mojical

I've been doing this for quite a while (using a batch file to create the symlinks automatically every time I launch the game) and I would recommend it to anyone with 16+ GB of RAM. While it won't give higher FPS on an SSD it'll help with IO related micro freezes, and it will preserve SSDs from wear. Hard drive users should certainly feel the difference. However I think there's no point in asking for a RAM asset cache, since this will without a doubt be a thing in Unreal 3.5, and I don't think the developers will want to spend effort into putting band-aids onto an old engine when the new one is already nearing completion. Also, the RamDiskUI ("C:\Program Files\ImDisk\RamDiskUIprogram" for example) that comes with ImDisk Toolkit has more features than the configuration tool shown here, including the ability to allocate the RAM disk's space dynamically. This is useful for those who play other more modern games and don't want to disable their RAM disk to meet their additional RAM requirements.

This not being implemented might have been intentional, since the silencer decreases horizontal recoil but adds vertical recoil, which is just about the opposite of what you want in a RFP. As for the 30m vs 40m situation, I'd say the most reasonable thing would be to revert all of them to 30m. The RFP is rather on the more OP end of the spectrum and much like the OCA buff, it didn't really need a buff to begin with. In any case, there's no reason why the Talon should have less range than the other variants. It was likely just an oversight as @BXNNXD said.

I haven't seen issues with hitreg itself compared to the previous patch, but hitmarkers have been quite wonky in FC for me lately. There are shots which clearly hit (as confirmed by a later kill or assist) but don't show any marker on screen. It might be that your shots are actually hitting, but you're just not getting the markers.

On the topic of the Carbine, isn't it obvious that it is in a truly bad spot at the moment? It's tied for range (35m) with the PMG which has no bloom (due to recovery between shots), higher kills per mag, lower TTK, ability to equip Cooling Jacket without downsides up to level 2, lower shots to kill, and is fully automatic? The only two upsides the Carbine has are higher initial accuracy (which gets negated by bloom after 2-3 quick shots anyway) or its somewhat usable markmanship mode, which is made worse by its incredibly slow marksmanship strafing speed. This strafing speed makes no sense for a weapon which is designed to be light and mobile, even weapons which are 100% hipfire based have sensible strafing speeds. I'm not asking for something ridiculous like the VBR, but 275cm/s to match the ATAC would be a good starting point. Also, if OSCARs become able to use CJ3 to reduce their burst intervals, there's yet one less reason to play the SR15/STAC. Even though a return to 5 shot carbine would probably be too much, I think a fire rate upgrade to make stock Carbine match CJ3, and decreased bloom recovery time to compensate for its effects on accuracy would be a fair change. This should be a high effort high reward weapon, and barely being able to match submachines at best just doesn't cut it for it. I know the Carbine doesn't have much to do with the changes this thread is about, but being deliberately left out of the +5 range increase is just salt in the wound, since there clearly are weapons in the assault rifle category that compete with carbines, just like is the case with marksman rifles.

It's quite fun and satisfying to play, but nothing I'd call "meta" or "overpowered" since it's way too inconsistent outside of point blank range. The biggest issue I have with it is that its equip time of 0.6s is far too long, considering the weapon's physical size and usefulness as a close range "panic" weapon. I would at the very least lower said equip time to match the RFP's 0.35 seconds if not even lower. The same applies to the weapon's sprint delay.

@LO_Beastie Is it possible to see preliminary stats for the Showstopper? I'm especially interested about pellet damage, pellet count, fire interval and 10m spread. Also about Rifling: I don't think the decision to slow down the weapon's fire rate is the correct way to solve the issue of Rifling being a no-downsides mod for certain weapons. Not only do slow-firing semi automatic weapons such as the Obeya take the largest hit to their TTK, but players will have to adjust to a new clicking rhythm. Meanwhile automatic weapons with lots of recovery between shots such as the already very powerful N-Tec get even better with this upgrade. My suggestion would be to apply a mild "reverse heavy barrel" effect combined with the existing bloom cap increase, while giving 3m/6m/9m extra range for each respective level of IR. The multipier that would be applied to per-shot bloom for each IR level would be 1.03/1.06/1.1. In comparison, Heavy Barrel applies a multiplier of 0.9/0.8/0.7 to per-shot bloom depending on level. This double (but mild) downside makes sure that IR has both positive and negative effects on the vast majority of weapons. As for shotguns, they should be designed so that they don't recover 100% of their center pellet bloom between shots if IR is used, so IR would make shotguns less accurate when they are fired at or near maximum firerate. The Fang will have less accuracy for the second and third shots in each burst, making it less likely to 3 burst kill.

