doorkicker

One simple change would be to loosen up the restrictions a bit so that more stuff can be layered, even if it doesn't work perfectly. Even still, there's a lot that is needlessly restricted like wearing a midriff web holster and shoulder knife harness together (you can't) even although there's no clash. Another (maybe less simple?) change would be to make hairstyles linked to outfits. Some outfits you want to wear with a particular hair style (especially for hats and so on) but you can't do that just now without it affecting everything. Please look at this post too https://forums.gamersfirst.com/topic/21521-new-clothing-content-survey/?do=findComment&comment=234226 A lot of these items already exist in the game and could probably be added without too much hassle. These changes could help quite a bit without requiring anything new to be made.

Longtime APB player, since RTW. Come back to the game every so often. Familiar story, sure anyone can relate. Feels nice to land back in San Paro after that time away, soak in the APB vibe, etc., etc. Well, for a minute anyway. Then the reality of this broken, underwhelming and disappointing game kicks in. A hundred million dollars in development, a team of highly talented engineers, artists, designers and more... Three companies now, ten plus years of 'development', the list goes on... And what's there to show for it? A third-rate shooter (if you can call it that) with a dwindling population and no vision, no significant changes in years and the lingering stench of G1's incompetence on every level. The game can continue as is, and it might just, but it's not going to have a sudden renaissance of popularity where gamers across the world ask themselves what they're missing out on and answer up with APB, a decidedly average game in every feasible way where nothing happens and the only thing that's worth a damn in it is a customization system that's largely untouched since the initial RTW days and is perhaps the only possible reason, sweetener or feature that could possibly be marketed or promoted for an otherwise outdated and static cesspool. Ok, sure, the words are a little harsh but such is the unavoidable disappointment when you see the state of this game. Now look, I don't pretend that most of APB's problems can be fixed or that it can become some amazing, popular, viral game that everyone's talking about... At the same time, it can be a lot better than what it currently is and there's really no reason why it can't be. If you ask anyone about APB, the recurring, haunting theme is "missed potential". Those two words are entirely freaking synonymous with this game. They probably accompany each other in a dictionary somewhere in the world - yes, it's actually that bad and yes, said dictionary probably actually exists somewhere. For something that started off as a cutting edge, next big thing, popular before it was popular open world with shooting and... customization, and... well not much else (we won't mention the driving because that'd be too cruel), it sure is fascinating to see that over ten years later APB's still exactly the same. It has shooting (okay, it's not going to blow your socks off but I digress) It has customization (the one jewel in APB's otherwise non-existent crown) What else does this game actually have? Cars? Open World? 'Action' Districts? I don't know, it's slim, it's marginal, it's all severely underutilized, underdeveloped or simply forgotten... When RTW first conceived this game, it was marketed to the world (with quite the budget) that APB was going to be the next big thing. It was GTA Online but before its time, it was everything you'd ever dreamed of, and much more, in a lively and action-filled open world filled to the brim with districts upon districts of hundreds upon hundreds of players. And yet, in, the end, the core gameplay loop of this game (if you exclude Fight Club) is that you spend five minutes in one area of the map fighting over who gets to take home a briefcase to the storyline dude that lost it for the five hundredth time and needs you to go pick it up for him, before the other side does. (Actually wait, that sounds a lot like freaking Fight Club) That is, of course, if you even get an opposed mission in the first place after you stand there at the objective, deliberately -- almost benevolently -- delaying its completion until someone shows up to stop you. Like, wow, for a city as torn and rife with problems as San Paro is meant to be, these Enforcers and Criminals sure mind their manners in giving each other time. So look, here you have it. Under RTW, this game was meant to be along the lines of an MMORPG or whatever - there was the whole cops and robbers thing with a little bit of story and theme, and... whatever. Now, obviously, we can't ignore the (liquidated) hundred-million-dollar elephant in the room and pretend that RTW was a success, but... In come GamersFirst, saviors of APB. It's going to be great, they said! I don't actually know what GamersFirst were trying to do (print money not withstanding), and clearly they didn't either, but I do think their direction for the game was quite clear. They took up this failed online 'sandbox' GTA-clone and they just went the other way and focused it as third-person, and equally third-rate shooter. Gone are the days of criminals being criminally and doing despicable things for money like killing their own, gone are the days of any actual spontaneous interaction or combat like the bounty system (which, yes, was flawed ... but not because of the system itself) and gone are the days of APB offering any actual excitement, connection or whatever-the-fuck else your random Joe Gamer is looking for, not that it offered much in the first place admittedly except being new and unique for its time. Now, LO are small and less ambitious than either G1 or RTW, and that's fine, and I don't fault LO for anything because this game could've quite easily died a somewhat more dignified re-death many years ago even despite G1's ugly resuscitations of its bloodied corpse since 2011 but just picking the game up and bogging yourselves down in failed project, after failed project probably isn't going to yield substantial returns. Maybe they realize this now, maybe they don't, but that's besides the point. There are far more consequential ways that LO can and should engage with APB and in a lot of cases they're so bleedingly obvious that if you summoned a genie and wished for them, you'd probably get refunded another free wish out of pity. The social aspect of this game lags so far behind what it should. You have all of these assets that RTW made in terms of art, design, animation ranging even to vehicles and weapons and yet the most exciting thing that happens in the dedicated Social District is that people do their best statue impressions while standing on a railing. The hell's up with that? Why is there even a dedicated Social District? It's not social, it's barely a district and the various kiosks and such that it contains could quite easily have been