Siamsol

Hey, it looks like you guys have given the Development Blog a seriously-needed face-lift, and moved it to a new address (https://www.gamersfirst.com/apb/news/ vs https://apbreloaded.gamersfirst.com/). I saw that the October post was only posted on the new page, so I assume you're switching over. Could you guys please add an RSS Feed to the new site as well? The old blog has an RSS feed, and it's easily the best way to keep up to date on new developments.

Every day this week, there's at least 1 or 2 district crashes while I'm on. Today, I just had 3 crashes within an hour. There's something seriously wrong with Jericho. Check it out.

In a game where we struggle to even get 100 similar-skilled players playing at the same time, LO wants to split the playerbase even more by adding a new mode that is extremely unlikely to work given the current population. All in some hope that it will draw players to the game. Here's a hint from every MMORPG, RTS, MOBA, and BR game that came chasing their trends - it never works out, and you're wasting your efforts and money. The giants are already established. You are not going to put a single damn dent in that. LO, can you stop making new-developer mistakes please? There's an entire damn industry of bad ideas to learn from, and yet you keep charging forward with ideas that have already failed time and time again. Lack of experience isn't an excuse for not learning from the past.

So you think it is fair if the Shredder has: Better consistency, better range, full-auto firing, drive-by mode, better pellet grouping, better hard damage, and a better ammo capacity - and a single downside of slightly longer TTK. That's balanced? You're extremely short-sighted. Dog Ear and Artemis have Shredder-tier hard damage? ...Do you even think before you speak, or do you just pass off your opinions as fact? ALIG top-end hard DPS is 412. That's without CJ3, since it blooms too much with it. And hell, it's lower than that due to its base bloom, tap-firing it leaves it around 330 HDPS or less. Whereas the Shredder has a CJ3 HDPS of 305, which is pretty much guaranteed, and plus it can be done from a car window. So maybe my statement of it being completely better than ALIG is exaggerated, but it's close. Yet the Dog Ear sits at 243 HDPS, and the Artemis at 250 HDPS. That's a bit high, with the DMR-AV PR2 at 242 HDPS, but if the DMR-AV is balanced, so are these guns. Artemis with CJ3 tops out a bit higher, but since I'm not sure how it performs with that mod, I will not make a concrete statement. Yet JG is 196 HDPS (210 with CJ3). Also, the JG is meant to have high hard damage as a shotgun. The CSG is a JG competitor, made for the specific purpose of being better against people than the JG - and the CSG tops out at 170 HDPS, thus reaffirming the JG's role. So why does the Shredder deserve to have 150% of the hard damage of the JG, on top of all of its other benefits? Hard damage that out-classes all of the other guns that are literally dedicated to having hard damage as a selling-point? Hell, take the NFAS as an example, since you seem to think that being an automatic-shotgun somehow grants it magical car-destroying rights. NFAS is 189 HDPS, 204 with CJ3 (lol good luck hitting with CJ though). As a fully automatic shotgun, it does LESS hard damage. BECAUSE THAT'S PART OF WHAT MAKES IT BALANCED. In no situation will NFAS compete with a JG for hard damage with how much the NFAS misses. And you know what, just to make my point easier to understand, here's a table: https://i.imgur.com/D14LdGq.png While doing this table, I also added values for the Shredder after its rate-of-fire nerf. Note that it only gets moved down to the category of hard-damage-specializing weapons, still out-performing all other shotguns by a huge margin. Remember that being hard-damage-specializing is reason enough to nerf other parts of a gun to make it balanced, so the Shredder still maintains abnormally high HDPS as one of it's massive advantages. Stop passing your opinion off as fact. Everything you say is literally provably wrong, over and over. Please never give balance 'advice' ever again. And hey, LO? Please look at that table. Double-check it yourself, and realize the Shredder needs more nerfing. C'mon.

Okay now I realize where I messed up. I was trying to compare them both at 0.60s TTK. Off-by-one error. I meant to say that 3-STK never happens, and that Ogre/NFAS is usually 4-STK. I'm stupid, I completely forgot what I was thinking when I posted those numbers. Whoops. So yeah, Ogre normally takes an extra shot from it's statistical STK, which is why I compared it to the Thumper's (much easier to achieve) 0.60s TTK. But yeah, my sarcastic tirade was meant to mock them for saying the Thumper is like an Ogre without a timer, because the Thumper is much, much, much better than the Ogre in nearly every way, except being semi-auto. Ogre is balanced, Thumper is not. Calling the Thumper an Ogre++ is just silly.

