sweetLemonade

Spot on! The management's incompetence has lead to the community's distrust in any of their implementations.

You've just described a gameplay mechanic which requires intrinsic knowledge of the game (positioning of car, knowing what angles are appropriate etc.) That is a tool in the arsenal of a good player. It only raises the skill ceiling. You're free to direct those questions to Matt Scott, who has uttered the words that "APB is a competitive game" in the last 2 AMA's. I think that your skill level is questionable, considering the hyperbole in your statements. Based on what data do you exclaim that "the game is full of cheaters"? The game currently has a population of ~300 players. Out of those players, anecdotally, the amount of times I've faced a blatant cheater can be counted on the fingers of one hand. As for "closets", I think they're a even smaller minority in this 300 pop game. Most of the "closet" accusations are usually worse players baselessly attacking better players for outplaying them.

Frankly, these two changes have to be highlighted, as they are the most important change in this patch GFAC is just another privacy concern, like other kernel-level access AC software, hence I will avoid writing about it (pros vs cons of such software decision can be found elsewhere) 1) Who came up with the splendid idea to add a 1.7 second delay in a fast-paced game, which is predominantly played in the 0.7s TTK range? This change has the ability to single-handedly kill any serious endeavours in this game for any future player base, regardless of how much you scale down the timer. Considering this game is now considered a competitive title (as per Matt's words from the AMA), how is this change supporting such crowd in any sense? It's like Valve removing bunny hopping or Apex removing tapstrafing, you only alienate any veteran players and any future, competitive players which you plan on receiving after EGS launch. I assume there are numerious edge cases which weren't convered, so one has to invest even more time in ironing them out. Time, which can be better spent on much more important QoL changes. Ironic that in the last 2 AMA's, most better QoL suggestions were scrubbed off as "negative work", while this "change" was pushed... a change which clearly has more downsides than upsides. The sheer man-power which was invested in this "fix" should've been invested in much more important changes, such as fixing the atrocious >120 FPS sliding bug and the complete lack of a working frametime limiter solution, ideally based on Waitable Timers. The game has absolutely horrendous 1% and 0.1% lows... Or, even better, allowing the user to place a ping around the area of a player without opening up the large map and finding the location of your character and then marking it. Absolutely mindboggling change. 2) Why is such a huge change, related to weapon accuracy, scrubbed off and trivialized under the term "a issue"? Can you elaborate on what exactly has changed? It's clearly not miniscule, if it seemingly affected all guns.

A small reminder that kernel-level anti-cheat solutions will not solve the problem this game has. The only solution to cheating is in-game moderation to take care off the blatants & separating casuals from competitive crowd with a separate queue (a pledgable contact or a separate, empty district for competitive matches) The separate queue will also take care of griefing indirectly as well, as you can separate entire teams in empty districts. Limiting the queue to 3vs3 and 4vs4 seems adequate. The low population of ~300 players makes in-game moderation a simple task. If someone tries to pull the "oh it's a long-term solution" excuse... I fail to understand how implementing GFAC in this version of the game is a good long-term solution. The developers have already shown interest in rebuilding the game in UE5, meaning such large endeavours are... frankly ridiculous if you ask me. This video is a obligatory watch: Instead of the wasted effort on GFAC (a fatal, user security & privacy issue, as well as a system performance hog), it would've been more appropriate to fix the >120fps sliding bug, implementing a waitable timer frametime limiter and doing something worthwhile to gameplay mechanics (district layout balancing, mission balancing, eliminating RNG from weapons, implementing anti-griefing solutions such as the one mentioned above etc.) or the UI (allowing for 3 FC's, fixing misleading crosshair representation, using explicit & numeric values for weapon statistics in-game, making a proper tutorial, notification pinging system with binds instead of opening up map, VOIP...) I wouldn't be surprised if, with the GFAC implementation, you've also indirectly removed any potential W7 users from this game. Yes, W7 is still a viable option for games employing the D3D9 graphics API, such as APB, as Microsoft has crippled D3D9 on W10 due to their "borderless" attempts. Or you could always upgrade the graphics API to D3D12 or employ DXVK

