Salvick

Let's bring some concepts I want to share since I've been thinking of this ideas for a while already. The threat system as it is already have huge flaws that let the portion of the players in both ends of the rating spectrum out of having chances of decent match-making while also enabling every single player out there abuse this system in search of more advantageous matches in detriment of the overall gaming experience for everyone else, aka: dethreat. Here are some reads about what has been done in the past in APB so we can base our discussion with acknowledgment of these previous updates to the rating (threat) system: March 2011: https://apbreloaded.gamersfirst.com/2011/03/missing-skill-ratings-and-thanks-to.html April 2014: https://apbreloaded.gamersfirst.com/2013/04/settling-score-version-11.html I think of a few options that might work to improve matchmaking and ensure encouragement of players to play fair, be more competitive and get rewards accordingly to their effort and skills. Let's get into it: 1. Frequency-Playing-Based Rating. Let's say, as how the system currently works, that your rating is based in your last 50 matches. How is this affected if you were actually performing above the average but then you decide to skip objectives, avoid killing opponents and barely participating in a mission for a couple of days to game the system and get advantageous matches as result? Well, this is not new and it is basically how dethreating works and is being exploited, right? But in such cases, there is plenty of people performing decently who maybe doesn't play too often and stop playing for a couple of days/weeks or more and then they return and get matched against tough players when are still rusty and even worst, since there's a constant flow of new players joining and leaving the game the overall scale of ratings varies causing a need of rebalance threats on such players who might be returning after a while. Usually a player returning after a couple of weeks or months should have his rating measurements reset so maybe they should play at least 5 matches or something like that before the game sets back a proper rating for such player. Potential solution: Monthly (or weekly) Rating System: Every week or month the threat system is restarted in a way that, while keeping the current rating every player has reach folded back, it requires you to play at least 5 matches to determine if you stay in your current threat level or you need a calibration to go up or down your current rating for further match-making. During this neutral period your match-making is based exclusively in your win/lose ratio from the past 10 or 30 days or whatever these time periods are set, along with your K/D ratio from the same period so you fight against players with similar stats. Once you pass the 5 matches threshold it settles your rating and triggers the more complex system where your whole performance is considered to set your threat progression based on your completed tasks, assists, overall performance, such as K/D and W/L ratios, etc. so you start to earn the assigned rewards for your threat/league/rating. _____________________ 2. Weapon-Role-Based Match Making: What happens when a group of experienced snipers who maxed out that role are teamed up against a group of CQC expert players? We are assuming here they are all on the same level regarding the overall performance of each one for any given scenario, but for some specific situations, having no snipers in your side when the other team is holding positions in high spots surrounding an objective with <4mins to finish it makes for a CQC team fall in the need of a very tactical and well coordinated moving to clear the area and reach the target before the time runs out, otherwise, we get very short missions as a result disregarding if you are in the winning or the losing team. Potential solution: Favorite Weapon-Class-Based Match Making: Every time the server searches for players to get them in a match, it could do a quick check on their role ratings and apply this in a very small factor to attempt to at least balance the roles of each member of the team to ensure both sides could cover almost every situation. I know this is mostly impossible and even if it is possible it could be not very accurate given the fact that there are only 40 players of each faction which means you can have as much 10 pre-made teams of 4 players as much which doesn't leave much space for such diversity as the amount of roles we currently have that are a bunch, but at least if you have 2 or 3 free players ready for a mission to pick for a match, it could then add this last check to see which one of them might fit better and be more helpful to balance the teams regarding this. Why not? _____________________ 3. Rewards for going up on a League System instead of only four threat tiers: When it comes to a wide player base the spectrum of skill ratings is way too big to actually have an accurate method to pair every player in a balanced match without risking to have an amount of them in the same pool with players way above or way below their level when there are so few tiers to frame them. Also in this particular situations there's the point where players looking for more rewards will try to game the system or would end up not getting proper rewards accordingly to their effort or skills put on the game leading to discouraging the new players or casual ones since they'll be struggling to get cash and xp or either making the more skilled ones get very few motivation to put an effort on improve and rank up if they could be getting same or better earnings and easier wins by just getting matched with less experienced players. Potential solution: Monthly League Rankings and Rewards Accordingly: If we could have sub-tiers within the current threat levels we could have some sort of a league system where every player gets matched within other players of his same league/threat but subdividing the spectrum into maybe 3 or more tiers within each threat rank. I think there already is something like 10 invisible ranks on each threat? Let's say the weekly rating session starts and past week you ended up as Silver II, then you have to play 5 matches to settle it down and define if you'll stay as Silver II or maybe Silver I or III or even jump to Gold or Bronze depending if you are performing better or worst this time. Then there's a multiplier in your rewards based on the tier you are which means that if you put an effort to go up to higher tiers your rewards will be bigger and also maybe in addition to this you get the chance of having some other rewards such as a set of League JMB with a small factor for bigger rewards and less relevant prizes when you are in a lower threat/league and a higher factor for important rewards and more relevant prizes once you go up through treat levels. This is also a way to discourage dethreating and add more interest for the players who will fight the best they can to get such mentioned rewards. To clarify this, let's say Bronze, Silver, Gold threats grants you better prizes (aka: JMB or JTickets) while the internal tiers (ie. Silver I, II, II, and so on) increases the multiplier for your cash and XP rewards and a chance of getting also a few JTickets if you earn MVP or something like that. _____________________ Now, what I think many of us will agree is that showing up that threat badge above our name tags only thing it did was not only segregate the community, particularly by separating servers, but also increased the amount of toxicity between players and discouraged a lot of newcomers of keep playing because they usually got bullied by other players who just reached a higher tier than them but were facing very stressful matches against higher threat players before so they learned it the wrong way, that's why I think threat badges should've never been there in the first place. If you want to see your ratings, you should be able to check your stats privately and then if decide you want to share them or not is up to you. We could have some sort of ladders or weekly/monthly rankings for these who wants to take part in a separated competitive instance districts ruleset for that too where also prizes might be more interesting. I'm not sure if I'm being accurate with my proposition in regards of what might be actually possible to do and what might be already in the board for future plans but by bringing this suggestion here, although it is a bit sketchy, I just want to contribute with some ideas I had based as well in what I saw around some other games where prizes for reaching higher leagues are a motivation that worked to stop tankers from dethreating and ruining the game. In addition, I'm setting a poll to know what kind of rewards you'd like to have if we could get a Leagues System with prizes for going up the ladder. Waiting for your feedback guys, hope we have a good discussion about this. Regards, Sal.