"Weapons that work at over 40m work better at long-range, compared to a gun that can't work over 40m", more news at 11. Coming up later, N-HVR works better at 90m than PMG, plus ten surprising balance facts that will shock you! Shredder works well with CJ3 right now. 0.69s TTK. What guns counter it at close range? OCA CJ3 is 0.60s, PMG CJ3 is 0.65s, JG (can't use CJ without ruining it) is 0.68s. Now consider that the pellet-consistency changes make it so that you can afford to miss pellets and still get a 3-shot kill with Shredder. These guns that could work in "hugging distance" are not afforded this leeway. Miss once with PMG, 0.813s, lose. Miss once with OCA, 0.686s, tied with Shredder. Miss two OCA bullets, you're dead. So you're saying that it's reasonable to expect people to have absolutely perfect aim AND RNG (because good luck being able to land all OCA shots consistently even at point-blank) to counter an auto-shotgun that can just brainlessly fire in your general direction? That's not what "balance" is. Oh and the ATAC has a default 0.70s TTK, but CJ3 makes it horrible and you'll miss constantly at max fire-rate. And even without CJ3, good luck landing every shot full-auto at 40m. ATAC is inconsistent as hell, sometimes it melts people, sometimes it starts drooling and misses half of your bullets despite aiming for center mass. So that TTK is only going to creep upwards, while Shredder is still sitting at effortless 0.69s kills. In what world should an auto-shotgun take zero skill to use and destroy people who don't have completely perfect aim and luck? Sure, you can counter a Shredder with another shotgun, but that's not really a fair comparison, is it? If your best bet to counter a Shredder is to use a JG - and in this pairing, they come out on equal footing in close range - then why should the Shredder also be able to work long-range on top of that, plus being automatic, plus destroying cars faster than the ALIG, and plus being able to lean out of cars with it? Did you miss the part of game balancing that teaches you about trade-offs? That balanced choices are balanced by an equal gap of pros and cons? Why should the Shredder be a JG but better in every way? And without a single downside? Being better in every way is called one of two things: Overpowered or Pay-2-Win. Or both, really.

Sorry, I was going off memory. I always use fragile, and I might have confused it with the Thumper's damage values. Thumper can 2-shot fragile. And the post you literally quoted said "It's like a Ogre w/o timer." Wind-up time is 0.59s, the 0.99s TTK factors in the wind-up time. And that person clearly said without the wind-up time. That was the comparison they were making.

I'm starting to feel like LO is just waiting for the Shredder negativity to blow over. We're transitioning from waiting weeks for a fix to waiting for months soon. By the time they push out their paltry rate-of-fire nerf, we will have to wait another couple months for them to touch its range or pellet-scaling. That is, if they even listen to us then, because they're clearly not listening now. I'll say it again: they want to make CSG and JG less consistent, but haven't even tried to change Shredder consistency yet. Priorities, eh? Looks like I won't be playing APB for a couple more months. Such a shame, I was happy to see servers working properly(ish) and a larger playerbase, but LO is just driving people away anyway.

There is so much wrong with this statement, I don't even know where to begin. Yeah, it's stupid to compare the Ogre to the Thumper. Ogre 4-shots (since 3-STK never happens anyway) at 0.60s, just like the Thumper's 0.60s. Except the Thumper gets tighter spread, increased effective range, better effects from the 'shotgun consistency' changes, and an optional mode for even tighter spread (which isn't even necessary, since the 'consistency' changes made hipfire more effective - you only need to land a few pellets anyway). How dare they compare the shitty Ogre to the ridiculously overpowered Thumper! Inb4 "How come I never see people with Thumpers then, only Shredders?" ---Edit: "Ogre 3-shots (since 2-STK never happens anyway)" changed to "Ogre 4-shots (since 3-STK never happens anyway)" ---Cookie helped me realize I typed the wrong numbers by 1. Silly accident.

True. If a gun's usage comes down to random chance, high skilled players just don't use it. Why gamble when you're utilizing skill? That's why the SHAW and M-1922 don't get much use - even with Muzzle Break, they still jump horizontally so much that it's random chance whether you succeed or not. That isn't fun, so people avoid it. However, in the case of the N-Tec, it's biggest problem is that it is too accurate (at least for its intended TTK and range, those could be changed instead). Compared to other assault rifles, it has the best effective accuracy. Sure, some AR needs to take the role of "most accurate," but N-Tec surpasses every other AR in terms of accuracy and usability. Making that gap smaller isn't random chance, it's still predictable results that can be counteracted. Can you tap-fire the STAR and manage its spread and bloom? Yes? Then it isn't RNG. Horizontal recoil (SHAW, M-1922) is RNG. If LO tried to make N-Tec balanced by making it recoil insanely hard, then that would be RNG, but that's not the case.

