APB Roadmap 2023 (03/08)

[Optimus_Crime 81]

The matchmaking and hosting part that's frighteningly your highest priority, sounds disastrous. Everything else sounds amazing on paper if you'll manage some of it.

I'd really have to see what this phasing and player hosting will look at all in a beta because trying to wrap my head around it is giving me a migraine but to me it feels like it'll make the san paro feel less alive and just add unnecessary loading times which break away from the game's nature of seamless and near instant mission matches when a district is full, but it's clearly vital for your idea of connecting all servers.

 

10 hours ago, Rade said:

1. How is the mission queue system going to work if you are playing in a group of  2- 4 players and each players so called skill rating ranges from one end to the other?
2. What happens when people in your team quit during the match and the backup option pops up? The added delay of finding players to fill the gap seems unreasonable?
3. What are you going to do to prevent players from the losing team quitting a match before it ends (so that they dont lose their threat level)?
4. What are you going to do to prevent players from manipulating their threat level?

 

What this man said. Kindly answer these questions, LO.

 

- We will migrate the existing worlds to ‘regions’. Each region will host their own game servers and characters. These are grouped by location and latency to keep things as fast as possible. The idea is to have more, smaller regions vs. less larger worlds."

- We hope to start adding previously supported regions back to the game like Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific, and South America – even if its just a couple district servers to start.

What good will this bring? it's not 2013 anymore, the game's player base is not big enough to be divided like this, it hardly ever was. The servers were merged before for a reason and that reason was waning player count and even if you go this route most players will stick to the most populated region either way even if at the cost of slightly higher ping.

 

- As a result of this system, we will be doing away with platform-specific worlds and districts. PC and console players will be able to interact together in Social districts, and PC matches can be happening right alongside console matches in the same district.

You need to clarify what this will look like for missions. Otherwise what's the point there, assuming they get put in the same district but never fight amongst eachother? I feel like this should be limited to social district for performance.

- This means our servers can be put where they are most needed.

Why does this sound like we're going to have to deal with laggy social districts because of you cutting corners and having say mission districts get the priority now

 

- Premium will also be able to queue in ‘Premium Only’ matches that we hope will free of reroll cheaters.

I can't say I see that many rerolling cheaters these days to merit using this special queue which in itself is a futile effort that would undoubtedly put you against the same handful group of tryhards at best and no one wants that and result in next to no matches at all at worst.

 

Good grief just leave the matchmaking as it is for now and focus on new and old player retention alike. New content and a makeover for the tutorial and the first minutes of the game was it right there.

[TimmyTheNerd 7]

Low priority suggestion, just something to look into:

See about getting APB Reloaded onto Nvidia's Geforce Now gaming streaming service. I've seen other free to play games that were thought to be dead (Cryptic Studios' Neverwinter and Star Trek Online for example) get a large boost in active players after going onto Geforce Now. And it'll allow players to play the game regardless of how good their computer is.

Very low priority suggestion, though. I don't think it's something that will make or break APB.

[Master Erick 5]

13 hours ago, Weaboos said:

Heres to a productive 2023 and revival of APB!

 

Regarding new matchmaking, it is known that currently switching districts deteriorates performance and people with older/weaker PCs feel it first. I wonder how new matchmaking will affect this if players are constantly being loaded from: random district > lobby > mission district. After the mission again: current district > lobby > mission district. I really hope I won't have to restart my game after a mission or two just to keep the game somewhat playable...

 

Also regarding new contacts: in the past Matt mentioned that he planned for the contacts to unlock no longer obtainable R-A-F weapons: CAP-40 and VBR, now he mentioned NSSW, Nano and Scout with no mention of previous weapons. Can someone clarify this?

 

Thanks 

 

Edit: Also I did not see anything regarding future optimisations to make the game run better. Surely the minimal improvements we got from 64-bit upgrade isn't the end of it? Current performance is still abysmal for anyone not running latest state of the art CPUs.

APB's been out for 13 years. If your computer still can't run this game that's on you at this point. My mid-tier computer ran APB at 50-60fps on low in 2010. You can play this game with good graphics on a 5 year old computer.

 

Roadmap looks very good. Of course it's all talk until we see results. Been around since CBT and while these changes will take out the chaos, some of us older vets definitely would have appreciated a lot of these anti griefing features a long time back.

