The state of the game

[DiVaice_ 13]

Dear, Little Orbit, you have been owning the game for 2 years and I want to ask few questions. Hope, you will response detailed. Also, I'm asking players to fill my list of problems if I forgot something.

1)Are you really trying to make the game better or you don't care about live version? Seriously, for the whole time of you owning APB you made only few good updates, at the same time, you made some bugs into the game that you haven't nerfed yet.
2)Why can't you focus on the problems that you're able to fix with the current engine. I'm not talking about bad optimization that is not possible to fix on the current engine. I'm talking about gameplay problems

• 1.Problems with modifications. For example spotter (example) or Radar Tower in the car that can make you visible no matter how far you're staying from the car.
• 2. Terrible spawn system. Sometimes Spawn points disappear from the map. Sometimes opponents can spawn 10m from you or spawn points that make you instantly able to defend the point with long range weapon.
• 3.Bounty system. Absolutely useless system that only bothers. Just delete it while     you can't find a better solution. I lost so many missions because one random kid     decided to come for me and kill me that makes me losing my position.
• 4.Missions. At the moment there's only one balanced final stage - deathmatch,       every other finale depends on RNG. The VIP stage is the most terrible should be     removed from the game and replaced with any other final stage. There's also a big     problem with time on some stages.For example, on one stage where you need to     raid 2 doors and grab 2 small items and drop it at the same stage has 10 minutes     while the same stage but with two medium items has only 7 minutes. Most of final     stages such as item hold or points don't have enough time. It's just nearly        impossible to comeback without overtime. These finals should have 10 mins time    and ends up when one of the side gets the maximum amount of score. Final stage     with item drop is a joke. Some missions always have drop points 400m+ and have     only 3 minutes for a stage. If you want to comeback, you have to kill the whole team     that takes a lot of effort, take the item and come to your point, kill the opponent     team again if they're on the point and then drop the item. It takes more than 3     minutes usually.
• 5.Vehicles. Most of them are useless. Everyone now running 4x4 Vegas or Pioneer/Espacio. Why don't make vehicles that is supposed to be top tier (Bishada/Jericho) having the same stats as 4x4. It will work basically as weapon reskins. 
• 6.Bugs. UI bug that you made into the game with the autumn assault event. Being unable to make a car object until you push it by your car (example). Also at car-park most of the time any car point almost always explode. There're more bugs that difficult to remember.

3)Also, almost any modern f2p project has only cosmetic things in their ingame stores that doesn't affect the gameplay, I have no idea why you're still going with that old fashion that makes thinking every newbie that the game is hard p2w. Also you trying to fix some weapons from contacts but u didn't try to fix their analog from armas.

4)Weapon balance. You're listening to the players who don't play the game on high skill level. Me and some of the russian players daily playing arranged and sometimes we play in the prototype district. Changes you're making to the shotguns don't make sense. You and most of the players who sits on forums don't understand how huge impact JG or CSG can provide with cornercamping or with cargameplay. You just kill every other cqc gun except maybe PMG. While NTEC gets a good change, not this garbage you made before that completely destroy the only one decent f2p Assault Rifle.
5)Terrible EU servers. Server latency jumping like crazy.
6)Player support. Why don't you want to support players that makes their own event. For example tournament that  is going to happen. I tried to contact Matt about the tournaments but he doesn't care about it. Innova had supported tournaments or other events from players. You could type the special command in the chat to start the specific mission and instantly get the opposition.
Don't need to write that you're busy with the new engine. While upgrading the engine you made 3 pointless events that died in 2 days each one and RIOT that was an unfunny joke.
 

[Fortune Runner 796]

technically it has not been 2 years yet that's around may 1st.

 

( following is personal opinions. may or may not be correct. if I'm wrong someone who knows correct me please)

 

1. you sound unaware of apbs coding. when Little Orbit bought APB the coding was a spaghetti mess. with the current engine it is not so easy to fix since the engine itself seems to be  breaking things as well.

