Haganu

NTEC not being a viable choice in CQC is blatantly a lie. Maybe you're not good with it in CQC but if I can gimp the gun with CJ3 RS3 and still shred players then there's certainly something wrong with the weapon. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind being faced with NTECs, and I like shooting NTEC a lot, but it's just not right the way it is currently, balance-wise. It's wrong to not call the gun too versatile or bad in CQC. It's like saying the STAR is better in every way.

That has to be the most idiotic argument I've ever seen to defend NTEC's versatility. If you lose in CQC vs a SWARM or CR762 it's not because of those guns either. This literally goes for any gun that doesn't perform at its best in the CQC range niche, so what exactly is your point here? Even if it's not NTEC's fault for losing in CQC, NTEC is really easy to spray in CQC with relative little risk, to the point where I just slap CJ3 RS3 on it and spray like a smart in Asylum yet am not struggling AT ALL.

i'll just remain smug for a few more minutes over this salt thread

a peculiar fluctuation but alas

All the guns you've mentioned excel in some range niche, and using them outside of their niche makes it more risky to use and be fully competitive in for most players. The NTEC doesn't have that problem. Spraying an NTEC in CQC isn't really risky, meanwhile it maintains accuracy to be fully competitive down range aswell.

I thought the IR3 nerf was clever, though the downside was overtuned and using a formula containing both a constant and a variable to calculate effective range gain would only confuse the majority of the players. We're playing a game on a PC, we're not having math class. NTEC is way too versatile, and too reliable for how effective the weapon is. You can gimp the gun with reflex sight and still be competitive. OCA also is too reliable for its TTK. OCA's sweet spot was having a slightly higher TTK than the PMG but being more reliable since it has a higher ROF, where the PMG is supposed to be higher risk higher reward, the risk being the slower cyclic rate.

My apologies if I caused any confusion, the post in which I said going Open Conflict being better than having matchmaking was before my discussion with Kewlin, while during my discussion with Kewlin I tried to convey that current threat and player distribution is faulty. Again the flaws Kewlin pointed out regarding Open Conflict can be found just as well in current matchmaking, but that's not matchmaking's fault. If you missed the point, it's not your fault. I also stated before that redistributing points would be beneficial, coupled with a reduction of threat levels per color. Even in Citadel dethreating has more or less become mandatory if you want to play a solid session in action districts outside of prime hours, so something has to be done.

I don't think that we should remove matchmaking as a whole - I'm not here to argue Remove threat please! - it's not my point (I posted it before though, sorry for that), but I don't think anything can be worse than the distribution of threat we have now. The flaws you pointed out with Open Conflict are roughly the same flaws that matchmaking currently has, that's all. Abusing matchmaking for its lack of intelligence is indeed a thing in other games, but APB's one of the few special snowflakes - if not the only game - where it's a significant part of the game. Also, people are already stomping newbies day in day out with the way things currently are. That's why first and foremost I think points and threat levels should be distributed differently, and districts shouldn't be locked by threat. Especially at this point I think Open Conflict wouldn't improve the game significantly enough, (1- five years is way too long, so everyone's already used to the way things currently are, 2- the year's almost over, we might get UE3.5 soon). It never lived up to its purpose either anyways since nothing has ever been done with the so called Data it was meant to gather for matchmaking. I still am of the opinion that the current vague/over-manipulated/lopsided guideline we've had the past 5 years has only been horrible for this game and its players and is the absolute worst thing a game can have. I also think that with the current distribution of points, getting a larger player pool alone for matchmaking by phasing between districts is not going to solve the issue we've been having at all.

I'm calm, don't worry. The point is, there is no protection for new players with current matchmaking. In both bronze and silver district new players get matched against premades or well-equipped and more skilled players than them everyday. This is especially a thing in bronze district. The way things are no is in no way a protection, and on top of that only hinders players by often giving them missions without opposition, and/or having them wait a while because matchmaking has to find a somewhat fitting opposition for them (which in most cases isn't a fitting opposition at all). I'd rather have no matchmaking at all until something that works is in place, then I won't have to wait for my opposition. Opposition that I either end up stomping or ends up stomping my team. It's kinda late for it now since we're soon halfway through november already, sadly. I'm used to typing rather long posts. Asking for an example only means I was asking for a response from you to validate that one-liner :v (then again it's a pity that one-liners are the status quo)