built into the other parts of the game. Now, yes, while I understand that it might be too late to change this kind of stuff and perhaps it's fundamental to the way the game is designed but... It still sucks, and it's hardly marketable in face of competition or the alternatives of today. Likewise, it's not as if standing on a railing is the theoretical maximum peak of said district anyway. Literally anything would be better: officially scheduled/promoted meets and contests, a gun range where players can temporarily try each others' weapons... Even simple, benign stuff like being able to sit on a bench would be about ten times cooler than anything else you can do there just now. You could at least try, LO. Likewise, it's genuinely unthinkable that the only meaningful use for a 'clan' is to have the name of said 'clan' as your character's title. I mean just think about that for a moment... you have this game based around vaguely competitive teamplay and the system that above all others should encourage teamplay and competition is relegated to little more than a freaking UI element. Just think about that for a minute, seriously. And then, let's not even get started on all the poor design choices that plague this game and its awful, awful mission-based combat system. Nobody wants missions like these, they suck. It's a terrible idea, and there's a reason no other game has anything even remotely close to them. They are truly terrible and are a complete bastardization of the open world, of the concept of 'action' districts, and of everything that either a MMO, an RPG, a TPS, or whatever-the-fuck you want to describe APB as, should be. They tick literally zero boxes. Zero. The ONLY reason that you'd make an open world for a game like APB is if you wanted the game to be a dynamic sandbox of sorts. Somewhere that players can dip in, leave their own mark on the game world, and dip out. I can understand the thought behind having matchmaking and whatever, but you only need that if you design the game around matches. Yeah, fine, CS has matches. R6S has matches. Whatever. That's great. Are they open world games? No. Is APB? Yes. If you're going to have an open world, then it should be open! In what twisted, warped reality does it make sense for all these supposed bad patootie characters in a twisted, crime-torn city on the brink to wait for orders to tag up a wall, or plant a bomb, or steal Justin Teng's hot Asian wife's girlfriend's panties? It doesn't! It's against literally everything the game is supposed to be about and it completely kills the potential for players to make their own moments within the game, or for clans to leave their mark on one district, or for people to stream creative gameplay where they're doing ridiculously outside-of-the-box things like creating a roadblock full of dump trucks that nobody can pass, with the difference being that this time they're Enforcers and with some actual new gameplay features can, oh I don't know, scan whoever passes for bounties, or stolen goods, or wait for it... ... an actual APB for something they've just done in the game (omg, imagine that!) Or just give people dumb things to do with their cash, or time... You wanna plant a bomb at the main spawn in Financial and get marked on the map for every Enf to come kill you? Why the fuck not? San Paro is meant to be a warzone, dude. Let groups of players/clans hold territory or turf, reward them with cash, dispatch players to take the turf back and create a new type of mission in the process. Make ramraiding/mugging/witnessing actually worthwhile with increased rewards scaled by number of active players in the district. What about the bounty system? Yeah, it sucked during missions. I think everyone gets that. But is the solution really to remove it, but only remove half of it, still penalize players for TKs of these imaginary bounties, and still nag the opposition faction to come and claim them? No! Do anything, literally anything. Do a GTA style wanted/heat level that scales progressively whereby a criminal does crime, gets a star for it, and they become fair game for any nearby Enf, but only for 30 seconds. They get 2 stars? Make it 60 seconds, and so on. And, no, this is nothing to do with GTA. APB is not GTA. It's similar, it's made by many of the same people, but it's different and it existed well before any online GTA did. It's cops and robbers, GTA isn't. It has proper servers, GTA doesn't. It has a player economy with user created content, GTA doesn't. The list is long if you think about it. That being said, it doesn't mean that APB shouldn't look at what other games since it flopped in 2011 have done. It doesn't mean that APB shouldn't try new things. I don't think anyone seriously wants apartments that you can buy and drink animated wine in in APB, ala GTA, nor does anyone seriously want dogs that you can train and pet... But, come on, you've got a half-working game with some wonky mechanics and I completely accept that there are many, many things in this game that need to be fixed, but that's only so much more of a pressing issue if the game continues on the downwards spiral that it's on, where the entirety of the game hinges on whether or not an N-Tec kills at 75m with IR3 or not, and doesn't at least try to reinvent itself in other ways where it matters much less what the current situation with the N-Tec is because... well, there'd be more to the game than one fucking assault rifle. Like, really, you have to accept that APB as a game, in it's current form, is dead. People have tried it, they've seen that all of the cool branding and the marketing is just that, and they've moved on. No amount of buffs or nerfs are going to fix that. Any game is going to have a meta, any game is going to have a gun people moan about... Make the game exciting and offer more than just the stupidly designed missions that haven't changed in 12 years and suddenly those problems become less and less. APB might not be a truly awful TPS, or it might have great customization, or it might have cool art design... But that doesn't mean that it's not a bad game. It's a terrible game (yes, you can play it while still honestly recognizing that it's without doubt the worst game ever made, ever). It's not something people would watch on stream, see some spontaneous moment (random dump truck griefing excluded perhaps) and think "woah, that's cool". It's not something you can invite friends to play casually because they'll just get stomped out it in ways that'd put off even the most determined newcomer. It's not something you can play competitively because there's no functional matchmaking, rankings or casual/ranked modes. It's literally a contradiction. It's a game that doesn't know what it wants to be. No Engine Update is going to save that. No 64bit Update is going to save that. As the saying goes, you can polish the turd but it's still a goddamn turd. Yeah, I mean, sure... APB's probably destined to always be a turd but... Can't it at least be a fresh turd instead of a rotten, decomposing 12 years old one?