 

2.1 not the first time that broke since it also broke under G1. i believe it may be deep rooted and may not be solved correctly until a new engine can finish cleaning up this coding.

2.2 spawn system was broken from RTW then broken further by G1 however car spawns help fix that to where its more balanced.

2.3 bounty system is not useless. if you're that good to always get bounty's then get out and fight harder people. very rarely do i lose from a single bounty on me.

       i normally lose from being a dummy and messing up horribly.

2.4 a lot of this on number 4 is your personal opinion. missions do need a rework for positioning but they aren't useless. your post sounds like it wants to strip APB of missions...if so then no thanks

2.5 i see people using a lot more than just those vehicles. plus you are talking about personal cars rather than npc cars which has a wide variety. cars are only a part of game play. there's grenades

2.6 some of those bugs are deep programmed into APB and can not be fixed properly until a proper engine can clean that mess up.

 

3 a lot of guns are on armas and a lot of those  same guns can be paid for with joker tickets instead which are free to earn by game play. its less paw to win than ever and it never really was pay to win to begin with. its mostly a deathcry excuse for noobs who do not take the time to learn how to use the guns or APB game play itself.

 

4 there are testing district to test out the guns and record data from usage. that data recorded is used to balance the guns , not just the community's opinions.

   also cqc means nothing on a  corner if i blow you up . its not written anywhere to use cqc against cqc. change it up

 

5 it has been announced more than enough that there's a new server setup being worked on and that the lag came from that.

   also the lag you complain about is less than what Australians get and they actually laugh at anyone complaining because they get worse lag but kill better on APB from being used to it.

 

6 because Little Orbit already has their hands full and any event would slow down work on the engine upgrade. holiday events are a double edged sword for us  because of it.

  as for RIOT some liked it some didn't. if you don't like it don't play it but please don't ruin it for the ones who do.

 

 

[NotZombieBiscuit 3146]

6 hours ago, DiVaice_ said:

 

• 4.Missions. At the moment there's only one balanced final stage - deathmatch,       every other finale depends on RNG. The VIP stage is the most terrible should be     removed from the game and replaced with any other final stage. There's also a big     problem with time on some stages.For example, on one stage where you need to     raid 2 doors and grab 2 small items and drop it at the same stage has 10 minutes     while the same stage but with two medium items has only 7 minutes. Most of final     stages such as item hold or points don't have enough time. It's just nearly        impossible to comeback without overtime. These finals should have 10 mins time    and ends up when one of the side gets the maximum amount of score. Final stage     with item drop is a joke. Some missions always have drop points 400m+ and have     only 3 minutes for a stage. If you want to comeback, you have to kill the whole team     that takes a lot of effort, take the item and come to your point, kill the opponent     team again if they're on the point and then drop the item. It takes more than 3     minutes usually.

3 point and single point hold final stages are completely fine. What are you even going on about.

[vsb 6171]

9 minutes ago, NotZombieBiscuit said:

3 point and single point hold final stages are completely fine. What are you even going on about.

the only issue i have is that i think overtime should take effect if any point is being capped by either team, thus avoiding the situation where each team has one point and one team is capping the 3rd but the mission ends regardless

 

 

Edited January 15, 2020 by Solamente
typo

[NotZombieBiscuit 3146]

6 minutes ago, Solamente said:

the only issue i have is that i think overtime should take effect if any point is being capped by either team, thus avoiding the situation where each team has one point and one team is capping the 3rd but the mission ends regardless

 

 

99% completely fine

[Lign 361]

3 hours ago, NotZombieBiscuit said:

3 point and single point hold final stages are completely fine. What are you even going on about.

It doesn't make sense when the opposition have only half points before winning the mission and you're trying to comeback and they have at least 3 opportunities to make one of your two points neutral to win on overtime. The mission should end up when when one of the side gets the score cap. The same goes for item hold stage. It doesn't make sense either when you're doing a comeback when the opposition has 60/120 score and it's overtime already and they have a lot of time to just press F on the item. It should end up when someone hits 120/120.