This kind of threads, we don't need. I don't see the point and it looks more like a trolling thread while I was about to post a new thread regarding a question about threat, but had to come here and waste time with more toxicity toward players and their threat.

My bad, you're right, but what I was addressing is the fact that someone with such long trajectory playing the game should know a few things already, specially this you are pointing out and the fact that every gold playing in bronze/silver was silver in first place in order to be able to join that instance, so many of them we couldn't tell if dethreated on purpose or just have been performing below the average gold level and still plays better than the average silvers. Adding this ^to what I'm saying explains it better too.

You pervs...

People used to complain so much about the lack of communications that it scares me now that they could start complaining about the excessive communication, lol! Keep it up with the awesome job you are already doing, there's a solid community backing you up 100% guys with this as you see.

Man, please tell me you'll upload the full song with you singing it some day so I can listen and confirm if that's the music I was listening inside of me while reading you, I swear.

Either you trolling or I don't know what. You're playing since December 2011 and you still play in bronze/silver? Yet you complain about "golds" while probably you are a de-threater yourself? But what concerns me more than anything is that you still have such mindset about this game and its GMs and "golds" and "botters" after ~7 years playing! And this people gets access to the internet, damn.

I support this. It is odd to browse the suggestions section as it is right now. Says the guy with no signature, that explains it all. (Joking, I see they already answered that) I noticed the same and my first post in the new forums was exactly regarding that, hope they add it eventually. Also I wonder if we could have an option to save a draft of our threads before posting. It would be useful because sometimes we are asking other players about some info or opinions about some stuff and we might want to hold a thread for a while before we post it but we might have already plenty of formatting on an specific thread we are creating and it is a shame to have to dismiss it all because we'll be posting some other day let's say.

