So when do we revive APB?

[VanilleKeks 755]

Dumb title aside; from existing plans I have seen I would really like to know when you'll actually make an attempt to gather new players.

I don't see any large "wow moments" happening without newer engine capabilities 

 

Many issues would be solved by a larger playerbase (fairer matches, less disproportionate amount of cheaters among others).
With the full engine upgrade being the original key to start marketing and that now being scrapped, what's the plan?

 

If I missed some info about this please show me (and no I won't join your discord, publish your news properly)

Edited April 1 by VanilleKeks

[Yapopal 196]

I once owned a Toyota Lite ace minibus with rear-wheel drive. He skidded on any surface. For example, he could slip on wet grass for no reason. This game reminds me of him. The developers are working hard, delving into the task. But it always turns out to be a minibus that is stalling.

[sweetLemonade 125]

5 hours ago, VanilleKeks said:

Dumb title aside; from existing plans I have seen I would really like to know when you'll actually make an attempt to gather new players.

I don't see any large "wow moments" happening without newer engine capabilities 

 

Many issues would be solved by a larger playerbase (fairer matches, less disproportionate amount of cheaters among others).
With the full engine upgrade being the original key to start marketing and that now being scrapped, what's the plan?

 

If I missed some info about this please show me (and no I won't join your discord, publish your news properly)

According to Matt's comments from the last AMA, advertising is planned after next content patch which is due in May–June this year.
The content patch will include 2 new contacts, a (very likely) new PvE district, Epic Game Store launch, Cross-World Matchmaking and the new "GamersFirst Technology Platform" (A in-house client & server anti-cheat) along with a supposed Monthly Leaderboard (from the description of it, it'll be akin to Battle Passes in other games)

Considering the state they plan to advertise the game in, the constant mention of a potential UE5 release (but explicitly mentioning that they won't repeat a "engine upgrade" scenario) in the AMA.... I don't have any hopes of this game gaining attraction again from new users, especially with the current gameplay mechanics.
They've seemingly transitioned all their news updates to Discord, which is quite bizarre considering they host these forums and that's what forums are for...

Edited April 1 by sweetLemonade

[VanilleKeks 755]

14 hours ago, sweetLemonade said:

According to Matt's comments from the last AMA, advertising is planned after next content patch which is due in May–June this year.
The content patch will include 2 new contacts, a (very likely) new PvE district, Epic Game Store launch, Cross-World Matchmaking and the new "GamersFirst Technology Platform" (A in-house client & server anti-cheat) along with a supposed Monthly Leaderboard (from the description of it, it'll be akin to Battle Passes in other games)

Considering the state they plan to advertise the game in, the constant mention of a potential UE5 release (but explicitly mentioning that they won't repeat a "engine upgrade" scenario) in the AMA.... I don't have any hopes of this game gaining attraction again from new users, especially with the current gameplay mechanics.
They've seemingly transitioned all their news updates to Discord, which is quite bizarre considering they host these forums and that's what forums are for...

Thanks for sharing. It's something at least. Lets see where it goes

[Gro 108]

You're gonna need necromancers for this, pal.

[Mitne 732]

Taking how G1 killed population in past with nonaction and false promises and then LO stepped in and both took too small fishing rod for too big of fish and also decided to limit their actions to the point they pretty much G1 v.2 in nonaction. I remember when I joined this game we had EU with populations of 20k on each two servers, two instances of NA for both East and West, equally filled to brim, Asian server called Han and Innova which was seperate one but russians at least had their place too. And over years population dropped, servers had to be merged one by one by one so we arrive here... with roughly 500 players at best hours. It's safe to say all the potential was there and was absolutely wasted. And popularity was absolutely ruined. You go to YouTube - type "APB: Reloaded" and the top results are about "Why it's 100 million $ disaster".

 

So safe to say, that ship already sailed. We just facing inevitable.  LO would need to do major... And I mean really major changes which would astound players. (Facepunch did that miracle with Rust but I doubt LO is capable to replicate what Facepunch did)

Either that or release new APB in background (of course hyping it up first). Problem is franchise was sold to company called "Unit Game" which appears to just sit on title and present it like some trophy.

 

So this game lost it future and really I blame developers (also game population didn't do any favours with cheating in rampant amounts for "people who love this game" and there's also people who treat newbies like "unnecessary evil" and decide to go full ham on them...)

