APB 1.33 “Loud and Clear”

[Emily 186]

Hello everyone,

 

APB 1.33 “Loud and Clear” is coming with the September 16 update.

 

This update introduces a new World Server, rebuilt voice chat, district improvements, stability fixes, crash reporting, and more.

Servers will go down on September 16 at 06:30 UTC, with approximately 4 hours of downtime expected.

 

You can read the full details here: https://gamersfirst.com/apb/news/2026/9/15/loud-and-clear

[purpleHorizons 149]

Quote

2. Voice chat, rebuilt

Let me get this straight:
For 4 AMAs in a row, voice chat was labeled as "it's low on our priority list" and now suddenly it became the most important feature to be reintroduced into the game?
Not only that, you're back to Vivox, which most people used to disable back in the day due to it being a CPU cycle hog.
Amazing.
Yet actual issues this game has still aren't solved:
• The UI of the game is completely unusable on 1080p, 1440p and 4K displays due to the game using fixed size assets made for 720p screens. Using the in-game "UI scaling" option results in all UI elements being subjected to some form of bad software algorithm which lowers the total sharpness of the game's UI elements. (Solution? Create higher resolution assets. Anything else is a band-aid; Should take up same UI size, proportionally)
• Mismatched UI frameworks (Scaleform & native UI) mixed together. Raw Canvas (for gameplay UI) & Dear ImGui is superior for pre-UE4 titles such as APB. Ditch Scaleform already.
• Crosshair is still bound to UI scaling and doesn't reflect accuracy across the entire 100m distance range of the game.
• UI bug, which completely disables the ability to swap to 2nd contact group, removes ability to see if you're resupplying something, removes ability to know if you've killed someone.
• Visual fidelity took a nosedive since RTW with no signs for betterment.
• Absolutely no sign of a new map (Midtown?), a new game mode (BR, racing district or something else) or something else which would freshen up the game.
• Both maps have severe balancing issues for more than a decade with no changes significant changes to them. Even the ones from 2 years ago are borderline invisible changes.
• Missions are still a unbalanced mess.
• Clans are a forgotten feature since launch.
• Griefing still exists in the game due to not segregating competitive & casual crowds in separate queues
• (Clothing/Car/Music/Symbol) Designers are untouched since launch (no new instruments, no fix of long standing issues)
• No weapon/modification/vehicle inventory changes in form of sorting, pre-made loadouts etc.
• ARMAS, the only money source of the game, still isn't comprised of account-bound only items. Matt mentioned that it's their "vision" to turn JT store into character-bound only items and ARMAS for account-bound only items. Why is this still being relegated?.... The new UI "redesign" is absolutely dreadful in terms of a UI design perspective as well.
• ARMAS also still has no way to properly inspect the item you plan on purchasing.
• Many ARMAS items are still stuck within a pack (e.g.: TAS-20 with 2 mods from Rocker Bundle), with no signs of a debundle occurring any time soon.
• No frame rate limiter in the UI since the inception of this game (It's 2026 already..)
• No ability to adjust Garbage Collection & OneFrameThreadLag in the UI.
• No map location pinging system akin to Apex, where during normal gunplay, you use a button bind & point to a location with your mouse, press the bind and a team/group marker appears, pointing out their location.
• Mouse sensitivity issue is still a thing, as per this
• Bullet holes cause stuttering, as per this (not fixed since 64-bit release)
• Leaderboards, which no one asked for, still don't have a single reward attached to them. More than a year has passed already since their introduction.
• MSI AB / RTSS & DXVK are blocked by GFAC for some peculiar reason. Heck, even Nvidia FrameView's overlay is blocked by GFAC...  
• FSE was killed off (likely unknowingly) and the "Fullscreen Windowed" setting results in a worse presentation model than was previously the case (before GFAC).
• No new F2P clothing or hair styles since the inception of this.

...but Vivox, a "low priority task" took priority. 
I was expecting the PvE (FTUE) district to arrive in this patch, but apparently not...

