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.

Half of the consumables being limited in stock is... problematic. Med spray literally changes battles, epinephrine alleviates distant-spawning issues, and the resupply box effectively balances out using brown mods that aren't field suppliers. Running out of any of these puts you at a competitive disadvantage, yet the rest (mobile cover, boom box, satchel charge) are [almost] useless. It's like playing a JPRG. Sure, I could equip my potions and use them when I'm hurt - or I could just avoid using them and stash up hundreds of them just in case I need them later, even if "later" never comes. Now, if you could activate consumables as an infinite resource limited by cooldowns, green mods would play differently. Flak Jacket could resupply grenades - at the cost of having an explosive box next to them. Kevlar could use epinephrine to cover short distances better - at the cost of the very same health that it's granted. Fragile with med spray is downright insane - good luck killing a goddamn starfish that's constantly hiding and regenerating limbs. Sure, you can do all of this now, but at the risk of running out of consumables fairly quickly, making the downsides more 'present'. The issue crops up then that the short cooldowns on consumables are so short because it is expected that you won't use it every time it is available, so a permanent version would likely have longer cooldowns, but that would bring the issue around full-circle... Hmmm.

All of these arguments to make CA3 replace the default stats are asinine. You do not make something default just because it is meta, that's absurd. That's like if a month ago you said that IR3 can work on any gun, so we should just add 7m to every gun in the game and turn IR3 into the opposite, making it give more accuracy but less range! Ridiculous. If something is meta, you need to examine why it is meta, not just assume it's the only logical choice. The two biggest reasons for meta choices are: Is it overpowered? Does it have competition? Kevlar, Flak Jacket, and Fragile all have fitting downsides that properly match their benefits. So it certainly has competition - the other choices aren't useless. So is CA3 overpowered? Well, look at Crusade's point that CA3 mid-fight healing is effectively free Kevlar. Look at how it enables players to almost ignore health regen mechanics entirely. Look at how its downside (longer time to full heal) is comparatively ignorable (slower speed is big, less grenades is big, lower health is big, slightly longer regen isn't even noticeable to less-experienced players). If a single aspect of the game is so much better than everything that compare to it, it shouldn't be the default, it should be brought in line with the rest of the game. It's the same reason we should look at what makes the N-Tec so popular and look to balance it with other guns, rather than buffing everything up to N-Tec standard, which is pretty easy to see as a bad idea. This is why LO is looking to add a downside to IR3 - to make it actually balanced, instead of it just being the default choice for everything. CA3 should be treated the same. Besides, making CA3 default would ruin Kevlar and Fragile. Kevlar would take an hour to full-heal, and Fragile's benefit of getting into cover quickly and quickly healing will be completely destroyed. Stop saying something should be default just because you equipped CA3 when you unlocked it and have never taken it off since.

Monitor refresh rate limits what you can see (60Hz = 60 FPS visuals), but the game can still run faster than that behind the scenes, which is what is used for programming cycles and input detection. That's why you can get screen-tearing without V-Sync, because your monitor gets confused when the rendered frames are so quick that they're swapping out before it can finish showing the full image. I wish the FPS-cap was raised for 60Hz users too (100 FPS now), since 144Hz users shouldn't be the only ones who benefit in gameplay from a raised cap.

Fair enough, I didn't see the comparison of CA3 surviving an extra bullet being like Kevlar with normal speed. Definitely leans towards CA needing a nerf for Kevlar to have its niche. Though I honestly can't find a way to make Kevlar work - the speed penalty is so harsh that I find it useless for everything but car-surfing. Maybe something radical, like instead of affecting total health, maybe a damage resistance mechanic. There's tons of numbers to play with there, what with flat damage reductions and percentages on top of it. It could be tweaked to be more effective against CQC weapons (flat damage reduction harms low-damage and high-RoF weapons more, which tend to be SMGs and shotguns), making its lower mobility less of an issue for dealing with people up in your face and more of a benefit for stationary weapon types (ex. LMGs). Plus it would be logically sound - bulletproof armor favors reduction of 9mm rounds over .50 BMG, of course. A balancing nightmare, to be sure, but there's potential for a good outcome.