You play since 2012 and you seriously are not aware of that particular lamppost? You need to get out of Social already. I'm joking, but seriously, it is the most strange mystery of the universe and the most deep concern of the elders of San Paro to understand who, when, how and why put that lamppost exactly in that particular place. I guess Javez needs to fill a complain in the City Hall about that hindrance but he never did...might be some unknown reason for this, probably there's some illegal economic arrangement between the G-Kings and the government of San Paro to let them do their business if they don't complain about that lamppost?

I agree they need to add more specific rules but I think they're aiming to do this and just posted the first set of rules while they tidy up the rest of them. For me, what I really don't like to see on forums are the titles that says nothing about the thread and makes me click or hold my cursor on the tittle to know what is about making me lose precious time I could use to get my *ss wiped ingame. No, seriously, its counter-productive if I'm browsing through a bunch of threads to have to read them one by one to know what are these about instead of reading a tittle and decide if I'm interested in the topic or I'm not.

Fixed it^

I never liked this because it only made the already existing elitism within the player base become even worst, those players who wants to help, such as I always did since ever without even attempting to submit a postulation for such programs, does not have any problem to be helpful and bring communications with newcomers to /whisper or /group chat to talk privately and provide the requested assistance. Veteran and experienced players are already known by the community and newcomers does not need to get more confused about who are in charge of the game management and what the role of those "volunteers" is in the game, indeed some of these volunteers are less helpful than actual players and a few of them even used these features just to group up with their friends in lower threat instances and to get attention and fame. If you are voluntary contributing to the community you don't need a special tag or a reward since you are doing it voluntary, why ask for permission or special abilities then to do it then? Also it leads to a lot of spam in the chat HUD making it even more difficult for both, the ones looking for help and the rest of us trying to play and chat with others. I'm pretty sure many players who never been on such programs, including myself, have been very helpful and might been helping way more players than the SPCMs did. In my opinion this kind of things were just a way Tiggs and G1 used to calm down the community regarding the terrible lack of GMs presence in game but as for how the new management seems to aim to handle it I seriously don't think this is going to be needed at all. Now, trying to think of real life analogies to compare what a volunteer program could be, if I think of firefighters they receive training and equipment to do their job, so probably a program where the ones who wants to help the community could follow certain guidelines to get aligned in the actions they'll take is something we could have and do just as players by sharing between us our experiences, knowledge and ideas of how to improve the game environment for the newcomers. Why not posting a thread where everybody can take part and comment and based on it we could then sort out the particular things that might need to be addressed to forward it as suggestions to the staff? That would be a true Volunteer Program imo.

TL:DR: Would be great if we could have an ingame report system where we could add another parameter next to the name to describe the reason of the report. This way we could specify if we are reporting a suspected cheater or a griefer, harasser, exploiter and even more detailed if it is clarifying if we suspect the cheater of wall hacking, aimbotting, speed hacks, or in the case of griefers and other bad behaviors specifying if he is blocking our objectives on a mission, using racial slurs or insulting other players excessively, etc. so the admins know what they should be looking at from such players. With a few restrictions to use it only a few times in a given lapse of time or such this could help a lot to the admins/GMs to be aware of which situations might require an urgent intervention to caught the player violating the CoC in the moment he is doing it or if it is something that just puts a flag on someone who could be just subject of some closer monitoring. And of course this helps to completely reduce the need of the customer support team to go through these reports that most of the time I bet must be senseless stuff.

Guys, please pay attention, Matt said in the Q&A that if there are stats recorded by FF that proves these are flagged cheaters, these will remain, if there are FF manual bans with no stats flagged then these should be considered to be lifted.

Wait, which one? The last kits are horrible and me, as a fan of making cars who bought every single kit I could for both my crim and my enfo simply stopped buying kits after the disappointment I had with the poor quality of the last kits they added.