 

I'd like to see clan leaderboards higher up on the list. I really enjoyed old days of APB with warring clans doing 4v4s at the endgame. No way to keep track of who was the best. The prestige was cool, though.

 

I'll come back when I see some more updates. Maybe log on later.

[Noob_Guardian 417]

 

 

High Priority

- Anti-Griefing Options / Streamer Mode

Griefing players in missions has long been a sticking point for people playing APB. I’ve made commitments in the past to address this with GMs and better oversight, but that has proven to be a waste of time on its own. I think our griefing problems are highlighted the most when people stream APB.

Let’s face it. APB is an extremely difficult game to get good at, and Streamers are shining a spotlight on themselves to showcase their skills and the unique aspects of our game. Nothing is worse than getting embarrassed live in front of other viewers through no fault of your own. From my perspective, Players who stream our game offer some of the easiest awareness and marketing for us. They are on the front lines for potential players to watch before they commit to downloading the game and playing.

Currently, Streamers have no options to remedy situations where they get singled out. Players can park out-of-mission cars in the way of objectives, dump trucks can force your team off-course, and it’s relatively easy for trolls to interrupt a serious match.

Teamkilling is another serious problem – for streamers and regular players. While these issues can eventually be handled by customer support, there is generally no immediate resolution to a situation and often it’s easier for a player to log off and not play the game than it is to have it properly dealt with it.

We need to make sure that the moment a player enters a mission, that they are not harassed by outside sources or intentional in-mission abuse.

We’re looking into options such as: - Disabling out of mission collision contextually to prevent objectives being blocked. - Disabling collision on player-commandeered cars nearby that players have not interacted with in-mission interfering with objectives. - Hiding out-of-mission players while in streamer mode. - Flagging players as griefers so they are deprioritized from matchmaking – and potentially placed with other griefers until their behavior changes over time.

There are potential abuses outside of these cases that we know we cannot address fully – no system is infallible – but with queued matchmaking combined with better cheat detection and deprioritization of griefers, we hope to lessen the impact on streamers to help the game grow."
 

 

 

Why not make it so instead of disabling all collision, "objectives" such as doors, garages, and drop offs etc to have a 15m radius around them where it disables out of mission player collision. Could include heavy task items as well. Should fix the issues without preventing normal travel to location collision.

 

If possible, make it so -adding someone to the ignore list- could disable that players collision entirely for a certain amount of time (but ONLY when they are out of mission and not in the same mission), would easily fix the issue as well. Though more temporary, it would be more pro-active than completely disabling collision to those who don't grief and are traveling place to place.

 

Making it so no collision whatso-ever is kinda dumb imo, since player collision, even dodging out of mission players who are going to their missions, is built in and has been for years and is fun/normal to dodge about and do. Though I agree anti-griefing methods are important.

 

 

Edited March 9, 2023 by Noob_Guardian

[donkeygorilla 9]

18 hours ago, Ritual said:

The last time APB: Reloaded released mainline progression contacts was nearly a decade ago with Gumball and Aletta.

[Reprimand 98]

On 3/8/2023 at 8:58 PM, NotZombieBiscuit said:

I'm gonna be pessimistic as fuck. But a quick glance over these give me a strong worry about degrading the chaotic social nature of APB and it gives me some instant flashbacks to how servers were also ruined in WoW. 

APB is only chaotic in mission. I don't understand why you're saying that it has a chaotic social nature and then are disagreeing with PVE.

Quote

 

The disabling of out of mission collisions, phasing of districts, hiding players in other missions, etc. Even the prior change to p5/n5 added to that too.

These are all to prevent griefing. Take GTA 5 for example. How many cars and weapons had to be nerfed due to excessive killing of players across the map. This is also mainly to benefit streamers who are here to promote the game. 

Quote

The devs even mentioning PvE in this really is just the capstone to all the stuff over the years that LO has no idea what APB is the entire time they have had the game.

But disabling P5N5 is a good thing? We still have a ram raid and evidence locker system which largely gets unused. They're aiming to expand the out of mission activity.

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Inappropriate language removed.    - Azukii

Stupid take. Cross play always benefits PC. 

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"Premium will also be able to queue in ‘Premium Only’ matches that we hope will free of reroll cheaters."