I'm not sure if it's possible since it doesn't show up on the killfeed, but I'd love to see all LTL weapons (and grenades) ranked from most stuns caused to least. It really feels like PIG and percs dominate the entire LTL meta (if such a thing even exists), whereas when it comes down to lethal weapons, primaries such as the N-Tec dominate. The Strife is a primary, has pellet spread, twice the equip time... I don't think it's a fair comparison, if anything it shows how bad the Strife is. The fact that there's no lethal workalike to the PIG makes it hard to balance. Surely the Showstopper will help in that regard but once more shotgun spread is a factor, and I very much doubt it will reach PIG levels of damage even at maximum pellet count. On the other hand, the TG-8 is pretty much ideally balanced, since it's almost equal to the FBW except for ranges where it doesn't even make sense to stun anyone.

In my opinion the DOW Thumper is king in terms of being underrated, but it's true that the Dog Ear (and NSSW to a degree) were low key overpowered for ages until they started popping up in players' loadouts rather recently. At the time sniper dropoff ranges became normalized and the Dog Ear became viable, barely anyone played it. As for the Thumper, I'm curious to see how the changes will affect it. Unlike the CSG it has a lot of overkill damage, so it's already very consistent and doesn't stand to gain much unless its overall spread is reduced. I wish the ADS reduced spread gimmick was tweaked to actually be useful, but the gun can hold its own using only the normal mode. Maybe other shotguns such as the Shredder will improve as well.

According to APBVault the stats are taken from the VAS C2, in other words it's a reskin, although it counts as an AR and not an SMG unlike the C2. I'd be fine with those stats being kept since they fit the concept of the weapon, but I do remember RP stating the gun was unfinished regardless of stats. https://db.apbvault.net/items/Weapon_AssaultRifle_NTEC-7_Compact Innova also had some other "interesting" items such as the CJ3 TAS20 (CSG reskin). Sadly I never had the chance to try that one since it required a lot of grinding, several tens of thousands of Joker Tickets.

Depends on what you define as "normal" speed. Something like 2400/2666 Mhz will definitely be felt, since the minimum FPS can tank by more than 50% (see the benchmarks below). I'd even suggest going for a 6 core and 3000+ RAM rather than getting an 8 core Ryzen and skimping on the RAM. It's not just bandwidth and latency that get worse. Modern Ryzen 8 cores are two quad cores connected with a bus that matches the RAM in speed, also known as the "Infinity Fabric". This means that games that use more than four cores, or games with heavy memory usage, will see the highest performance penalties. Eight-core Ryzens also benefit a lot from manually tweaked low latencies, but the 2700X gets much better RAM latencies out of the box than the 1800X and other first gen Ryzens, so it's not always necessary to adjust timings with a high end kit. There's a YouTube channel with some benchmarks specifically geared towards Ryzen's performance with different RAM parameters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHBsR1Y68G8 (tests the 2700X but no real "low end RAM") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6yp7Pi39Z8 (tests the 1800X with a wide spectrum of RAM configs) As for APUs (Ryzen 2200G and 2400G) these take it one step further since their GPUs run off system memory. Memory is the main bottleneck for these APUs and performance scales almost linearly with bandwidth, also trying to go single channel to save some bucks is VERY bad on these parts. They should be pretty sweet to play APB on a budget though. Now, I have no idea how APB would perform if it were to be included in that sort of benchmark. However, I helped a fellow APBer with the RAM latencies on his 1800X and he can easily sustain 120fps in 1440p in APB. Ryzen is more of a tweaker's CPU than the "plug and play" performance that Intel offers, but it can really pay off.

Both the AMD 2700X and Intel 8700K will offer stable 120fps even at high resolutions in APB, when set up properly that is. As far as Intel vs. AMD, AMD does have some impressive stock performance with the 2700X, but you really need fast (and therefore very expensive) RAM to get the most out of it. Intel chips aren't so picky with RAM. One issue I do have with Intel is that they only support one generation of CPUs per motherboard chipset. If I could just plop a 8700k onto my Z97 board I would do it immediately, but to upgrade my CPU I need to change motherboard, RAMS, etc. which is not exactly consumer friendly. Also Intel use some low quality thermal paste between the CPU and heat spreader, which makes temperatures worse than AMD parts with similar power consumption. Of course Intel its higher frequencies and as said above isn't as dependant on RAM speed, so both have their advantages and disadvantages. I've put together a parts list (it's German prices, probably more expensive elsewhere in Europe) for around 1000€ which should be good for multiplayer gaming, including APB of course. I've chosen a Radeon 580 GPU for it but a GTX 1060 is a viable option if you don't care about FreeSync. Most modern gaming monitors out there support FreeSync so if you have one of those I'd say it's worth it to get the Radeon. https://de.pcpartpicker.com/list/K46Wr6

There's still a bunch of issues, for starters you have "outtagrave" and "outtagraave" which are the same players bar one, not sure what te reason behind that is. Also, did you look through the list of players in each team? There's several cases of the same player being in different teams at the same time, causing some impossible matches (such as this one). Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to ask the teams to re-confirm their entry to the tournaments and make sure each player only plays for one team at a time. Otherwise it's pretty obvious this is going to be a huge mess.

