Lord Cashpoint

They are a very nice addition to any arsenal

Ideally they need to bring back the Tutorial districts, but make structured and guided. So teach players how to switch out weapons and vehicles, the different types of missions etc. Any amount of A.I., even very rudimentary could provide some experience to players regarding the very basics of APB's combat (Such as grenade throwing, or using flanking routes). Realistically though you would want the Trainees to fight real players, ideally other Trainees to get their first experience of real combat. Perhaps these first missions could have lots of hints and pop-ups which would then fade away as they attained a threat level.

I think it's important to recognise that APB will not have as many sales under Little Orbit as it did under G1. G1's Armas suffered from the issue of very very high prices, to the point where the only time people would purchase anything was during a sale. This led to a feedback effect where players knew there would be a sale eventually, so less people purchased outside of sales. Little Orbit has reduced the price of G1C as well as generally lowering Armas prices. As such there's less need for sales, as items on the store are more fairly priced. This isn't to say we shouldn't have sales on Armas, and it would appear instead of putting on a large sale on Armas, Little Orbit has elected to hand out premium to all players for the time being. It's not compensation, as it's not Little Orbit's fault. Matt stated this in his announcement: So it's half Little Orbit tempting people to come play (Which has worked I suppose), half them recognising that people may be low on funds right now and may be less inclined to purchase premium. They are not the only company to take such measures, as many are currently looking to reward loyal customers in the hopes they will stick around through whatever else follows.

And so the classic question must be asked: Will the silenced C9 be a Whisper reskin, or just a silenced OCA?

Admittedly this situation is rare, but I have seen people essentially stand behind a car with ammo and spam the Fireworks gun into the air repeatedly. If they're in a hard to reach location such as on the highway this essentially means you're spotted no matter what. I'd say my main grievance with the firework gun is that it's very difficult to judge how far away you have to be from it to avoid being spotted, and to know what constitutes "hidden". It was less knowing the position of enemies that matters and simply knowing how many enemies are in a given area. That aside, a way to address the "wall hack" elements of the game may be by making a change I've really been thinking about since I've started playing this game. Which is mainly that there should not be anything that always reveals your location in "real time". This idea came from playing Deathmatch and VIP finales, and realising how frustrating it is to fight someone when they know exactly where you are at all times. It completely changes APB's dynamic and not in a good way. I always found Deathmatches become this silly corner peeking, grenade hurling nightmare (More than the regular game) simply because you cannot sneak up on enemy players very effectively. I'll detail my ideas below: Player markers in TDM finales (and maybe VIP) do no update in real time any more. They instead reveal the player's location every 3 seconds or so perhaps (Or maybe even 5 seconds). In this way you can't run and hide in TDM as your location is still going to be broadly known, but you're still able to surprise enemies in some way. I got this idea a few years ago when markers in TDM kind of broke for some players producing this effect. Spotter could be changed to be the same - it could reveal enemy locations 3 times, with a gap of 3 seconds between each reveal. (I forget how long you are currently spotted for right now) Flares and fireworks could have a lingering effect (of lets say 3 seconds) where you are revealed in real time only for those 3 seconds after detonation, but after that point the marker remains static for another X seconds. Mobile Radar Tower is difficult. Perhaps you could make it so that it sends out visible pulses on the minimap, which only detect players when the pulse happens (Again could be every 3 seconds), allowing players to get close to it without immediately being spotted. My other idea was maybe to make it so you're only visible on it if you're sprinting, to re-use that old myth from the RTW days. In this way a radar tower car driving past you would not immediately spot you if you were standing still. Tagger could remain exactly as is. Radar Jammer could prevent you from being spotted at all when active, to add more utility to the mod.

Spotter could be really just be replaced by an actual "spotting" system in APB, which random teams could sorely use to point out where they see enemies. Spotter currently falls under all the other wall hack methods (Spamming fireworks and Radar Tower for example) which don't really add anything to APB. Teleporting into cars is quite interesting. One of the one hand, if you remove it entirely then you may end up in situations where you are not able to enter a vehicle at all which could prove to be pretty frustrating. Perhaps a solution could be in situations where you would normally teleport, you have to wait for a timer to finish (equivalent to the time normally get in to a vehicle) before you get teleported.

Or could use an LCR for the same TTK.

It's not the first time APB has been struck by a mystery virus:

I always saw it a bit like the jumping door kick - it's not intended, but most people I've encountered in game just see it as the way the game should function. Attacking may be a bit easier if you could walk faster with medium items or use a secondary at the same time, but for now being able to move slightly quicker via the jumping method seems to be the solution. Mentally I file these types of issues under mission improvements which the game is long overdue.