Nooooo. The main drawback of Clotting Agent is increased time to full heal. Base full heal is 8 seconds to initiate, 4 seconds to heal, 12 total. CA2 makes the delay 4 seconds, and increases the heal time to 10 seconds. 14 seconds total. Yes, CA2 says +50% heal time, but it doesn't actually work off of a modifier, it adds a flat 6 seconds, likely based off of the default 12 seconds for the entire process, not just the healing time. So changing default health regen to CA2 means it takes 2 seconds longer to heal from, say, an HVR shot. CA3 isn't even that great anyway, its use in the meta is overrated. 1.6s to start, 16 to full (+12s), 17.6s total. Almost 6 seconds over base, making it +50% total heal time. That's an eternity. I very, very often can leverage healing without CA to end up taking out entire teams of enemies - they'll rush me expecting me to still be hurt, but I'll have fully healed - and now they're out of cover. And with how often this is the case, I can assure you that there are huge benefits to not using CA at all. In fact, I'll say that CA1 and CA2 are entirely useless and only harm you - the upside of CA3 is minor healing within a firefight to survive an extra bullet or sometimes two, and CA1 and CA2 do not offer that, since you won't start healing at all mid-battle. As for Kevlar, well, it's a joke mod right now. Move speed penalty limits the best way to manage damage: not being hit at all, and moving to and from cover. I'm not sure that there's a way to make a move-speed penalty ever be beneficial, just like how Heavy Barrel's lowered damage makes it never worthwhile. Flak Jacket is fine. If anything, you shouldn't get 3 low yields in the first place, so Flak Jacket would make more sense then. And I'm sure anyone that has seen me play knows that I support Fragile, so yeah, give Fragile a bit more speed!

Is it pathetic that some people enjoy things in different ways than you do? A lot of people play APB in a competitive sense because Medium-TTK games are almost non-existent. You might see that as playing it like an arena shooter, but that's not bad. What else is there? Overwatch is basic as hell. Paladins rebalanced the game to Low-TTK and added P2W features. Team Fortress 2 is old as hell. Dirty Bomb is endlessly tweaked to be more casual. Arena shooters are dead. Quake Champions ruined the arena shooter genre by adding heroes. Tribes is dead. The new Unreal Tournament is a glorified, unfinished tech demo. And until LO, APB was dead too. You might play the game casually, but the only reason this Medium-TTK game has survived is because of the casual playerbase to keep it chugging along. It's unfair of you to criticize others for enjoying the competitive side of things. Or are you really upset that some people play the game on minimal settings? A very large amount of competitive players across many, many games tend to play with minimal settings. This is because input speed (mouse/keyboard changes being reflected in-game) is determined by how fast the game is running. 60 FPS means it is only checking for new input every 1/60 of a second. More FPS means more nuanced control. Rhythm games aren't even properly playable under 1000 FPS. Milliseconds matter. Also, NotZombieBiscuit was making a joke. Woosh.

I honestly think it's asinine to say "okay we've screwed up" and then follow it up with "so we're going to delay fixing it because we want to get the fixes as correct as possible". Taking time to perfect things is good, but you can't just leave the game in a broken state (that you've admitted to!) while you work on another change. It would be trivial to revert the shotgun changes while you continue to test and refine on OTW (unless they did something stupid like deleting the old values), but instead LO is leaving us to play in this mess. All because of some "moral principle" of feeling like they have to stick to gradual changes and not knee-jerk reverting things. Sounds like they cannot fully admit to their mistakes, and don't want to take ownership of them. Or they are completely oblivious to just how bad things really are - like how they didn't even realize the servers were rubber-banding until weeks into ownership, when a developer FINALLY logged in for the first time. So, incompetence or obliviousness, or both? Also, they've only nodded to the Shredder being overpowered, but haven't spoken a word on the Thumper, so we don't even know if they even understand the scope of their mistakes. Glorious.

