APB Anniversary Letter

[Nagletz 215]

Weapon changes?

Dont forget my bois SBSR's and Norsemen pls  

Also revert N-FAS and Thumper

Please guys, don't nerf any gun more, we already have boring meta list and this boring gameplay makes me sick...

Edited June 30, 2021 by Nagletz

[AlienTM 138]

13 hours ago, Sakebee said:

We are focusing 100% of our efforts on the engine upgrade this year

Then why Matt said hes the only one left working on it?(probably last couple of months)Plus we heard that "focusing 100% our effort" last 3 years-each year.Talk is talk-the results are what we got.I mean ill be login in this game till the end but things are gettin too obvious..

Edited June 30, 2021 by AlienTM

[yourrandomnobody74 106]

14 hours ago, Sakebee said:

Hey everyone,

Happy APB Anniversary! We are focusing 100% of our efforts on the engine upgrade this year, so things will be a little quieter than they have been in the past. If you haven't seen already, we have a new specialist coming in to help Matt power through the engine upgrade. We also just renewed our free premium grant to all players. We know you are all itching for new content, so if we haven't said it lately, we want to take the opportunity today to say that we really appreciate your continued patience and support as we work to get the game back on track. Progress has gone slower than we all hoped in the past, but we remain enthusiastic about next steps as we get the engine upgrade where it needs to be.

 

While the bulk of our efforts remain on the engine upgrade, we have been listening to the community in the meantime. There are a few balance changes for APB that we are working on releasing in the next few weeks to thank those who continue to log in and enjoy our game. Specifically, we are looking at Med Spray, Grenade spam, and some minor weapon balancing. These changes take time to test, and we don't want to take anything away from critical engine upgrade work, but this is something we hope to deliver in the next few weeks.

 

Here's to the future of APB,

The Little Orbit Team

Nade spam? Med spray? There is absolutely nothing wrong with this? Stop listening to the silvers on these forums and listen to veteran players maybe? How about you make consumables a permanent unlock from Joker Store instead of scamming us by dumping our money? Marketplace tax and dumping money into consumables is just something I don't understand why it exists.

Oh, and if you desperately wanna touch consumables, you can buff epinephrine and med spray to a middle value between old stats and current stats. :)

Also, please don't touch any gun. The only changes I'd like to see is boosted first bullet accuracy, so you don't RNG a shot even though it seems like the crosshair is 100% accurate.... It's frustrating not knowing if RNG, hitreg or ghostshots owned you...oh and longer TTK along with overall less RNG, but people don't know how to hold a mouse for that. 

The aforementioned tweak is for guns like the OBIR, HVR and Scout (they should all be 100% accurate without HS on them for the first shot, Hunting Sight should just allow for more zoom instead of "less RNG")

Oh, and remove the downsides of all blue char mods, they're useless and have been useless ever since Car Surfer got released.

These are all small QOL changes that make the experience a bit better, out of many more which I cannot at this moment remember. 

What I'd love to see though is a pinging system, look at Apex Legends as an example of a proper pinging system. It's frustrating to go into the map, press M2 and not even be accurate on your ping. Might as well just have it on a certain bind and be able to pin the location of something.

Edited June 30, 2021 by qb

[MACKxBOLAN 427]

"STOP THE NERF"  

WTF is wrong with U People, I want the person/s responsible Locked Up' 

You have no business fooling with weapons, fkn ruined a whole category of guns (subs).

Oh I support You, but this make Mack Mad, and it Disgusts Me. 

 

[vsb 6171]

3 hours ago, qb said:

Med spray? There is absolutely nothing wrong with this? Stop listening to the silvers on these forums

smh full hp in less than 2s is fine and balanced, smh these silvers dont know anything smh

[Iazer 204]

17 hours ago, Dezire said:

like you

have my babies?

 

[Annabellica 1]

4 hours ago, qb said:

Nade spam? Med spray? There is absolutely nothing wrong with this? Stop listening to the silvers on these forums and listen to veteran players maybe? How about you make consumables a permanent unlock from Joker Store instead of scamming us by dumping our money? Marketplace tax and dumping money into consumables is just something I don't understand why it exists.

