LilyRain

lol yes Massive respect, that's a lot of work but damn. Perhaps it saved to Cloud before it deleted everything? Would be a lucky shot if it did

Senator Armstrong is needed

You all were great and behaved like a human should, extending to each other as well as giving the cat a future. May the world continue to have good people

inb4 V-Day Event now magically requires the Engine Upgrade.

I'm interested in seeing your non-joke fact-debunking efforts.

I'm not against the idea but instead of going back and forth between segregating or keeping things more open to allow friends to play together more easily, perhaps going deeper towards the root of the problem would be a good alternative to think about. Of course, at the moment, threat only cares about final mission score. The simple act of pressing F at an objective would give the Player the equivalent of 2.5 kills (250 score) and the team members would also get 1.5 (150) on top of their potential to get kills. As APB stands, If you get an offensive mission and can press F, you can be Gold. Tweaking score on this fact alone would indirectly give more emphasis to actual Player performance (getting kills/arrests), so threat will slightly be more accurate. I'm not saying it is perfect but at this point, any benefit to the matchmaking process should be welcomed.

Too much effort was made into rendering but none at researching what is feasible, what isn't and what actually makes sense for the game's theme or even its future. - Why would people play APB for Zombie mode when there are games out there that do it substantially better? - How will you introduce Zombie animations when we don't even have an animator? LO isn't even adjusting some weapon-holding or reload animations. - How will you balance it? Critical balance details are missing. Nothing about what Zombies can and can't do by Players was mentioned. If you're not willing to provide a full-prototype, don't expect LO to balance it for you. They simply won't get it anywhere near right & if they do, it'll be done in a jank-cheap way. This might sound like a joke but it really isn't: Perhaps with more work this would compete with RIOT. You'll need WAY more work to make this a proper blueprint for a Zombie mode in APB.

As an Enforcer, I'd be happy to have more Environment interaction that extends beyond returning stolen vehicles to an impound station or waiting to witness a criminal mugging or ramraiding. Problem is they'll never be as worthy/profitable as playing an actual mission and if they did, we'd be escalating the problem of players not wanting to play missions. ------------------------------------------ First, I'd rather see improvements to PvP such as missions becoming more dynamic. They are always the same. You'll know where to be (or /abandonmission) the instant you see the mission title after pressing k. What spots to be at ahead of time, what weapons will do the job better at those spots, etc. I'd like to see LO place all doors, all cameras, etc in a single pool & have missions randomly assign which one to go to next. Sure, mission description texts will have to be edited but that is an achievable goal that adds replay-ability to each and every mission, without having to literally add new missions that are set in stone.

Easy Anti-Cheat, advertising itself as "the industry-leading anti–cheat service" was money-hungry. LO decided to go back to BattlEye as supposedly it had improvements that LO was willing to try. To be fair, this was a fine move. There is no point in spending a good chunk of the funding from selling the IP to the Chinese on either anti-cheat, as they both are not be able to catch private cheats without first, simultaneously perfecting client and server side detections. Would've been a waste of money. They thought jumping on the Battle Royale train would be good since that game-mode has a lot of audience. Sad part is that they tried to make it too much APB rather than a Battle Royale, ultimately making the early iterations of RIOT the best and better balanced. The later iterations however... killed all strategies involved with money-management. Money earned in RIOT was simply a representation of remaining lives as one can die and respawn with their own action district loadout without having to even buy it again. It was breaking, made lives even more easy for pre-mades and nobody bothered playing the game mode anymore. There weren't even any decent rewards to make it more approachable. RIOT could've lived a bit longer even without a Battle Pass, but of course they accelerated its death with sub-par balancing. To be fair, DDoS is very difficult to fight. They had solutions but they supposedly required a more modern environment to function (Newer Engine). It was impossible to fully eliminate NA getting DDoSed at a reasonable time-frame. Good question. For example, it would be something to see a car's door when opened go through a wall rather than instantly teleporting into the driver's seat. Yes, might've looked a bit silly but teleporting inside is even more silly and too potent. Should've been decent gameplay-wise if such a change was made. Yep, they could've had the matchmaker consider more than just threat (which is only score based). The downside would be longer matchmaking times because having to wait for appropriate opposition to end their current active missions would take considerable time (assuming they don't exit the game after their mission). It is a rather heavy drawback compared to something like cross-district Phasing. THIS i'd very much like to see an official response to. insert x2 Med Spray for over a year, buffed Epinephrine (yes, the current 25% HP penalty compared to 50% for a 150% speed boost is rather cheap and outright stupid), charge-rifle-crosshair HVR, buff OCA 'Whisper and nerf LTL memes. 'Also let us casually not buff garbage weapons rather than keep nerfing and buffing meta to pretend that we are actually changing anything'. The destruction of the game's balance is a deliberate inside-job.

Good question. Vivox was really great at keeping players online as it gave life to Social District. But assuming 1.3 succeeds in going Live, I am hopeful for VOIP because 1.3's will supposedly have modern repositories and code libraries. At that point, I don't see why a voice-protocol won't work if LO and Vivox agree to support VOIP for APB.

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.