This is purely optional and is an incentive to get people to join premium. Many games have VIP only servers. 

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I don't think you realise how much cheaters willingly spend on accounts. This just splits the player base, which is in exact contrast to your attempt to district phase and increase matchmaking population pool.

No it won't. With the new anticheat rolling out the problem won't look anything like it does now. 

Quote

Most premium people will just play in non-premium queues for the largest player base anyway, thus defeating the point of even introducing this.

lol

Quote

Please don't even try to bother with PBR. You'll just ruin the aesthetic of APB further.

You were so pessimistic about the engine upgrade and now 64 bit has come around and we're finally going to get a better looking game. 

 

It just seems like you're complaining for the sake of it. 

[BlatMan 711]

- Hosting Upgrade #1: No complaints here. Having APB on another platform will help bring in more players.

 

- New Car: I want to say the new vehicle and tweaking the existing vehicles will be a good thing, but I doubt it will be done right going by previous balance attempts.

 

- Hosting Upgrade #2: Sounds like cancer. More loading screens. Longer matchmaking time due to loading screen. More random disconnects due to switching districts. Lower performance over time due to switching districts. Less interactions with other players due to constantly switching districts and never having the same players in the same district.

 

- New Contacts: I don't care for new contacts atm. I rather see currently locked content be added to the lower contacts. I'd also like to see contact random rewards be easier to get. For example, there needs to be an in game way for players to see all the content each contact can unlock.

 

- Hosting Upgrade #3: You need to fix the routing issues before implementing this. Also, reduce the lag compensation so players with high ping (+150ms) do not delay the hit detection of lower ping players. This will encourage players to join servers with the lowest ping.

 

- Anti-Griefing Options / Streamer Mode: Why? Part of APB is getting randomly hit by a dump truck. How about having your moderators do their job for the edge cases.

 

- New Events and Holidays: I don't like those events, I won't play them in the future.

 

- Upgraded Tutorial / First Time User Experience (FTUE): Sounds like a good idea.

 

- Server-side anti-cheat alongside EAC: I have my doubts Fairfight will be implemented properly. Your current dev team can't detect a player running faster than a V20.

 

- Vivox Reintegration: Good. We need a voice system.

 

- DirectX12 Rendering System: You'll lose some players due to hardware/software compatibility, and I'll lose frames.

 

- Xbox and Playstation Ports of 1.30: Drop console support.

 

- Premium Revamp: Other games implement the same thing. and it doesn't work. Cheaters don't care about a paywall. All this will do is split the community into two queues, or everyone will join the free queue so there's no wait times.

 

- Player vs Environment (PVE) Missions: Meh. If I wanted to verse the environment I'd play another game.

 

- Physically Based Rendering Pipeline: Do you have an irrational fear of high frame rates? We better get dong physics if this gets implemented.

[N66 97]

2 hours ago, BlatMan said:

- New Car: I want to say the new vehicle and tweaking the existing vehicles will be a good thing, but I doubt it will be done right going by previous balance attempts.

 

- Hosting Upgrade #2: Sounds like cancer. More loading screens. Longer matchmaking time due to loading screen. More random disconnects due to switching districts. Lower performance over time due to switching districts. Less interactions with other players due to constantly switching districts and never having the same players in the same district.

 

- Anti-Griefing Options / Streamer Mode: Why? Part of APB is getting randomly hit by a dump truck. How about having your moderators do their job for the edge cases.

 

- Vivox Reintegration: Good. We need a voice system.

 

- Premium Revamp: Other games implement the same thing. and it doesn't work. Cheaters don't care about a paywall. All this will do is split the community into two queues, or everyone will join the free queue so there's no wait times.

 

- Player vs Environment (PVE) Missions: Meh. If I wanted to verse the environment I'd play another game.

I agree with a lot of this, not sure if most people also, haven't read all the replies tbh

 

- New Car: Vehicles and Heavy burn fuel "balance" is very terrible, I have empty vehicle mod slots and a bunch of HB sitting in inventory, I still use 4x4 Vegas, but now it's somewhat meh, your (LO) idea of balance seems to be nerfing everything to casual players and bullet sponges, which is exactly the opposite of what attracts players to APB's combat, and now to think all vehicles need to be equal sounds even worse, they're not guns, they're tiered.

