Timeframe on return of threated districts?

[DedGaem 148]

1 minute ago, HawtGirl said:

What if just remove the option to choose district thread and the game puts you where you belong instead?

 

Ofc if this happens, there will be a need of dynamic ranking otherwise some districts will turn empty. 

Sometimes there's only a waterfront open.  It could be there's only a silver waterfront and folks need waterfront to rank up.  They should be able to dethreat in gold district and choose where to play.  Also, a bronze/silver might want to join in special competition day on gold server, again the freedom to choose is priceless.

[vsb 6174]

8 minutes ago, Hey! said:

Thats why a system where older players who want a less tryhard game should be able to dethreat and play in the bronze districts, help there friends, etc.... BUT, the moment they are playing "too hard" for the district and turn gold, they should get insta-kicked back to lobby and be stuck playing the gold district (or fight clubs) so as to prevent the kind of long-term trolling dethreaters who only played on Bronze to WTF-Hardstomp and destroy (all day long) the lesser skilled and chill playerbase.

not only would allowing dethreaters to freely exploit the system mean that more matches in gold districts are ruined by afk players, but since the only way for these dethreaters to stay in bronze for any length of time is to lose missions they’ll be artificially boosting genuine bronze/silver players to higher threats - leading to an ever increasing loop of players dethreating, or quitting altogether

[PotatoeGirl 220]

1 minute ago, Hey! said:

Sometimes there's only a waterfront open.  It could be there's only a silver waterfront and folks need waterfront to rank up.  They should be able to dethreat in gold district and choose where to play.  Also, a bronze/silver might want to join in special competition day on gold server, again the freedom to choose is priceless.

Actually what I wanted to say is to have the servers having dynamic skill rating regardless of rank (not actually the players as I said)

So based on population there may be one server for bronze+silver and silver+gold in that particular moment. If you are silver you will get put in the server closer to your current skill.

 

if there are less than 80 there will be only one server obviously and the matchmaking should take care of the situation within the server.

[DedGaem 148]

16 minutes ago, Solamente said:

not only would allowing dethreaters to freely exploit the system mean that more matches in gold districts are ruined by afk players, but since the only way for these dethreaters to stay in bronze for any length of time is to lose missions they’ll be artificially boosting genuine bronze/silver players to higher threats - leading to an ever increasing loop of players dethreating, or quitting altogether

At this stage of the game there are hardly any actual new players.  What we have is a kind of split community between essentially 1. tryhards and 2. chill players.  Makes no difference if an actual gold (skill level wise) wants to play in more chill districts, provided he isn't playing to his full "gold" capacity and rolling the less-skilled.  How is this considered by you "freely exploit the system?"

The system is inadequate.  We're all just brainstorming ways it "could" work.  The whole point of mad dethreaters who "exploit" in order to tryhard versus the less skilled, is a system that insta-kicks on attaining "gold" skill-level in the Bronze District.  And such an open-ended system allows for lesser skilled to opt to play with tryhards and for higher level skilled to opt to play more chill or with lower skilled friends sometimes.

It's not an exploit, it's trying to to prevent abuses and provide a "choice."

"but since the only way for these dethreaters to stay in bronze for any length of time is to lose missions"  Welp, If a Gold has been losing a streak of missions in order to tryhard and rick-roll the playerbase... he will turn gold quickly, and get kicked out of district quickly.  That forces the "gold" to "dethreat" in the Gold District. If he's in the Bronze District playing AFK... he should get kicked from mission in say 4 minutes. If he's simply not playing, no one can really make him.  The whole goal is for him to just play more "chill" and not tryhard for you know 25 kills... if he's skilled but plays slower for the District and tones it down to maybe the mission average (I donno 6 kills...) why would he have to AFK? If he's playing chill, he won't get Gold.  If he's playing Gold he should get insta kicked and not be able to get back in unless he dethreats in Gold District.  If he wants to "not play" well... he'll get bored and leave. Y'all can start Tking him or something.

Edited January 21, 2020 by Hey!

[vsb 6174]

21 minutes ago, Hey! said:

At this stage of the game there are hardly any actual new players.  What we have is a kind of split community between essentially 1. tryhards and 2. chill players.  Makes no difference is an actual gold (skill level wise) wants to play in more chill districts, provided he isn't playing to his full "gold" capacity and rolling the less-skilled.  How is this considered by you "freely exploit the system?"

The system is inadequate.  We're all just brainstorming ways it "could" work.  The whole point of mad dethreaters who "exploit" in order to tryhard versus the less skilled, is a system that insta-kicks on attaining "gold" skill-level in the Bronze District.  And such an open-ended system allows for lesser skilled to opt to play with tryhards and for higher level skilled to opt to play more chill or with lower skilled friends sometimes.

It's not an exploit to prevent abuses and provide a "choice."

it’s not preventing abuses it’s openly allowing them

 

removing the penalties for dethreating alone will actively encourage more people to do so and those people will still go and stomp on bronze/silver players, bleeding the population from both ends of the skill spectrum

 

it’s very easy to manipulate score in order to affect your threat level, especially when the system assigns you a low consistency rating, as it does with dethreaters

 

 

all your suggested system does is have little orbit stop banning the few dethreaters they already do

 

 

21 minutes ago, Hey! said:

Y'all can start Tking him or something.

yes let’s just allow even more ToS violations that’s how we make apb a better game

 

 

Edited January 21, 2020 by Solamente
typo

[Nainakai 3]

After reading this entire thread ( thus far ), the only conclusion I arrive at is that we simply need to remove the colors all together, simply because of the demotivating factor.