Considering "silvers" make up most of the already declining playerbase it'd be absolutely stupid for LO to listen to "veteran" players - y'all can't even fill an entire district.

[koenyboy500 38]

Ooh. I love balance changes! I also love new metas!

From last year onwards I have been snooping around the APB:DB site and looking at every.single.integer.   I love to read how the mods themselves change values on programmed in sections (i.e. value-range 9 would be your crosshairs/reticle model).

 

Sakee stated that players are agitated with how long it takes for new content. Sadly I have to say that I have been one of them for a long time (EMP-grenades? New Contact? Possibly more slots to equipment and clothing?  ).

 

If I took a quick out-of-my-head survey about what weapons I find a bit tad overpowered at the moment. I'd say that the JokerGunworks (when used propperly. ESPECIALLY if someone wants to play Strife really, really badly most of the time and then go to a JG) has virtually no negative downsides aside for range. I also think that the Colby 45.AP is unfair as a secondary. I'd suggest a solid 5.99 bulletstokill requirement. It changes nothing for people who grabbed their pistol and only use that, but currently the weapon hits way too hard imo.

 

slight damage nerf for OBIR? (1 burst is 49.99% dmg 0.o)

I feel like the Obeya (WARNING, VERY EXPERIMENTAL!) could go with a better accuracy/stabilised, slower firerate and 4 shots to kill with medium overkill route.

 

Aside of that I could only ask for a buff for the Strife, cause that dream of a gun is just way and way too difficult (and impressively low-damage in most situations! Scraping a target means an NFAS that hit the same # of pallets but fired twice deals even more!.... propably.)

 

Always warms my heart to see the Forum flicker to live again ^,^

 

Merged.

 

Oh right. And one MASSIVE problem for us golds is that it is sometimes > IMPOSSIBLE < to play the game. We get 2 servers of (yea I know, but that is how it works)... Silver threat.

Outright unplayable to play the game with a friend of mine (who is silver whereas I am gold). I feel like there are more players waiting but don't want to join a 4/4 district. Maybe introduce some sort of 'do-you-want-to-change-district-for-#%-more-bonus? kind of thing so that BOTH servers get to be 20/20. Effectively doubling the capacity of >the game< for Golds.

[yourrandomnobody74 106]

1 hour ago, Annabellica said:

Considering "silvers" make up most of the already declining playerbase it'd be absolutely stupid for LO to listen to "veteran" players - y'all can't even fill an entire district.

That is an absolutely shambolic way of dealing with balance.

"hurr durr let's make this game easier for us cause there's 'more' of us, let the game adopt to us instead of us evolving and learning how to play a game"

There's a reason the majority of good people left this game, not gonna reiterate the already known reasonings.

 

2 hours ago, xiphos said:

smh full hp in less than 2s is fine and balanced, smh these silvers dont know anything smh

I've yet to see someone spam med spray as much as people on the forums make it seem to be. Why does the meta have to stick to CA3, epinephrine and blowtorch?

Let people have variety, I really don't understand what's so broken about it. The fact you outheal HVR tags and 85's (duration of healing is 2s) every +45s? 45s is a lot to kill a person.

I'd like to also throw a common statement people like to throw at me for calling out car gameplay in this reply, a fan favourite. 

"just outplay it smh..."

Edited June 30, 2021 by qb

[JunoSuzuki 99]

How about we don't listen to people with certain threat colors or people with certain amount of playtime but people with comon sense when we talk about balance? 

[LilyRain 671]

19 minutes ago, qb said:

...Why does the meta have to stick to CA3, epinephrine and blowtorch?

 

6 hours ago, qb said:

you can buff epinephrine and med spray to a middle value between old stats and current stats. :)

You clearly do not have a good-grasp of what Epinephrine was, what it is now and where it should be for a proper balance.