They can say whatever they want, the intent is very clear. They're trying to make a battle pass, with visible tier list for people to "grind for". In a game which isn't even close to being competitive in the slightest and was clearly steered towards a casual mindset for more than a decade. In a game which has a myriad of larger concerns, choosing leaderboards as "#1 priority" is not the right approach at all. They (seemingly) haven't used the RTW code, at least judging from the look of the UI. It seems that they've scrapped the idea of using Kismet or Scaleform completely. GhosT's suggestion is spot on, they should've stuck to increasing the amount of JT obtained from in-game contact dailies. Also, very concerning to see that the dev team of LO has admitted to using ""vibe coding"" (relying on LLM's nonsense for the game's code) for their AC solution...

I'm expecting them to completely forego Linux altogether, akin to other publishers... In-house solutions from a small company such as Little Orbit sounds troublesome. Even Valve & RIOT have difficulties with their in-house solutions, where they have a larger dev team & larger resources. What assurement can we have that LO won't abuse their system akin to the previous rogue GM? I fail to understand how they'll circumvent the most common modern cheating method, which bypasses quite a few larger AC solutions...

This entire thread can be summed up with this image: The game shouldn't be balanced according to the wishes of users who do not have the willpower to learn the nits & grits of it, nor understand basic concepts of what makes up a shooter game.

The last AMA has left anyone having a glimmer of hope for this game with disappointing message. Every single question in regards to UI changes or some dramatic QoL changes (UX, music, clothing) was scrubbed off with the following words: "Negative work" They've also hinted & talked about some plans ("internal tests") of remaking APB in UE5.... this should tell you enough about the current state of the game... A game where almost all complaints which have been plaguing this game for a decade can be solved in a span of a month... relegated to another cycle of wait. A funny "warning" they've made once they've mentioned their UE5 build "internal tests and R&D" was mentioned on Discord was: "We don't want to create another Engine Upgrade scenario" Which they did, in fact, do. The mere action of shrugging off all major issues of this game under the pretense of "Negative work" & then mentioning how they're doing "internal tests on UE5" is doing the exact opposite of what they're supposedly "trying to avoid"

All these rage-induced ad hominem attempts at LilyRain, while he just quotes basic numbers from APBDB which the other party doesn't seem to understand? It's bizarre to read some of these comments. Funnily enough, the comments somewhat emphasize how much of a issue mixing the casual & competitive crowd together in a single basket was detrimental to the game.

I would personally group the FR0G 'Thumbnail' in the discussion too, but I agree with your points. The 2nd paragraph is a great observation too. To derail this topic a bit, since I find it nonsensical to talk about the ".45 AP being OP" when it clearly isn't, what would you do with the game's balancing if you were given access to edit anything you want? I find these types of discussions more fun, since singling out 1 gun is impossible as they're all heavily-related.

I was always perplexed as to why that occured. Was it complete lack of care from the management team or developers team in terms of new content & balancing? Was it the abysmal game performance at the time? Was it the supposed "ghost-shot" issues? (which were mostly RNG complaints) Was it the, supposed, rampant cheating & lack of a illusion that a anti-cheat solution exists? (lack of separate casual & comp queue exacerbated this even further, PB wasn't helping it, however) As a concept, APB did many things right... it just lacked support after it's release due to lack of, as we can now easily claim, good management.