True, plus it also has less vertical recoil than the regular N-Tec. I don't think it's underpowered, in fact it works really well against people who are partially behind cover, such as cars. It's just a shame the only open-slot scoped N-Tec is the reskinned VAS Scepter, since the scoped N-Tec itself doesn't have a Dvah variant. The third slot would be useful to equip a 3 point sling or tagger.

I think the problem is not the required amount of spending to get it, but the fact that the 2 slot AMG (such as the Euryale) isn't available outside of loyalty rewards. This could be fixed by making the as of yet unreleased "Stheno" variant available as a regular ARMAS weapon, or perhaps even as a lease from a future contact. I'm pretty sure this was planned at some point, that's why the Stheno exists. Most other loyalty weapons are reskins so they aren't big game changers anyway, just nice to have for people who don't buy reskins or 3 slotted F2P weapons.

Firing in bursts of 2 or even 3 can be a powerful alternative to tapfiring at medium range, especially with Cooling Jacket equipped. Usually, targets with cover who peek a FAR don't feel very threatened by its burst damage, so they may stay out of cover long enough to take a burst of multiple shots. Of course, when hipfiring and running full auto is the only option, if that's too inaccurate it's simply not worth hipfiring in the first place. Usually when I play this weapon, I run Mobility Sling/Cooling Jacket 2/Magazine Pull 3. Another positive quality of the FAR/STAR is that they cover every distance up until their maximum range really well, which means that when I use the FAR, I hardly ever have to use my secondary. This makes it a good weapon to equip "specialty" secondaries such as a firework launcher, LTL gun or even a SNR as a finisher. Otherwise, @LUST summed up what this weapon is about really well.

The OSCAR for instance does not bloom at all between bursts, and has comparable (if not better) accuracy overall. The ACES' TTK advantage, at least in the rifle's case, gets much smaller if HB2 or HB3 is equipped, whereas the OSCAR has the advantage of higher range and burst damage. Sure, OSCAR requires manual clicking, but that's nothing a few hours of practice can't fix. Even if there was a consensus that HB2/3 is overpowered in the ACES series, a simple change in the stats (which almost wouldn't make a difference in a HB-less weapon) could fix the problem and mitigate the effect of Heavy Barrel. For the rifle, this could be done: Recovery delay: 0.00 -> 0.03 Per shot modifier: 0.38 -> 0.23 This would make it recover less bloom, but also generate less, pretty much breaking even for a vanilla gun but preventing even HB3 from negating all of the bloom in between shots. For the SMG the same could be applied, but the changes wouldn't need to be so drastic since the effective bloom per shot is higher.

They function differently because they use a different base weapon, not because of the mod. If you look closely, the multipliers attached to each line of the description do nothing. It's literally just text. These "modifiers" are respective to a common base that does not even exist, which is why the text does not make any sense in the first place.

That's the recovery per second, not per shot. You have to multiply this by the fire interval to make a direct comparison. And yes, the fire interval of the ACES is much lower (0.045s vs. 0,091s) , as it has a higher firerate. You can test this by trialing an ACES and shooting at a wall, and seeing how the crosshair grows bigger, while the OCA's bounces around but stays the same size after each round. CJ3 does negate this and add some very slight bloom, but most of the bloom is still recovered between shots. Also, the fire interval values for weapons such as the ACES are inaccurate on APBVault because of rounding to 2 decimal digits. It's better to divide the TTK by the shots to kill minus one, to get a more accurate number.

The problem is that unlike the OCA, the ACES does not recover all (or almost all) of its bloom in between shots. So by the time you've shot 5 rounds in full auto with the ACES the accuracy difference is already gone. Sure, you can fire in bursts, but that won't do any favors to the effective TTK. Also, the OCA's TTK disadvantage is easily offset by equipping CJ2/CJ3 which the ACES can't do.