You're completely missing my point that I agree that the Shredder should be better at range than the other shotguns. I have simply said that its range benefit should not be from actual damage fall-off range, but just from pellet grouping making it more accurate at range and thus higher ranged DPS than the more inaccurate shotguns. Giving it extra damage fall-off range on top of pellet grouping means it over-performs, since it is double-dipping mid-range bonuses. The point is that Shredder's pellets should drop-off the same as other shotguns over range. Being able to hit full blasts at mid-range is enough of a benefit to its ranged capabilities, making it distinct from the other shotguns. If its benefit is accuracy, then accuracy should be what benefits it. Not damage drop-off range. When you stack these two upsides, that's when it goes from being a "separate but distinct" choice to being a "straight-up better" choice. As for fragile not being considered when the shotguns were changed, yes. That's my point. It wasn't considered. It should be. LO has ignored the fragile TTK floor of ~0.45s from OBIR, and are adjusting Shredder back to 0.42s. I'm simply adding that the Thumper's 0.30s fragile TTK significantly deviates from that floor value, and should be considered for future changes.

Shotgun consistency is fine for the actual shotguns, the ones that are meant to work point-blank. For more marksman-esque shotguns like the Shredder and Thumper, these consistency changes are insanely powerful and not fun at all to fight against. Shredder's rate of fire should be reverted, and I agree with that, but the range of these two guns needs to be seriously looked at. The Shredder and Thumper are more consistent into mid-range than even SMGs, which is ridiculous. The effective range and damage fall-off of these two needs to be cut down by a lot, perhaps even halving where it is at now. No exaggeration. On top of this, I've made a post about how the shotgun changes affect fragile. Shredder coming back to 0.42s puts it in line with the OBIR's 0.45s as the fastest fragile-killing guns. Thumper is sitting at 0.30s, 2 shots, to kill fragile from full health. If it wasn't a marksman shotgun, it wouldn't be so bad, but it's just as ridiculously long-ranged as the Shredder. In my opinion, the benefit of the marksman shotguns should not be increased range. The benefit of marksman shotguns should be tighter grouping on pellets, allowing more precise firing. Even if their damage fall-off range is short, the accuracy benefit of marksman shotguns makes them do more effective damage at range, thus conferring an advantage without having an actual statistical range bonus. And that's how it should be - shotguns are shotguns, they should drop-off harshly, and marksman versions should offer a way to offset that drop-off without changing its values. On top of that, the other primary benefit of tighter grouping is that they're inherently more consistent. It's far more likely to land additional pellets with a marksman shotgun, meaning they need less of this "shotgun consistency" balance-pass. Marksman shotguns should be far closer to before you inherited the game, because they're already formulated to be more consistent. Ipso facto, giving them even more consistency is why they're launching well into overpowered territory. Shredder and Thumper are ruining my enjoyment of this game right now, more than anything G1 ever did - and I've been playing since Open Beta. These two guns are completely breaking the game, and no amount of "gentle" touch-ups are going to make them fun to play against. I'm generally in favor of switching things up - I'm more than willing to try everything else in this second balance-pass, and I wouldn't even complain about N-Tec changes - so I hope my extreme disapproval of the Shredder and Thumper changes means a bit more in that light.

It doesn't, though. IR in fact makes it worse, since the spread bloom has time to set in even moreso. Find a spot 50m out, and fire without correcting for vertical recoil. Watch the bullet hole decals. I just did, and CJ had much, much tighter grouping compared to -18% RoF IR3. And if I counter the vertical drift, IR3 leaves the third bullet almost spreading randomly - I cannot control it at all, and it almost always sprays far upwards and slightly left or right, whereas CJ is almost perfectly accurate. I made ~15 different groupings with each mod, and IR3 is even worse than no mod at all.