[vsb 6171]

48 minutes ago, qb said:

I've yet to see someone spam med spray as much as people on the forums make it seem to be. Why does the meta have to stick to CA3, epinephrine and blowtorch?

Let people have variety, I really don't understand what's so broken about it. The fact you outheal HVR tags and 85's (duration of healing is 2s) every +45s? 45s is a lot to kill a person.

I'd like to also throw a common statement people like to throw at me for calling out car gameplay in this reply, a fan favourite. 

"just outplay it smh..."

we dont have to stick to ca3, but that doesnt mean current med spray is balanced either

 

and a 45s cd means that med spray can safely be used on every single push, which it is

[Annabellica 1]

1 hour ago, qb said:

"hurr durr let's make this game easier for us cause there's 'more' of us, let the game adopt to us instead of us evolving and learning how to play a game"

Just say you wanna play alone lmfao you guys are doing your absolute best to kill off APB for ages, it seemed to work.

[Nagletz 215]

Make everything usable and versatile ffs. So called "pro" players use only meta and it looks boring.

[explosiveUA 48]

blah blah blah
In the meantime, there are ~ 300 people online

[JunoSuzuki 99]

14 minutes ago, explosiveUA said:

blah blah blah
In the meantime, there are ~ 300 people online

So what.

[Frosi 722]

35 minutes ago, Nagletz said:

Make everything usable and versatile ffs. So called "pro" players use only meta and it looks boring.

A lot times a weapon is simply underpowered and needs a buff, but there's plenty of weapons that are close to being meta but still lose out to the current meta consistently. While I agree that buffing should absolutely be the focus, there's certainly weapons that are holding all the other weapons in the game back by simply being too strong. A great example would be the OCA right now, its not exactly fun to play against but it is the best SMG in the game and makes most of the other SMG's look bad in comparison. 

 

So often it is best to start by identifying issues with the weapons that are sitting all the way at the top because if you simply keep buffing eventually you'll get to a point where almost every gun will feel problematic which then makes for an unenjoyable experience overall. Once there's is nothing super broken in the game you can start looking to bring everything at the bottom up gradually, I've been very vocal about this every time I stream and I already have plenty of possible buffs ideas and suggestions written down once LO comes around to look at some of the guns that are simply lacking but with a player population that is dwindling slowly every month as we all patiently wait for the release of 2.2 they are in a spot where they will likely want to address the guns that are overperforming to make the current game less frustrating to play while also allowing for some of the 'borderline meta' weapons to be played to create at least a bit of diversity.

 

I am crossing my fingers that this set balance will go better than the other ones which might encourage LO to have someone spend some more time to slowly fix things bit by bit. There is so many guns that could be made at least usable with just a small buff here and there, some of which have already been in the game, such as the LCR rate of fire buff during the IR Nerf period which happened to work pretty well and actually make the gun playable. We've seen that these major balance patches often do more harm than good so I am really hoping for a smaller but more frequent approach to changing weapons.

[Bamakam 0]

would you make a promo for this game after the release of new engine to bring more ppl in community? anyway i wish you, LO, good luck

[yourrandomnobody74 106]

3 hours ago, LilyRain said:

 

You clearly do not have a good-grasp of what Epinephrine was, what it is now and where it should be for a proper balance.

Considering how you're vulnerable, can't jump, your strafe speed is only fast if you go in one direction(ADAD speed is the same) and I've played through a ton of iterations of this game, I understand how it was and how it is now. 

I do agree it was spammable during the 45s CD days and it shifted the meta to a single consumable (making other ones obsolete, other than med spray) but this is the case even now. Epi and Med spray are still the top choices for consumables, people still use it and spam it, albeit epi at a slower pace (slightly) Did the change fix anything?