In the case of the M-1922, Scout and CSG, when the Valentine's day event was originally released these guns were fairly rare and not as widely available as they are now. They were actually a pretty decent way of obtaining the weapons with different mod setups. The Scout in particular contained HS2 which was very useful as the gun used to be able to jump shoot quite easily with that mod in. (Also which weapons are more expensive on Armas than the regular versions? They should really update the weapon selection however.

I'm not one usually to complain about the lack of new content, but we have had the same Valentine Day's weapons for 8 years now. Considering how many new guns have been released since that point, do you not think there is some money to be made by including some new ones? All it takes is creating a weapon with the love skin and tagger locked on.

This may be a bit of a stupid question, but in the last patch notes, it does say this: However my experience so far is that you can still be P5/N5 whilst in missions - however you are immune to damage by players outside of the mission, and you no longer show up on the mini map for enemy players. This effectively removes bounty as a concept, because the only disadvantage now is that you have a larger symbol above your head. Is this what everyone else has experienced, or am I missing some patch notes which explained this change?

I'm not them, but I can't see how having a detailed breakdown of your rank would be anything other than pointless. As much as I like this game, the missions don't resemble anything close to a "fair environment". It seems silly to individually rank players against each other when you can lose a mission because a random player rammed you with a dump truck, or you got an extremely unfavourable location for an attack objective. Just the fact that missions are attack/defend without switching sides at the end almost invalidate the current threat system, let alone a more granular one. This is to say nothing of how the current scoring system works - with you getting more points for dying before killing a player, or the disproportionate amount of points Blitzkrieg medals give (These are just two of a litany of issues with the point system in missions). I agree that the way ranks are skewed right now is probably inadequate. Gold is too easy to achieve, green is an unnecessary division, etc. These need changes, but overall I can't see a more granular ranking system achieving anything other than tempting players to engage in win-at-all-costs behaviour, which would likely be a detriment to the game (If anyone remembers the Clan competition from years ago which ranked clans by number of mission wins, it produced some of the most unbearable matches).

I suppose that is one element of it yes - there's a couple of other aspects to the heat system which are problematic. One of most obvious ones is that it's unbalanced towards factions. Criminals achieve N5 far quicker than their Enforcer counterparts - but you are able to pay off at any unlocked contact. Enforcers on the other hand take a lot longer to achieve P5, but apart from dropping off stolen civilian vehicles (Which are surprisingly difficult to locate sometimes), have no way of (reliably) dropping their prestige (This is excluding killing a P5 player, which is a serious flaw in the system itself). This overall gives Enforcers a notable disadvantage, because eventually they'll hit P5, and continue to do so the longer they play. Perhaps the best way to remedy the system (if it is going to be kept) is to think about what the ideas behind the original concept was, and how they can be updated for a contemporary APB. When the game originally launched, the open world aspect was far more prevalent - the entire city was mean to be alive, and the Prestige/Notoriety System was part of that. Players who did very well would not only be a high threat level (Their entry into districts would be communicated to all players there) but also would achieve a high heat level. The idea behind this was simple - you get more rewards from being Heat 5, but you also had to deal with the entire district hunting you down. The players on the opposing team also benefited, because it meant if there was a player that was doing extraordinarily well against them, they had a chance of gaining outside assistance in taking them down. Two main issues really made themselves clear from how this was designed: 1) Heat 5 interacting with out of mission players was rarely a fun experience. Part of the fun of playing APB is the thought processes that go into each match, it's about predicting enemy movements and countering them. Being sniped at by a random player who just showed up never felt particularly rewarding, especially so if it meant you lost the mission. On the flip side, being on your own mission and having a Heat 5 player start attacking you was also frustrating, especially if you were of the same faction. 2) Heat 5 is too easy to achieve really. Instead of sign-posting a player that was absolutely dominating a match, it instead is more of a measure of how long someone has been playing the game that day. If I had to give a solution to these problems, I'd probably recommend Heat 5 players stay entirely confined within the specific mission. It does rob the game of a bit of open world gameplay, but it was hardly the highlight (In any case, we're long past the point where APB functions as a proto-GTA online. Factional differences and open world mechanics realistically need to be completely ripped up and re-made to have a positive impact on the game as a whole). This would mean that Heat 5 players only are visible to enemies in the mission, to give them a better chance of being able to kill them. Secondly, I would probably make it so that Heat resets at the start of every mission, and you can only achieve it by doing exceptionally well in that one specific mission. As a side note there could be better rewards for staying at Heat 5, beyond money and standing. Also the use of the Heat meter to determine if a grenade hit is fairly janky, and probably should be made into a hit marker instead.

