LilyRain

It is all-around superior to JG. It kills faster (0.6s vs 0.65s), has the same base accuracy (8 cm at 10m), has tighter spread (125cm at 10m vs 150cm at 10m), has better mobility (sprint delay 0.45s vs 0.65s), faster reloads (0.5s vs 0.6s) and better damage dropoff range to help compensate for its red mod (15m vs 10m). https://apbdb.com/items/Weapon_Shotgun_DOW_Slot2_ArmasJB https://apbdb.com/items/Weapon_Shotgun_JG_Slot2 The niche is its mod. Much tighter spread but half the fire-rate. Marksmanning it is not the way. Just go CSG/Tas-20 at higher CQC-ranges (or drop down to being a PMG/OCA garbo-player).

Yes but the effect is so miniscule the answer might as well be no. The following image shows the accuracy stats of NFAS that has Reflex Sight 3 and Cooling Jacket 3. Reflex Sight 3 improves Run Modifier by 10% (1 → 0.9). However... Cooling Jacket 3 increases spread alone by 50% (150cm → 225cm) as well as increase the shot modifier cap (spread) by another staggering 70% (1 → 1.7). Add to these the fact that NFAS doesn't really have any time to recover during its automatic firing (Fire Intercal is 0.2697s but Recovery Delay is 0.6s), which makes the situation even a bit more worse. The negative effects of Cooling Jacket on NFAS are so high that Reflex Sight won't help. Reflex Sight is generally considered useless on shotguns overall. Perhaps but there was another thing. While reducing the fire rate seems fair in exchange for more range, it made automatic weapons a lot easier to use. N-Tec started to handle like N-Tec 'Ursus', so the skill-factor in controlling shots was effectively gone. Additionally, due to how powerful and easy-2-use close ranged weapons are, it made their lives even more guaranteed against those using assault rifles in close range, because assault riflers by default sacrifice mobility when marksman-aiming in order to land shots. Close Rangers can also equip cooling jacket, making it rather impossible to lose without actually missing shots, which is rather unfair skill-wise. ---------------------- Tier 3 Mods aren't always the best choice. Cooling Jacket 2 is often seen better to use compared to Cooling Jacket 3, simply because of how big the negatives are with cj3 in exchange for a tiny benefit that is often not worth it.

Good notice, it doesn't. They can afford it, that's why things like Obeya CR762 are still strong with CJ3. It already has good range so it doesn't need IR3. CJ3 works well on it. Correct. SMGs are mostly short-range so CJ3 won't hurt them as much. CJ3 PMG is a very strong choice. N-FAS with CJ3 though makes it spread too much. It requires almost kissing-distance to work. That would be much more straightforward for CJ3. Not necessarily a bad thing at all if tuned right. There was a previous change for Heavy Barrel that made it fire slower. It was too excessive so it was reverted.

It does but indirectly. APB is a game of distances. Cj3 makes weapons substantially more likely to miss due to bullet-spread. In a sense, it shortens your optimum weapon-range in exchange for some speed. (e.g medium-range weapons become short-high-range weapons). Attempting to use a weapon at its original best range will easily require an extra shot. That extra shot increases time-to-kill by a lot on many weapons. In that sense, DPS-wise, its drawback is comparable to Heavy Barrel's.

Spot on, balance is whack even for endgame. Surely fresh Characters will naturally suffer. The exception is Clotting Agent 3 + "green gas" (medspray). That combination doesn't really work. If you see someone using it just continue the fight, it won't contribute to healing them at all.

You can keep repeating the word "delusional", it is all you can say at this point. I've given you numerous chances even though you sealed your deal from the get go. You aren't good enough to discuss this and using your frustration from P5/N5 deaths that don't really matter is the ultimate proof, more so you tried to argue that Spotter/Tagger are less 'wallhacky' than the Bounty System. You're done.

