An Open Letter from the APB community

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

 

Over the next week or two, I plan to go point by point through an open letter that many of you participated in creating. For the purposes of transparency, I'm going to post the intro of the letter in its entirety here without any modifications, and then I'm going to post each sub section in a separate thread under the newly create "Community Open Letter" sub forum. I'll leave each thread open for comments, and then I'll edit the original post with my responses.

EDIT: I want to schedule an AMA where I can talk directly about some of these topics after we have had a chance to let players weigh in.

It's my understanding that a online form was created and that community members voted on various topics to help craft each section. I respect not only the effort that was involved in creating the letter, but also the way in which it was presented to me. Hopefully this will act as the springboard it was intended to create the dialog around each area that you guys asked about.

Before I jump in, I also want to acknowledge that I am super late getting this posted. My schedule has been a mess for a while now (something I'll have to write a separate post about at some point). But this letter was initially brought to my attention in October, and I intended to get things started in November, but I ran out of time before my vacation. I got back late on Friday, and I committed to getting to this first thing, so I'm posting it now.

Here goes.

Thanks,
Matt

 

------

An Open Letter from the APB community

 

As we're getting close to 5 years since Little Orbit started to manage APB and its future, I on behalf of not only myself but also a total of 36 other community members wanted to sit down and reflect on the state of the game. This post will feature many questions and concerns that were commonly raised by us, the APB Community ahead of the writing of this post.

 

Over the few years APB has received a couple of updates, new features such as a Trading System and a complete overhaul to its ingame report system, reworks of the Armas Marketplace and a complete removal of Joker Boxes with a significant update to the ingame Joker Store to go along with it. We have seen the introduction of three new Legendary guns as well as a regular shotgun sidearm, we’ve seen a couple of balance patches, including a complete pass on vehicles and vehicle related mods as well as adjusting and balancing missions to make the general gameplay flow of APB better as a whole. While many of these updates were happening Little Orbits primary focus was on upgrading the games engine to make creating new content easier by providing them newer tools as well as a better, less tangled foundation to work with, this was seen as something needed by just about everyone in the community. However, as the updates kept happening at a slow pace and the results were rather lacklustre leading to the eventual cancellation of first 3.5 and then 1.2 the community has grown more and more weary about the actual state of the game seeing as the only updates it has received in recent years were very infrequent balance updates. This as well as the general confusion regarding many topics I will write about below were the primary reason that incited me to approach many members of the community and talk to them to see if they felt the same way, many of which have shared the same feelings or worries, eventually leading me to widening my search and gathering as many members of the community I could reach to ask them if they wanted to help in writing this letter and had them fill out a Google Form to gather their opinions and feelings about certain topics.

 

Before I get into the many topics I want to emphasise that I myself and every single one of the participants are doing this out of love and care for the game and its future. This is NOT a collective effort to bash Little Orbit and their efforts to improve the game and provide a future. We care and we want to see the game succeed, we simply have a lot of questions and concerns that have gone unanswered for too long. We love the game and appreciate Little Orbit for their tireless efforts to improve APB so please do not see this as an attack of sorts, we write to you because we care!

 

This Letter is going to be a very lengthy one so once more before I head into the list of topics I want to reach out and offer Matt the ability to respond to this in a possible AMA Livestream. This was something I have also asked about in my Google Form and the responses universally agreed on the fact that this would be a good thing, it's been far too long since we have heard from you in a way that felt personal Matt and we would really appreciate it if you could sit down for an hour or so and respond to these topics for us.

 

Now let's get to the topics and results of the Google Form, these were the common things brought up by myself and the many members of the community I talked about during the initial stages of creating this letter and are what this letter is going to be all about.

 

●     Promises made during or shortly after Little Orbit acquired G1.

●     Neglect towards the Live game as part of working on some sort of major Engine Upgrade.

●     The state of the previously mentioned console update that meant to be released alongside 3.5 for PC which has since been cancelled.

●     Keeping more players informed about what's going on, especially those that don't visit the Forums.

●     What happened to the EU/NA server consolidation and whether or not it is still planned in the future.

●     The lack of new content as well as other things that would make players want to play at least a little everyday.