To me, this reads like a immense skill issue on your part. Your only complaint about the .45AP is that it has the ability to "kill fast" when abusing TPS cornerpeeking? This is a problem with a majority of primary weapons, let alone secondary weapons. It's a symptom a much bigger underlying issue this game has. This is why I replied to the OP of this topic that "you either adapt or get left behind". Your analogy to what the .45AP feels like is also completely ridiculous. The .45 AP is no-where near the theoretical strength of a 1STK sniper rifle weapon. If get fragged from a user which has the map geometry advantage, it's a mistake on your part not the weapons issue. I do however think that the removal of sprintshooting was detrimental for the attacking side, when attacking the defending side There's a reason APB had longer TTK with low RNG & with sprintshooting, they balance each other out. Sprintshooting & the longer TTK allowed you to punish a person who misses and tries to abuse the map's geometry. Now, it's the exact opposite. Defending is much stronger than it was, which I assume is your primary issue here. The "...People can aim, everyone can aim..." part is also hillarious, considering the sheer amount of users which lack basic map awareness & mechanical ability in this game, even after +10 years of play. No matter how loud you want to be, solely ironing out the .45AP as the reason for breaking gameplay balancing not the right approach. Let's assume your complaint of the .45 AP being OP gets heard. It's STK go from 5->6 without changing anything else, making it roughly similar to the FBW, RFP's TTK. Do you think anyone would play the gun again? Of course not, everyone would play the FR0G afterwards. Then the next wave of people complaining about the FR0G would arrise, then people would swap to the Mountie, PDW or N-FA 9 Then after that, people would complain start complaining about primary weapons (ACES, OCA, DOW, shotguns) being too fast to kill and one being forced to use that primary weapon instead of their preferred weapon of choice. All of these complaints would be akin to yours, their strength to frag a person without the other party being able to respond in any way, shape or form. Essentially granting them the frag, served on a silver plate. This is only looking at this topic in a gameplay aspect, without going into LO's financial incentive to keep guns such as the .45 AP, FR0G & others strong on purpose to fuel their pockets. Yes, this iterative process would lead to elongating the game's TTK to ~1s, which I personally am more fond of,. However, you're then forcing reliance upon primary weapon choice on every spot. Then people would complain about that in the way I've mentioned above. Do you understand my thought-pattern? The actual issue, in my opinion, is the following: The game is heavily biased towards the defending side due to the short TTK of all guns, the high RNG in ADS across all guns and the removal of sprintshooting. The fact it's TPS exacerbates this problem severely. What is the solution? - MM Modifier=0, Walk Modifier=1 across all guns, change out recoil patterns & adjust ranges accordingly. - Removal of TTK-altering, range-altering & RNG-altering modifications (CJ, IR, LRR, HS should only adjust FoV) - Bringing back sprintshooting - Pushing the TTK of the game back into 0,9s – 1,6 s This would solve all the complaints. Sorry, but this is completely ridiculous. If 200ms is not a massive difference as you say it is, try outfragging a ACES SMG with an OSCAR in the same range? You can also test how a ~170ms difference feels by playing the OCA with HB3 vs a ACES SMG (800ms vs 630ms TTK) 200ms is a MASSIVE difference. They've even made studies how a mere 10ms difference in ping has decided the champion in Valorant's tournament... Every millisecond matters.

"Let me tune an a secondary weapon, which will drastically alter interplay between all weapons & alter finances of the company which hosts the game I play, instead of getting better at the game I play since 2012. Why is it my fault that I can't win missions against better players?" "I want to stay in my comfort zone and not advance" You either adapt or you leave, welcome to low population PvP games. There are exactly 5 out of all 18 secondaries and 33 out of all 48 primary weapons which beat the .45 AP in TTK. Just get a FR0G, NFA9, PDW or RFP even and use map geometry to your advantage. Cookie answered this well, it's just a low population issue. Although personally, the issue more lies in that this game mixes the casual & competitive crowd together in a single queue, along with the short TTK of all guns in live not being designed for APB's map layout, but no one cares about making the game objectively better for competitive play

To you and everyone who shares your sentiment: when are you finally going to get better at the game? The .45 isn't the problem this game has.

Arc/Battlemage GPUs do not perform well in OpenGL & D3D9–D3D11 (DX9–DX11) titles due to their driver overhead penalty. APB is a D3D9 title, all effects render on the CPU. The driver causes massive stuttering even in CPU-limited scenarios, where the GPU usage is low. This is just a driver software limitation, perhaps a architectural limitation to some extent as well since Intel focused (& still focuses solely) on D3D12 (DX12) performance only. Even Vulkan was subpar on Arc & Battlemage cards, last time I checked. I would, instead, recommend you to go for a ≥12GB VRAM Nvidia GPU, at minimum Ampere (30-series) architecture or newer. There's a reason their usage market share is that large.