The cherry on top was this:

Quote

Small spawn adjustments in Waterfront to improve some of the worst spawn spots, and a small Health Damage nerf to the ISSR-B after its previous buff.

The game designer definitely confirmed that he has no vision on how to balance guns in this game and it shows
As per ("gatekept") extra information provided by the game designer, which he has written on Discord only, health damage per shot statistic looks like this for the ISSR-B now:
265 (for the longest time) → 315 (buffed pre-1.33) → 285 (this patch)
Memes write themselves.

Edited September 27 by purpleHorizons

[TheMessiah 431]

post apb 1.33 also on facebook(still not there)

[Uhtdred 261]

world district map? what if I don't want to be moved to a citadel server because of high latency?

[Westford 212]

4. Crash reports reach us again

For a long time, when APB crashed and you clicked Send on the report dialog, that report went nowhere. As of this update it arrives, and we symbolize it against the exact build you were running. This does nothing for you in the moment, but it means the crashes you hit this week become the fixes in the next patch. If the game crashes, please click Send.
 

So after 7 years, 7 months, 15 days, my forum post has finally been answered.

 

Reference Post Concerning Crash reports:

 

 

After not receiving any response to this forum post, I admit not hitting "Send" anymore when these Crash Report Windows popped up.
Turns out, my intuition that these reports were not going anywhere was correct.

Thanks for the update.

[WaIeed007 67]

just a few more years till a solo dev using gpt 8/claude 6.5 creates a game like APB but infinitely better

[MACKxBOLAN 497]

They just ruining the game, not like you can work on any contact from another district. 

No this is so the casual gets ripped from the dist he came to play n sent to eu with extreamly high lat

to make it easier to kill casuals, as in those that dont cheat. 

They putting voip in so the big gang of toxics they send in can cuss out people they want to quit. 

So they can keep having bias rule enforcement by not banning them for what they say in chat/voice. 

So the rules are not enforced equally in game as they are in discord. 

at least she didn't lock this thread so we couldn't talk about it. which is considered a negative act in customer service.

last event was good, wasn't just targeted for golds, and it should be double xp as long as contacts are open. 

They gave us all these extra levels and fairly crappy max rank symbols to work for vs toxics instead of 

Grandfathering all the prior max ranks. Max is something you earn, quit making me work longer to keep it. 

beings that the unlocks for the contact are only the m9, and the aligator symbol for cops, i wont be maxing out. 

Now if you remove my post i'll just be another incident of bad customer service. 

[lesbianrus 12]

On 15.09.2026 at 13:31, purpleHorizons said:

