LilyRain

This could be a good thing. Back porting the critical new features alone to the current engine might make the next beta run overall faster. Now can we undo the bandaid balance touches, improve gameplay rules and make the game slightly more fun again? Might as well make the game less of an uphill to New Players from now to retain some new blood before 1.3 is actually ready? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Meanwhile, SakeBee be like:

Is it really that hard to believe that people blatantly lie? Considering the topic, if advertising happens, you did in fact lie about lack of new content because there is PLENTY of game time and things for New Players to explore before they even hit R195 to experience the real world yet even reach R255. Lack of "new" content is a problem to those who have played for years, not for new players.

What isn't broken can't be fixed. Out of 40v40 (assuming the district is full), the matchmaker can only match those in a ready state after pressing k, which aren't plentiful at all. Usually only 2 teams are ready at a time. The matchmaker really hasn't got much choice but to put those people together. There are only 2 major things you can do: 1- If you aren't interested in a challenge (or zero-honor OCA team), Do NOT press k as soon as you are done with a mission against a group of 'super demi-Gods'. Give them some time to get matched with someone else first. 2- This is easier said than done but considering people were waiting since 2014, might as well continue waiting till the New Engine is out, then wait even more after that till Phasing is finalized (Phasing will allow matching across all similar districts). This SHOULD make matching a bit less rough.

Much appreciated

I see promise and consistent quality throughout You should make more of these!

1.75ttk at perfect execution is correct

Yeah, sounds about right Absolutely STAR doing better than N-TEC at CQC still has some depth to it because N-TEC still kills faster. If STAR is a piece of burger-meat then N-TEC is the buns. Perhaps at the upper-range of CQC towards low-mid range. Yep, weapon mods are insane. Hunting Sight is a prime reason as to why New Players are initially screwed. I would rather it only be a zoom modifier but nooo... let the new players with their zero-slot STAR effectively not be able to make use of the weapon's effective range and indirectly, also not be able to burst/spray with it better (because minimum accuracy isn't as good without Hunting Sight). lol perhaps but at least you can hold a discussion without meaningless, childish spam. Not so many, Glaciers continues to do a fine job with 13k+ posts. He's objectively the King of Forums atm.

You say it like LO only cares about modern PCs but that isn't true, because here is the fun fact: Top-tier PCs can't play optimally either because the current engine doesn't like RTX cards, so RTX users can't play with any sorts of decent textures. Till the new engine goes live, they have no solution but to play on potato visuals as well.

I'd like to but client performance, matchmaking and weapon balance are all their distinct things. Improving performance and matchmaking will change nothing balance-wise. It has everything to do with OP's question. Read it again, he is talking about the effect of "time" and ultimately asking whether LO is doing things in a time-manner that is factually good or not.

While the Engine Upgrade is at the center of all their plans, discussing balance at this very moment is of utmost importance, perhaps one of the last moments where it can be safely brought up while having some time to do something about it. I say this because of the latest roadmap LO officially posted: Of course, some delays happened so the New Engine is now internally at version 2.2, hopefully in 2022 instead of 2021 but LO is yet to give any official statement/changes to this roadmap. Therefore at this moment, the current plan stands the same in order. Balancing was brought up because not only it highlights serious issues when it comes to how balancing was and is being delayed for no reason but also because unlike some other things (e.g phasing, global merge), it REALLY doesn't need the new engine to be done, period. With the given order of goals, delaying it is nothing but procrastination and a recipe for failure. Balancing the game is not to be ignored because... APB is a game at the end of the day. If we don't talk about this now and get it out, might as well watch the whole thing go down in flames.