●     Anti-Cheat issues.

●     The overall toxicity of the community, whether it's ingame or outside the game.

●     The lack of quality of life changes to improve the overall quality of the game as well as make it more new player friendly.

●     Cross District Matchmaking / Phasing and whether or not it is still planned in the future.

●     Game balance, this includes Mission, Weapon, Car, Mod and even Map balance.

●     The scope of the 64Bit update and what LO's plans are for its release, whether it'll be its standalone thing or include things such as new content, qol changes or meaningful updates that make returning players stick around.

●     Transparency and the overall communication frequency between LO and the players.

●     Enforcement of edits that are against the ToS (such as editing .upk files to remove particle effects)

 

And here are the results of the Google form that asked all 36 participants which of these points they feel strongly about.

 

 

[NOTE FROM MATT: I have taken the liberty of creating separate threads on each topic that includes that part of the letter, and I linked each top above for easy reference.]
 

Closing words

 

First of all, thank you from the bottom of my heart for making it this far and reading through this absolutely gigantic letter. In the month or so of working on this letter I had the pleasure of speaking to so many different members of the community, many such conversations lasting hours and exceeding simply asking them if they were interested in making such a letter and subsequently filling out a google form to gather their opinions. As I was chatting to all these players it became clear that many of us still do care and want APB to be the game we all know it can be with a bit of work. I also want to sincerely apologise if anything came off as too harsh, if it did, please know that the intent wasn’t to be mean but rather to show you that we truly care for the games future.

 

So once more, I on the behalf of not only myself but many members of the APB community want to thank you for reading and we hope to hear from you soon.

 

Sincerely,

 

The APB Community

[Deadliest 385]

Thank you I will read later 

[gremlen 18]

To be honest, I do believe that we reached a point where no such small tweaks or QoL changes that will make some players comeback because many players just burnt out.
 

The only thing that I want right now is to removing faction segregation because it is outdated thing from old gaming era. The game barely fills one district at the evening and a population of each faction is flactuating a lot in this district. I either play empty missions with a hope of getting an opposition or jumping between factions. Eventually I come to the point of just quitting the game after constantly jumping between factions or playing empty missions.

Edited December 20, 2022 by gremlen

[your-username-is-not-suitable 82]

All of the content bundled in there was a lot to read. This is a big step in the right direction when it comes to having a link to the community.

[Helix Reloaded 102]

big post

[DouglasFalcon 125]

Quote

I personally have already created a 18 page document with weapon-related and some car-related changes which are all buffs except for one thing which is a nerf to the DMR-AV.

BRO?!?!
Out of ALL the broken weapon running around in this game you wanna nerf a weapon that can't even run custom mods?

[Knite 158]

Personally I've had little issue with most of the points brought up here. LO seems to have gotten a grasp on a real direction for APB's future with the 64 bit work, and has stopped chasing the engine upgrade dragon. The effort spent on implementing and validating work for the current LIVE game is better spent elsewhere; weapon and car balance are largely fine and the outliers that do exist are not game breaking.

Beyond all of that, the misplaced desire to revive the player-base before any meaningful delivery from LO will likely just leave a bad taste in the mouths of those players; "Oh, is the engine upgrade done?" "Oh, is there anything new to do?" Any serious drive to bring back players needs to happen when there's something they can come back to. This game doesn't even run reliably on RTX cards, so many of us can't even play it even if we wanted to.

[koenyboy500 38]

I check the admin-newsfeed every day. Every single day.
And with everything in this open letter, I agree whole heartedly.

 

I absolutely love this game, and I have grown up with this. Some bugs, like the INSTANTLY popping into a car cause you cannot play the animation, has simply become a tool for me.

But despite all that feeling for the 'glitches' and 'bugs' that I now know in and out (and can use to my advantage), I would be happy to see things change.

Whenever I try to explain APB (and I LOVE doing that!), almost every topic is about 'how to abuse the mechanics in your favor' as that, to me, is just what APB has become. Some sort of chess, winning battles before they are fought. Things like "a defender with a shotgun 'cornerpopping' is a guarantee loss" and those sort of scenarios. It's "strategy" (and luck, based upon how the enemy plays).