 People still abandon matches before they begin simply because they see what color their team mates sit at; People give up completely if they get faced against a full stack of golds,
that has to stop happening. 

 The fact that some pre-made groups never get op, is because of people abandoning "low threat" team mates, thus the grouped players won't be levied against them most of the time.

 

While I am for threat districts to be re-enabled, that in it self would require a more healthy population; Jericho would die out if it were to happen.

Edited January 23, 2020 by Nainakai

[Hexerin 1143]

5 minutes ago, Nainakai said:

After reading this entire thread ( thus far ), the only conclusion I arrive at is that we simply need to remove the colors all together, simply because of the demotivating factor.

 People still abandon matches before they begin simply because they see what color their team mates sit at; People give up completely if they get faced against a full stack of golds,
that has to stop happening. 

Hiding the colors won't have that effect. Instead of just giving up instantly, the player will instead give up after going in 2-3 times. Which is worse, because it has a significantly higher "I wasted my time" impact on the psyche, which will result in faster burnout on the game.

 

It's pretty much a no-win situation. Could've been avoided if the game wasn't mismanaged so hideously badly over the years though.

 

Edited January 23, 2020 by Hexerin

[Nainakai 3]

8 minutes ago, Hexerin said:

Hiding the colors won't have that effect. Instead of just giving up instantly, the player will instead give up after going in 2-3 times. Which is worse, because it has a significantly higher "I wasted my time" impact on the psyche, which will result in faster burnout on the game.

 

It's pretty much a no-win situation. Could've been avoided if the game wasn't mismanaged so hideously badly over the years though.

 

At least there would be more people trying, instead of instantly re-logging or giving up. I've sat in missions that took half an hour simply because the op never showed up, but decided to stay hidden or run away at the end while I completed the objectives. Tell me how that is not even more of a waste of time.. 

 Granted, I'm guilty of that same thing when I've had a profound amount of matches where I'm at a loss of what to do against what I most of the time refer to as godlike players, and I'm a "gold" myself with thousands of hours into this game.. go figure.

 Threat segregation looks good on paper now, but as I edited into my last post > It requires population, which we currently do not have.

Edited January 23, 2020 by Nainakai

[Revoluzzer 274]

On 1/20/2020 at 10:03 AM, Hexerin said:

What we really need:

• Threat levels globally reset across all accounts on a set schedule.

 

Reset threat levels globally on a schedule? That's just admitting you failed at building a proper threat system. All past resets did nothing but allow a bunch of people to play easy missions for a while, until everything was back to square one and they had to de-threat "for fun" again.

If you want a working threat system you introduce rolling boundaries and ignore inactive accounts (e.g. everyone who was offline for 5 consecutive days) for the calculation. Then you can define 15 - 20% of all (active) players to be Gold at any given time. If you are so keen on keeping a visible threat indicator at all.

 

 

On 1/20/2020 at 4:22 PM, Lord Cashpoint said:

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).

It also happened to cause some "I'm definitely Gold material"-players to drop to Silver and some "No way I'm good enough for Gold"-players to prove themselves, but ultimately having both accuse the system to be broken.

 

On 1/20/2020 at 4:22 PM, Lord Cashpoint said:

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. [...] 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 disagree with this insofar as players who team up regularly will naturally end up in the highest threat regions, where they would - again naturally - fight others like them. A necessity for limited districts (i.e. another form of segregation) wouldn't exist, because good lone wolves / duos would end up in a lower skill bracket and only face full pre-mades occasionally.

 

Of course it all boils down to population size and the way matchmaking work. Or, more importantly as far as I'm concerned, player distribution into districts in a way that supports matchmaking.

[M72_LAW 6]

I support the idea of ditching visible threat levels.

 

What frustrates me is the inconsistency of evaluating threat. I am a very low gold player, meaning that whenever I lose a mission I go silver, and if I win I return to gold. I often go gold even if I was just carried by a good team, and did nothing special myself. Meanwhile, facing a coordinated enemy team, with no trusted allies by my side, will most likely make me a silver. Despite putting more effort into the match.

 

Therefore I don't have the will or courage to play in mission districts if I don't feel 100% competitive. This has made me take long breaks from the game after open conflict districts were shut down. Playing or even socializing with golden friends is stressful, as suddenly going silver makes me look rather bad. And at the same time, I don't tend to find much in common with actual silver players. I started playing in late 2015.

 

All of this makes the current threat system feel detrimental, and somewhat hollow to me. Segregating players into these skill levels gives a noticeable boost to toxicity. Either directly in chat, or simply in the form of abandoning missions when there are silvers in one's team. With such a low playerbase, we can't afford to split the community with such a system. Not to mention the way it is being abused constantly, by dethreating and finding all bronze players in one place.

 

I know not that many agree with me, but that is completely fine. I'm just telling how I've felt about the game for a few years now.