With that in mind, looking forward to see and design a new car, but not to drive it in missions.

 

On new contact, sounds like it won't bring new content, if it's just old weapons, hopefully new mods, and hopefully, radio tower will finally be brought back.

 

- Hosting Upgrade #2: This can seriously affect the playerbase negatively, if it is done in the manner the roadmap describes, and if it's released segment by segment, it will kill the open map and world/player interaction of APB and replace it with a "match based session" like in DOTA or such games, I see it breaking the game flow and replacing it with a bunch of loading screens, meaning even the social aspects such as customization will be worth far less.

 

- Anti-Griefing Options / Streamer Mode: This goes well with the previous point, it's part of APB identity and what I love about it (on the long term, not in the moment), will vehicles pass through eachother if players are not in the same mission? I think occasional and accidental negative interaction with other players is a good thing, it's part of the unfairness and how you handle it, what I agree with, is abusing this to ruin missions insistently should be punished, but this isn't an ESports game afterall.

 

- Vivox Reintegration: Is there a chance this can be used to stream imported music in game?

- Xbox and Playstation Ports of 1.30: Don't consoles now support mouse and keyboard too? I think the matchmaking should differentiate according to mouse / keyboard, not hardware, also, maybe PC should support controllers too

- Premium Revamp: Sounds reasonable, toxic but justifiable, but I doubt it would work

- Player vs Environment (PVE) Missions: This is not worth the investment and the time, no one wants APB for PVE, there will always be better games at that, and APB actually aces other, AAA games when it comes to PVP, don't change focus, it will flop like Battle Royale, but taking a lot bigger investment.

[Weaboos 89]

10 hours ago, Master Erick said:

APB's been out for 13 years. If your computer still can't run this game that's on you at this point. My mid-tier computer ran APB at 50-60fps on low in 2010. You can play this game with good graphics on a 5 year old computer.

 

 

Yeah well my old pc from 2011 with Amd Phenom II x4 955, Radeon HD6870 and 8 gigs of ram ran APB at steady 100 fps on max settings in 2011-2012 untill they fvcked something up in late 2012-early 2013 and suddenly the same pc ran APB at unsteady 70-35 fps in full districts. Max or low settings - same fps - 0 difference. Dropping graphics to clay gave +5 fps. That's when I quit in 2014-ish after promised engine upgrade never arrived. Later I upgraded that pc to GTX 960, got +0 fps cause this garbage game is cpu bottlenecked.

 

My current laptop from early 2018 ("5 years old") has i7-7700hq, GTX 1050 Ti, 16 gigs of ram and a SSD. One moment it runs at 80 fps and then the next it drops to 50-or even sometimes 42 fps which is unacceptable. After about 1-1.5 h of playing performance degrades over time to the point where it doesn't go above like 57 fps when I'm driving and I have to restart. Switching multiple districts causes permanent stutters untill you restart. This 64-bit upgrade gave me maybe +5fps so instead of 42 it drops to 47, which is better but still garbage.  My cousin has the same cpu but a normal GTX 1050, same story. Sure it's "playable", is it enjoyable? No.

 

Spoke to a guy who has a "5 year old pc" with GTX 1070 and Amd Ryzen 5 1600, which was the CPU to get in 2017-2018 and he said his game drops  regularly to 50-something fps in full district too, so he spends his time in social and treats this game as VR Chat.

 

Another friend has a 4th gen Ryzen 5 and even that drops to 78 fps sometimes. This game feels garbage when it runs in 70s and 40 fps in this game feels like 20 in any other.

 

This old 13 year old game runs like garbage on modern systems unless you go crazy in cpu department. GTA 5 looks and runs 10x better. Stop trash talking if f you don't know what you're talking about.

Edited March 9, 2023 by Weaboos

[StunStick 140]

13 hours ago, Hexerin said:

That's literally not possible for an NA<->NA connection. The lowest you could theoretically go under ideal conditions as an end user is something like 10-20ms.

Do you want a picture? 
I usually range between 1-30ish

Edited March 9, 2023 by StunStick

[iRawwwN 282]

16 hours ago, Noob_Guardian said:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

High Priority

- Anti-Griefing Options / Streamer Mode

Griefing players in missions has long been a sticking point for people playing APB. I’ve made commitments in the past to address this with GMs and better oversight, but that has proven to be a waste of time on its own. I think our griefing problems are highlighted the most when people stream APB.

