Haganu

I like how this thread sets once again such a good example of this community. Not specific players but this community as a whole. Before districts were without threat everyone wanted to have threat segregation removed because it causes issues like people actively dethreating to go into bronze district. So LO actually did that - not even because people were asking for it but because it seemed like they had no other option, the other half that's perfectly fine with the pitiful state the game is in goes full vocal. It's not entirely unusual, but for population numbers this small this community is quite divided. People stomping on new players un punished can be fixed in much better ways than reintroducing the system that caused things to be like this in first place. They could've made instances for people up to a certain rank or account timer and further leave everything open. People wouldn't need to dethreat then. They just have to take distance from all their posessions to roll some new account. Just a small idea that has been chewed over a thousand times before LO took over. Even this wouldn't be perfect, but it holds far more potential than the mess we have now. Instead, everyone just pulls on the brakes... Go back to the awful state of the game we were in before. Before anyone mentions it, the Engine Upgrade really is no excuse for lack of creative thinking to solve currently existing issues that might bring the game into a state where the systems everyone puts all their hopes on, god doesn't even know why but phasing I'm talking about you, won't fix any issues. This game needs a long term vision and I'd be intrigued to see more of what MattScott has in mind to do with this game, because from what I've read sofar especially after all the progress that has passed it's really insufficient to bring this game back to life.

They're nowhere near to that yet unless UE3.5 is as good as done.

Rayscaling intended to tackle the reliability issues and it did just that. Shotguns in this game are either so powerful it'll be your go-to choice for CQC or they end up being useless especially with a community whining as much as this one when it comes to balance. As for the HVR it did do its job for the most part. Initially people complained about the 850 damage because it was easily abused in CQC. The abuse in CQC is nearly entirely gone, because it is too clunky now for most people. The damage is still the problem with that weapon. That I agree on, but it does what it intends to do. Also, I kinda remember MattScott saying he wants the HVR to stay as a heavy hitter. He never really intended to tackle the problem the 850 damage poses in first place. The systems did what they were supposed to do, but I agree that they're not enough to solve the balance issues these weapons have.

The only good 2 weird systems this game has ever seen was the shotgun pellet damage curve and the HVR damage ramp-up relying on reticle accuracy. It's funny how those 2 are also the only systems that whatwashisnameagain (Qwentle?) never thought of. The rest is just bad. The combat in this game is too set in stone to make these weird twists to the game's shooting. It's just bad for the reliability of the weapons.

i haven't head any issues using reshade after just installing it normally using the default installer it's amazing how much better the game's color balance looks with so few tweaking

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.