leeway to get himself into trouble with accuracy (otherwise it's actually pretty hard for the bonus to have any effect).
     
    Test B
    Switched Crosshair. Uses existing assets but simplifies, stops overlap and removes top and bottom elements.
    Remove Movement Accuracy Recovery curve.
    Adjusted recovery rates and overall shot modifier caps to compensate. Will now never get more than 1-shot's worth of recoil away from full accuracy.
    Significantly increased the effect of the pershot modifier reduction as you fire.
    Increased Fire Rate to 0.735 (from 0.77), allowing the player a bit of leeway to get himself into trouble with accuracy (otherwise it's actually pretty hard for the bonus to have any effect).

    Linking Damage and Accuracy (HVR Only)

    We've linked the accuracy of the HVR to the damage it does in an effort to reduce the effect of firing it at players point blank / while moving and getting a kill because you got lucky / were so close accuracy doesn't matter. It's been a major source of frustration for a lot of the player base, and we felt it needed to be changed in order to get the weapon in a better place without trying something more drastic like just chopping a bunch of damage off it (which would also hamper its effectiveness in the situations where it's meant to be good).

    When at resting accuracy (standing, unaimed), the HVR will do 40% of its normal damage in Test A (340), and 33% in test B (280). When aimed and stationary, the weapon does 100%. Between these two accuracies it linearly interpolates between the two percentages. This helps us stop situations where players get lucky shots with wildly inaccurate fire.

    Pellet Damage Tweaks per Shell
    We're adjusting how shotguns do damage, to allow for more damage for partial hits (the first pellets to hit a single target do more damage than the last ones). This allows them to be more forgiving without buffing their overall damage. The current OTW implementation is focusing on checking that the mechanics work as desired, we're aware that this makes the range significantly better and will be tweaking that down in the next iterations of OTW.

    This may be seen as dumbing down somewhat, but it's particularly important to give us more values to tweak. Inconsistency with shotguns is a big problem, even for experienced players. Server performance is part of it, we won't deny that, but APB's shotguns are also hampered as we're a very fast paced game with a lot of clutter in close ranges to block pellets. On top of this, in third person games very short range combat gets tricky when the player is within the boom distance of your camera, as in APB the camera is fairly far out from the character. Previously, inconsistency between pellet shots was dealt with by either increasing the number of pellets (bad for performance when it goes too high) or increasing the damage of the pellets (which can only go so far before all of the shotguns one-shot). This allows us to adjust the consistency of each weapon as an individually tweakable value, allowing us to reduce other values such as overkill without affecting overall TTK. This also allows us to essentially set minimum and maximum TTKs much more easily, allowing a Shotgun to kill in 2 hits if you're great, or 4 hits if you whiff most of it but still tag them. Previously the JG would kill in between 2 and 16 hits.

    Here's the JG example in graph form, with what's currently in OTW.
    xyXpo7L.png

    For our initial test values, you can see that the JG will 2-hit a target with 6/12 pellets hit with each shell in Test A, and 5/12 hit in test B, down from 8 in Live. In Test-A, we also reduce the damage of the JG (upping the hard damage % so it keeps its vehicle effectiveness), letting us test to see if we can improve consistency while reducing effective damage. Given that the Shotguns on Baylan A are currently performing really well, that's certain the case (and again, we realise they're also overperforming outside of the range, we'll work on that next).

    If you're interested in how each of the Shotguns have their pellet consistency currently tweaked, there's an imgur gallery here: https://imgur.com/a/ikTa1LL
     

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  23. Posted

    1 minute ago, Tobii said:
    That sounds like a good way to move forward.
     Does this apply to the other weapons as well? I guess you're just waiting for feedback and then change the weapons accordingly?
    Indeed Tobii, all of the guns have different stats in Prototype A and Prototype B. I don't expect either weapon set will go through exactly as is for any of the weapons, we're essentially bracketing (https://www.militaryfactory.com/dictionary/military-terms-defined.asp?term_id=786) until we find the right spot.
    • Like 1

  24. Posted

    Hi, just want to mention that I've posted a comment related to this topic on the upcoming weapon balance thread (where it's also being discussed).In a nutshell, we're aware of this and it was expected that the shotguns would be outperforming at range in the first pass on OTW. With the first pass, we were focusing on getting the mechanics in and working within their intended ranges. The second pass will start to focus on reducing the effectiveness they've gained in areas where we don't want them to.

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1

  25. Posted

    Hi, thought I should reply to this thread since I've been the one making the balance changes for the Shotgun (Still getting my forum details set up, hence the Community Administrators tag).

    The shotguns are quite a bit overpowered right now, indeed, and we kind of expected it to be that way but wanted to push it into a test environment to make sure before we start nerfing certain aspects of them to compensate. Historically we've been able to tweak consistency of shotguns in one of two ways; increasing the damage or increasing the number of pellets. Increasing damage is dangerous when it goes too high, which the pump action shotguns are kind of pushing, and increasing pellet count can only get us so far until we start to worry about performance implications of that many raycasts at once 

    These new changes allow us another way to tweak consistency; by adjusting the point at which the shotgun will be able to kill a player when hitting a certain percentage of its shots. In the A variant of the weapons, we've actually significantly reduced the overkill done by the weapons if you fully meat-shot them. For an example, here's the graph we have for our test changes of the JG, showing damage per pellet hit.

     tQwDnlb.png

    What this doesn't cover however is range, which we deliberately didn't change for the first test (it's easier to tweak things if you change a small number of variables at a time). In Live, we currently balance the range of shotguns primarily on pellet spread, then secondarily with the effective range values. Traditionally, the further away you were, the less pellets hit and thus the less damage is done. This isn't as much of a factor with the new mechanics, as smaller numbers of pellets can still consistently do a lot of damage, hence the ridiculous ranges we're seeing.

    The first iteration of OTW in the case of shotguns was to see if the intended effect of the mechanic (additional consistency with killing at close range) would go up, and I feel at least that it has to a degree I'm happy with. The next iteration will focus on pulling the shotguns back in cases where they're working outside their intended combat situations, primarily by reducing the range, reducing damage, and/or reducing the effect of the damage per pellet mechanic until it's minimal while still providing the desired benefit.

    • Like 6
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