[VanilleKeks 755]

20 hours ago, Mitne said:

Taking how G1 killed population in past with nonaction and false promises and then LO stepped in and both took too small fishing rod for too big of fish and also decided to limit their actions to the point they pretty much G1 v.2 in nonaction. I remember when I joined this game we had EU with populations of 20k on each two servers, two instances of NA for both East and West, equally filled to brim, Asian server called Han and Innova which was seperate one but russians at least had their place too. And over years population dropped, servers had to be merged one by one by one so we arrive here... with roughly 500 players at best hours. It's safe to say all the potential was there and was absolutely wasted. And popularity was absolutely ruined. You go to YouTube - type "APB: Reloaded" and the top results are about "Why it's 100 million $ disaster".

 

So safe to say, that ship already sailed. We just facing inevitable.  LO would need to do major... And I mean really major changes which would astound players. (Facepunch did that miracle with Rust but I doubt LO is capable to replicate what Facepunch did)

Either that or release new APB in background (of course hyping it up first). Problem is franchise was sold to company called "Unit Game" which appears to just sit on title and present it like some trophy.

 

So this game lost it future and really I blame developers (also game population didn't do any favours with cheating in rampant amounts for "people who love this game" and there's also people who treat newbies like "unnecessary evil" and decide to go full ham on them...)

"I remember when I joined this game we had EU with populations of 20k on each two servers, two instances of NA for both East and West, equally filled to brim"

 

The game has never been beyond a 6k population peak in total on Steam and we did not get 20k per server from launcher users lol.

 

By all means G1 and LO have let the player-base decline but let's not act like APB Reloaded was ever a major title that was killed or anything.

The population was always abysmal for a free online title.

[sweetLemonade 125]

On 4/9/2025 at 8:58 AM, VanilleKeks said:

The game has never been beyond a 6k population peak in total on Steam and we did not get 20k per server from launcher users lol.

 

By all means G1 and LO have let the player-base decline but let's not act like APB Reloaded was ever a major title that was killed or anything.

The population was always abysmal for a free online title.

I was always perplexed as to why that occured.
Was it complete lack of care from the management team or developers team in terms of new content & balancing? Was it the abysmal game performance at the time? Was it the supposed "ghost-shot" issues? (which were mostly RNG complaints) Was it the, supposed, rampant cheating & lack of a illusion that a anti-cheat solution exists? (lack of separate casual & comp queue exacerbated this even further, PB wasn't helping it, however)
As a concept, APB did many things right... it just lacked support after it's release due to lack of, as we can now easily claim, good management.

Edited April 10 by sweetLemonade

[VanilleKeks 755]

4 hours ago, sweetLemonade said:

I was always perplexed as to why that occured.
Was it complete lack of care from the management team or developers team in terms of new content & balancing? Was it the abysmal game performance at the time? Was it the supposed "ghost-shot" issues? (which were mostly RNG complaints) Was it the, supposed, rampant cheating & lack of a illusion that a anti-cheat solution exists? (lack of separate casual & comp queue exacerbated this even further, PB wasn't helping it, however)
As a concept, APB did many things right... it just lacked support after it's release due to lack of, as we can now easily claim, good management.

RTW APB was already a failure so I would assume that the amount of returning players for a "sequel/re-release" wasn't that high to begin with.

The rest is up to speculation. I would say 6k is actually a decent number as a seed for growth, but they never managed to pour water on it.

 

Cheating has always been an issue for the community and that's largely because APB's district design is really bad for a PvP environment.

Early on I would say we had "normal" cheater numbers but they are disproportionally encountered compared to other shooters.

 

With most people in a district being a mission you have maybe 10 possible enemies to encounter at any given time, which means if you queued into a cheater there is a high chance that that's all you're gonna get for the rest of the session.

 

Had we have gotten phasing earlier (and not in such an annoying state) I doubt that this game would have ever gotten such a large reputation for cheating.

Edited April 10 by VanilleKeks

[Uhtdred 249]

this game is dead without a proper anti cheat system.

 

Fair fight needs to come back asap.

