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I personally believe that LO should make an example out of toxic players, but at the moment LO is in a bad position. The population is already low without signs of improving. LO is stuck playing the short term game rather than the long term game. Have things improved? Yes, but more can and should be done about toxicity. There are plenty of games that are more welcoming than APB, more populated, and with different/better gameplay. The only advantage that APB has over the current lineup of online games is customization and that can only go so far. Why bother playing a game with stale gameplay and toxic players that go unpunished? As for those saying that silver dethreaters are worse than toxic golds, I'm not so sure about that. While both are definitely bad, I have personally experienced the toxic golds. The toxic golds are the types of players that take things to a whole new level and try to personally attack others. A good example of this was ffbans. When I used to play in bronze, everything was peaceful, players were nice and missions were actually fun. I'm not sure if things have changed, but I'm willing to bet that dchat in bronze is better than dchat in silver.

This assumes that the individual has not had any previous checkpoints done and that the other individual has not yet won a full game. With my scenario, I could have 4/5 checkpoints done prior to meeting said individual who has not done the winning the match achievement and leave before the end of the game.

If we're going by that logic, what is stopping me from leaving the game after getting my 5 capture points? You wouldn't be allowed to post if they restricted bronzies.

No, the trick is not holding down m1. Yes, let us blame the player for not being able to do a daily instead of fixing a design flaw, lovely logic right there. For your information, I always complete both dailies everyday because I have the time to and I know that I am capable of completing them. The issue here is that the capture the objective daily can take an absurd amount of time to complete or that there is the potential to not complete it at all. A worst case scenario for me is that I am paired up with teammates that do not want to do the objective and I have to solo my way through multiple games. It would take me roughly 5 full games to complete the daily, which could be 1-2 hours depending on how long a full game lasts. This scenario assumes that I am able to solo capture and hold an objective. Now, replace me with your average joe and I am willing to bet that that person is going to spend much more time than I did to complete that daily or not even be able to complete that daily before they have to go. If that isn't a design flaw then I don't know what is.

The snowball event is a good concept, but there are several issues with the event and the rewards. 1.) One of the two dailies is bad - There seems to be only two types of dailies within the snowball event, kill 15 players or capture and hold 5 objective points until the end of a round. The first daily is fairly easy in nature and straightforward, kill players in order to complete it. The second daily is not as easy or user friendly to all types of players, especially ones that decide to solo queue. The player is forced to rely on teammates and pray that the teammates are willing to help capture the objectives. I have been playing the event and doing the dailies for about a week now and I can tell you that the majority of the time, I am put with teammates who are either afk, 500m away from the objective, or only going for kills. This is a major issue for players who have the objective daily because that player will be put in potentially, unfavorable conditions such as 1v2's, 1v3's, and 1v4's. This is especially noticeable on Jericho where the playerbase is low enough that you might get the same "helpful" teammates as the last round. How do we fix this issue? You could implement a way to force a different combination of teammates every round, basically you would not get the same teammate(s) from last round. Although, there will be a point where this is not feasible anymore depending on the population of the district. Another option could be to eliminate the objective daily entirely and only have a kills daily. Personally, I think this is the best option because it coincides with the completionist title of "Slayer", slay more to become a slayer. Also, it is favorable for two types of players, the solo queuer and the group. The solo queuer is forced to rely on their own ability to kill players and the group can help their teammates stun an enemy if one of them is incapable of killing players on their own, it is a win-win situation. RNG has almost no influence on completing this daily. 2.) Time gating is bad - Not everyone has the ability to play everyday for "x" amount of minutes/hours to complete two dailies per day. I have an idea on why one of the new rewards is being time gated. It is possible that LO wanted players to play everyday to keep a healthier population in the seasonal districts, but this is definitely not the best way to go about it. People have real life obligations and may not be able to play for a day or two. By time gating rewards you have lost some players from ever playing the event. An example of this is when I asked my friend if he wanted to come back to APB and bribed him with the new cool titles from the seasonal events. I told him how to get the rewards and he already knew he would not be able to complete some of the tasks to receive certain items/titles due to real life obligations. Basically he already gave up before even starting the game and I completely understand why. What is the point in doing a task if you're not going to get it anyways? How do we fix this issue? Do not time gate rewards but rather provide some incentive to play everyday if you can while allowing players to hop on at any time to complete the tasks for their desired seasonal rewards. This could be done by using the same concept as gun roles. A player would have to kill "x" amount of players to receive the seasonal reward. As for incentive it could be something as simple as free G1C, free cosmetics, or free JMBs for playing on a certain day. 3.) How the snowball event feels like with a bug/exploit? - As some of you may be aware, there is a way to throw multiple snowballs at blazing speeds by doing a certain trick. I won't say what it is in order to prevent more people from doing it, but playing against this is unfun. The event has become a spamfest and the team with the most players that can pull off this trick is most likely going to win the match. At the end of the day, I am glad that LO is attempting new game modes, but I feel that there is room for improvement.

I mainly meant a team focused on communication between the community and LO, almost like game sages in a way. These individuals would be responsible for interacting with the community.

