AnOldAPBFart

Hoooooo boy. You would NOT have liked APB in the RTW days, where the TTK was 2x across the board.

Pretty sure the beta was the incentive. Clearly, they need feedback to from a Live test environment to focus on areas that need improvement, and LO legitimately is a small studio by comparison, so that's what these beta tests are for. Try... not complaining, but rather contributing when possible. You might feel more rewarded at the end of the day. However, judging by the average player count of less than 6 for the majority of it being up, well... I don't see that happening.

This, too, is correct. G1's poor decision and their vastly worse listening skills stemmed from being intertwined with, or basically a rebranding of what was a company called K2 Networks or some crap which was a notoriously shady P2W studio IIRC. They made some changes to the core framework of APB, screwed up the bloom settings, broke a bunch of crap, and literally did not create a backup of RTW era files. Changed the Threat system, removed or broke a ton of missions... I mean, the list goes on. That drove down the player count more and more. The literal lack of anti-cheat system also did a lot of that too. More staff left, game kept getting worse. Matchmaking got bad, because it used to mean something to be gold, and they skewed those brackets with the changes too. People started Dethreating, further shrinking the player count, and it snowballed. studio continued to shrink. Engine upgrade talk began. That was f***ing 2014. Years go by, basically nothing really happened from then on except a few "changes" to matchmaking and the respawn system, which, honestly, did not solve any problems. Years went by. Then in came LO. This game... I mean, its a relic in technology terms. RTW initially started development of this game in like...I want to say 2005-2006. This game's bones are OLD. The largest amount of development this game saw, outside of RTW days, was between 2009-2011, which was the RTW ---> G1 transition, and was on life support ever since. I'd say LO has done an amazing job with the Overhaul, and its beta feels and looks good. Definitely needs polish, and content, but damn despite those 2 things and framerate issues, I truly want this game to do well. It deserves it, true underdog style. But man... yeah. Reality sets in at some point. Hopefully, by some miracle, LO has a trick up their sleeve in the marketing department.

I may be too far removed from the happenings of APB to actually know what's going on, I'll admit that. It has been a long time.

You know, pardon my frank approach to this here, but this absolutely sucks patootie. Not you guys, LO, you do what you can within a legal capacity. But, and you can take this with with a grain of salt because I don't have any evidence to give in regards to the matter, we've had this issue for a long, long time, and there's a guy out there that used to terrorize this game with Hacks and DDoS for years (his name rhymes with Boat)... and I get the feeling, to this day, its the same shitheel doing it. That isn't entirely true. This game has had a long standing issue with DDoS attacks and from some older digging a few years back, it was pretty easy to put together that there was, and may still be to this day, one guy who spent an entirely unhealthy amount of time on trying to force this game down. I'm not tinfoil-hatting this thing, I just think that you're entirely underestimating what one guy can accomplish with a strong enough will and access to advanced coding and network infrastructure knowledge can accomplish with a room full of old slave rigs.

I'm not sure if you realize this... But, APB has had a stagnant population for YEARS now, and has continued to dwindle each year since 2013/2014. I've watched this game go from 1-2k average daily player count (Just on West Coast) to a literal Ghost town, and as much as any of us doesn't want to admit it... No amount of anything will ever revive this game to "Glory Days" levels of players (and I'm not even talking about the RTW days pre-G1) because it has a horrendous reputation and is now on its 3rd developer since 2010. Sad, I know... but let's be real here. This is far from a new problem, and any of us still around from the old days, is all too painfully aware of it. Edit* And just to add on to this, NONE of APB's problems are LO's fault. I just want to be clear, none of my pessimism is directed at them. This game just has a really scuffed history.

What's the effing Deal with this thing's download speed? 9.07 GB download but it is running @ 900KB/s meaning this download is going to take a total of 186 minutes. 3 hours? What gives? And no it is not my internet.

Woah now slow down there, Satan.

Yeah, it pretty much is the only thing that's technically pay to win in APB's architecture. This should have been changed long ago, and premium time should have never continued to deplete when being logged out.

What an absolutely horrible decision, on all fronts. We thought we were done with the anti-consumer decisions that were continuously made by Gamersfirst. Apparently not.

I think a more important question is: Do you still think you're working with local police to track cheaters in APB? Cuz, to this day, that's probably one of the most ridiculous claims I've seen anybody make around these parts.