Haganu

At least better than having a conservative mindset. Not much good came from this game by being conservative. Funny enough, a conservative mindset like keeping threat segregation, as flawed as it is doesn't matter apparently, is directly against one of this game's key selling points to this day: creative freedom. There's really no point in keeping it when the game is already this dead, and to point out another one of your misreadings; no, they didn't kill the game. They did their part of the job, though.

Instead of reducing character support to alphanumeric and certain special tokens (and literally just alphanumeric in character naming), I'd prefer if the game added support for unicode characters in both naming and chat. It would be much more interesting.

To report people you actually need, you know, people you can report. If NA is really as dead as it's shown or if it really is difficult to fill 2 districts, then segregating districts per threat for the sake of being able to differentiate dethreaters from normal people is just silly. If you can't even fill districts it means you're too late on actioning dethreaters anyways, they already have done their part of the job in killing NA then.

Not saying OP is a dethreater (feel free to confess your sins though).

No but MattScott has stated that one of the 3 pillars of foundation to build matchmaking on player-to-server latency. So if 2 people are relatively far away from each other, matchmaking would find a server as close to halfway between those players as possible, to give both players an as equal amount of latency possible.

Considering MattScott takes ping into account for matchmaking, I want to say it's fair that Ru vs Br matchups are a bit far-fetched to be viable. I'd probably make ping numbers like that off-limits.

Exactly. It's not like you have to be matched with the exact same threat level, but your second sentence describes the issue precisely. An issue I'm afraid even phasing won't fix sufficiently, due to the small population this game has. With a more simple threat distribution (instead of the 40 levels we have now), it would work at least a little better whenever phasing becomes a thing.

Not to mention the population is so small that even phasing probably won't fix the issue with matchmaking during off hours. At least, not with the current threat system.

It's this thread again. Even the same trash tier spacing between every line.

maybe the game would be better without missions overall and a whole new system of gameplay where even issues like threat and matchmaking wouldn't wouldn't be a problem

Even DayZ got out of alpha and got released.

The game is dying because eveyrone still actively present in this shit community is afraid of change and everyone puts their hopes on the Engine Upgrade. Literally every discussion for the past half a decade has boiled down to cheaters, matchmaking, balance and a bunch of other things that KEEP coming back, because whenever something new gets introduced everyone pulls the emergency brake like a madman. New content isn't going to save a game that fundamentally flawed. And with fundamentally flawed I don't per-say mean the engine the game runs on.

It's like this very forum is almost like politics. Just greedy assholes lobbying to get the best situation for themselves instead of the game as a whole. The main difference here is that those pulling the strings are actually trying to be earnest and transparent instead of trying to hide their mistakes and save face.

APB is the kinda game that manages to make every anticheat look bad. We've had FairFight, BattlEye and now EAC. What's next? GameGuard? Maybe a properly configured GameGuard can pick up cheats, right? It works similarly to a rootkit after all. Don't mind the performance loss, it actively checks your RAM! It's not going to work due to how poorly APB runs, not due to how "bad" the anticheat is.

What if people wanted to vote < 0?

Now that we have a competent team working on the game, it would be interesting to see another attempt at the old RTW balancing at some point, at the very least.

Doesn't invalidate his point. On the contrary, you'd think bragging about actions highly detrimental to the game's atmosphere and the player's attitude is enough of a reason for the devs to take action. Sure what comes around goes around for Hex, but it's just as ridiculous nothing is being done against it. At the same time it's a bit late to do anything against it, so in the end a thread like this has null meaning, contrary to bragging about actions against the ToS (and thus bannable) on a public forum (and pretty much getting away with it).

The vast majority of golds in bronze end up dethreating at the end of the day, despite it being clearly against the TOS. The Engine Upgrade is a fundamental change needed before better matchmaking can be implemented, but that's not an excuse to further do nothing against the current situation. It's ridiculous how obvious it is to see who is dethreating and who isn't, so a pair of eyes monitoring bronze district would not be much of a wasted effort. Well, it wouldn't have been a couple years ago, and really LO should've tackled this as soon as they got used to how things go around here. At the same time, I feel like people with meta gear like 3 slot HVRs, NTECs, car surfing rocket launchers and what have you, also do not belong in a district.