Let’s face it. APB is an extremely difficult game to get good at, and Streamers are shining a spotlight on themselves to showcase their skills and the unique aspects of our game. Nothing is worse than getting embarrassed live in front of other viewers through no fault of your own. From my perspective, Players who stream our game offer some of the easiest awareness and marketing for us. They are on the front lines for potential players to watch before they commit to downloading the game and playing.

Currently, Streamers have no options to remedy situations where they get singled out. Players can park out-of-mission cars in the way of objectives, dump trucks can force your team off-course, and it’s relatively easy for trolls to interrupt a serious match.

Teamkilling is another serious problem – for streamers and regular players. While these issues can eventually be handled by customer support, there is generally no immediate resolution to a situation and often it’s easier for a player to log off and not play the game than it is to have it properly dealt with it.

We need to make sure that the moment a player enters a mission, that they are not harassed by outside sources or intentional in-mission abuse.

We’re looking into options such as: - Disabling out of mission collision contextually to prevent objectives being blocked. - Disabling collision on player-commandeered cars nearby that players have not interacted with in-mission interfering with objectives. - Hiding out-of-mission players while in streamer mode. - Flagging players as griefers so they are deprioritized from matchmaking – and potentially placed with other griefers until their behavior changes over time.

There are potential abuses outside of these cases that we know we cannot address fully – no system is infallible – but with queued matchmaking combined with better cheat detection and deprioritization of griefers, we hope to lessen the impact on streamers to help the game grow."
 

 

 

Why not make it so instead of disabling all collision, "objectives" such as doors, garages, and drop offs etc to have a 15m radius around them where it disables out of mission player collision. Could include heavy task items as well. Should fix the issues without preventing normal travel to location collision.

 

 

See this is why I love a Noob_Guardian post, the guy just knows his stuff.

 

 

[BlatMan 711]

12 hours ago, StunStick said:

Do you want a picture? 
I usually range between 1-30ish

If you're going by the in game displayed latency, it's wrong. It's always lower than the real server latency.

[Shui 225]

Nothing about optimizing performance

 

Quote

However, we will not be publishing any individual public ban lists – we feel that the previous usage of FFBans glorifies cheaters, and doing so only increased the level of toxicity of the game.

This makes me so sad
2016 with ffbans.org was the best time APB ever had

The comment sections were hilarious

[SkittyM 287]

17 hours ago, N66 said:

- New Car: Vehicles and Heavy burn fuel "balance" is very terrible, I have empty vehicle mod slots and a bunch of HB sitting in inventory, I still use 4x4 Vegas, but now it's somewhat meh, your (LO) idea of balance seems to be nerfing everything to casual players and bullet sponges, which is exactly the opposite of what attracts players to APB's combat, and now to think all vehicles need to be equal sounds even worse, they're not guns, they're tiered.

With that in mind, looking forward to see and design a new car, but not to drive it in missions.

20 hours ago, BlatMan said:

- New Car: I want to say the new vehicle and tweaking the existing vehicles will be a good thing, but I doubt it will be done right going by previous balance attempts.

 

Actually curious, what's wrong with the current vehicle balance the game has?  So far the only changes have been upping cargo space on some vehicles and undoing some of the bullet sponge mobiles.

 

The only problem right now is the Coywolf being the goat mobile.

[Connor 6]

21 hours ago, N66 said:

 

- New Car: Vehicles and Heavy burn fuel "balance" is very terrible, I have empty vehicle mod slots and a bunch of HB sitting in inventory, I still use 4x4 Vegas, but now it's somewhat meh, your (LO) idea of balance seems to be nerfing everything to casual players and bullet sponges, which is exactly the opposite of what attracts players to APB's combat, and now to think all vehicles need to be equal sounds even worse, they're not guns, they're tiered.

With that in mind, looking forward to see and design a new car, but not to drive it in missions.

 

1 - How can you say the 4x4 Vegas is 'somewhat meh'? It is undeniably in the top 3 vehicles in overall strength for missions and I would personally put it ahead of the Pioneer in 2nd.

