Population crisis.....

[AWBtwo 16]

So can we a agree that threat restricted servers suck? And should be removed?

[Eixo 33]

Best way for now will be leaving only open conflict and remove all threat districts

Generally server will have golds,silves, bronzes which will guarantee better MM overall and leave matchmaking working but hide threats for players

Edited September 21, 2018 by Eixo

[PingOVER9000 189]

1 hour ago, JungleFlaco said:

What about just removing District Threats, but keeping player Threat?

yep, better keep in consideration the player level from 1-125 all togheter in their districts, all above to others districts.

People with account of 250 hours+, so people at this time with a decent/ good knowing of the game, directly they can join  all  only in districts high level.

[Inquitoria 108]

BE EXPERIENCED PLAYER
Gold district empty. Go to silver district. Get grouped with 2 low-ranked silvers and 1 gold on OPGL against 4 clanned max rank golds with dictionary names. Get completely rekt. Maybe dethreat, go to bronze district, ruin the games of those poor guys until gold again, rinse and repeat.

BE NEW PLAYER
Join the game. No idea how to play. Win a few missions, quickly become silver threat. Just use the normal district selection screen (not the advanced tab), so always joining silver district. Constantly matched against golds, gold teammates rage. Finally discover bronze district, get matches ruined by Golds who dethreated.

I'll bet the above applies to over 80% of the current population to some extent. And people wonder why nobody plays this game, it's literally made for masochists.

[LilyV3 323]

9 hours ago, Tosei said:

people quit because no new contents, such as new clothes and events, not really all about gameplay tbh

No they quit because the game runs bad on client and serverside, cheaters are still an issues (at leats on Citadell). And yes noob protection and matchmaking has its issues especially with dethreathing.

@Op we had no Threat districts and no one was there anymore playing on them. If you make this the default mode you just lose even more people.

[Techdev 11]

No point in playing frustraties, cheaters/hitreg/low server ticks should be top of the list, not those pointles weapon Balance and so on. Untill the real issues get fixed my team is not playing.

 

Edited September 21, 2018 by Techdev

[image 9]

There's no way a guy who just downloaded the game gets matched agaisnt someone who has played for years, a complete matchmaking/threat rework is needed.
There have been multiple occasions where brand new players would complain about getting matched agaisnt me, a person that has over 5k hours into the game.
It's quite sad because I think this is one of the major issues that keep APB from growing and getting new players, I would be so frustrated if I downloaded a new game and got put agaisnt someone with thousands of hours.  

[TheMessiah 430]

"What about just removing District Threats, but keeping player Threat?"

thats not gonna work because all 4 threats gonna be in same districts and can happen often greens/bronzes vs golds when similar threat not available

Edited September 21, 2018 by TheMessiah

[Similarities 226]

2 hours ago, NotZombieBiscuit said:

It is a 9 year old game. What do you expect. APB never hit that high of a population and it is a miracle it has actually gone on this long. 

FFXI has a larger population currently, it came out over 15 years ago and still runs on a subscription-based service, it also aged way worse graphically and mechanically than APB has, "the game is old XD!" isn't an excuse for the game being dog shit and never will be.

[JungleFlaco 10]

Letting alone other matters:

If there were no Threat Segregation no one could call out on anyone for being where he does not belong.. And Matchmaking would have a wider Threat Pool to match players and/or groups up.

Edited September 21, 2018 by JungleFlaco

[TheNightingale 4]

Matched up a couple of days ago in silver district. 1 gold 2 silver 1 bronze, vs 4 gold premade. Until they fix matchmaking there is little point in trying to fix anything else because the other fixes are meaningless while matchmaking is a disaster since the data is skewed because of the bad matchmaking.

[BEASTASBTCH 8]

tons of people came back when apb got bought out
tons of ddos happens right after that
tons of people who came back left again

rinse and repeat. fix the fucking ddos whenever you idiots make a huge patch/change then people will stay

[magik 184]

11 hours ago, kurbstomp88 said:

I don't understand this whole there's no content argument rank means nothing in this game and the entire game is killing people around missions. the combat is the content. and serg anytime I think about trying a free game on steam I make sure to look threw reviews to see if its worth the time of downloading it since there are so many money grab freemium games that devs completely neglect 
 

I just mean I personally haven't read the reviews in a long time. 

4 hours ago, thesamscout24 said:

According to steam charts, APB was originally averaging 4k players and is now averaging about 1100 players. Pop did spike when LO took over and I believe that it will happen when new content is added, but the game would need to be fixed (UE 3.5) before this can happen
Removing the threats from districts may be a good idea to try and unify the playerbase, provided that a tutorial district is preserved to prevent Greens on Golds.
On that note, most people dethreat, so the threat system is partially redundant anyway.

In my opinion, adding new content won't bring a permanent population back. The issues with Hitreg seem to have been resolved with this update.
The update to UE3.5 will definitely bring players back.

Simply having just a "financial" instance, and allowing for players to all have a cross-instance matchmaking for all 'financial' districts would resolve the issue of matchmaking pools.
If a district has no threat, the matchmaking should ensure that a green player does not ever play a gold player (with the exception of them being in a private group with a gold player)

Although, once again, this is my own personal opinion.