Consumables in general are a really hard topic to tackle tbh, maybe allowing us to use all consumables (without the stupid cap and the buying system) at any given time (with the same CD's, so you don't spam epi + med spray all day and get free speed boosts) would make things more interesting? Or just removing them altogether since no one asked for them? Or maybe turn them into some kind of brown mod? To me, I've never considered consumables outright broken or unbalanced in any patch this game had, except the mobile shield (which they've addressed in a decent way tbh)

To me, movement, gunplay, matchmaking and map balancing are more important and they've always been the thing APB has been lacking all these years. (without counting the performance issues everyone has even to this day, which will hopefully be fixed with the EU or alleviated with clever techniques today's day and age developers use to allow low fps games to feel very fluid in the new EU, making the game playable)

I'd rather see a whole rework of the movement system in this game and make them more fluid (walljumping, airstrafing, sliding maybe like in apex? all kinds of crazy possibilities), rewarding people who wanna grind and master the mechanics.

This is what I'd like to the gunplay as well, I'd enjoy longer TTK with accurate guns (with proper range drop off, controllable recoil/bloom etc.) so it rewards the person who grinds his aim, why leave things to chance? It would also allow for much more flexible balancing of such a huge variety of guns that we have (also a problem this game has, they've added way too many guns) And so on and so forth.

But this answer is out of the scope of this thread and it probably won't happen.

hopefully i got my point across, consumables are fine and so are nades (except emp nades lmao imagine inventing a nade type to counter a stupid mechanic people abuse). fixcoremechanicspls..ihatewritingwallsoftext

[Hexerin 1140]

On 6/29/2021 at 2:36 PM, Sakebee said:

Grenade spam

There's a real simple solution to that (in terms of how to change it gameplay wise, would obviously require some dev work to implement). Change grenades so that the player only has one grenade, but it is on a cooldown rather than having an ammo stock. When you change your grenade in your loadout, you are changing which grenade you throw rather than actually equipping a grenade. This completely eliminates grenade spam (player can only throw one grenade, and it can't be resupplied because it's not ammo-based), and also would have the side benefit of making it significantly easier to make grenade balance changes since they'd all have the same baseline.

[LilyRain 671]

32 minutes ago, qb said:

Considering how you're vulnerable, can't jump, your strafe speed is only fast if you go in one direction(ADAD speed is the same) and I've played through a ton of iterations of this game, I understand how it was and how it is now. 

I do agree it was spammable during the 45s CD days and it shifted the meta to a single consumable (making other ones obsolete, other than med spray) but this is the case even now. Epi and Med spray are still the top choices for consumables, people still use it and spam it, albeit epi at a slower pace (slightly) Did the change fix anything?

Consumables in general are a really hard topic to tackle tbh, maybe allowing us to use all consumables (without the stupid cap and the buying system) at any given time (with the same CD's, so you don't spam epi + med spray all day and get free speed boosts) would make things more interesting? Or just removing them altogether since no one asked for them? Or maybe turn them into some kind of brown mod? To me, I've never considered consumables outright broken or unbalanced in any patch this game had, except the mobile shield (which they've addressed in a decent way tbh)

To me, movement, gunplay, matchmaking and map balancing are more important and they've always been the thing APB has been lacking all these years. (without counting the performance issues everyone has even to this day, which will hopefully be fixed with the EU or alleviated with clever techniques today's day and age developers use to allow low fps games to feel very fluid in the new EU, making the game playable)

I'd rather see a whole rework of the movement system in this game and make them more fluid (walljumping, airstrafing, sliding maybe like in apex? all kinds of crazy possibilities), rewarding people who wanna grind and master the mechanics.

This is what I'd like to the gunplay as well, I'd enjoy longer TTK with accurate guns (with proper range drop off, controllable recoil/bloom etc.) so it rewards the person who grinds his aim, why leave things to chance? It would also allow for much more flexible balancing of such a huge variety of guns that we have (also a problem this game has, they've added way too many guns) And so on and so forth.

But this answer is out of the scope of this thread and it probably won't happen.

hopefully i got my point across, consumables are fine and so are nades (except emp nades lmao imagine inventing a nade type to counter a stupid mechanic people abuse). fixcoremechanicspls..ihatewritingwallsoftext

Epinephrine isn't best used to engage in such a manner face-2-face or to traverse high-grounds. That is simply suicidal. Plus, straffing doesn't matter when you can literally sprint at 150% of your original speed.

