Songbearer

Yep. Having way more fun in bronze than I would in silver and I'm borderline low gold if I'm playing for reals. I've played this game long enough that I know how it works and all the ins and outs but the four year gap was enough that regular players who stuck around when the game was in the doldrums are beyond godlike at the game and it's extremely rare I'll have an enjoyable matchup in silver. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind playing in silver win or lose, but it isn't fun and as soon as I inevitably downrank back to silver, people shit a brick when I show up on their team. So me and my friends remain in bronze, where we have fun and even matchups with all the other people who are stuck in the same mid-tier boat as us. If I unleashed ~*My True Power Level*~ and grabbed my HVR while co-ordinating with my friends we'd probably completely crush the opposition but that's no fun for anyone involved so I run around with guns I'm actually interested in using (STAR, NSSW, LTL) that I'd be steamrolled for attempting to use instead of The Holy Meta in silver districts, which gives everyone involved a fair chance and lets me avoid the boredom of plinking people with my hellcannon for the entire match. No shame in playing in Bronze as long as you're not doing it to stomp newbies who can't fight back. If you find yourself in that situation, draw your weakest secondary and give the poor guys a fighting chance. With the matchmaking being the way it is at the moment, there's no good answer for new and average players. Dethreat responsibly, be considerate of fellow players - and show no quarter to those of your skill level. Yeah, I could git gud with a couple more hundred hours of being steamrolled by the most hardcore of players that - for some reason - the game insists I must be capable of beating, but I'm too old to be bothered about that sort of thing and the road to competency is long, hard and boring. Coupled with my friends being of middling skill level - same as me - and bronze is the clear-cut answer for this game to keep being fun.

I like how cynical you already are for a company that's just started updating and has already accomplished revitalising the game and adding functional anticheat as well as communicating when they've promised to. I mean, feel free to come back in 2019 and see how much the game has changed if you have your doubts, but maybe give them a chance to fail or succeed before you start shitting on them.

OP: Go play Second Life. I'm serious. If you're playing game for T&A, why not do it there? You'll get plenty of ridiculous internet boobage in a wide variety of interesting locales!

Nobody can do any business transactions or logistics because of the sheer amount of violence happening at any given point. Be honest, even if you play an Enforcer you've probably intentionally shot or ran over pedestrians who've done nothing more sinister than cross a road. What do you think would happen if you saw them, say, carrying a crate of valuable goods? You wouldn't be able to resist crushing that crate, running the poor silly person carrying them over, then turning up to their funeral in your hot pink Cisco and spinning donuts on their grave.

Nothing wrong with shaking up a nearly 4 year old meta, especially since there are so many guns in this game that have fallen to the wayside outside of extremely niche/gimmick-level gameplay.

For broken weapons, I'd say the heavy HVR is powerful to the point of being mandatory if you're playing against a team worth their salt - at the very least, if they're running one, you either have to have a teammate to mirror it or run OPGL to put heavy pressure on the sniper (If they're smart enough to always be just on the outskirts of the objective). Yes, it's counterable, but the sheer amount of hoops you have to jump through and relative ineffectuality of other weapons if you're not mirroring just make it an extremely boring gun to go up against and one that isn't exactly entertaining for the user either. Making it 720 - 750 damage would be a lot kinder for that weapon as it gives tagged enemies a chance to retaliate or find cover. DMR-AV stands out to me as the closet thing I can say is a P2W weapon because it's such a reliable long-range antivehicle gun which is every bit as potent antipersonnel as a regular DMR. Even with three open slots, it's tough to say that the regular DMR is worth taking over it. If they ever added tracers again, it'd be alright as the DMR has a built in silencer that hides them whereas the AV does not, but as it stands I'd offer that either mildly increased recoil or a slower firing rate (With slightly increased Hard damage to offset it) may be a good change to differentiate the two guns. I love the STAR but yeah I'd love to see the day where I can pick it over the NTEC and not feel like I'm hamstringing myself. Four times now I've introduced new friends to the game, and although they do well with the STAR they ask if there's another assault rifle they can try. I point them towards the NTEC and give them a few tips on how to handle it and they're instantly erasing probably 2x the amounts of enemies with half the effort.

Just tested it, and nope - guess it just wanted to go easy on me. Tried launching both the launcher and the direct executable as administrator, no juice. Apparently this also happens to my friend as well, but it seems like a rare issue.

Running the launcher as an administrator may have fixed this. I'll confirm when I come back from work later.

Aside from the nano and to a much, much lesser extent the Colby CSG being absolutely insane way, way back in the day, I've never gone up against a paid-for weapon that I've considered overwhelmingly powerful. The only thing I think is an oddity these days is the DMR-AV which is just a straight upgrade for the DMR with no downsides (as far as I can tell), but also kind of lol if you're using the DMR anyway when the NHVR exists.

