Lord Cashpoint

I stand corrected, Q1 2014 is a full meme. Is that not the blog post after half the developers left the team?

If I remember correctly "Q1 2014" was the proposed release date for a much smaller project, which was never met because before that point they pivoted to the "full" engine upgrade project. I could be very wrong on that point however as it has been a long time. I have to agree with Revo though, it's hard to imagine how LO will draw life out of a game that began development in the mid/late 2000s.

I'm by no means an expert in software development or managing projects of this kind, but it does seem remarkable that it has taken this long for a realisation that downscaling objectives was necessary. I do understand from Matt's previous posts that there were a number of methods they believed would be succesful, but I barely believed a full engine upgrade would have been enough at this point, let alone the new set of targets they have listed in the road-map here. Whilst many of those planned changes, such as fixing RTX crashing would be very welcome, it really is only scratching the surface of the problems facing the game currently. The Engine Upgrade was only ever going to be the beginning of a new phase for APB, one where after launch the developers would still have had to work extremely hard to maintain any playerbase. I think the issue here is while these goals may be more managable, for all the former players (supposedly, although I guess I am one by this point) hanging around awaiting news, it will be very difficult to communicate how these new set of changes will make a difference, without being drowned out by the fact that the Engine Upgrade has been cancelled. Regardlless of how this news affects the game long term, it's still a blow to know the update which has been "under development" for over half the game's life has now been permanently shelved. Which for a game whose average Steam player base hovers barely above 200 is hardly very encouraging.

I'm sure it will go a little way to reducing dethreating, but if the districts still utilise regular matchmaking, there will still be an incentive to drop your rank to avoid playing against higher threat players. If regular matchmaking is still running then surely this will just make matchmaking times unreasonably long anyway, as the game's thresholds for acceptable match-ups is too high right now. Additionally gold groups will probably continue to face the same groups repeatedly as there is no other suitable opposition. Seems like a necessary evil for one server, and at best a mixed bag for another.

Advanced APB Launcher is quite handy for turning down settings, I'm yet to run into any crashes since switching to it. I do hope there is a fix for this issue soon, but I fear we won't see it until the Engine Upgrade release.

I am interested to know the plan for how griefing will be tackled - unfortunately APB as a game allows for a wide range of harassment techniques, from deliberately impersonating with the intention to mock, to directly interfering in missions. But at the same time, many actions that look like griefing (Such as ramming a player in a mission) may be accidental. How does Little Orbit plan to approach this? How will they look at less obvious griefing methods, such as ghosting? (Where a player not in a mission follows a team around and reports on their locations/actions to their opponents).

From Matt Scott himself. Just kidding. Looking forward to this year - the consultant idea to help with the engine performance sounds promising!

This thread can be closed as I have fixed the issue: Looks like the software for my MB and GPU "MSI Dragon Centre" had enabled "Game Mode" or whatever for APB itself - disabling this feature fixed my issues.

I am afraid that I am unable to open task manager (Or do anything else) once the freeze takes place. It is extremely consistent in the manner in which it freezes, and I've never experienced this with any other program.

Hi, If anyone could help me with this, it would be greatly appreciated. I hadn't played APB for maybe a week or so before the last patch, but I've been having an issue with the game since the 23rd. APB: Reloaded is currently freezing my PC in two different ways, which forces me to hard restart the PC. The first is after I have closed the game, about 5-10 seconds later after the application has visually closed, my PC locks up. The other is if I try and launch the game via Advanced Launcher, it will freeze the PC in the same way. For the first method, please note I am not launching the game via Advanced Launcher. I am using Windows 10 Pro, with a i7-4790k and a RTX 2070 - if anyone has any clues about what is causing this, please do let me know.

To be fair Matt did say this at the end of the last engine upgrade post on December 2nd. Whilst Little Orbit has done a pretty good job on communicating with us so far (Not even by APB standards either) it's not unreasonable that this community may be slightly sensitive to a dearth of news given the experience we've had so far (Never forget "You'll get sick of us communicating"). Obviously we shouldn't expect to hear very often around the holiday period news on the engine upgrade, but given how low APB's population is currently, there will be plenty of people hoping for some kind of update on the situation.

A lot, because it is the starter weapon (Hence the name). The STAR is actually the perfect weapon for new players, as it is a very versatile weapon. It can not only compete at short-medium ranges, but the mechanics of the gun actually help to teach new players about weapon handling in APB (By having the ability to tap fire, burst, full auto and hip fire). The same idea was behind having the SNR 850 as the default secondary - its fast equip time was meant to force new players to realise the utility of a secondary weapon. Most new players are not struggling because of the weapon load out they have, but rather just how unforgiving the game is to play on a new account with no knowledge. There are so many aspects which put newer players at a disadvantage, whether it be not having access to Clotting Agent immediately, or the bizarre default sensitivity and zoom level a new account starts with.

Has this not been a concern every time a large game is released? I don't think even GTA V's PC release had that much of an impact on this game's numbers. APB players don't stick around because there aren't other games to play, they do so because nothing available is anything close to what APB offers.