 

Epinephrine is best used to flank an enemy that is engaging a teammate, finish off a player you got the jump on & attempted to retreat, or to retreat yourself. When used like this or in any other strategically-viable manner, the vulnerability it gives wouldn't matter. The problem is that the spatial-design of APB maps doesn't really best accommodate 150% sprint speed and is a major factor as to why consumables changed if not destroyed APB. Consumables would've been fine if they were just an added small-layer on top with marginal stat-multipliers but they ended up being too potent. They got worse when their potency increased after LO attempted to adjust them. Rather than reducing Epinephrine's x1.5 speed-boost that should've never happened, they kept it but increased the cooldown instead. It doesn't matter if it is usable once every hour, 150% sprint speed is simply not presentable. It fails even on the comical-level to fit APB's gameplay and map design. It got even worse when they reduced the health damage penalty from 50% to 25% as an excuse to make the longer cooldown look okay. Currently, 25% health is a VERY generous amount to pay in order to gain 150% sprint speed. The previous Epinephrine was objectively better as using it was a duality, it would go either way as the User would get the kill or a 50/50 chance at escaping but people disliked having 50% HP chipped away.. They wanted a panic button that guarantees things go in their favor for as little as 400 $APB per press and this is the result. Now one can't go wrong when using Epinephrine at all.. it always works and when it doesn't, the User simply used it in a certain-death situation. The same thing can be said for Med Spray but that thing is even worse because it kept its cooldown of 45s and is borderline an alpha-presentation without Clotting Agent equipped. As I personally vouch for weapons to be buffed, consumables should be nerfed irrespective of their cooldowns (the exception would be Boombox but there is nothing to nerf there, perhaps rig it to actually Boom, that would make it more useful).

 

Now as fun as APEX Legends can be, it has larger maps that support what it is doing. APB's maps simply do not allow for faster movement or higher-ttk. Clotting Agent 3 is the dominant norm because one can simply tank all bullets as they go from one place to an adjacent cover, passively-utilize CA3 to heal it off as it never even happened then go out again. It works wonders at supporting the abuse that is 3rd-person shooters and the decline in the player base shows. APB's relatively high-ttk for what it can accommodate as a shooter allows this and any higher would make the game even less functional in certain mission areas. APB isn't built to copy Apex or a similar shooter and work off that. Let us keep Apex unique to Apex as that would be best for both games.

[L0pht 28]

On 6/29/2021 at 5:36 PM, Sakebee said:

. Specifically, we are looking at Med Spray, Grenade spam, and some minor weapon balancing. These changes take time to test, and we don't want to take anything away from critical engine upgrade work, but this is something we hope to deliver in the next few weeks.

 

Just END threat segregation already , the game is dying. Golds can’t even play on Jericho anymore. thx

Edited July 1, 2021 by L0pht

[Pekausis_ 58]

7 hours ago, Hexerin said:

There's a real simple solution to that (in terms of how to change it gameplay wise, would obviously require some dev work to implement). Change grenades so that the player only has one grenade, but it is on a cooldown rather than having an ammo stock. When you change your grenade in your loadout, you are changing which grenade you throw rather than actually equipping a grenade. This completely eliminates grenade spam (player can only throw one grenade, and it can't be resupplied because it's not ammo-based), and also would have the side benefit of making it significantly easier to make grenade balance changes since they'd all have the same baseline.

What about bricks? I play only with bricks and running around with only one brick would not do me any good. Just for the sake of conversation.

[explosiveUA 48]

10 hours ago, JunoSuzuki said:

So what.

A little more and she will finally die

[Annabellica 1]

9 hours ago, L0pht said:

Just END threat segregation already , the game is dying. Golds can’t even play on Jericho anymore. thx

Seemed to be the only option that made the console version playable. They should totally look into that