 

2 - They very clearly didn't say 'all vehicles need to be equal', just that there needs to be a rebalancing to bring some vehicles that have been left behind in terms of overall strength - e.g. Mikro, Vaquero - closer into line with the other more recent releases (e.g. Coywolf).

 

I thought this is a really positive change as vehicle variety is low in this game. 

[Yapopal 168]

Why does everyone have to suffer because of the problem of a handful of streamers? Is someone stopping you from completing your mission? Move the crosshairs over this person, in the window that appears, click on the IGNORE button. All problem solved! Again, do not solve the problems of some at the expense of others! You've already done this when you were trying to resolve server issues in North America. As a result, you have lost half of Europe's population.

The presented matchmaking model will turn APB into fucking GTA online! With such a matchmaking system, you constantly need to wait for someone, someone will come out, someone will come in, then the game crashes, starts to lag. As a result, in an hour you will complete one really good mission.

[Daarin 19]

14 minutes ago, Yapopal said:

Why does everyone have to suffer because of the problem of a handful of streamers? Is someone stopping you from completing your mission? Move the crosshairs over this person, in the window that appears, click on the IGNORE button. All problem solved! Again, do not solve the problems of some at the expense of others! You've already done this when you were trying to resolve server issues in North America. As a result, you have lost half of Europe's population.

The presented matchmaking model will turn APB into fucking GTA online! With such a matchmaking system, you constantly need to wait for someone, someone will come out, someone will come in, then the game crashes, starts to lag. As a result, in an hour you will complete one really good mission.

That is a very good point i haven't thought about at all, with phasing, if someone leaves the mission, its gonna be hellish. Backup will work completely differently, you would either have to stop the mission to wait for people to join in for 20-60 seconds depending on PC, or just have 1 player less for a whole minute + time it takes to find them. Imagine the opposition being able to call backup too afterwards...

 

Just a whole list of issues to consider for a system which this game wasn't designed in mind for.

 

But i actually wouldnt mind seeing them try to implement it, as long as old system can be reverted. Just so they can see the mistake they are making

[Yapopal 168]

New matchmaking will turn the game into a waiting simulator. There is no need to completely redo the matchmaking. It will simply cause new problems that you do not know about and in the end you will again reconfigure everything, redo it. Improve the current matchmaking system by focusing on its shortcomings. Seat players initially in districts with a certain skill level. Limit skills for entering a district with a low level of danger. Reward players with points bonuses for entering a district with a high level of skill. Put on the wanted list of players with the fifth level of threat for a few minutes. To limit their clear advantage on a mission.

I think a wanted level system would be a great help in balancing the forces. I think she was originally needed for this. This system was destroyed by one of its minuses. The player did not repeatedly receive the fifth level of danger after death. That is, the period of time in which this system limited the player was very small. Skills of units can be balanced by assigning the fifth level of danger for several minutes. This is a very important part of the game that has been pushed far to the shelf. I WILL WRITE IN CAPITAL LETTERS THAT A PLAYER CANNOT GET THE FIFTH LEVEL OF DANGER COMPETING WITH HIS EQUAL OPPONENT.

Edited March 10, 2023 by Yapopal

[Bluequadre 2]

The real topic that should be one of the topics first prioritized is inter server movement or character convershion, this is because of the appauling market in NA. SOmething they could do is make social universal and thus the market aswell allowing acess across all servers to the market for the greatest veriety.

[CookiePuss 5378]

3 hours ago, Daarin said:

 or just have 1 player less for a whole minute + time it takes to find them. Imagine the opposition being able to call backup too afterwards...

That doesn’t sound very different from backup now. At least this way you may have hundreds of players to choose from instead of 50.

[Annette_Sasha 8]

"Disabling out of mission collision contextually to prevent objectives being blocked" - it is not necessary. It will look ugly if one car goes through another. You already broke an interesting game mechanic in the form of a 5 star threat level, at which the player could be killed by players of the enemy faction who were not on a mission with him. There is no need to go along with people with mental disorders who constantly say that something is bad.
DirectX 12 and PBR, new contacts, new content and fix cheater issue - It will be great. Balance has always been a problem with this game. In the case of randoms in my team, most often the players are even worse than me, and in the opposing team there are either cheaters or pro gamers.
In general, your plans, as always, are huge. But the result can be much less. Well, we can only hope that the game does not become a corpse.