Whilst I don't know this for sure there are a number of weapons in APB which have "dummy" mods which don't actually affect the base weapon stats - instead the base weapon itself is different. The best example of this is the ACES Rifle and ACES SMG - both have a red mod which have effects listed, but as far as I know don't actually change anything, instead it is the base weapon of each gun that is different. What I base this off is APB:DB which isn't perfect, but it lists for each mod all the effects it has and the "Type" of those effects. A great example of that is the Ursus orange mod called "3-Post Dot Sight" (Strangely called the German Reticle): https://apbdb.com/items/FnMod_Weapon_GermanReticle_Armas/ Notice how two of the effects are listed as type 56 and 80 Then have a look at the regular Hunting Sight: https://apbdb.com/items/FnMod_Weapon_HuntingSight1 It has the same two types. When you look at the Medusa's mod https://apbdb.com/items/FnMod_Weapon_AMG_Stabiliser/ You can see all the effects are Type 0 - which in mods indicates that the effect is actually nothing, and is just a dummy effect So to try and answer your question, I believe if you put Muzzle Brake on a weapon like the Medusa, it will simply just modify the gun's existing recoil pattern instead of stacking the effects of both mods. This is of course assuming that I have interpreted this all correctly, and if apbdb displays such mods in a correct fashion. As for the Silenced N-tec + heavy barrel, you can see from apbdb by applying the mod yourself, that the damage reduction does stack.

It does seem a bit silly that now we are seeing the HVR having its damage reduced after a number of previous blog posts (Not just from LO) stating that the HVR needed its damage etc. It went through so many different nerfs before they finally got to the one that was the crux of the issue. My main issue with the cross hair scaling is that I don't think it's particularly well explained to new players - it along with the DMR has a hidden(ish) mechanic. Might have been better for the HVR to have some form of reverse damage drop off instead of the cross hair to make the heavy snipers (Excluding IRS I guess?) more consistent.

I can't remember a single design event that didn't have scores of people complaining about who was chosen as the winner. So this thread is about par for the course. The outstanding quote from the Joker Store Contact design competition for me was someone stating "Designed by silvers, picked by silvers"

Whilst I'm also no fan of players using exploits in these events (as well in action districts) the fact is APB's maps have so many different areas in them that you can bug your way up to or launch yourself with a car. The only saving grace is that most people don't know how to access these areas/they're not generally useful all the time. The out of bounds system realistically needs to be re-examined, and more blocking volumes put into the maps (For people who are in missions/events, leave people who are messing around alone).

It's a bit desperate that after half a decade of running the same event every year we still need GMs to prevent players from bugging out to silly locations.

I imagine then the Scoped N-tec was originally in the same boat as the Ursus then - probably overlooked in the January patches, with the most recent balance changes being a correction (Although possibly a mistake) I agree the Scoped N-tec is certainly in need of a bit of attention, but I'm not sure lower max bloom was something that made sense on the weapon, given that its designed for longer range.

So they did they just not change the Scoped Variants whilst changing the regular N-tec previously? Was it ever stated that this was an intentional decision? The fact that the Ursus (and to a lesser extent Cap-40) have until recently been overlooked when it comes to weapon changes means I would not be surprised if this was just a correction.

I know the draw distance is certainly one the areas they are targeting (Essentially to improve how much detail you can see further ahead) This might help in some firefights where you end up hitting invisible objects - I don't think there are any plans to extend the combat ranges in this game above 100m (Excluding explosive weapons) however. I'm not sure what super-long range gun fights would even achieve, given that so few areas actually allow you to have them. By using the DMR you can see that even 80m distances can be hard to actively fight people at.

Scout's damage made it a fairly unforgiving weapon. Given that a CA3 player only have to survive maybe 2 or 3 seconds between Scout hits to survive a second consecutive shot, I think a little bit more over damage wouldn't hurt it. The HVR has the opposite problem - it's far too forgiving. You can hit the 1st and 6th bullet in an HVR magazine and still secure the kill. Again however, I am struggling to understand how you can nerf the OBIR and HVR but not Obeya - the latter is already one of the most dominant weapons in the current meta. With the nerf to Ursus and HVR, it will shine even further at those medium-long engagements. Hard to say without playing - I'd imagine the nerf to the PMG will help it out, as well as the ATAC nerf, however it will have to now compete with more accurate OCAs, Carbines and N-tecs. I doubt its overall standing will change significantly.

The Joker Carbine is finally getting more reserve ammo. It only took about 9 years. Also how the Obeya CR 762 rifle remains untouched is wild, considering how huge a patch this is. Also slight typo here: Can we expect another article @Sakebee?

Interesting to see how much of G1's old philosophy around monetizing the game LO will dismantle. A few questions: Does the discount on Joker Store clothing apply if you bought the item on Armas? Will the Joker Store clothing items cost APB$ to buy from the clothing booth? Will this affect the clothing packs already in Armas? Any plans to make all of them account bound?

Desert Scarf - both variants. Neck lines in APB can look rather strange as they have a habit of distorting clothes put on them - the scarves quite nicely cover up this issue.