6 hours ago, Fortune Runner said:

1. you sound unaware of apbs coding. when Little Orbit bought APB the coding was a spaghetti mess. with the current engine it is not so easy to fix since the engine itself seems to be  breaking things as well.

It sounds like you're trying to defend little orbit who made a 3 useless events and one major joke RIOT on that spaghetti mess while they could fix the live with small changes like mission balance, fixing bugs etc. If they can't just for example add time for some of the last stage then by that logic they shouldn't be able to add events or making a weapon balance.

 

Merged.

 

6 hours ago, Fortune Runner said:

bounty system is not useless. if you're that good to always get bounty's then get out and fight harder people. very rarely do i lose from a single bounty on me.

       i normally lose from being a dummy and messing up horribly.

How it's not useless for you? Killing some random guys and getting +20$ for it or what? Do I need to say how many times I lost mission just because exactly that system. The last time happened just two days ago when on the VIP stage random silver came inside our point with nfas and killed my VIP that ended up for my vip getting farmed by car gameplay. Are you really that dumb?

[CookiePuss 5377]

4 minutes ago, Lign said:

How it's not useless for you? Killing some random guys and getting +20$ for it or what? Do I need to say how many times I lost mission just because exactly that system.

Its happened to me twice recently, and both the same annoying scenario... Im capping a point in overtime to win a match and some asswipe not in my mission, someone whom I have no control over, goes P5 next to me immediately kills me. Not that it matters, if I stopped doing the point in order to fight this someone not in my freaking mission, Id have loat anyways.

 

Great system.

[Lign 361]

2 minutes ago, CookiePuss said:

Its happened to me twice recently, and both the same annoying scenario... Im capping a point in overtime to win a match and some asswipe not in my mission, someone whom I have no control over, goes P5 next to me immediately kills me. Not that it matters, if I stopped doing the point in order to fight this someone not in my freaking mission, Id have loat anyways.

 

Great system.

Fortune Runner: nOt uSELeSs sYsTEm

[mtz 496]

11 hours ago, DiVaice_ said:

1)Are you really trying to make the game better or you don't care about live version? Seriously, for the whole time of you owning APB you made only few good updates, at the same time, you made some bugs into the game that you haven't nerfed yet.

They've been kind of busy doing other things besides regular content updates.

 

11 hours ago, DiVaice_ said:

2)Why can't you focus on the problems that you're able to fix with the current engine. I'm not talking about bad optimization that is not possible to fix on the current engine. I'm talking about gameplay problems

Because they are prioritising other things at the moment.

 

No bigger complaints towards subpoints #1, #2 and #6, 'cause yes, these are mostly valid concerns... however:

 

ad. #3) "just deleting" the whole system does not address the question of monetary rewards from various bounty levels. Both factions get 2.0x multiplier to rewards at Bounty 5, but different rewards at each level below that. How do we approach that? What do we do with the interface in the top left corner of the screen?

ad. #4) You're using the term "RNG" like you don't know what it actually means. Also, exactly what is wrong with 3-point holds and 1-point holds?

ad. #5) "Most of [the vehicles] are useless" ...and yet you only have a problem with the 4x4 Vegas outclassing the Bishada and the Jericho. You're forgetting about a lot of cars.

Just to name a few: there's Macchina Calabria Cosenza and Balkan Ravan (both cars are practically made out of paper); there's Han Veo (which is very average at best); there's Charge Cisco (which is good at speed and terrible at everything else, such as durability and grip...) and it doesn't stop there.

Practically every car besides the 4x4 Vegas has some kind of a problem holding it back from being competitive, the most prominent examples being the amount of HP and their ramming ability — and yet you only want improvements to be done to the Bishada and the Jericho?

 

11 hours ago, DiVaice_ said:

3)Also, almost any modern f2p project has only cosmetic things in their ingame stores that doesn't affect the gameplay, I have no idea why you're still going with that old fashion that makes thinking every newbie that the game is hard p2w. Also you trying to fix some weapons from contacts but u didn't try to fix their analog from armas.