Because balancing is influenced by taste, not by what is better for the game. Yes, LTL should remain weaker than lethal counterparts for very good reason (to not give Enforcers an edge) and I very much agree with that. But it is very easy to slightly buff LTL while maintaining that law. Instead, they nerfed LTL and buffed OCA on the SAME PATCH by not just nerfing PIG, but by making it completely useless (Stamina damage 950 → 675): https://www.gamersfirst.com/apb/news/2020/9/11/weapon-balance. Their reasoning I heard was 'to prevent stunning those falling from a certain height', right. That doesn't necessate this much of a nerf. Later on, they pretended to 'forget' that they were supposed to rebuff it to 750, which they have done later.

Seems like you're describing yourself. I have ARRESTED AND BEATEN some of the best known players around and I would most certainly have no problem arresting you too, thank you. It does since that was your only argument, which didn't really say a single objective issue about the Bounty System. Just your own personal frustrations of getting owned. No, you cannot. The average time to kill in this game is 0.75s. Some weapons kill faster, others do it slower and that is the case in a 1v1 scenario. You're trying to argue that you alone vs 3-4 other players can hold out till your teammates arrive? The spawn screen alone requires enough seconds for a person to be killed. I guess it is YOU who never participated in "very competitive matches consisting of the best players". You wouldn't last remotely as long as you claim. Which is why this is a checkmate against your entire argument but sadly you are incapable of reading... Yet AGAIN, I repeat: "Golds will continue to play the game irrespective of being spotted, tagged or being P5/N5". You have just confirmed this fact. The Bounty System existing or not won't change anything in this very regard. And no, the Bounty System is not griefing, it is playing the game. Having it disabled is closer to griefing that not since it enables griefers to do their thing while being virtually God Mode. This should be very easy to understand.

I am glad you said that, let's examine yours yet again.. Then you shouldn't have any problems but you somehow do, massive ones at that pertaining to "skill issues". You won't, unless your metric is silver/bronze opponents. Basically people that are still learning the ropes. Your grasp of timeframes in this game appear to be massively lacking. There is no "stalling" here. You either wipe the enemy wave or they wipe you. Silver takes huh? What do you call this then? You are fine with spotter/tagger that literally provide actual visual feed in the likes of wallhacks, but you call the bounty system that only shows a star on minimaps "wallhack".... do you even know what wallhacks are, my friend? It isn't bad design at all when it is less prominent than actual mods such as spotter. If Bounty is bad design, you should vouch for the removal of spotter/tagger as well. Till you do, you're not being honest. I have given many objective reasons that are simply not up for debate, but since this has devolved into a skill conversation then I'll give you a no "bs" one: The Bounty System should return so you get to learn a valuable lesson. That lesson being Golds (which you believe you are one of) don't really have a problem with the system. People will talk about it for a week or 2 then get back to their lives. Golds will continue to play the game irrespective of being spotted, tagged or being P5/N5. You however will continue to say that people are getting some 'unfair wallhack' & that they are ruining/griefing your mission. P.S: Griefers can grief anyways. They'll ram your car, ghost & call your position out to their mates, etc. The Bounty System actually gives you a chance to kill griefers, which makes it fun to get back at them every once in a while. I'm interested in your next wave of nonsense.

- The Bounty System doesn't award JTs.. - "the last person stopping the enemy team from scoring a win" doesn't really work in APB. The game is against going Rambo (1 man army) against entire teams. He/She will get pushed and killed. Doesn't change the outcome. I'm not sure how to tell you this but if you have trouble killing 1 person whom you can literally see on the mini-radar in real time, you're probably not good enough to be discussing game balance.