This is pretty interesting, as it was one of the last remaining elements of "open world" gameplay left from the original design of APB. I know obviously the issues with the Heat 5 system, but I do wonder if it makes the entire Prestige/Notoriety system a bit pointless now if you can't get bounty in missions (I know you can get it via other means, but very few people participate in those activities). Not to say that I was a fan of how it works now or that I'm not happy about this, but removing it altogether seems a bit drastic. Perhaps it is the best solution before the devs are able to take a more whole scale look at how that mechanic works.

The issue is as we found out in 2013 is that less people believe they should (or want to) be fighting golds than would be strictly necessary. When the gold rush event was going on, and you got G1C for fighting gold players, there was no shortage of silvers and bronze players lining up to enter the gold district. Obviously there was an ulterior motive at play, but it's not like they got destroyed every single game and had so little fun that they gave up. What was more noticeable is when the incentive went away, even golds themselves desperately started de-threating to get away from gold districts (At this point golds could only join gold districts). I think people get far too wrapped up in the colour next to someone's name, and lower threats do have a tendency I find to almost mentally give up when they see gold next to someone's name (This does go both ways, especially before demerits were required to kick a player, and silvers were kicked at the start of a mission). But as I found when playing as a silver years ago is that you only got better from fighting golds, and learning what they did. This is true in all games, but is especially so in APB, where it's not a simple case of just aiming better. It's not an argument for silver teams to get wiped by gold pre-mades, just that some cross pollination may be a good thing now and again. Pre-made teams do tend to have a more disastrous effect on matchmaking than having a range of threats does. A gold team of 3 for example will likely not be able to play against their equal in a district, and as such will often force the opposition to be cobbled together from various lower threat groups. This would be a problem even for 3 unorganised golds to fight against, and they'll often be hit just as hard as any silver group. Higher skilled players don't tend to play solo for a variety of reasons, one of them that you are at the mercy of the match making system. If APB had better population, we could have trialled a solo (Or maybe 2 man max) district only. I think that would have been interesting to see. I think it's more if you're going to play this game at all, you'd rather do it with competent team-mates each mission. Honestly most of the time pre-mades sit waiting for opposition, and when you do get matched against 4 silvers, you're not happy about it, because it's unlikely either team will enjoy the match.

I don't remember this being a particularly effective deterrent when we had it initially. The issue always was as gold was such a broadchurch when it came to skill level, golds in general never wanted to play in a district solely populated by golds. I don't think matchmaking is ever going to work as long as there is such low population in the game, which is split into two factions who can only face each other, and then further split by being restricted to the district they're in.

I meant more that weapons like SMGs and Shotguns need to have their TTKs increased, so that they still have to fear running into LMGs.

That was me! For me what puts me off all the LMGs except for perhaps N-SSW is that their standing accuracy is usually pretty poor. This actually means there's huge parts of the map where you can't even use the weapons because you need to stand up to fire (The highway in Financial, or the mall in Waterfront are great examples of this), and addition it means you can't stand up from behind cover to fire at someone, you often have to expose your entire character in order to use the gun. If instead the penalty for standing up was heightened recoil, it would mean that LMGs could at least be used in an aggressive role by firing in short bursts, with longer periods of fire requiring the user to crouch. LMGs already suffer from having to be stationary to operate, which in APB is a massive disadvantage. Yet in APB, they're also given poor standing accuracy, strong recoil, long reloads and subpar hipfire to deal with. No other weapon class is disadvantaged in some many aspects, and it's no wonder that they remain perennially unpopular weapons. The standing accuracy change would be a great help to LMGs, but I suspect what would improve them most would be to give them some room to breath. Since 2014 with the release of the Troublemaker, we've seen a slew of weapons with increasing low TTKs. This has meant that the one big selling point of LMGs which is that they kill fast is not as relevant as it could be. But TTK balancing is a topic that goes beyond the scope of just LMGs.

The longer the name, the higher the price.

Reverting the M-1922's recoil back to its pre-curve mechanic days would be a nice change. I'd also like to overhaul a lot of the LMGs as well - I really hate the design decision to give many of them essentially unusable accuracy whilst standing. It may make sense if you're thinking of it from a mobility standpoint, but it actually means LMGs can be a really massive liability to use in areas of the map where you need to stand up to fire (This is especially true of the highway in Financial, or the mall in Waterfront). I'd rather that crouching gave more of a recoil based benefit than such a large accuracy improvement. At least you can control recoil.

The STAR is actually quite a decent starter weapon - even though it might not be the most effective, it is a pretty good tutorial, in that it can teach new players a lot about weapon handling, such as bloom, hipfire etc. All the little skills you need to learn to be effective with other weapons can be practised on the STAR. If you want to help new players, maybe change the default sensitivity - it's crazy high by default, with an incredibly low Marksmanship mode sensitivity.

The Weapon Curve balance update.

Neat. Little Orbit should bring back that design competition where the winning design for a clothing set got sold in the Joker Store.