APB is literally not pay-to-win anymore. You can get permanent weaponry without spending real money. Nothing you can get for money gives you a straight advantage that is not available to non-paying players. What are you talking about here?

 

11 hours ago, DiVaice_ said:

4)Weapon balance. You're listening to the players who don't play the game on high skill level. Me and some of the russian players daily playing arranged and sometimes we play in the prototype district. Changes you're making to the shotguns don't make sense. You and most of the players who sits on forums don't understand how huge impact JG or CSG can provide with cornercamping or with cargameplay. You just kill every other cqc gun except maybe PMG. While NTEC gets a good change, not this garbage you made before that completely destroy the only one decent f2p Assault Rifle.

See, this is a part of a bigger problem that APB has — a massive identity crisis on whether it wants to be a casual game or a competitive game.

You could balance the game around the people who play the game every day, have every single mechanic figured out and can solo most fights... and that's going to leave you with changes that pretty much benefit only those players and leave everyone else in the dust. Instead of making it a game that's easy to learn but hard to master, you insist on making it a game that's hard to learn and hard to master.

 

As a sidenote: How about you contribute to discussions? How about you provide some of your feedback? If you're so knowledgeable on gameplay mechanics, show it. Voice your opinion in weapon balancing threads. You've literally made this account this year, this is your only post, and in that post you complain about how Little Orbit doesn't listen to you and players at "your skill level" — to which I have a question: have you ever even given them a chance to hear your opinion? Honestly, at this point you're complaining about LO not being able to read your mind.

 

11 hours ago, DiVaice_ said:

5)Terrible EU servers. Server latency jumping like crazy.

They have been actively working on fixing those issues with the new server setup. What exactly is the problem here?

 

11 hours ago, DiVaice_ said:

6)Player support. Why don't you want to support players that makes their own event. For example tournament that  is going to happen. I tried to contact Matt about the tournaments but he doesn't care about it. Innova had supported tournaments or other events from players. You could type the special command in the chat to start the specific mission and instantly get the opposition.
Don't need to write that you're busy with the new engine. While upgrading the engine you made 3 pointless events that died in 2 days each one and RIOT that was an unfunny joke.

Human resources management is a thing. Little Orbit can only allocate certain amounts of people to certain tasks. If you want to organize a tournament that's endorsed by Little Orbit, they would need to have at least one representative present there, in the form of a GM or someone with similar permissions. One GM would probably be not enough, two GMs would probably still mean complaints that it's not enough "care" from them — and the more GMs you have, the less GMs there are to tackle player issues not related to the tournament.

 

Also, can we please please pretty please grow out of that silly attitude that RIOT was pointless and a waste of time? It was being worked on concurrently with the Engine Upgrade (meaning it did not slow down the process, presumably due to a different team being allocated to it) and it allowed LO to get a grasp of the game's codebase, how the game logic operates, how to alter the gameplay flow, how to add entirely new assets to the game, and so on...

Yes, it wasn't perfect. Yes, it died quickly. You're absolutely allowed to have a negative opinion on it from a gameplay stance — but if you genuinely believe that nothing good came from those events/gamemodes and absolutely nobody benefitted from them in any way, you're just being dishonest.

 

Edited January 15, 2020 by MartinPL
mistake regarding reward multipliers in the Bounty system

[Lign 361]

53 minutes ago, MartinPL said:

Also, exactly what is wrong with 3-point holds and 1-point holds?

Time

 

Merged.

 

53 minutes ago, MartinPL said:

but if you genuinely believe that nothing good came from those events/gamemodes and absolutely nobody benefitted from them in any way, you're just being dishonest.

Every event LO made died in 2 days. The only one event that was fun is xmas gungame made by g1 that for the whole time it was up had at least two full instances. The last xmas event in prime time had 10 ppl only. So, what's the point of keep doing when they can fix the main gamemode

[mtz 496]

29 minutes ago, Lign said:

Time

Subjective at best. I see no problem with the current timespan of those final stages, especially considering the overtime mechanic. It's either that or final stages drag on forever.