Then tell me, what would not be better than a system that AND caused the population to bleed for a significant part AND makes sure anyone willing to try this game out gets scared away? What would not be better than this current system, that for a good 4, nearly 5 years is the source of this game getting negative reviews from anyone trying out this game? If you don't know the things this current system has caused then you must've been living under a rock for the past... half decade or so. At least on this matter. New players get faced with toxicity the moment they get matched up after pressing K. It's the same in both silver and bronze district. The majority of new players will just leave and likely leave a negative review on Steam (or you have those YouTubers that give their opinion). The few that stay end up becoming as toxic as the players that steamrolled them in their first hours. It's easy, but insane folly to blame the players solely for this, when it's the systems distributing threat and players that's causing this. At this point ANYTHING is better, even having no threat-based matchmaking and distribution. If you think otherwise then I'd like to hear some clear, detailed examples from you. If you don't feel like coming with any then your opinion might aswell instantly be discarded. If you can't come with anything, save yourself the effort and just not post at all on this subject.

Anything is better than what we have right now until the game has proper systems. That includes having no threat-based matchmaking at all. It's absolute folly to think differently when you've seen the result of the current system with your own eyes for half a goddamn decade.

WoW and Final Fantasy has more developers working on it than APB has players playing it, so let's not talk about that. WoW and FF have massive dev teams and more than enough money and resources to develop their game, which is not really the case for APB. It's not much different since Little Orbit took over. Next to that WoW and Final Fantasy are globally acknowledged. There are not many people that don't know about them, so it's much easier to uphold a reputation. APB is one of the more obscure games in the industry, and overshadowed by games like GTA. It's a much tougher job for APB to uphold a good reputation, though I must say G1 also ignored literally every chance they had to improve the game's reputation, and instead pushed the Engine Upgrade as vaporware.

You mean open conflict that nobody played in? That would be a very solid idea to waste resources.

I certainly don't think LO as it is now is completely honest and transparent. They mentioned that 2 major systems needed work, but we have no idea how much work they need, if they ran into obstacles, et cetera. Stating ETAs like old G1 did is a very cheap way to get people hooked and risky when you don't live up to your ETAs. A more interesting way to keep players hooked to your big project for the game is to describe in detail what's being worked on. What it requires, how complicated the systems are, what impact they will have on the game, et cetera. It's not UE3.5 that I feel like they're failing to be transparent about though. IMO they're not doing a good job with ARMAS. We have a new layout even though the content body of the site stayed the same, and some items are debundled. Some items got cheaper, some items got more expensive, no word on account wide availability either. Hell they could've been creative and allow double purchase of an item to turn the item account bound, but it's just same old same old it feels like. Just in a new coat. Overall they're doing alright, but they're not flawless either.

I rather have threat removed too than keeping this system in place till Unreal 3.5. Having no threat is better than having the abomination we have right now.

Meanwhile I rather hear if they stumble on issues, instead of LO taking the G1 route by promising an ETA and then not delivering. Don't forget the silence when they don't!

At this point you'd probably call everything you don't want to hear "White Knighting". It's their very first seasonal event and instead of recycling the same old boring Headless Horseman event for the forth time they decided to change things up and make something new. Other than rewards distribution the event's been rather fun IMO (white knighting comments inc). Using daily events to progress through roles was a horrible idea though. It probably would've been better to use what Baylan uses. Open conflict has been dead for a long long while now, and its initial purpose has never been fulfilled because pre-LO G1 did nothing with it. OC existed to gather data on how to improve matchmaking, but since after a good long year of its existence not a single change has been made to matchmaking I'm surprised they even kept it up. Probably they were just too lazy to make changes to the district select Ui. Pre-LO G1 broke many things aswell and eventually they did nothing for 2 years. I agree things should be tested more thoroughly before pushing it to live, but with the current engine it's not really surprising that things break. If you're still getting upset about that in this exact year I honestly feel quite bad for you.

I rather have LO do a poor job at events currently and delivering stuff overall than old G1 doing alright-ish at recycling events and doing nothing for years.