Давайте уточним:
в течение четырёх подряд AMA голосовой чат был отмечен как «он низко в нашем списке приоритетов», и теперь вдруг он стал самой важной функцией, которую нужно вернуть в игру?
Более того, вы снова возвращаетесь к Vivox, который раньше большинство людей отключали из-за того, что он занимал много циклов процессора.
Потрясающе.
Однако реальные проблемы игры до сих пор не решены:
• Интерфейс игры полностью непригоден для использования на дисплеях 1080p, 1440p и 4K из-за использования фиксированных ассетов для 720p. Использование внутриигровой опции «масштабирование интерфейса» приводит к тому, что все элементы интерфейса подвергаются работе некачественного программного алгоритма, что снижает общую резкость элементов интерфейса игры. (Решение? Создавайте активы с более высоким разрешением. Всё остальное — временное решение; Должен занимать одинаковый размер интерфейса пропорционально)
• Несовпадающие UI-фреймворки (Scaleform и нативный UI) смешаны вместе. Raw Canvas (для игрового интерфейса) и Dear ImGui лучше подходят для игр до UE4, таких как APB. Отказаться от Scaleform уже.
• Кроссхэр всё ещё ограничен масштабированием интерфейса и не отражает точность на всех дистанциях 100 метров в игре.
• Визуальная качество резко упало с момента RTW, и признаков улучшения нет.
• Абсолютно никаких признаков новой карты (Мидтаун?), нового режима игры (BR, гоночный район или что-то ещё) или чего-то ещё, что могло бы освежить игру.
• Обе карты имеют серьёзные проблемы с балансом более десяти лет без изменений, но существенных изменений. Даже те, что были двухлетней давности, почти невидимы.
• Миссии всё ещё в беспорядке.
• Кланы забыты с момента запуска.
• Griefing всё ещё существует в игре, потому что соревновательные и казуальные толпы не разделяют в отдельные
очереди • (Одежда/Машина/Музыка/Символ) Дизайнеры остались нетронутыми с момента запуска (нет новых инструментов, нет исправления давних проблем)
• Нет изменений в оружии/модификациях/инвентаре транспорта в форме сортировки, готовых экипировок и т.д
. • ARMAS, единственный источник денег в игре, всё ещё не состоит только из предметов, связанных с аккаунтом. Мэтт упомянул, что их «видение» — превратить магазин JT в предметы, предназначенные только для персонажей, а ARMAS — только для аккаунта. Почему это всё ещё выбывает в низшем классе?.... Новый «редизайн» интерфейса просто ужасен с точки зрения дизайна интерфейса.
• ARMAS всё ещё не имеет способа должным образом осмотреть товар, который вы планируете приобрести.
• Многие предметы ARMAS всё ещё находятся внутри пака (например: TAS-20 с двумя модами из Rocker Bundle), и нет признаков ближайшего разрыва.
• С момента запуска этой игры в интерфейсе нет ограничителя частоты кадров (сейчас уже 2026 год..)
• Нет возможности регулировать сбор мусора и OneFrameThreadLag в интерфейсе.
• Нет системы определения местоположения на карте, похожей на Apex, где во время обычной стрельбы вы назначаете кнопку и указываете мышью на место, нажимаете кнопку — и появляется маркер команды/группы, указывающий их местоположение.
• Проблема чувствительности мыши всё ещё актуальна, как и
следующее • Пулевые отверстия вызывают подтормаживание, как это (не исправлено с момента выхода 64-битной версии)
• Таблицы лидеров, которые никто не просил, до сих пор не имеют ни одной награды. С момента их интеллекта уже прошло больше годаРодукция.
• MSI AB / RTSS и DXVK блокируются GFAC по какой-то странной причине. Даже оверлей Nvidia FrameView блокируется GFAC...
• FSE была отключена (вероятно, неосознанно), а настройка «Fullscreen Windowed» приводит к более худшей модели презентации, чем раньше (до GFAC).
• С момента появления этого проекта не было ни новой F2P-одежды, ни причёски.

... но Vivox, «задача низкого приоритета», имела приоритет.
Я ожидал, что район PvE (FTUE) появится в этом патче, но, похоже, нет...

Вишенкой на торте было следующее:

Геймдизайнер определённо подтвердил, что у него нет видения, как балансировать оружие в этой игре, и там видно
: согласно дополнительной информации, предоставленной геймдизайнером, которую он написал только в Discord, статистика урона здоровья за выстрел для ISSR-B сейчас выглядит так:
265 (долгое время) → 315 (усилено до версии 1.33) → 285 (этот патч).
Мемы пишут сами.

 

4 hours ago, MACKxBOLAN said:

Они просто портят игру, ведь нельзя работать с контактами из другого района.

Нет, это для того, чтобы казуал был вырван из района, на который он пришёл играть, и отправлен в ЕС с чрезвычайно высокой широтой

чтобы было проще убивать казуалов, то есть тех, кто не жульничает.

Они вводят VoIP, чтобы большая банда токсичных людей, которых они посылают, могла ругать тех, кого они хотят уволить.

Так что они могут продолжать применять правила предвзятости, не банив их за то, что они говорят в чате или голосе.

Поэтому правила в игре соблюдаются не одинаково, чем в Discord.

По крайней мере, она не заблокировала эту тему, чтобы мы не могли об этом говорить. что считается негативным поступком в сфере обслуживания клиентов.