While I do enjoy the Bounty System, my liking to it is subjective. However, objectively speaking, it is quite the mistake to make APB nothing but Team Blue vs Team Red. There are many games out there that does this better & APB shouldn't straight up compete with that. APB should strive at making itself better at what it has unique, its chaotically-alive District nature. It isn't like we have after-mission leaderboards for it to be a problem. The moment you get your scoreboard, look at it by pressing Tab then press K, that match-history is GONE FOR GOOD. There is simply no reason to pretend that it is a problem. Moreover, years ago, the Bounty System was really lucrative rewards-wise. All Money and Standing were doubled, even those awarded at the end of a mission, so getting one at the last stage was a decent deal to those good enough to maintain it. But of course, that got nerfed to promote buying premium. Objectively speaking, I'm certain many people would have enjoyed this and actually help keep districts more alive away from peak times just because of how more likely it is to benefit from it. Additionally, it would help kickstart districts earlier because the hassle of farming non-opposed missions will be effectively HALVED (NA would've been fine a while ago when people needed Waterfront to progress & things were looking dead because of it. I wonder why nobody considered this, hmm?). Getting the Bounty System to be more rewarding again will be an unquestionable boost to APB. That is a clear-cut fact. More pressingly, progressing weapon roles without the Bounty System in mission districts is substantially slower. It doesn't matter what your average K/D per match is, you WILL get a massive hit to your role progression simply because of how many kills are required for max role. It is evident this wasn't considered/compensated when the system was switched off. The Bounty System should come back, it carries substantially more merits against meaningless, subjective demerits.

Indeed. LO's latest plan is Phasing between adjacent districts but I'm not sure how well that will go or take to be ready.

Dethreaters will make sure that the increase in population will go down again. Their presence destroys missions in the stronger district in order to forcefully dethreat, then further make newbie-life hell on the weaker districts. Please no, never again. Dethreaters should have their fair-share of the real-world like everyone else.

You have the upper-hand since O-PGL's weakness is time, plus since the O-PGL is jumping, both of you would be exposed. The situation is ultimately in your favor. O-PGL can drop grenades on the floor, bounce them off a wall or jump-shoot from a distance but at every single instance, O-PGL grenades require 5 seconds to explode. Long-ranged O-PGLers can be killed easily in less than 2 seconds. Even in 1 second with weapons such as Obeya CR762. Your best tactic against any O-PGL user is to either take the initiative or evasive action to attack later. Play around them and they are easy-prey. You could also get in a car to close the distance. They can do absolutely nothing about that.

1 vs 2 scenarios in APB are all painful. Unless you get to fight enemies in relative 1v1 succession, you're going to die (unless they can't aim). Try being in between 2 OCAs/PMGs, shotguns, Light Machine Guns, etc. Should we remove those as well? Because they are substantially worse. Literally instantly killing. At least both O-PGLs have a fuse timer of 5 seconds, you can literally start moving when you hear them and you'll be fine.

APB is a game that chose chess-like gameplay over what makes sense and was balanced along that path (despite balance not being perfect). Weapons like EOLs not being usable from passenger seats consequentially looks stupid but allowing EOLs at the present time to be used from Passenger seats would instantly change the value of EOLs from zero to hero. EOL 'Deep Impact' is a literal Concussion Grenade Launcher (Health, Stamina and Hard damage to vehicles are all identical) but with the added benefit of a fuse timer that is ONLY 2.5 seconds (faster than Low-Yields) compared to 4s from actual throwable Concussion Grenades. Being able to shoot that from a Passenger seat is massive (it can also reload in only 1.15 seconds). ALIG users crouching to disable Pioneers would become completely suicidal. ALIG requires 3.24 seconds to destroy a Pioneer, meanwhile the user can receive 990 health damage in just 2.5s, putting them in a perfect place to be 1-tapped by anything, like the driver pressing F to finish the job or another passenger doing the honors. In the event the Pioneer has High Burn Fuel, ALIG needs 2.7 seconds to destroy it which is still slower than the fuse-timer and even if the ALIG-user succeeds, the passengers can simply press F to avoid death due to High Burn Fuel being outright one of the most stupid additions to APB. Again, one-tapping the ALIG would be cake-walk from there. Unless APB's balance gets revised, this would be a problem.

I don't believe that renaming APB is necessary or beneficial but assuming it is a good thing to do, APB is not ready to be rebranded nor the way APB is handled allow for such an approach. A renamed game must simultaneously release with new content, enhanced gameplay, features, etc. APB releases things bit by bit and tweaks things one at a time which doesn't bode well with a rename-effort.

