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[Snubnose 640]

@LO_Beastie posted a thread and it's showing up on the admin tracker...

can't view it fully though, it says
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We could not locate the item you are trying to view.
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please fix Q_Q

[vsb 6171]

you have to get permission first 

 

[NotZombieBiscuit 3146]

That is gonna be a no thanks from me.

[Tobii 346]

Quote

 

Hi Everyone.

Below are what we've changed in the current version of OTW.

One of our main goals with this balance pass is to try and get weapons focused more within their intended ranges. 
Shotguns are currently a bit overtuned and dominate close up (where as previously they were rarely used in favour of SMGs due to their relative inconsistency). 
Likewise Assault Rifles (particularly the NTEC, but also in general) tend to push a bit too much into the range of Rifles, making Rifles for the most part seen less often than other categories. 
A lot of the changes here are somewhat experimental, and in this case we expect a fair few of them to be reverted entirely, but it's worth playtesting them to see if they're viable.

We should also point out not to expect any of these changes to go live at any point soon, we want to do a lot of testing on these over the course of the next couple of weeks, and only release ones we are sure are ready. This new forum section should be used as a space to provide feedback on these changes. Assault Rifles In general. 

The standard-ranged ARS have received a 5m effective range reduction across the board.
Combined with an increase in the range of rifles, this allows rifles (and LMGs, to an extent) to shine at longer ranges where previously most players would just take an NTEC.
Min Damage Range stays the same, so you'll see a more gradual falloff of weapon performance over distance. 
This also promotes taking Rifling if you want to increase your range (more on this in a bit), at the cost of reducing your TTK at close range. 
This affects the following: AR-97, ATAC, COBRA FAR, Raptor, S1-FA, STAR, NTEC.

The NTEC is a fairly difficult challenge to tweak, as it's by far the most popular weapon in APB and thus any changes will affect near our entire playerbase, but it does need some changes.
There are two effective ways we can go about this without drastically changing the feel of the weapon, so we're investigating both simultaneously and we can compare side by side. 

Test A - Increase the fire-interval of the NTEC very slightly (from 0.14 to 0.145), adjusting accuracy stats so the accuracy over shots stays the same. This helps increase the perfect TTK slightly so it's closer to its contemporaries. 
At the same time we also reduce the Magazine capacity a little, to 30. It has a very high Kill to Magazine capacity as it is (and a relatively fast reload), so reducing this helps in a few ways: It makes missing slightly less forgiving, it makes the choice of blue mod more interesting, and gives players another comparison marker when choosing to use the weapon over the STAR (which now has more ammo than it).

Test B - Reduce the effective accuracy of the NTEC, making it a little worse in terms of pinpoint effectiveness than other ARs, giving space for weapons like the ISSR, LCR and AR97 to get a look in. This reduces the base accuracy of the weapon to 28cms at 10m (from 24) and the Marksmanship modifier to 40% (from 35%). 
It also decreases jumping accuracy to 18 (from 12) to see if we can reduce jumping spray at close ranges a little. Minimum accuracy is 'improved' to stay the same as in live (since it's a multiplier on base accuracy). 
With this test, we also reduced ammo in the weapon to 28.
Note: The Scoped variant is unchanged in testing. If we actually make any changes to the NTEC, those changes will carry over. 

Rifles In the same vein, we've increased the effective range of non-carbine Rifles by 5m, giving them a bit more oomph at ranges where they'd previously fall off This affects the following:, FFA, CR-762, OBIR, SBSR.
This is also important as a lot of rifles were relying on Rifling to make them valid for long distance engagements, and we're moving Rifling to be more of a trade-off than it was. 

Shotguns - The range-reduction we made at the beginning of the week on Live for Shotguns was a stop-gap solution to help reduce the problem while we look at further reducing the power of shotguns. 
Their now very consistent kill- rates at close range allows us to change them in other areas to reduce their power while still making them the best choice at point-blank. 
We can also start dropping the effect of the pellet bonus damage in some cases where it's resulting in the weapons being too effective. 

Strife Test A - Effective Damage increased to 903, 2-shot pellet count improved to 8 from 9 (Reduces Pellet Scale to 0.926 from 0.933). 

CSG Test A - 2-shot pellet count reduced to 15 (from 13) (Damage 64 from 70, Scale 0.935 from 0.9). Fire Rate down to 0.8 (from 0.68). Effective Range changed to 1000/1750 (from 750/1750).
This gives the CSG a little bit of its range back, but requires better accuracy, and takes longer to kill, helping distinguish it more from the JG.

JG Test A - 2-shot pellet count reduced to 7 (from 6) (Damage 100 from 140, Scale 0.897 from 0.82).

Shredder - Increased fire interval to 0.42 (from 0.37). This is a revert of a buff from the previous patch. We buffed it in a number of ways, this one was maybe a step too far.
 
Rifling -  We reduced the effectiveness of Rifling on live while we made some mechanical changes behind the scenes to be able to change it on a percentage basis, and this is the first test of this.
Rifling (the OTW test variant) now increases range by 5, 10, 15%, followed by an absolute increase of 1 2, 3 metres. 
This means it works better on longer range weapons, but at least has some effect on close range weapons (where the absolute increase has more of an effect). 
On average, Rifling 3 increases Shotguns by 4.5m, SMGs by 7.5, Carbines by 8.25, ARS by 10.5 (9.75 in prototype), Rifles by 10.5 (11.25 in prototype), LMGs by 13.5 and Snipers by 16.5 (essentially removing max range for them). 

Cooling Jacket - We're also testing to see if adding the Cooling Jacket effect to Burst Interval as well makes sense. 
It provides an interesting counter-option to rifling for burst weapons, though notably right now Cooling Jacket is essentially all benefit for Burst weapons and no downside, so that'll need some thought before we go further with anything in this area. 

OCA - The OCA fire-rate buff a few years ago was a bit over the top, but it did need something at the time to make it viable (it was overshadowed at the time by every other SMG other than the Norsemen). As such, we want to pull back the buff, but not remove it entirely. 

Test A - 0.95 fire interval (from 0.92).
Test B - 0.98 fire interval (from 0.92, very close to its old 0.1 fire rate).

 

Seeing as the forum doesn't allow us to see the changed OTW sub-forum.
here is the post in a somewhat cleaned up form.

[CookiePuss 5378]

1 hour ago, Tobii said:

~snip~

btw thanks for this and the other thread Tobii
 

[Flight 239]

The thread was hidden for now.
I believe the issue with that given subforum is being corrected, or the thread will be posted elsewhere.

We'll keep you updated!