As someone who dethreats not to stomp but to keep having a good time with my less dedicated friends, I honestly yearn for the day where we don't have to keep up this ridiculous balancing act to ensure an enjoyable play session. I don't mind playing against equal opposition - in fact, I crave it and have plenty of recorded experiences of great, close matchups from playing exclusively in silver districts four years ago - but I'm not getting that from silver districts anymore. The sooner this sort of thing is over, the better - I genuinely don't want to shit on any new player's learning experience.

I was a gold player before I finished playing in 2014 or so, then after coming back got my arse kicked so hard by people playing for all that time in silver districts I dethreated to silver. Since most of my friends were silver beforehand, I stuck to bronze districts and - lo and behold - with those matchups, wins felt achievable. If I go HVR and can communicate with my team, I can almost hang in silver districts. The thing is, the matchups have such huge skill differences the matches simply aren't fun. It's the difference between getting in a bar-room brawl after a drunken night out vs trying to take out a black belt in karate. You might be able to land a blow but you're going to get reamed - and it's simply not fun or rewarding. Yeah, git gud and all that, but for people who don't really have the time (Or years) to dedicate to ceaseless playing, going up against golds as an average player is all too often a one-sided stomp. I don't encourage dethreating in order to stomp people who can't fight back, but for new or average players? I can definitely see the reasons why they do it. I think if you're a long-term player you owe it to yourselves to not go full tryhard if you are one of those people with competency in the game who choose to play in bronze instances - use weapons you're unfamiliar with or give the enemy a sporting chance - but I have a much better time in bronze with my friends than I do in silver. I honestly think there needs to be a rating beyond gold for the super superb players who've really earned it, but as it currently stands I don't mind losing in Silver... but golds don't like having me around, my less dedicated friends don't like playing against them, and I just don't have the inclination to play that hard all day.

Do you not see how broadcasting bans can actively encourage hackers? Imagine your name got displayed in chat for all players every so often whenever you won a mission. How would you feel about it? Amused? Proud of the notoriety? You'd want to keep winning missions so people could keep talking about you, right? Now apply that to hackers. I can guarantee that a lot of the people who rerolled persistently had "You get to see my name/my new account's name show up for everyone" as one of their reasons or motivation. A whole website full of angry people discussing you? A leaderboard of such that keeps track of every account banned without any effort required on your part? I bet that craploads of games got ruined just for another notch on the infamy board. It's not a difficult concept. Naming and shaming doesn't work if the player isn't ashamed of their actions.

Even if BE isn't currently firing, people seem to be behaving themselves by and large. I can count the number of suspicious players I've faced on one hand in 20 hours of gameplay.

It's an interesting mechanic but I think it should be up to the players to bring the correct weapons to the fight and to come prepared. The only part I really like and the reason why I'd use it is to try out legendaries I don't own if they're used against me.

I doubt many of the old staff would want to return to APB after getting burned twice. I owe Jotunblut a lot, though. Still got his name tattooed on my character and that ain't going away!

Wish I could get the 4x4 at a reduced rate because years ago I bought the pack without the 4x4, before it was so ubiquitous. I'd love to buy one now as a sort of "Welcome back" buy-in thing, but nooo way am I going to pay over the odds for a car because the only way of getting it is through a pack I own 3/4 of the contents of.

Overwhelmingly yes. Matt said that he'd need to look into whether they have the music rights but the old login screen was so much better than the current one. Loading into a login screen and then loading into the game is a terrible idea.

Little do you know BattleEye can see everything. Everything. It knows you're naked right now. Oh, you're not? It can see through your clothes.

Are you looking for insane kills, mad montages, killstreaks a mile long and clutch teamwork that'll make you weep? Well, you've come to the wrong place! If you want to see a bunch of silver losers dicking around and a bunch of silly stuff in the process, though, you're in for a treat. My official 101st APB video since I got my priorities jacked up and made another, lesser video for my 100th but we don't talk about that one. Good to be back, San Paro.

What kind of trucker? I hope you're not a dump trucker otherwise coming back to APB is gonna do bad things to you.

These are both actually good ideas, the problem is implementation. According to the devs, damage over time is a no-no in this version of the engine and they didn't have any animators for a while so any changes were out of the question. The big problem with stunning as it stands for teammates who aren't in the know is that the "stunned" animation looks nearly identical to just crouching, leading to a lot of spoiled arrests in the heat of combat. If a stunned crim hit the deck when you got them it'd be a lot more obvious what was happening. There's a pretty big chance that the stunned animation being a kneel is to make it fit into the crouched hitbox, though.

This is holding me back from getting the 4x4. I already brought the rocker pack + kit back in the day but no 4x4, and like hell am I shelling out nearly £40 for a car.

Face your PC speakers outside your window so all the street can hear your sirens

Back when Chaos Districts were in me and my buddies decided to bring in the Incredibles to sort out the mess:

Paragraphs, my brother. I'd love to see some expansion on the lore of the game and new characters, maybe small storyline events that cause the maps to change in drastic ways. A bombing of a building causing a block's worth of devastation, the highway being completed in Financial with new jumps and routes to take, things like that. Remember when the skatepark got added in? That was a wild month of people pulling crazy stunts for the fun of it.