I have, it is called discipline. You just didn't think things through, hence denying your own words & attempting to change your stances so rapidly as shown and explained down below. You say people don't read but you aren't reading yourself (most likely pretending).. In response to that, I've already told you that they DID vault weapons in their own way through destroying them till they get fixed in the future, ultimately debunking your point. It wasn't really in their best interest nor it helped whatsoever. All it did was cause further concerns in LO's ability to actually balance the game. You call it backlash, smart people call it feedback. Learn the difference as the feedback LO received was in order. Repeating it over and over won't make it any less false. You just lost it. It is perfectly relevant. It affects gameplay. If it didn't, it wouldn't have been vaulted. It proves a lot, you weren't aware prior of the EULA hence saying what you said about possible compensations and you still continue to say it. BY LAW, LO under no circumstance whatsoever, is liable or should provide monetary refunds in any shape or form. It doesn't matter if said players who paid for weapons agree/disagree with the changes, can deal with it or get upset enough to RIOT over their entire continent. No legal liability from LO towards Players for monetary refunds, period. You said you've seen many EULAs, then you should know that EULAs really doesn't leave room for opinions and thus, yours. Going against that after supposedly agreeing to it upon entering the service is foolish on the fundamental level. Why would you do this to yourself? What did you gain telling everyone that you didn't read the EULA? Too many mistakes were made, I'm afraid. - Your opening sentence is wrong in essence. Attempts that failed aren't really a positive point. Quite the contrary. You may have sympathy but they are still failed attempts that had their effects on the game's population, profitability and playability. - You proceed to imply that Halo CE was a failure when it really wasn't. The game was made from scratch and ended up being a decent accident that works better in comparison to other Halo games, gameplay wise that is. - The most extreme examples aren't representative of something as a whole. Again, Halo CE puts more emphasis on player skill compared to weapon choice due to players dying faster on average. The chess-factor is less there in comparison. Just because it exists doesn't mean it is dominant. - Fairness can't truly be "ensured" in unbalanced games. Map design will always favor a set of weapons over the rest, things don't really work like you say. I didn't really agree with you. I was affirming that you got the games mixed up. Halo CE is nothing like Halo Infinite when it comes to what someone can do with a controller's aim assist, which changed a lot of things. I was simply building up the stage to say that unlike Halo CE, Halo Infinite is closer to APB when it comes to "chess" like decisions due to obvious overall less demand from the Player. You just can't follow. That's not how chess works and it proves you didn't understand the "chess" discussion at its core. I made it perfectly clear that APB requires less cohesion due to how slightly too high time-to-kills are. Chess in this light means to check mate a player back to the spawn screen... Your reading comprehension is beyond concerning. It also goes without question that some chess pawns aren't really dangerous alone. They aren't really much of a threat in few quantities as well against say the Castle, the Bishop and of course the Queen. Pretty much half of the chess pieces without a good plan and patience to make them useful, are half-garbage. This is why Chess strategies get developed in the first place. Again, you lie and change stances too much... So should APB play more like an unfun MeanBetsy-Chess or more competitive? You advocated for both yet they are complete polar opposites? Which one are you for truly? Make your choice once and for all. You don't really have to say things directly. Welcome to the English language. Your stance and adjacent sentences that you throw around too much to cancel later did the talking for you. Your understanding of chess-like play directly supports longer-ttks, because if player speed and skill were dominant, there wouldn't be much chess to begin with. APB is already at the bad-paramount of how strategic it can be. Again, I repeat... many Players wouldn't dare login to play solo because solo-gameplay is gimped to the maximum. Teamplay is as easy as one attack per decade. This is a strong reason as to why APB is not competitive enough to attract competitive-seeking players. A lot of decent APB players moved over to Valorant, APEX Legends, etc. While player counts dipped, APB isn't really "on its last leg". Even Jericho is populated enough to play missions. Can't really call a game dying if you can press k and play still. But you want to make gameplay more loadout-based than performance just because 'player counts, we must do something'? No, thank you. The things you ask for are self-contradictory, you don't really seem to understand the general direction of where things should be to achieve what some people call better "competitiveness". I really hope so too. Indeed, G1 messed up quite a bit. The biggest reason and obstacle to retouching all of the game's balance isn't the idea in itself but the belief and approach that they should only touch 1-2 weapons at a time. That belief still exists today, it was actually posted 2 days ago by an SPCT on LO's official Discord server: While I do agree that playtesting to verify changes practically is important, it doesn't truly help in staying on an approach that was tried before and wasn't fruitful nor it really supports his claim of things not being addressed for a long time because of it. It isn't like those District A and B weapon tests were rapid enough to prevent that long time either. It would actually take longer, months upon months to visit every weapon in the game in this way and there would still be discrepancies/inconsistencies at the end of the first pass, because with this approach, those mini-changes also keep in view other weapons that were touched and to be touched. With their reasonings and how they approach this mess, it just won't end in a reasonable time, especially when that is the plan according to LO's roadmap and that is to wait for the New Engine before attempting to make the balance better (amongst other qualities of life), which brings another great example, being that OCA buff and PMG nerf in order to swap their places in the meta when simply nerfing the PMG would've sufficed. Problem is they didn't really bother to make other weapons that are in desperate need of a buff faster either. Funny enough they actually nerfed LTL. They simply don't seem to be even trying. At this stage, a healthier and rather unavoidable approach is to simply decide on a baseline (which SakeBee said they did establish one but didn't really show where it is in the current roster of weapons) then buff/nerf all weapons towards it by a certain percentage, because atm, a lot of weapons are their own distinct baselines when there shouldn't be this many. From there, tweaking weapons individually in smaller increments would finally become less of a wall, because then weapons wouldn't be so niche or with some ancient unchangeable identities that don't really allow for narrowing the gaps between weapons a bit further.