Последнее событие было хорошим, не было только для золота, и должно быть двойной опыт, если контакты открыты.

Они дали нам все эти дополнительные уровни и довольно плохие символы максимального ранга, чтобы использовать против токсичных вместо

Сохраняя все предыдущие максимальные ранги. Макс — это то, что зарабатываешь, перестань заставлять меня работать дольше, чтобы его сохранить.

Поскольку разблокировки контакта — это только M9 и символ аллигатора для копов, я не буду прокачивать максимум.

Если вы удаляете мой пост, это будет просто очередной случай плохого обслуживания клиентов.

 

4 hours ago, MACKxBOLAN said:

Они просто портят игру, ведь нельзя работать с контактами из другого района.

Нет, это для того, чтобы казуал был вырван из района, на который он пришёл играть, и отправлен в ЕС с чрезвычайно высокой широтой

чтобы было проще убивать казуалов, то есть тех, кто не жульничает.

Они вводят VoIP, чтобы большая банда токсичных людей, которых они посылают, могла ругать тех, кого они хотят уволить.

Так что они могут продолжать применять правила предвзятости, не банив их за то, что они говорят в чате или голосе.

Поэтому правила в игре соблюдаются не одинаково, чем в Discord.

По крайней мере, она не заблокировала эту тему, чтобы мы не могли об этом говорить. что считается негативным поступком в сфере обслуживания клиентов.

Последнее событие было хорошим, не было только для золота, и должно быть двойной опыт, если контакты открыты.

Они дали нам все эти дополнительные уровни и довольно плохие символы максимального ранга, чтобы использовать против токсичных вместо

Сохраняя все предыдущие максимальные ранги. Макс — это то, что зарабатываешь, перестань заставлять меня работать дольше, чтобы его сохранить.

Поскольку разблокировки контакта — это только M9 и символ аллигатора для копов, я не буду прокачивать максимум.

Если вы удаляете мой пост, это будет просто очередной случай плохого обслуживания клиентов.

 

[lesbianrus 12]

I've been playing this game for 12 years.I can't wait for the 2 closed slots in the equipment to open.And apparently, I'll never wait.Neither Mat nor his friends know why they are closed.They're just closed.

[BlatMan 755]

Is this the real round trip latency for the UDP packets APB sends, or just the ICMP ping command going to regions?

 

You can't test for upload instability, which has plagued APB since the initial DDoS protection was introduced back in 2014 or 2015. The in-game network stats are currently useless. The latency scales based on the total player count in the server, often showing 0ms on an empty server. The packet loss counter is only for download. There's nothing for upload, which is APB's main hitreg problem.

Edited September 16 by BlatMan

[cowhorseman 496]

So the many issues are still not adressed. but hey atleast it's slightly harder for cheaters to kill you in waterfront via spawn camping with an HVR. 

Love the range weapon buffs and debuffs. it's like you throw random numbers onto a board, then throw darts at it. then pick a gun from a wheel and give the selected numbers to that gun (minus the ntec)

can we do something real? like get FE online? or change how asylum works to give you a functional amount of tickets instead of around 200 per a week maybe 400 if you can mange to handle being killed over and over by the no lifes that hang there killing you at every single spawn before you can move an inch

Maybe give us clothing or guns we want? weres my 3 slot 20GA at?

 

ah to hell with it. Complaining is pointless, no one wants to listen to anyone anymore.

[cowhorseman 496]

Just now, cowhorseman said:

So the many issues are still not adressed. but hey atleast it's slightly harder for cheaters to kill you in waterfront via spawn camping with an HVR. 

Love the range weapon buffs and debuffs. it's like you throw random numbers onto a board, then throw darts at it. then pick a gun from a wheel and give the selected numbers to that gun (minus the ntec)

can we do something real? like get FE online? or change how asylum works to give you a functional amount of tickets instead of around 200 per a week maybe 400 if you can mange to handle being killed over and over by the no lifes that hang there killing you at every single spawn before you can move an inch

Maybe give us clothing or guns we want? weres my 3 slot 20GA at?