[vsb 6191]

16 hours ago, sweetLemonade said:

I was always perplexed as to why that occured.
Was it complete lack of care from the management team or developers team in terms of new content & balancing? Was it the abysmal game performance at the time? Was it the supposed "ghost-shot" issues? (which were mostly RNG complaints) Was it the, supposed, rampant cheating & lack of a illusion that a anti-cheat solution exists? (lack of separate casual & comp queue exacerbated this even further, PB wasn't helping it, however)
As a concept, APB did many things right... it just lacked support after it's release due to lack of, as we can now easily claim, good management.

rtw was a very large, very public failures and gamersfirst really miscalculated the brand recognition (and so did little orbit)

 

combined with poor advertising and slow, monetization focused development the game has been relegated to “shitty gta clone with cheaters” by just about every gamer i’ve ever met

 

[DedGaem 162]

On 4/9/2025 at 1:58 AM, VanilleKeks said:

"I remember when I joined this game we had EU with populations of 20k on each two servers, two instances of NA for both East and West, equally filled to brim"

 

The game has never been beyond a 6k population peak in total on Steam and we did not get 20k per server from launcher users lol.

 

By all means G1 and LO have let the player-base decline but let's not act like APB Reloaded was ever a major title that was killed or anything.

The population was always abysmal for a free online title.

You're so wrong... 

GamersFirst has confirmed that APB: Reloaded has over 3 million user accounts. The game sees between 25,000 and 30,000 active players every day.
APB: Reloaded Surpasses 3 Million Players Following Steam Launch

[VanilleKeks 755]

1 hour ago, DedGaem said:

You're so wrong... 

GamersFirst has confirmed that APB: Reloaded has over 3 million user accounts. The game sees between 25,000 and 30,000 active players every day.
APB: Reloaded Surpasses 3 Million Players Following Steam Launch

There is no way to verify this source. Anyone can write an article and G1 marketing said all kinds of stuff.

 

Steam has statistics dating all the way back and if the all-time peak is 6k on the most popular gaming platform there is no way G1 managed to pull in 5 times those numbers with whatever crappy launcher they had at the time.

 

Also I was playing during this time and we had no where near enough the amount of active districts to accompany what would average around like 10k players at any given time of day

Edited April 11 by VanilleKeks

[Mitne 732]

On 4/9/2025 at 8:58 AM, VanilleKeks said:

"I remember when I joined this game we had EU with populations of 20k on each two servers, two instances of NA for both East and West, equally filled to brim"

 

The game has never been beyond a 6k population peak in total on Steam and we did not get 20k per server from launcher users lol.

 

By all means G1 and LO have let the player-base decline but let's not act like APB Reloaded was ever a major title that was killed or anything.

The population was always abysmal for a free online title.

You talking about Steam like it was universally used back then. LOL. Game for some time wasn't even RELEASED on Steam? Hello?

 

Who are people liking your comment? Are they misguided or don't know history of this game?

Clearly both.

 

I'm suprised YOU don't remember history of this game since you been here even earlier than me.

 

And also btw. read with understatement - 20k on each two servers. Each, two servers had 20k.

Edited April 14 by Mitne

[DedGaem 162]

On 4/11/2025 at 5:38 AM, VanilleKeks said:

There is no way to verify this source. Anyone can write an article and G1 marketing said all kinds of stuff.

 

Steam has statistics dating all the way back and if the all-time peak is 6k on the most popular gaming platform there is no way G1 managed to pull in 5 times those numbers with whatever crappy launcher they had at the time.

 

Also I was playing during this time and we had no where near enough the amount of active districts to accompany what would average around like 10k players at any given time of day

People also tended to avoid the steam launcher and use game launcher from desktop or a number of privte launchers that tweaked settings and config files. It was conpetitive, people were changing xhair, removing the videos, etc to gain some fps advantage back in the day. Steam population stats were a fraction of the active players.  I was there... we had Citadel, Han, Innova, Colby, Jericho.  They had full districts.. sometimes 40-50 full districts.. major clans... it really did have glory days. This was followed by inreasingly aggressive permanent bans of THOUSANDS... I believe Tiggs lost her wig at one point and stepped in beyond Fairfight and began manual bans.. something like 14,000 were banned in one banwave just before Little Orbit bought the game.

How differently the game would benow had the company simply listened to their playerbase who asked for TEMPORARY BANS... since many were questionable and unfair... and permanent bans simply created new raging hacker accounts that nearly killed the game.  LO stepped in and did right by unbanning... but Battleye sucked, Fairfight did not. the problem with FFwas twofold... 1. permanent bans... and 2. Name & shame hostility of named announcements and Fairfight flames hate forum.
 

We NEED a GOOD anticheat LIKE Fairfight... but just temp bans to discourage cheating, not kill the playerbase.  I don't know what the max level of playerbase was.. some published reports say 1-3 million when G1 first opened it on Steam.  But when I joined, easily... there were tens of thousands of ACTIVE players on multiple THRIVING servers.. and MANY were paying a monthly sub.