 

11 minutes ago, Lign said:

Every event LO made died in 2 days. The only one event that was fun is xmas gungame made by g1 that for the whole time it was up had at least two full instances. The last xmas event in prime time had 10 ppl only. So, what's the point of keep doing when they can fix the main gamemode

As I've said:

36 minutes ago, MartinPL said:

[...] it allowed LO to get a grasp of the game's codebase, how the game logic operates, how to alter the gameplay flow, how to add entirely new assets to the game, and so on... [...]

Point is, the events weren't immensely successful in terms of attracting players, but they helped Little Orbit from a developer's standpoint, as they were able to make something out of APB's spaghetti code.

[Lign 361]

2 minutes ago, MartinPL said:

Subjective at best. I see no problem with the current timespan of those final stages, especially considering the overtime mechanic. It's either that or final stages drag on forever.

Oh yeah, I can easily come to the point, bait you to lose your nades on me and easily make it neutral and you gonna lose it pretty quickly, so balanced. It should end up when someone reaches the score cap.

Edited January 15, 2020 by Lign

[CookiePuss 5377]

8 minutes ago, MartinPL said:

Point is, the events weren't immensely successful in terms of attracting players, but they helped Little Orbit from a developer's standpoint, as they were able to make something out of APB's spaghetti code.

While technically true, that was all that could be said after the failure of the mode and the wasting of time and resources.

 

"well... I guess at least we learned stuff"

 

It wasnt originally intended as a learning experience, they actually expected the mode to succeed.

 

 

Edited January 15, 2020 by CookiePuss

[DeadPixels 253]

24 minutes ago, MartinPL said:

RIOT was pointless and a waste of time

Since battle royale games have been so popular the last couple years they decided to make RIOT, but guess what...almost nobody wanted this mod in APB, so yeah it was kind off a waste of time making it. Instead of RIOT they could have made a new FC map or something else, at least players would play this more than 1 week.

 

I'm sure RIOT could still be saved if they would put some more time into it and update it. I have read a lot of complaining comments about RIOT, but did LO try to fix this things, nope they didn't! It's a tradition in APB when something fails just leave it in the game and don't touch it again. Nothing is ever finished, done in order and everything is rushed. Why would you put time and resources to build something and then discard it just like that? LO shouldn't make this kind of things considering in how bad condition the game currently is

[Speedz 147]

7 hours ago, Fortune Runner said:

2.3 bounty system is not useless. if you're that good to always get bounty's then get out and fight harder people. very rarely do i lose from a single bounty on me.

       i normally lose from being a dummy and messing up horribly.

The problem is that the current bounty system punishes you for doing well. Normally you get rewarded for killing multiple people in a row without dying. If there were any upside to being bounty in a mission, it wouldn't be such a punishment.

 

11 hours ago, DiVaice_ said:

5)Terrible EU servers. Server latency jumping like crazy.

afaik after the quickreboot this was fixed, atleast I was able to play for 2 hours yesterday and the ms didn't go above 35.

 

11 hours ago, DiVaice_ said:

6)Player support. Why don't you want to support players that makes their own event. For example tournament that  is going to happen. I tried to contact Matt about the tournaments but he doesn't care about it. Innova had supported tournaments or other events from players. You could type the special command in the chat to start the specific mission and instantly get the opposition.
Don't need to write that you're busy with the new engine. While upgrading the engine you made 3 pointless events that died in 2 days each one and RIOT that was an unfunny joke.
 

I assume they don't do this because it is often paired with favoritism. If you do it for a couple event holders, everyone wants a pocket GM which does things for them. Don't understand me wrong, I'd love more support for custom events from LO, but it often ends up in unnecessary drama. 

[Lign 361]

13 minutes ago, Speedz said:

I assume they don't do this because it is often paired with favoritism. If you do it for a couple event holders, everyone wants a pocket GM which does things for them. Don't understand me wrong, I'd love more support for custom events from LO, but it often ends up in unnecessary drama. 