 

ah to hell with it. Complaining is pointless, no one wants to listen to anyone anymore.

ALso just thought of it. turning of VC again. i'm not being followed around by some guy playing bass boosted or racially charged music again. while ramming me with a dumptruck/vegas.

Or the guy who feels the need to insult us the whole match
or screm the whole match

Or make out with his girlfriend/boyfriend during the match

I could go on i got a lot of examples of how VC is abused

[SixxstagesofMajik 12]

There is a bug in which if you get called to another district for a mission it just does not move you at all and you are stuck with "moving to mission" , can't ready up nor switch districts as says "moving you to mission" tho it is not , only way out is to exit apb or return to lobby 

[explosiveUA 53]

Its still not engine update. skip

[Symphyotrichum 1]

Quote

If voice chat gets you talking to the people you play with again, it was worth it.

Super excited to return to the days when people drove around blasting Hitler speeches or troll music from their cars, and shouted racist or other forms of unhinged rage at teammates, all with impunity. It'll compliment all the swastikas and other racist graffiti and car decorations I see nearly every time I log in.

 

This will be a huge boost to the fatooey (d/b/a "First Time User Experience") too.

[Ardita 254]

On 9/15/2026 at 8:21 PM, Westford said:

After not receiving any response to this forum post, I admit not hitting "Send" anymore when these Crash Report Windows popped up.
Turns out, my intuition that these reports were not going anywhere was correct.

Thanks for the update.

 

They ended all right here ^...^

[LilyRain 710]

On 9/18/2026 at 5:28 AM, cowhorseman said:

Love the range weapon buffs and debuffs. it's like you throw random numbers onto a board, then throw darts at it. then pick a gun from a wheel and give the selected numbers to that gun (minus the ntec)

#Accurate

[raging 30]

On 9/18/2026 at 11:28 AM, cowhorseman said:

Love the range weapon buffs and debuffs. it's like you throw random numbers onto a board, then throw darts at it. then pick a gun from a wheel and give the selected numbers to that gun (minus the ntec)

 

Wrong, seriously bro after all these years even that would be too much effort.. come on the only other gaming company with a bad rep like Lo would be EA..

[BlatMan 755]

Even the N-TEC 5 has been molested, although I forget if Little Orbit owned APB at the time.

 

- Bloom changed from linear to exponential.

- Base damage reduced to make Heavy Barrel II less viable, from 6 shot kill to 7 shot kill.

- Reloaded added the minimum damage drop off, reducing it's effective range. I'm not sure if this counts since most weapons were nerfed with this change. 

 

Did the scoped N-TEC 5 always have the accuracy penalty while walking? I didn't use it until after the VAS weapon series was released. Archive.org seems to have wrong data, since it's showing min damage range in December 2013.

[purpleHorizons 149]

On 9/24/2026 at 11:29 PM, BlatMan said:

Even the N-TEC 5 has been molested, although I forget if Little Orbit owned APB at the time.

 

- Bloom changed from linear to exponential.

- Base damage reduced to make Heavy Barrel II less viable, from 6 shot kill to 7 shot kill.

- Reloaded added the minimum damage drop off, reducing it's effective range. I'm not sure if this counts since most weapons were nerfed with this change. 

 

Did the scoped N-TEC 5 always have the accuracy penalty while walking? I didn't use it until after the VAS weapon series was released. Archive.org seems to have wrong data, since it's showing min damage range in December 2013.

HB2 is 6STK in live right now.
Yes, scoped NTEC always had a higher walk modifier.

[ColorBauss 77]

I don't have an opinion on this topic really, but I had a good chuckle reading "even the ntec has been molested" and then reading that it happened like 14 years ago. 

[BlatMan 755]

12 hours ago, purpleHorizons said:

HB2 is 6STK in live right now.
Yes, scoped NTEC always had a higher walk modifier.