Ask yourself logically... if there were only "the all-time peak is 6k" How the HELL did they manage to BAN so many THOUSANDS regularly over the years and STILL have a playerbase? Right off the bat your figure of 6k is refuted by the published SteamDB figure nearly 2x higher.. and you completely exclude the majority who launched from desktop or private launchers.. which easily would have been 2/3 of players esp then when computers and graphics cards ran like potatoes. That would give a reasonable estimate of 30,000-40,000 active players with easily 5x more accounts that played less actively. Maybe the published early articles exaggerated the 1-3million accounts.. the number of 6k is a dramatic undercount.

Quote

"Hello APB community, 

 

Today we unbanned thousands of accounts that were done by Fair Fight and a few other very specific types of bans. We are going to be doing a second wave of unbans in the near future. We knew that not all accounts that were banned for cheating were going to be hit by this first wave of unbans. These mass unbans, since they hit thousands of accounts, take time to preform and so we split them up into more than one wave. Please be patient till we do the second wave. 

 

Thank you all for being understanding."

 

Selali
Account Unbanning - General Discussion Archive - GamersFirst Forums

Quote

"APB Reloaded had an all-time peak of 11813 concurrent players on 10 December 2011. SteamDB has been running ad-free since 2012."
APB Reloaded Steam Charts · SteamDB

Quote

"Hi all,

 

We recently banned a large number of players for using external tools to modify their game directory files. 

 

I want to remind everyone that only the Advanced Launcher has been approved by Little Orbit. This program only makes changes to the config that any normal player can make by hand editing the config themselves.

 

Use of the Advanced Launcher has been temporarily approved until we can integrate these features directly into APB Reloaded, and then we will not allow it any more.

 

Players should only download the Advanced Launcher directly from us here:

-Matt Scott

Recent ban wave and approved launchers - General Discussion Archive - GamersFirst Forums

 

Edited April 20 by DedGaem

[Darkzero3802 627]

We revive APB when cheaters are removed

[Weaboos 90]

On 4/9/2025 at 9:58 AM, VanilleKeks said:

"I remember when I joined this game we had EU with populations of 20k on each two servers, two instances of NA for both East and West, equally filled to brim"

 

The game has never been beyond a 6k population peak in total on Steam and we did not get 20k per server from launcher users lol.

 

By all means G1 and LO have let the player-base decline but let's not act like APB Reloaded was ever a major title that was killed or anything.

The population was always abysmal for a free online title.

A lot of ppl used to play via G1 launcher, hell, at first the game wasn't even available on Steam. While I personally never seen 20 k/server I have myself seen 10-11 k+ on EU1 in like 2011. Later in 2012-2013 population dropped and EU1 about 7 k players while EU2 had 3 K and it all went down the gutter since. Late 2012 to 2013 is when the game's performance degraded with every patch to the point where me and some of my friends quit due to simply being unable to run the game at satisfactory performance. I remember this clear as day.

 

What didn't help is that all the cheaters get unbanned every time. How many unban waves has there been? 3? Every singe one was unbanned and free to cheat again. Hell under G1 cheaters even got free premium after being unbanned lol.

Edited 20 hours ago by Weaboos

[LilyRain 706]

On 4/9/2025 at 10:58 AM, VanilleKeks said:

"I remember when I joined this game we had EU with populations of 20k on each two servers, two instances of NA for both East and West, equally filled to brim"

 

The game has never been beyond a 6k population peak in total on Steam and we did not get 20k per server from launcher users lol.

 

By all means G1 and LO have let the player-base decline but let's not act like APB Reloaded was ever a major title that was killed or anything.

The population was always abysmal for a free online title.

Self-contradiction right there.

Of course, APB was never FIFA or Call of Duty but going down from those numbers to the current PEAKS (sub 500 players on EU, sub 160 players on NA) most certainly counts as killing APB's playerbase. Even for those that didn't feel like playing, at the very least, socializing in Social was a thing to do all day. Now? If you're in social, you're literally wasting power. Better off attempt mining some crypto. YES, the game was killed to the point where Live Servers are currently the Open Test Servers. Anyone who says otherwise is simply not living in this timeline.

+Those peaks are factually half since many Players run around with multiple characters. So it is even worse.

Edited 13 hours ago by LilyRain