What makes you think they don't? The C.E.O said it himself, while LO sold the IP to the Chinese, the selling deal involved retaining complete control over THIS game, APB. LO can do anything gameplay related to this game and they did, both the good and the irrational. This is a first-grade online games problem. 'If it doesn't bring money there is no need to fix it or even talk about it', hmm? This is the mentality of short-term thinkers, a.k.a failures. They don't really have to be in order to receive fixes/improvements. If anything, if you think about it, there are players who religiously bought premium for the extra benefits such as more end-of-mission payout to skip grinding. Hence to them, indirectly, Mobile Radar Tower (amongst other things) were indeed paid for. "Most" here is an inaccurate exaggeration because the most talked about weapon was the N-TEC, which happens to be available for free. Since you were absent for so long, such a thing wouldn't matter anyways because ARMAS weapons are now available for purchase with JTs from the Joker Store, which is one of the great things LO did to this game. NOW you do. Had you known previously, you wouldn't have said this: But you always seem to say things that you don't really mean so it is whatever. It isn't new at all. In fact the rational half of the player base (not the trolly side who suggests wrong things just to see the game fail, because that's what they like to see) was actually suggesting ARMAS to stop selling weapons completely to kill the existing and future stigmas it brings, as well as to kill Joker Boxes because lootboxes are also a scummy practice. The latter was forced to happen when some countries declared lootboxes in online games illegal, the former is yet to happen. At the present moment and the near future, it won't help populate the game at all. The damage was already done. Those who thought the game is pay2win/pay4advantage because of it already left, dragged their friends with them and probably DDoSing the game just how they DDoSed Jericho to its death door. This will only help the possible new breed of players once the game re-advertises after the engine is out. Problem is, such changes must happen promptly, not afterwards like LO's roadmap shows. As it stands, it is a recipe that guarantees losing a good portion of those yet to arrive players. Not even remotely accurate. Halo CE.. "distance and your ability to aim. Those two factors are like that of chess pawns"... do you even know what you are talking about? For starters, the Halo franchise's balance was all over the place so it is a bad example to use to begin with, but we'll go with it. You got it backwards, btw. Halo CE was a faster game so no, weapon choice matters less in it: On the other hand, on the disaster that is Halo Infinite with controller-aim-assist being an aimbot AND substantial time to kill, THAT game actually puts more weight to weapon choice. It isn't really hard to understand. APB is in a similar situation anyways (minus the controller aimbot). When it comes to "competitive" games (e.g counter strike), each weapon is dangerous in its own right (even when considered sub-par), because they can still kill quite fast with further ability to headshot people. So they really aren't "chess" as you call them out to be. They are "competitive" because unlike APB, the dominant factors there are player speed and skill and hence, solo players can still wipe out an entire team in rapid succession. But in APB? Not even close. Good luck doing that in APB without camping some corner, abusing car gameplay or consumables against players that know what they are doing. You can start a fight with someone, have your teammate or theirs join a decade later to end the fight. Cohesion doesn't need to be good in APB to be effective because APB is by far a chess game in comparison. There wasn't much comparison anyways. That game plays like a shooter, APB not so much and no, APB doesn't need to play more like a chessboard. The game is already at a point where a lot players wouldn't dare play solo and hence population counts being lower than they would've been for the current state. You are in fact on the side of some who suggested APB should have longer ttks. I won't trust you on your stance because evidently, strategically, factually, with APB's spacial design AND statistically, that will be the end of APB's gameplay.