I can understand that perspective, especially with regards to the matchmaking. Although, the incident between you and I that is memorable for me was when I was solo queueing on EU 2 years ago and we got into a 4v4 mission on Financial. Both sides consisted of four gold players, so it was supposedly "balanced" in the sense that there were no silvers on either side. The thing that stuck to me was when you lashed out at me because I replied to your comment about "where is the team????". You just proceeded to get angrier after my initial reply. Prior to that incident, I used to watch you on an almost daily basis and I enjoyed the stream, my favorite APB streamer at the time. I was really happy when I finally got to play with you, literally fangirling "omg I'm playing with kemp!". After the incident I was like wow he's just like the other jerks and I just stopped watching altogether. I thought maybe it was just a one-off incident like a bad day or something, but my EU friends said they had similar experiences. I know I'm probably derailing the thread at this point, but I just wanted to let you know why I felt this way. Anyways, thanks for all you've done so far for the community. I appreciate the clarifications, thank you. With regards to the duties of SPCT, I am perfectly fine with them just being another form of proofreading when it comes to future content. It is just the way these individuals were initially portrayed as community figures that startled me at first, especially since there was no announcement of another potential community team in the works. As I said before, this is certainly a step in the right direction and it should only get better as time goes on. Thank you once again for all you and LO have done for APB and the community.

Still up to your old shenanigans of toxicity?

My apologies then, I was under the assumption that people had to apply for the position. Although it does not stray away from the fact that the SPCT is considered a position of power and essentially a public figure in a way. The SPCT has the ability to provide feedback to untested content that regular individuals as myself do not have access to. I am willing to bet that their feedback will be more heavily considered than feedback provided from the average community member. Individuals with higher ranks than the average individual should be held to a higher standard and be more professional. Also, just because you think my allegations are incorrect, doesn't mean they are, it's just that I stopped bothering with recording every mishap I had with members of the community since G1 rarely dealt with toxicity.

I am not the one who applied for a position of power. I am simply a person of this community who is providing their input about an individual. If I applied, got accepted, and was listed as one of these SPCT members, I would approach a person who criticizes them in a different manner than how they have done so now, regardless of whether or not the input is addressed in a civilized manner. If not that, then another option is to just simply not reply to the criticism at all.

First impressions are everything.

Thank you for responding. If the SPCT team's sole purpose is to provide feedback about untested content and not to connect the community and LO together, what is the point of publicly announcing specific individuals who were chosen for the SPCT team? All this does it increase the possibility of negative behavior being thrown towards these individuals, which may lead to biased feedback about untested content. I'll use the game's environment as an example. There have been numerous individuals wanting to change the game's environment during missions, specifically that individuals outside a mission cannot interact with the players inside the mission (ie: cars going through cars). If these SPCT members are being specifically griefed during missions, they may try to change how the environment works for upcoming events/content, which may or may not be a good thing. I am happy with what has been done and changed by LO, but I still believe that there is a lot toxic behavior that needs to be dealt with before the game can get better. You can have all your feedback and fixes to gameplay, but if the community is toxic then people are going to continue straying away from this game. Not having a community team that provides a positive experience for the entire community reduces the chances of toxicity being dealt with. That being said, I am hopeful for the future, thank you for that.

Is the SPCT only limited to this or will they be interacting with the community as well? If it is the latter, then I am very concerned about a few of the individuals chosen for this position. Based on my past experiences and my friends' past experiences, the only one who has a good grip on how to interact with the entire community and not just a select few is SKay. The other SPCT members have not shown to me that they can provide a good, welcoming experience to the entire community. This could mean that I either have not seen much of them or that there have been negative experiences with them. As much as I hate to specifically target people, I feel that this individual is probably the easiest to describe what I mean when it comes to poor behavior with the community. Kempington is one the SPCT members who fits in this category of poor behavior. I have played missions with him and he the worst when it comes to positive interactions with the community. He is the type of individual who will bash and blame his teammates for a loss in a mission if he feels it is warranted, so basically majority of the time. The only times where he does not blame his teammates is when he is playing with individuals he knows or thinks is good at APB. From what I have seen and experienced with Kempington is that if you are not associated with certain cliques (theme makers/lovers, "good" players, or subscribers), you are going to be undeniably mistreated by him. If you have watched his streams over the years, you will notice this. Besides his negative attitude with the community, he has definitely been more than helpful with regards to information and gameplay of APB. He has probably done the most out of all the current SPCT members if we're talking from an informative perspective about APB. So as much as I am probably bashing him, I am glad to see him on this team because I believe he will be able to help connect the community and LO. Though, he has to fix his attitude. A member of the SPCT that does not make sense to me on why they were chosen is Skitty. I have had some bad experiences with this individual and my friends have as well to the point that they have quit the game because of said individual and his clique. He is like Kempington with regards to how he interacts with the community, but not helpful at all. If you were to try to approach Skitty prior to this, he would come off as a jerk regardless of what is being said or asked. Now, if we were solely going off of gameplay and information, he doesn't fit the qualities for SPCT either. He only knows how to use Remote Det and is not known for playing a wide variety of guns. I don't see how having this type of person will help connect the community and LO or help provide valuable feedback for future, untested content. @MattScott Introducing a new SPCT team is a step in the right direction, but I'd like to hear more on what the duties of the SPCT team are and whether or not they are going to be held to a higher standard when it comes to behavior and interactions with the entire community. Also, I'd be willing to provide my main to you if you so desire just so you know I'm not just a troll trying to start stuff. The only reason I have not posted on my main is because I know how vicious the community is towards people who "attack" their friends.