I wasn't there when the old threat distribution was in place, so I can't tell much about it, but the sheer simplicity of it (determining threats by win/loss) easily causes a lot of problems. The new (current) threat distribution tried to fix that but did a horrible job. Horrible being quite an understatement, since this introduced dethreating. Mainly balance is way out place. Everyone here always likes to politically debate on balance, yet I haven't seen much debates on balancing in points distribution throughout the years on this forum, and is something that in my opinion deserves a lot more urgency than it currently does. People go up (and down) in threat way too easily, simply because your influence on points (gaining/making the opposition gain) points is so easy. In one afternoon I can go down from gold all the way to green threat. I've done that multiple times just for fun, doing Asylum afterwards. I can go from green to gold in an afternoon aswell. That absolutely cannot be right. As @Lord Cashpoint already has mentioned, one issue disturbing this balance is the points you get from medals. Medals that count as much as a kill, multiple kills or all the way up to 10 kills (blitzkrieg 4) is a major problem disturbing balance, of which the worst comes to light once match-ups are extremely out of balance (asymmetrical match-ups with a significant skill gap comes to mind). Although both teams can gain medals throughout a mission, the points are way out of balance. Another major problem is that pressing F can net you an easy 250 points, or just being near a teammate doing an objective giving you 150 points. Everyone sees match-ups caused by the current points distribution are awfully lopsided, but the matchmaking system can't see this. The game increases or decreases the threat of players based on their score, not even calculating against a global average or anything of such sorts (correct me if I'm wrong, I've never seen anywhere that there is a global average it compares your score to). If you score bottom half of the field you go down in threat, as long as you've done at least 2 things throughout the mission (assisting in a kill, stunning an enemy, killing an enemy, doing an objective, et cetera). Then the next time people ready up for missions they're matched up against the best opposition matchmaking can find. That is an opposition with threat as close as possible to yours with what's available in the instance. Then another issue is the sheer amount of threats levels We have 4 colors, and each color has about 10 levels. That has to be confusing for matchmaking, especially with the population we have now. The chance of a matchup of 2 teams with exactly the same threat is absolutely 0 as it is, and I don't think phasing will solve it with this /pop. I'm also slightly skeptical when everyone says the playerbase will grow once UE3.5 hits. Maybe the first week there will be a huge influx of players, but when everyone realizes it's the same song with different background instruments they'll just tune out again. Once UE3.5 releases I think Little Orbit has very little time to push through major changes. If Little Orbit doesn't manage to push such changes through I expect nothing significant to change at all. At least not for the better. Just the way the game looks and the tech it runs on. Then you can release as much content as you want, but in my opinion those little peaks of temporarily returning players wouldn't be worth development hours, costs, and years of promoting what would eventually end up being vaporware (even though this community promotes the Engine Upgrade almost entirely by itself). To complete the picture, remove hard segregation and don't define districts by their threat color. TL;DR Points, the current way of measuring threat, should much more revolve around kills and overall performance, instead of on how many objectives you press F. Low-skill medals, and low-skill methods of gaining medals (blitzkrieg 2+ from rocket laucnhing a car with 3+ players), should not reward as much points as it currently does. Completing an objective also shouldn't reward as much points as it currently does. Decreasing the amount of threat levels would also be beneficial for matchmaking. It doesn't take a new engine to balance these, right?

I do agree the pulsing should be a bit faster. Other than that I like the skins. Too bad I won't be getting all of them. The login reward works on every character though so I'm glad.

I've been wondering what's been happening with UE3.5 for the past month or so now. @MattScott, any news? What's happening with the 2 major systems that still had to be worked on? Are they close to being completed? Anything other than "it's being worked on" is welcome. Even if you've stumbled upon issues during the work on it, I'd like to hear. It's better than the silence old G1 gave us for years.

So... when is the login rewards distribution? It's past 7 PM UTC.

armas isn't really the problem, more that the tubes being flat looks so silly and stupid that i have no idea why anyone would want to bother wearing it

APB's gameplay and meta are absolutely atrocious as they are currently. The only reason I'd say don't change things too much (yet) is because the playerbase is so small that moderate to substantial changes in meta/balance/gameplay will cause more people to leave while the game doesn't really gain people. APB already changed from its core into what we have now, and will only deviate more from RTW's vision when Unreal 3.5 releases, unless the lead producer, designer and artists are the same as RTW had. RTW had a lot of concepts (cover system, heavy artillery, et cetera) on the table and didn't have time to realize them (or they got canned in the end), Reloaded did nothing with those concepts and instead shortened TTK, introduced unnecessary curve mechanics further disturbing weapon balance, et cetera. APB Vendetta had interesting concepts too, although I don't know if RTW had those in mind back in the day, but APB Vendetta turned into well, you know it, nothing. lol The so called "core" of APB you're talking about is nothing but an abomination everyone got used to as the years of literal zero significant development passed by. As such, Little Orbit should do what they think is right for the game. Judging by how ARMAS pricing on weapons and bundles is still preposterous and there's still no sign nor answer on things like Account Wide distribution/availability, I sincerely hope Little Orbit's vision doesn't end up the same as Reloaded's.

All flaws considered, I think the event is well done even though both the lead and the event itself are new. I'm very positively surprised even though I've been playing the event solo. If requirements and rewards can be more balanced and event reward distribution is account wide you're golden in my books.