Except vaulting or developing aren't even needed to take another, more reasonable initiative towards balancing some numbers or fixing things. Of course they have the liberty to vault things, they own the game and they DID vault some things. They did vault the blue vehicle mod "Mobile Radar Tower" as well as most of the Heat System (Prestige5/Notoriety5) in order to fix the former and make the latter better. Instead, those two were simply dumped and forgotten. Considering how RFP got the same treatment, HVR's damage now scales proportionally with the crosshair size (silliest band-aid fix ever, because simply changing its damage output would've been better). Vaulting other weapons are likely to end up the same or also taking over a year (like Med Spray did). To clarify, RFP now requires 1.5 seconds at BEST to kill up to a mere 41 meters for what it sets out to do. Can it occasionally get a kill or an assist in the middle of a chaotic fight? Yes. But speaking of vaulting, LO might've as well vaulted it because right now it has no reason to even exist. Any mediocre performance would've temporarily sufficed (e.g 1.2-1.3s). Better even they should've just removed Improved Rifling 3 from RFP-Fang and gave it some 'Fang' tagger or even Improved Rifling 1 to keep it consistent with most preset secondaries (because IR3 is the root of the problem). No, per EULA, no one is entitled to a refund no matter what. Players 'agreed' to this but most have played and paid without reading the EULA. Plus, they got their money's worth of it by now anyways. I agree when it comes to not attaching weapons to real life money, if anything payments should only be made towards cosmetic items for the best results. But their balance attempts are less than stellar not because of any of that but because they are holding on to previous beliefs that shouldn't be held on. APB is a shooter so they should make it a shooter. Instead, they are trying to make it a super-silly arcadey chess board (yes, they made epinephrine consumable ridiculous also. 150% speed boost for a cheap 25% health cost) where every weapon must be a distinct chess-piece on the 2nd row. This never succeeded and certainly won't after the game re-advertises with the new engine. Literally not many outside the current community would ever find this appealing but I hope LO's luck shines and proves me wrong.

The community wasn't in the wrong. A lot of changes weren't even close to being well thought out, completely out of place and others didn't even need to happen (e.g buffing OCA to oblivion and not a buff across the board, x2 heal Med Spray that lasted for over a year). When it comes to the community getting mad that their weapon got nerfed, we have a great example to look at. RFP and RFP-Fang. The weapon is beyond "nerfed", it is completely destroyed. Who's talking about RFP these days, really? It was long forgotten and most others would've been not forgotten but praised that they are a part of a decent balance state. A successful company should be able to tell what is reasonable and what isn't and the history of balance changes under LO's reign (discounting the Vehicle balancing because that one was actually good), doesn't really show much improvement. The good part about LO is that it is willing to revert bad changes, so once some do indeed happen, there is nothing wrong to demand going back to the previous state. It is actually the right thing to do.

That is absolutely true. However, LO is simply delaying EVERYTHING, even things that don't need to be, such as improving the game's balance for both current and potential new players by the time the engine is actually out. Whether on the current or new engine, stats are stats. Unlike some vehicle shenanigans (embrace the new Vegas physics), A STAR will kill in 6 shots under its drop off range and so on. There is no better time than now to at least come up with a plan for execution rather than start making one after the engine and new players flood in. There is no way LO would balance the game, improve new player experience, get a better tutorial out, etc before the new players realize the game is incomplete from the first week (realistically from the first day or two).

"sucessfull" ↑ That spelling says everything. Any 'successful' company would fire you day 1. Try to troll again when you actually know more about what happened throughout APB's history, have a basic grasp of what would work for it and better even learn how to troll properly. By the way, LO sold APB's IP to the Chinese because they wasted time with RIOT and thus.... money. It didn't look like RIOT's battle pass made that any less painful. Thanks for the memes Mr. 7 years of being a useless employee.

How much money did LO exactly earn from RIOT's 3-weapon-skin battle pass, can you enlighten us then? Joke of the Century right here.

Please, I get more by simply existing. If you have a valid point to say, now is the time. Even then, you can cry yourself to sleep with the knowledge that the APB community doesn't like your beloved battle pass garbage.

Of course, you can't even debunk a single thing I said so you resort to blaming emotions. Typical. As if your expertise had anything meaningful. Congratulations, you wasted 7 years of your life.