I understand what you mean, but at the same time it can make more other player to make their own events if they get a support by LO, turning into more community interactions.

[mtz 496]

32 minutes ago, CookiePuss said:

While technically true, that was all that could be said after the failure of the mode and the wasting of time and resources.

 

"well... I guess at least we learned stuff"

 

It wasnt originally intended as a learning experience, they actually expected the mode to succeed.

Good point. Still, I personally can't criticize them for knowing when to cut losses.

[CookiePuss 5377]

Just now, MartinPL said:

 Still, I personally can't criticize them for knowing when to cut losses.

I completely agree. That couldn't have been an easy thing to do, but I feel like they made the right call.

[Lign 361]

Would be nice if they at least fix time on some missions. We can provide every mission name if they need

 

Edited January 15, 2020 by Lign

[Fortune Runner 796]

9 hours ago, Lign said:

Fortune Runner: nOt uSELeSs sYsTEm

yes it is not useless.

you and i had this discussion before how i had said it would be nice if it was adjusted to not interfere with missions as much and go off afterwards.

the bounty system itself fits into APB lore just fine. and you whining over an extra challenge over fighting easy opponents only makes me want to bounty hunt you more so

if you want something easy go play minecraft.

7 hours ago, Speedz said:

The problem is that the current bounty system punishes you for doing well. Normally you get rewarded for killing multiple people in a row without dying. If there were any upside to being bounty in a mission, it wouldn't be such a punishment.

it would be nice if it went off after a mission and not during one . its the only adjustment i believe may be needed. but as for useless as some claimed ,  no it is not useless.

 

7 hours ago, DeadPixels said:

Since battle royale games have been so popular the last couple years they decided to make RIOT, but guess what...almost nobody wanted this mod in APB, so yeah it was kind off a waste of time making it. Instead of RIOT they could have made a new FC map or something else, at least players would play this more than 1 week.

it looked like it was 50/50 on that.

a lot of people in game do not come on the forums and would go play when there were people for it.

either way if they adjusted RIOT it may work better but the way it is is currently  not a good idea.

[vsb 6171]

9 minutes ago, Fortune Runner said:

no it is not useless.

it serves no gameplay purpose, and if it was limited to out of mission players it would only be more useless

[Fortune Runner 796]

57 minutes ago, Solamente said:

it serves no gameplay purpose, and if it was limited to out of mission players it would only be more useless

it always had a purpose of making a way to have extra content that fits APB lore , plus currently adds a feature to give extra backup for those who are getting dominated by multiple bountys whoa re clearly too good against the team they are playing against.

 

a random bounty in a close match  however is a nuisance none the less.

 

but regardless of all of that , there are those who love bounty hunting and stated as such on the thread about bounty's  a year ago or so.

[vsb 6171]

1 minute ago, Fortune Runner said:

it always had a purpose of making a way to have extra content that fits APB lore , plus currently adds a feature to give extra backup for those who are getting dominated by multiple bountys whoa re clearly too good against the team they are playing against.

 

a random bounty in a close match  however is a nuisance none the less.

 

but regardless of all of that , there are those who love bounty hunting and stated as such on the thread about bounty's  a year ago or so.

lore is not gameplay nor would i consider the shallow bounty mechanic "content"

 

the current bounty system is not dependent on current mission performance so the "backup" excuse falls a little short as well

 

just because there are people (im willing to bet a very small minority) who enjoy something doesn't mean it needs to remain

[DiVaice_ 13]

About bounty system, if you guys want punishment for being good on missions, LO can make you only visible for enemy team but still neutral for everyone else who is not on mission

[Fortune Runner 796]

1 hour ago, Solamente said:

lore is not gameplay

can you show where the lore of APB is not important for gameplay? because i am not quite following you on this part

1 hour ago, Solamente said:

just because there are people (im willing to bet a very small minority) who enjoy something doesn't mean it needs to remain

racing districts....

clothing customizations

vehicle customization...

we all have our "thing"

god forbid horses for apb...it wouldnt fit in