Absolutely baffling. LO looks at the JG and CSG and see that they need their consistency toned down, yet when they look at the consistency of the Shredder at 30-40m, the only thing they see is the RoF being a bit too high? Still? Two weeks ago, as a preliminary change, sure. But even now? And absolutely no changes being tested for the Thumper? Are daily forum threads not enough to point out the issues with the Shredder? Are the videos being posted of the ridiculous things it can pull off not shocking enough? Is seeing at least one Shredder in every single silver-district match not worth anything? Is the game's population dropping (even at peak times), making the silver district rarely fill up, not an obvious correlation? Completely oblivious. That is, unless they nerfed the Yukon just to prop up another pay-2-win gun. Is the new boss the same as the old boss?

The post of OTW changes in this forum doesn't mention the Shredder's RoF revert (0.37s back to 0.42s) that's in the Social subforum, so I hope that's in OTW right now. It definitely needs the range nerf too, since the benefit of a marksman shotgun should be tight pellet grouping across distance, which gives an effective ranged damage increase without having to actually touch its stats. 40m range on top of tight grouping is just double-dipping buffs making it far too good at range. That, or the scaling needs to be tuned waaaaaaay down - land only 1/3 of the pellets and you'll still be granted a 4-shot kill. Crazy. A shotgun may be a mechanically easy weapon to use, but a specifically marksman-tuned shotgun should need more player skill and aim to be used at these ranges. Aiming within a foot or two of your target and just hoping 3 pellets hit each time is pretty cheesy, to put it lightly. Thumper needs adjustment too. It's sitting at 0.60s for hipfire TTK. JG is at 0.68s, and it doesn't have the ranged benefits that the Thumper does. In my opinion, the Thumper should have around a 0.65s hipfire TTK at least, under the reasoning that granting it increased effective range should come at the cost of close-range performance. A gun (a legendary one, at that) should not perform exceedingly well at both its primary range and its unique added range - LO should know this, since they decided to make the Showstopper come in two distinct versions for ranged effectiveness, instead of a single gun like the Thumper has. Versatility should come with downsides. However, 0.90s in marksman mode is fairly balanced - I would recommend that if the base TTK is modified to 0.65s, the percentage RoF change in the inherent red mod should be changed to 40% for a virtually-identical 0.91s TTK. As for the thumper's effective range, I wouldn't make it so far off of the shredder as you suggest. However, it may be worth looking into adding the effective range change into the inherent red mod. A big struggle for shotguns with LO's consistency changes is having shotguns with higher effective range spamming easy kills. Before, the pellets landing was the limiting factor, now it isn't. If you want the Thumper to be consistent with the rest of your damage scaling changes, I would highly recommend making the Thumper's base range the same as JG/CSG, but add additional range when in marksman mode in its red mod. That way, players will not be able to hipfire spam it at longer ranges to scrape by on minimal pellet counts hitting their target, but still benefit from the shotgun consistency changes.

They really handed out rewards for finding people with those guns? Did absolutely no one think to just run a database search during maintenance? Bizarre.

Damn, watching a recorded clip of that just makes it even more indefensible. Only 1/3 of the pellets hit at the range of that second kill, and it still melted that poor guy. Guess I missed when they replaced the buckshot with anti-tank rounds. No idea how LO can see this and say "oh maybe the fire rate is too high." APB is in good hands.

Matt Scott said "Again, I own the mistake. We are working to rectify things." A week ago. Yet there's been silence for the past week, no changes, no revert, nothing said. Just some bare-minimum Shredder change put on OTW, not touching its (or the Thumper's) range, consistency, or complete lack of aiming-skill. I'm not sure in what world "owning" your mistake just means admitting it and then shrugging your shoulders with "eh, too late now, deal with it." This is starting to feel like when LO said they're working on netcode improvements... Then weeks into it, Matt Scott launches the game for the first time and sees the rubberbanding, instantly prompting actual work to be done. Hey Matt Scott, want to log into APB for the second time and see how the Shredder and Thumper are doing? Maybe you'll see this marksman shotgun being used with Reflex Sight and Cooling Jacket and still being insanely effective at 30m. A bit of whiplash never hurt, has it? Edit: Oh yeah, and the fact that Shredder kills cars faster than the ALIG, a weapon specialized in that role. Man, there's so much wrong with shotguns that I can't even remember it all at once.