Well I'll be dammed. That was done back in 2020. Also noticed they changed the CR762's max damage back to normal, but the minimum is still low, so it's still in the back of locker collecting dust.

[koenyboy500 83]

I've made a post stating that the Scoped Scepter was underpowered for a while. It removes your ability to be mobile but it has zero range advantage other then a SLIGHT SLIGHT SLIGHT bonus to ADS accuracy.

The gun deserves more range.

[MACKxBOLAN 497]

All their guns deserve more range, not just the comparison to real life guns, but the view or perception of distance in game. 

for instance a sniper is ranged at 100 meters. so 250 feet, this is the outside range of most pistols except .22's, Effective range being 

about 200 feet, but 200 feet in apb is across the street, so in game you're already outranged with any gun type if they're across the street. 

So you would have to shrink the game and environment down to a point where the view was the same as if you looked outside to see the grass, and it matched the actual footage relative to the guns range. I just think these kids have wall sized screens to make such quick aim. 

 

[purpleHorizons 149]

Once again, a example of the developers using their resources (developer time) into features a small minority (that doesn't even play the game) asked for.
Of course, one has to visit Discord to get this information... forums have been relegated into irrelevancy.

Quote

12:22]Caramel [GOS], : 

How's the Linux build going young man?

12:31] MattPScott

The game compiles under Proton now. Just working through the dependencies
We compiled APB on Ubuntu by running Microsoft's own MSVC 14.16 compiler and MSBuild under Wine through msvc-wine, with wine-mono so MSBuild could run. We had to fix a number of case-sensitive path collisions and kept the workspace on CRLF line endings. To run the engine we used Proton's Wine (Kron4ek's WoW64 build) with DXVK, the legacy DirectX runtime DLLs and a faked PhysX registry key, because Ubuntu 24.10 blocks Steam's own Proton sandbox.
There are still a few Linux-only problems that need fixes: an engine bug that crashed commandlets on exit (fixed in CL 859222), multithreaded shader compiling that crashed under Proton (now turned off), and Wine-only dialogs at editor startup that a launcher script dismisses automatically.
To @Ketog point, I guess it's inaccurate to say we compiled 'under' Proton. It compiled on Linux with wine and once we fix a couple things it will run under an unmodified Proton
 

13:17]Ketog [COS], : 

usually the point of proton is that devs have nothing to do for their game to run on linux, and the issue is always the anticheat check that fails due to the missing windows API calls, or other windows checks that fail because they don't exist on windows
 

13:18] MattPScott
I got some feedback from another player on a number of non anti cheat issues that APB has. So I thought compiling directly on the platform and running through each piece was in order
He had to customize Proton itself to get APB to work
It would be amazing to host Linux game servers too
So much easier

 

13:24]Ketog [COS], : 

i understand if it's for debugging purposes to compile parts of the game to see where it hangs, but to me that sounds like work to debug why apb doesn't run on linux sure, but the main issue GFAC
 

[13:24]mojical: 

ultimately solving the non-anticheat issues on LO's side is much faster and cleaner than upstreaming the fixes in this case

[13:24]mojical: 

because all of the necessary fixes were very crude workarounds

 

13:25]MattPScott: 

I had fun getting it working. It felt a little crazy running out tools on Linux

I haven't started the Launcher yet. That's next

Physx is a mess. That's also next

Thankfully we have the source

I may bake that in

I personally feel like webview was a bad decision on our part. It's not easy to upgrade or even detect properly

It was an easy cheat to show pretty pictures

But not sure it was worth it

I have 4 or 5 different work streams right now. I was going to deal with Linux + GFAC alongside the next GFAC update

I am also working on Halloween because that's around the corner

I really want something slightly new

Revamping our content authoring to bring it more current

Console ...

Once again, the population is <200 players.
Linux players make up <10 players. 
This is another example of a "(very) low priority" task taking precedence over much more major issues this game has. Why?

Edited September 28 by purpleHorizons