Why bother putting legendaries down for being cheesy or useless? The whole point of legendaries, in case it wasn't obvious from the unique mods, skins and effects they have.... is cheese. If you are treating APB, in 2020, with its broken threat segregation and lack of population to fill even one district on one of its servers like it's an actual competitive thing to be taken in any way seriously then you're out of your mind. Try them out or watch videos and use whatever legendary is fun for you.

Have never complained about a nerf before until I tried using the PIG today... Like, seriously? With the health damage unchanged, the PIG is now more likely to kill people than it is to stun them.

This is a fantastic post, good to see there's still logic in the world!

# Full character pic: https://i.imgur.com/tDMBwC5.png

You guys just can't catch a break can you.

I feel like if anything, it is all of us who should be thankful for what you and your team have done over the past year or so for this game. Let us not forget that barely a year ago, APB looked certain to die a slow, painful and silent death. Sure, things may not exactly be fantastic at present and people might've had bigger (if not unrealistic) expectations but I don't think any of that should take away from the work that you've all done and the actual, demonstrable progress that has been made. I don't even think that the RIOT update is something that will interest me too much (at least not compared to the engine update), but it is certain to breathe new life into the game and really, what else can anyone ask for at this point? Huge props to you and your team for not only owning your failures, but also pushing on nonetheless. That's a very, very welcome change from a year ago.

I feel like there's an issue with the cross-faction gear packs. The point seems to be that Criminals can get (previously) Enforcer only packs, and vice versa. For example, the Rapid Reaction Gear (initially only available to Enforcers) is available to Criminals on that page. How come this isn't the case with the Wargear pack on the same page, though? The Enforcer version is the normal Enforcer one (with the grenades vest config), and the Criminal version is the normal criminal one (with the grenades chest config and spray cans). Surely those versions should be on the normal Packs page, and it should be swapped around on the cross-factions page?

Thanks! Your band-aid on the forehead is a cool little detail. I made an alternative outfit for mine, it's a bit different but happy with how it turned out...

Had some fun making this one!