You know, if everyone was really good at their job, then the gaming market and the world as a whole would be a much better place. You clearly weren't good at yours and it shows. The first thing to do when analyzing anything is information gathering (a.k.a doing your homework), which you didn't do a great job at. If you were also that good then you wouldn't have jumped companies so often. So there is a lot of debate when it comes to anything you say, really. I am sorry but battle passes aren't a magical formula that brings players. If you were paying any attention, you would've seen that RIOT's battle pass was empty with nothing but 3 weapon skins which would've been rewarded traditionally for playing RIOT a certain # of times. If you were actually present then you would've realized that RIOT's battle pass wasn't the thing that spiked player counts as it literally had nothing to offer. Nobody asked for APB to get a battle pass nor a Battle Royale mode and the majority were against the idea https://forums.gamersfirst.com/topic/8317-apb-battle-pass/ https://www.reddit.com/r/APB/comments/bf5ani/full_riot_rundown/ LO did it anyways. We played the game mode for what it is then the majority of Players left within the first week, causing the game mode unable to even launch. Is this really your "expert" understanding of boosting player engagement? Don't be ridiculous. Yes and no as this still creates the need-to-play basis and emptiness of feeling that there is nothing more to do after these mini goals are met. What kind of mini goals would it have? These mini goals already exist in the form of contacts giving mini side missions for additional JTs (kill few people with a shotgun, be MVP, etc). What would it possibly have that isn't a joke, drive a car for 5,000 meters? And if so, Players would login to drive than actually press k to play, no thank you. A Battle Pass would also create additional severe problems such as time commitments. LO would need to continue updating the battle pass with items that make sense (mostly cosmetics). Such a task is costly and LO with its financial crisis, lawsuit loss and hoping to find a sponsor by the time the New Engine is out doesn't really put them in a good position to open that door. It will only cause them further losses as they have proven it literally takes them over a year to do something that can be done in the next week's maintenance (e.g. reverting the ridiculous Med Spray x2 heal rate). LO previously clearly stated that they will stop posting due dates because the community gave them ♣♦♠♥ for always being delayed, so LO figured it is better to keep going without promising a due date. Do you really thing they can meet a monthly or so due date of a new battle pass season? That would be a miracle. Overlevelling usually repeats prior rewards just to get extra copies from, which in APB's case would only be great if it was a JTs reward and even so, most existing players bought all they wanted to buy with JTs anyways. Problem is that most Players around have been here for a decade. They have already bought all they wanted to buy so unless LO actually adds new things, there won't be any more money flow, especially when LO is still generous enough at the moment to provide Premium for free (since COVID started). APB needs to PLAY BETTER and then afterwards to increase the Rank cap with new things to work towards, perhaps give meaning to standing earned at max Rank, not a battle pass that will only encourage timely rewards that would be unattainable once its period is gone. Leave that garbage to Battle Royale and Gacha games, that's the last thing APB needs.

Very debatable. In the short-term, yes. What happens after a Player fully grinds a battlepass season in about a single week? He/She proceeds to grind a different game. This trend is similar in any game that has a battlepass system. Population counts spike at the start of a season to grind the new pass then goes down gradually. It creates the 'play on a need' basis rather than play the game for what it is. This won't help APB at all, it will make things worse. Again, RIOT was a good live-example. As soon as some people grinded the few weapon skins that RIOT offered, they NEVER played RIOT again and the game mode wasn't even able to start because there weren't enough players. APB does not need to go through this ever again. I have addressed the part of "to play more" but when it comes to spend more, still depends on how the battle pass is done. There are battle passes out there where if the Player FULLY plays a season, they will get the monetary equivalent to buy into the next season without actually paying for it. So dedicated Players only get to PAY ONCE provided they grind the first week or so of every season (which is easy to do). The reason why every game does it is because they want to jump on the new trend train, because they think that's what the current generation of Players like. Nothing more. See, here is the contradiction. If battle passes are indeed the reason to make someone play a game more, then it won't be really grindy at all as it will complete itself as the Player plays, yes?

I must say hard no to adding a battle pass. A battle pass can destroy a game's reputation and discourage people from playing it in numerous ways even if handled mostly right. It would require a miracle to work for APB, even more so considering APB tried it with RIOT and ended up being one of the emptiest battle passes in the history of online gaming.

I see. Yes, there would indeed be potential blessings to it. Perhaps also there won't be any need for people to /abandonmission or to restart the game because last stage is V.I.P or Creme De La Crime mission. Perhaps a new culture would surface where Players would simply talk to each other and let it all end before last stage. Yeah, it isn't really probable to win while Ranking up against seasoned players. They have all the experience, know all the spots, all the weapons, cars, muscle memories AND mods, while the Ranking up player is simply discovering them one at a time. I'm glad you made it all the way I agree to all these points but I'd also add increasing Contact Standing reward from non-opposed missions. Making it like 80% of Standing earned from playing an actual mission would make more Players willing to log in earlier before peak times & to stay a bit longer afterwards, ultimately making the game slightly more alive.

This alternative is both heaven and hell in 1. Upside: There will be no meaning to winning or losing, so players who want to play will simply play the game. Downside: A good number of Players whom aren't at max Rank will simply abuse this and instead of playing, they will make sure they lose early to better maximize their standing per hour. We will have a major problem similar to dethreating. Instead of dethreating, players will play a single stage or 2 before losing on purpose. It won't be pretty.