[Yapopal 168]

At the expense of disabling collision. You have disabled bullet collision for non-mission players' vehicles. I noticed that beginners often lose because of this. If you add an ignore button, then this miserable crutch can be removed.

[The_Boss 22]

I agree with the general sentiment that the new matchmaking system does seem overly complicated, though I'm assuming it's easier than enabling cross-faction matches?  It used to exist for crim v crim, and it's been requested a few times.  I believe it would be better received than phasing and decrease toxicity ingame.
It would be a shame if cross-factioning never returns, imo.

 

Edited March 10, 2023 by The_Boss

[magik 184]

On 3/9/2023 at 5:27 AM, Weaboos said:

Yeah well my old pc from 2011 with Amd Phenom II x4 955, Radeon HD6870 and 8 gigs of ram ran APB at steady 100 fps on max settings in 2011-2012 untill they fvcked something up in late 2012-early 2013 and suddenly the same pc ran APB at unsteady 70-35 fps in full districts. Max or low settings - same fps - 0 difference. Dropping graphics to clay gave +5 fps. That's when I quit in 2014-ish after promised engine upgrade never arrived. Later I upgraded that pc to GTX 960, got +0 fps cause this garbage game is cpu bottlenecked.

 

 

My first desktop was an A8-6600k with 8gb RAM and a GTX650 1gb, ran the game at a solid 45-60fps on high. Upgraded GPU to an RX560 4gb then the whole system to a Ryzen 5 3600, 16gb RAM and a RX 5700xt. Never did I have severe stutter issues between 2012 and now. Even now the game runs great on a Steam Deck granted you adjust the settings and wait for the shaders to load.

[Revoluzzer 274]

On 3/8/2023 at 7:01 PM, SkittyM said:

I'm guessing the new matchmaking thing means the current matchmaking will just be gutted?  My main issue has always been with Phasing being kinda marketed as a fix to matchmaking but throwing more people at the problem wont fix it, just look at the American highway system.

Besides throwing more people into the pool (which is a good thing when it comes to matchmaking), it will also increase the difficulty of gaming the system. Dethreating and hiding in Bronze districts for easy matches won't work anymore. Of course the next logical step would and should be to remove visible threat altogether.

 

On 3/9/2023 at 12:58 AM, Optimus_Crime said:

- We will migrate the existing worlds to ‘regions’. Each region will host their own game servers and characters. These are grouped by location and latency to keep things as fast as possible. The idea is to have more, smaller regions vs. less larger worlds."

- We hope to start adding previously supported regions back to the game like Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific, and South America – even if its just a couple district servers to start.

What good will this bring? it's not 2013 anymore, the game's player base is not big enough to be divided like this, it hardly ever was. The servers were merged before for a reason and that reason was waning player count and even if you go this route most players will stick to the most populated region either way even if at the cost of slightly higher ping.

From the sound of it, they will consolidate all players into a single pool. The regions will be represented by physical servers, but those can be spread finer (e.g NA-East, NA-West districts, both in the NA region). Everyone can play in all regions (on all servers), no matter which region the character originates from.

 

So I could take my EU-region character and play on a NA-East server. A player from the NA-region could have the same name as I, so I'd have the appendix @EU while I play in the NA-region.

 

On 3/9/2023 at 12:58 AM, Optimus_Crime said:

- As a result of this system, we will be doing away with platform-specific worlds and districts. PC and console players will be able to interact together in Social districts, and PC matches can be happening right alongside console matches in the same district.

You need to clarify what this will look like for missions. Otherwise what's the point there, assuming they get put in the same district but never fight amongst eachother? I feel like this should be limited to social district for performance.

With cross-district-matchmaking, it wouldn't really matter which district you get put into. Your next mission might not even take place in the current one. So why not have everyone play on the same servers? Even if one group might be significantly smaller, they'd feel like they play a well populated game.

 

On 3/9/2023 at 12:58 AM, Optimus_Crime said:

- This means our servers can be put where they are most needed.

Why does this sound like we're going to have to deal with laggy social districts because of you cutting corners and having say mission districts get the priority now

Which performance-critical activities happen in social district? Aren't they already much less performant because the number of heavily customised avatars is much higher?