 

Also, and do please roast me on this in a personal DM xD, are there really that many cheaters? It feels like a lot of enemies are just downright good, I win some, I lose some. I do find enemy players some very tough gamers to crack though.

Edited December 6, 2022 by koenyboy500

[NotZombieBiscuit 3146]

Why'd you hide your names

[Fasalina 163]

All well and good, but as long as there is nothing tangible coming out of LO nothing will change. We still don't even have a release date for anything they are working on. Atleast give us a rough estimate as to what 2023 will bring to APB and deliver on something.

[CIoud 26]

⠀

Edited September 6, 2023 by who

[AlienTM 138]

we know all of this..waiting for the 64-bit upgrade news in couple of hours(hopefuly)

Edited December 6, 2022 by AlienTM

[yourrandomnobody74 106]

On 12/6/2022 at 2:52 PM, NotZombieBiscuit said:

Why'd you hide your names

^ this basically, also why not list the "18 page weapon balance form"? Who were the authors of proposed changes? What model of game do they have in mind when balancing? Have they balanced around the actual weapons or around mods? Do said changes catter a certain crowd more than another? Does better mechanical skill win? Many unanswered questions.

 

Sadly, no mention of adding more complex movement mechanics, which are very desperately needed in a low TTK game like APB.

 

Some good points were made in general though, let's await for Matt's response.

 

Also about the UI suggestions, due to mess we have in-game in form of Scaleform + Kismet, it is very likely not possible to do anything listed (source: old dev posts from old G1 forums when Scaleform first hit the game). I'm hoping Matt will address this, along with the possibility of adding all 3 fight club maps in rotation (a UI limitation/Engine limitation, not mentioned by old devs if it's due to bit size or some other reason)

 

EDIT: A user below mentioned RIOT, which I forgot to mention.

How would this 64bit upgrade handle adding new game modes (such as RIOT, racing district etc.) and content to the game? Can it scale? UE3.5 was promised for this. Staying on an archaic UE2.5 version of the game very likely isn't a very 'future-proof' thing to do.

Edited December 7, 2022 by yourrandomnobody74

[Talla 84]

Will parts of the codebase ever become source-available?

Let us help you!
We all want to achieve the APB endgame vision.

 

Contributing a few pull requests would be better than refreshing the admin tracker on a daily basis, waiting for things to happen.

Edited December 6, 2022 by Talla

[gremlen 18]

19 hours ago, MattScott said:

●     The lack of new content as well as other things that would make players want to play at least a little everyday.

You have an abandoned idea from RIOT that is iteration of a thing in most modern popular games called seasonal content. As far as I remember RIOT had a contact that we needed to level up to get rewards and it would reset every new season and RIOT also had a season pass that unlocks an access to better rewards, basically like battle pass in modern games such as fortnite, warzone etc. I have no idea why this feature hasn't been implemented yet in main game. People would come to level up these contact daily by playing regular missions.

Edited December 6, 2022 by gremlen

[GhosT 1301]

15 hours ago, DouglasFalcon said:

BRO?!?!
Out of ALL the broken weapon running around in this game you wanna nerf a weapon that can't even run custom mods?

 

Really questionable choice in my eyes. Out of all the guns, DMR-AV doesn't really need any changes whatsoever.

 

9 hours ago, NotZombieBiscuit said:

Why'd you hide your names

 

It's not that hard to wrap your head around it, there isn't many people left in this community that still stick to the game.

[ticcitobygaming1 5]

18 hours ago, DouglasFalcon said:

BRO?!?!
Out of ALL the broken weapon running around in this game you wanna nerf a weapon that can't even run custom mods?

he cant cope with skilled snipers like me running it

 

[BlatMan 711]

That's a lot of words to say nothing. Did you have a help desk chat bot write those replies?

[NotZombieBiscuit 3146]

On 12/6/2022 at 9:12 PM, yourrandomnobody74 said:

^ this basically, also why not list the "18 page weapon balance form"? Who were the authors of proposed changes? What model of game do they have in mind when balancing? Have they balanced around the actual weapons or around mods? Do said changes catter a certain crowd more than another? Does better mechanical skill win? Many unanswered questions.