Kudos for staying polite in a somewhat heated thread. I'd upvote if I weren't on my quota yet. That aside, although there's a lot to gain in community management, if that's not happening (it barely was if ever, and still is pretty much barely done), we'd need a different way. I'm also not sure what else you want to hear. Yeah it's obvious that a lot of systems are bad and incite poor behaviour, that and poor community management are just very detrimental on the game and its population. But sometimes developers don't see what's obvious for us. Especially when they don't play the game live sufficiently if at all. That's why putting certain design flaws and how it impacts the playerbase is not really a waste of time. Arguing against it, however, is. Especially when it's obvious. That is, unless you have a valid explaination as to why system a or design choice b is meant to be that way. That means the reason for said system or design choice to exist has to count heavier than the potential negative effect on players. 195 mods, threat segregation and threat overhead display, and witnessing really don't have a valid excuse to exist anymore. They're more a sorry excuse for other aspects of the game, such as the lack of sense of progression, or the lack of actual faction-locked content/gameplay. Little Orbit has their hands full developing this game, and I'm sure they missed a couple things here and there that need to be addressed, if they want APB to be a good game in the future. That's why threads like these exist, albeit the title is clickbait-ish. It's not necessarily the systems that are meant to cause chaos that are bad. It's just the way some of them are designed. Even during the Reloaded era, the devs applied a couple measures here and there in missions against poor player behaviour. A couple years before even Tiggs went silent they implemented a system against ghosting, for example. It's a Safe Space system, more or less, but sofar it works decently, since ghosting is at least more difficult. All in all APB needs a major design overhaul if it wants to actually be a cops vs robbers game in first place. A lot of design choices in APB are quite out of date and could use a huge refresher. There's a lot within cops vs robbers, and APB is really doing poorly in doing anything in those boundaries. It doesn't have to be perfectly 50/50 balanced, it just needs to convey the attitude (it really doesn't right now) the game wants to put up.

Doesn't take away it's really bad for the game and its population.

It's not a complaint but a breakdown of certain mechanics of the game that are detrimental to player attitude. Also, even with the game being as dead as it is, not everyone has a group of people willing to do stuff like what you're suggesting. It's a pretty insane counter just for ram raiding, and I really hope that's not your standard go-to counter argument for ram raiding troubles. Merged. Funny enough the orange parts that you call irrelevant change the context of his stance entirely, especially the secondary orange section. Then what would you have called it when he was specifically stating his post only concerned for the ill-behaving people? I think it's more a thing in general rather than for victims/offenders. Fact is that people behave poorly in video games, one reason being anonymity. But when a game actually rewards poor behaviour, can you really blame the offenders? Telling victims to toughen up or telling offenders to go away really won't help the game at all, for one (not implying you said such). How do you intend to tackle the problem then? The only way to tackle people behaving poorly is to punish poor behaviour instead of rewarding it. Right now the game's actually rewarding poor behaviour. Taking the rewards away is step one in the right direction. There's always toxicity involved in online games. I have seen games with literal mentally insane people while the game doesn't even facilitate nor incite such behaviour, but the difference between most of those games (PSO2 which I frequently play being one of them) and APB is that APB actually incites poor behaviour by rewarding it, whereas in the other games it's more of a when there's a will there's a way case. Again, when a game rewards you for being an arse, can you really blame the people being an arse for being the way they are? It takes someone morally deeply virtuous to not succumb to the joys of being a douche while being rewarded for it. APB doesn't need to be soft, PC or what have you, but some mechanics are really not thought out well, and are part of the reasons the game's population is as low as it is. Excuse me for the double post, I'd have used the edit button if I could properly move quotes from the new post input area to the edit post input area.

The cars look like they're made of cheap molded plastic as they are right now. Pretty much like everything else in the game. cough cough Pestilence suit cough cough

i'd be amazed if APB and its engine upgrade would be too difficult to manage for tencent "the game that even tencent couldn't handle"

I want APB to not be constrained or limited by its DNA in creative aspect (that includes gameplay).