The changes must be drastic, namely against mobility. APB is a game where people can instantly turn 180º and continue moving at full-speed. Currently, a lot of fights get cancelled using Clotting Agent 3 behind objects, or the ability to enter a nearby-car. Having longer TTKs will guarantee that APB will become a game that requires getting more friendlies to aim at the same target to make any progress. Solo-gameplay is already at a high-disadvantage and any higher TTK will effectively make it useless without explosives.

Good chance Console-servers are handled by Sony and Microsoft, so upgrading them should be more straightforward. But for PC-servers, some upgrades/changes can surely prove to be beneficial due to servers having similar trends to client-demand (core-clock rather than multi-thread). Current APB servers are confirmed to be single-threaded: "The clear winner here is the SoftLayer 1270v3 at 3.9Ghz (TURBO). That's a bit surprising, since technically it's the "smallest" of the three processors types (AWS C3 is a E5-2680v2 with 10 cores at 2.8Ghz, and the SoftLayer E5-2690v2 is an 8 core 3.0Ghz processor) and by far the cheapest. However, Unreal eats processor clock for breakfast, and does not properly use multiple cores for its processing tasks. So the smaller processor actually wins out. For the 1270v3 even with each district at full 100 capacity, frame rate remained close to 30 FPS, and dropped only very occasionally to 25 FPS. This is higher than the current servers’ frame rate of 25 FPS under the best conditions (down to 18 FPS at 80 capacity), and actually better than the US based Overkill servers which run closer to 22 FPS under the same 100-player load!" Which makes sense because servers receive information from clients, so there have to be some similarities. Because of this, there is also a good-chance cheaper servers were used because having more threads at the moment doesn't matter. Luckily though, multi-threaded CPUs are now very affordable for servers compared to the past. I remember it to be more lively (till players block-roads on purpose with green planet trucks)

Districts in APB were 50v50 when I started playing it. At one point in time the district cap got lowered to 40v40 due to server performance: https://apbreloaded.blogspot.com/2015/02/new-apb-servers.html If servers can benefit from the x64 environment then that is a solid yes as that will help with the benchmarks that happened years ago against district population. If not, x64 with Cross-District matchmaking will allow the matchmaker to consider those in a ready-state across other districts, it will then move them all to an appropriate district. I never came across in-depth details of how that will happen (will there be loading screens? will players phase inside civilian traffic? no clue atm).

Correct. There are things that don't really need the x64 Engine Environment. The exception being matchmaking because of the way LO wishes to address it, Phasing (cross-district matchmaking). The only quick-alternative to waiting for the x64 engine is for LO to increase district caps, because 40v40 is quite low for matchmaking to shine. A slower alternative would be to either revise scoring or skew how threat changes, because anyone who can press F at an objective can be Gold. But yes, things like balancing should happen NOW. Even if LO delays its advertising of the x64 Engine, players and Game Bloggers WILL BRING the World's attention back to this game. They will re-try it, see that it indeed performs better, RTX-Cards don't crash, etc but the game is still the same unbalanced mess.... then they will leave. Plus, weapons are hit-scan. There are no physics involved with bullet travel time because that doesn't exist in APB. Also, the efforts later will naturally revolve around finding bugs in the x64 environment rather than balance the game. If balancing gets delayed, that would be the ultimate mistake.

Precisely. Longer TTKs will simply amplify ALL of APB existing problems. Anyone who advocates for longer TTKs doesn't have a single clue to what they are talking about.

Jesus was born in Summer.

But we do. Grenades in APB come with some smoke by default since that is a natural aftermath of the explosion. The exception being half-brick, 8balls and snowballs which aren't really grenades.

Imagine an option in Counter Strike that lets players switch off Smoke Grenades and Flash Bangs. Fairness will only exist if smoke is either visible or doesn't exist for EVERYONE.