As the title says, would it be possible to have the preset barrel mods on ACES weapons removed? Their descriptions are just cosmetic, their icon is (very) poorly designed and sticks out compared to other modifications, and the only effective purpose they serve is preventing players from equipping red mods on either of the ACES variants. Given how poorly these weapons perform in today's meta, with more forgiving guns such as the Whisper or PMG basically being a straight upgrade over them, the ability to equip reds could give them a welcome boost in usage. Right now the ACES (in either variant) is sort of a high-risk-low-reward weapon and while fun to play, because it encourages proper tracking, it could use the small boost in expandability. I am pretty sure that no red mod would make the ACES broken or overpowered, particularly after competing guns such as the OCA have been buffed. As a curiosity, 3-4 years ago (IIRC) G1 mistakenly released a version of the PDW-57 (P90) that instead of being a reskin of the OCA had the stats of the ACES rifle, and could take red mods. Most people put CJ3 in it which while effective at close range also increased bloom and the likelihood to run out of bullets mid fight. Of course, it was taken out of the Joker store and deleted promptly, but it was fun while it lasted...

Of course RNG will prevent it from happening, but the Yukon has a 40m dropoff (lol) so it could in theory kill someone at that distance at 0.45s. You can also crouch and fan the trigger to see that it actually has a lot of range. As for the burst fire mode, it's not even comparable to the RFP, let alone the OBIR, but as a gimmick it can be useful from time to time. The problem is that it has substantially more DPS than a N-FA9 or S-AS, while having similar accuracy and adding the burst-fire mode as an extra. I don't think equip time is enough for it not to render any other CQC automatic pistol obsolete, because it just has so much more killing power, and none of the guns it competes with have more accuracy. The solution has been said countless times already and it is to make the gun behave like a Nunavut or Northwest when firing from hipfire. I don't understand why some people still suggest that it be deleted, refunded or whatever when it's pretty clear what the weapon was intended to be like and the differences between that and what we got in-game.

Loremaster

Where do I start... The 1804 update from a few months ago ruined sound quality for me and a few clan mates. This could be fixed by uninstalling the audio driver and reinstalling the one provided by the manufacturer, but it was annoying and a waste of time. Also my PC attempted and rolled back the same update several times until I manually reinstalled the OS. I've had several cases among friends and family members where I've had to reinstall their OS from scratch because of how badly mangled the OS had become after an update. Not to mention that there are few things more annoying than having to wait for a massive pointless feature update to install right after the PC turns on. This is especially problematic for slowish laptops which take longer to install updates. Meanwhile, Linux distros can update its software package by package even while it's being used actively, and typical end-user systems only need reboots for Linux itself as in the kernel. Server distros of Linux can even update the kernel without rebooting the machine at all by using something like Kernelcare or Ksplice, and these technologies are 10 years old.

I really wish the problem was just the lack of games available for the platform, but drivers and the overall fragmentation between display servers, window managers and distributions really do get in the way of gaming on Linux. However, if it weren't for gaming (which is the reason I dual boot) I'd definitely have shifted away from Windows at least ten years ago. Windows is just far too bloated that it barely fits in a DVD at this point, and the update system is atrocious. Also, Linux is just better suited for coding and development, to the point that Microsoft even offers an official Ubuntu subsystem with Windows 10. While this would help some players who want to make Linux their main or even only OS, most people who use Linux and play games regularly already have a dual-boot setup or even a virtual machine with direct GPU access for gaming, so it wouldn't make a huge difference for existing players. However, it might be a good way to attract Linux Steam users looking for something new to play on their OS. Either way, Steam is supported on Linux so at least that would make the game easy to install on all popular distributions, in the rather unlikely case that the dev team follows through with it.

@MattScott Will the balance changes also target grenades and deployable modifications at some point? Anyway, here's my personal opinion on these two types of items: I believe Low-Yield fragmentation grenades could do with something like a moderate blast radius reduction as their huge radius (equal to regular frags) and low fuse time makes them too easy to just spam at enemies. This type of change would encourage players who use this type of grenade to make more precise throws. As a counterpoint to a change like this, a new alternative path to unlock them could be added so that beginning players can at least try them out without having to grind to upwards of R195 for them. Lore and mechanics wise they seem like a decent fit for a beginner, particularly those wanting to switch away from percussion grenades. This unlock could be achieved for example with Joker Tickets, much like the leased 7 day mods. Funnily enough, the item description states that this grenade was intended to be sold in ARMAS at some point. Thankfully this didn't actually happen... Also, I would seriously consider removing the ability to resupply (practically unlimited amounts of) grenades from deployable ammo crates, because this can make low yield users even more frustrating to face if they get a defend spot on high ground and can just keep on throwing grenades. The only way to resupply grenades besides field suppliers should be the mobile supply unit, which is heavily underused nowadays. Finally, a more radical way to solve the complaints about "grenade spam", "air strikes", etc. could be changing grenades to run on a cooldown (such as one grenade each 15s) rather than carrying a limited supply of them. Items that affect the amount of grenades carried (such as low yields or flak jacket) could decrease or increase said cooldown respectively. I think this would also be a good mechanic for people who survive through a lot of fights and can't afford to resupply, for example in fight club.