Hola!

^This, doesn't sounds legit imo.

Would you consider major economy changes such as adding a different currency and tokens such as we already have with the G1Coins and Joker Tickets but by making them accessible through multiple way? Since the announce of Legendary Weapons being no longer tradeable this will not only turn a few of these items on a "Pay 2 Win" sort of stuff (or at least at the perception of the majority) but also the game will need a money sink system in place for those who grind a lot of money in the marketplace auctions to spend their earnings and we'll need to have some motivation to keep creating content or we'll be eventually stopping since there'd be no reward for our time and effort invested there. Would you guys consider doing something with the Multiplex Cinema / Joker Distribution Center showcase displays there? WE would love to see more player-made content there and specially rotating the stuff we have stuck there since years and that basically almost nobody buys. (I mean the player-made cars and clothings)

Yeah, indeed these screenshots could look a bit better if I would lower the bright a bit, but I usually set it a bit high for an advantage in darker areas of the maps and night time. Though I still miss the old shaders with bullet tracers and atmosphere particles and such.

The elite of APB, damn guys you making the game looks like crayon drawings, lol I've been always in love with these renders, could never get tired of seeing new ones. And you guys have clearly put a huge effort on all this, not only rendering but also teaching others and sharing your knowledge!

This ones I love, a lot. Saw them around other social networks, glad to have them all together here too.

Hi fellas! Back in the days there was a time when Jericho asked us to submit screenshots to use in the official APB Facebook page which was great as it allowed us to have some of our best screenshots of San Paro featured in their page for a week. Later when Tiggs announced they'd be working on a new media campaign she stepped this to the next level and requested us to submit screenshots too but as some sort of contest where the selected screenies would be rewarded with certain amount of G1c, besides having a picture featured in any official site of the game is already a greater reward than anything I could personally expect. This is why I have like, literally thousands of screenshots to share so I'm bringing here a small selection of these. Also lot of people submitted screenshots for both of these events and I'd like to invite everyone else to share these and any other screenshots of the game you have for everyone else to enjoy. However, we could apply similar rules: I ask you please to post only screenshots without the HUD (you press F12 to turn off the HUD) and trying to be the most representative images of San Paro and its actors, such as scenes of action, gun fights, car stunts, characters, social events, etc. Clan pictures and symbols are also ok although there's a specific thread for symbol showcasing. Let's get into it and hope you guys enjoy the eye-candy! (Warning, massive images on spoilers!) The people of San Paro:

Thinking a few ideas in a rush, not going in a deep analysis thought, I think a few possibilities: 1) They could add themselves manually a small set of legendary weapons on sale in the ingame market place for anything above $3 or $4 millions on a weekly or monthly basis so they ensure there's a money sink system in place and still grant access to other players to buy OP or permanent weapons in game if they put enough effort to earn that cash. 2) They could let us trade these between players as a private trading? But I know this would allow an easy way to circumvent restrictions. 3) Nerf Legendary weapons and render them useless except for just a visual feature? (Nobody wants this, but let's be honest, how many of us still stick to Carbine, N-tec, Obeya/Obir and other stock and ARMAS guns besides holding a bunch of legendaries in our lockers?) 4) Drop JMBoxes as a rere Daily Activity and maybe through Joker Tickets too? I don't know, I'm concerned for this as well since I stopped buying JMBoxes when I noticed I was falling into a bad gambling habit and also it was great to have a way to spend a couple of millions I was holding in something useful that also allowed us to share very valuable items with our closer friends and clannies. Edit: Oh and not only AAEPD, there are permanent OPGLs too. I know these are weak af but still perma explosive weapons.

Has anyone noticed this or am I missing something? Because I'm creating a topic and can't find the preview function as same for a comment where I had a typo and couldn't find the edit function. If I'm right with this, probably this topic should belong to the suggestions section, right? Wait, I am in the suggestions section, dork, yet I'm editing this thread. :S Well, I guess this is going to be a suggestion to simply add the "preview" ability for new threads we create since that's still missing at the time I'm posting this one. Thanks!