 

Sadly, no mention of adding more complex movement mechanics, which are very desperately needed in a low TTK game like APB.

LO has already shown they are against movement in APB. Nerfing jump shooting, nerfing HVR (which was needed) but doing it through a stupid movement way, bloom modifier adjustments, etc.

 

G1 at least showed they were for movement, especially with increasing run speed and jump height as well as adjusting or adding mods that promote it.

 

Merged.

 

On 12/7/2022 at 12:05 AM, GhosT said:

 

It's not that hard to wrap your head around it, there isn't many people left in this community that still stick to the game.

Putting your name on it in such a  small community gives more credence to it. Hiding your names does the opposite, even if it may be obvious as to some of the members behind it.

Edited December 7, 2022 by NotZombieBiscuit

[gremlen 18]

Just now, NotZombieBiscuit said:

LO has already shown they are against movement in APB. Nerfing jump shooting, nerfing HVR (which was needed) but doing it through a stupid movement way, bloom modifier adjustments, etc.

Jump shooting needed a nerf because people at the corner has a huge advantage over people pushing them. Also the skill ceiling with jump shooting is much lower on weapons such as hvr, ntec, obeya etc.

[AlienTM 138]

This is the big thing from like 12 hours ago(check the 64bit upgrade topic)

Quote

Going into last week, we had hit a number of irritating issues with byte alignment blocking our progress, so our engineers brainstormed through a task to revert a slice of our changes and focus on keeping only the memory management from the 2.x. This meant going back and revising code to try and stay inline a bit closer to 1.20 - except in situations where 64-bit or VS2017 compatibility was required.

We worked on that task last week, and it proved to be very successful. The code is much more reliable than what we were trying to do before. We were able to complete the serialization and UnrealScript building part of the 1.30 upgrade on Monday. Now that we’re finally able to build the game’s UnrealScript packages, we can finally begin the process of attempting to load the Editor and the game’s content.

I'm happy to report we are finally booting the Editor and working through ensuring shaders build properly!
I'll report more progress next time.
 

So they finally made it.Soon hopefully they will start showing us some of the maps loaded in the editor and the good stuff coming after that.I hope theres not gonna be some huge issues and the things will start hapenin in some faster pace(like future testing etc)If everything gos approximately well i supose the entire upgrade will be done in the 1st half of 2023(thats my hopes have no idea just guessin)

[Yapopal 169]

The weapon balance from the fans of the game is scary. In this matter, you can not listen to the fans at all. Especially when it comes to weapon buffs. Time to kill and so below nowhere. You need to understand that the players live in different countries, there is a server delay, there is a network delay. Meta weapon, the best of the fact that the enemy does not have time to react due to ping. To balance a weapon, it is necessary to collect usage statistics and understand what this weapon is intended for. Balance means BALANCE. The weapon should be interesting to use, have its own zest. The DMR sniper rifle has its own character, playstyle, and is an interesting weapon. I doubt the competence of the authors of the letter if they want to remake this weapon.

Edited December 7, 2022 by Yapopal

[GhosT 1301]

6 hours ago, NotZombieBiscuit said:

Putting your name on it in such a  small community gives more credence to it. Hiding your names does the opposite, even if it may be obvious as to some of the members behind it.

 

Because this community isn't absolutely toxic and spews hatred towards one another.

Adding names just does more harm than good. Same reason why everyone spams namechanges and new characters.

 

You'll be fuming knowing I was part of it.

[CookiePuss 5379]

6 hours ago, NotZombieBiscuit said:

Putting your name on it in such a  small community gives more credence to it. Hiding your names does the opposite, even if it may be obvious as to some of the members behind it.

Makes sense to have it anonymous so people have to judge the content of the letter by itself without things like “Oh Player-X wrote this? They’re an idiot not even worth reading.”

[NotZombieBiscuit 3146]

2 minutes ago, GhosT said:

 

Because this community isn't absolutely toxic and spews hatred towards one another.

Adding names just does more harm than good. Same reason why everyone spams namechanges and new characters.

 

You'll be fuming knowing I was part of it.

Why would that make me fume? I already assumed you were apart of it and you're just assuming how that makes me feel. I've always been neutral about you.