[magik 184]

4 minutes ago, BEASTASBTCH said:

tons of people came back when apb got bought out
tons of ddos happens right after that
tons of people who came back left again

rinse and repeat. fix the ~**~ ddos whenever you idiots make a huge patch/change then people will stay

DDoS solutions aren't simple or easy.
Wikipedia explains this pretty well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

Quote

Defensive responses to denial-of-service attacks typically involve the use of a combination of attack detection, traffic classification and response tools, aiming to block traffic that they identify as illegitimate and allow traffic that they identify as legitimate

They use the example of a DDoS attack as:

Quote

A DoS or DDoS attack is analogous to a group of people crowding the entry door of a shop, making it hard for legitimate customers to enter, disrupting trade.

Think of APB as the storefront. A DDoS attack blocks the door to the store. No one can get in or out, right?
What Little Orbit can do, is mitigate the attack... which includes:

• Detecting the Attack
• Screening the incoming requests - whether or not they are the attacking "mob" of computers, or actual player requests.

When you perform mitigation, a significant number of resources are diverted from running the server under normal conditions, to classifying, and routing traffic.
This obviously hurts the performance of the server.

 

[Sayori 311]

13 hours ago, CookiePuss said:

Game runs like shit. 
Until that gets fixed, nothing else will matter. 

How so?
I used to have solid 75+ fps with 3rd gen i3 and decent graphics. Now with i7 I could easily have stable 140 if I bothered to remove the 100fps cap.
If you refer to netcode I don't think it's  bad unless some scriptkiddie is ddosing.
I'd say population dropped because... BlindEye and the meme weapon balance.

[JungleFlaco 10]

Core was [Designed(STARTED)] about 2005..

Edited September 21, 2018 by JungleFlaco

[CookiePuss 5382]

26 minutes ago, Sayori said:

How so?
I used to have solid 75+ fps with 3rd gen i3 and decent graphics. Now with i7 I could easily have stable 140 if I bothered to remove the 100fps cap.
If you refer to netcode I don't think it's  bad unless some scriptkiddie is ddosing.
I'd say population dropped because... BlindEye and the meme weapon balance.

I too get the max frame rate... but it doesnt prevent the game being a stuttery mess. The shit servers or netcode or whatever it is doesnt prevent me getting killed from what looks on my client like 3 ntec shots, or two shotgun blasts fired seemingly at the same time.

While yes, weapon balance has caused a drop in pop, I guess Im more talking about why the game is dead in the first place. Edited September 21, 2018 by CookiePuss

[Keshi 436]

6 hours ago, JungleFlaco said:

What about just removing District Threats, but keeping player Threat?

^
Only thing to do to make that work is to fix the matchmaking tho Edited September 21, 2018 by Keshi

[jarko 43]

13 hours ago, BXNNXD said:

allowing golds to freely stomp bronzes is only going to make the population even more unhealthy

6 hours ago, NotZombieBiscuit said:

It is a 9 year old game. What do you expect. APB never hit that high of a population and it is a miracle it has actually gone on this long. 

BXNNXD made quite a good observation there.

More likely zombie's post resume quite well why the population is as it is.

The only thing that i would presume to bring back a few players is...the engine upgrade, new contacts, new map for mission district & a completely seperated.........Battle Royale mode B) just to be cool like everyone else and follow the hype train haha....


  Edited September 21, 2018 by jarko

[TheMessiah 430]

34 minutes ago, jarko said:

The only thing that i would presume to bring back a few players is...the engine upgrade, new contacts, new map for mission district & a completely seperated.........Battle Royale mode B) just to be cool like everyone else and follow the hype train haha....

Thats true but matchmaking is still 1 of the biggest problems.What i suggest on 1st page is best solution right now for current system.Simple to do.That in combo with some event and give JT/G1C can bring a lot of players back even without new content/engine upgrade

p.s. its interesting how everybody start to discuss threat/matchmaking so much now when the last server with /pop is about to die gg too late Edited September 21, 2018 by TheMessiah

[zekter 11]

The threat system could actually be improved with had more players, because Bronze, Silver and Gold aren't sufficient to balance players. I know that I'm not bringing any solution to the current pop problem, but sometimes I get really frustrated with this game because of the current threat system. Like, I'm currently gold and I still get owned by Gold players? When I used to drop to silver (which doesn't happen anymore since I lose 5 matches getting rekt and win 3 owning everyone) something weird always happened, I always owned silvers and low-gold players (like me) but when I got queue'd against real golds they used to make me want to uninstall the game and never come, even though I kept playing the game LUL. The only solution for this problem is creating more threats, but since our pop is low as hell I don't think it would actually work and we would need a new matchmaking system. 

Just imagine APB with more threats like Bronze 1 - 3, Silver 1 - 5, Gold 1- 10 and even a completely new threat like Master or something like that with the top 100 players of the server. If we had this system and including some great rewards when you rank up your threat, this game would be awesome.
 

[Mitne 724]

24 minutes ago, displacement said:

Just imagine APB with more threats like Bronze 1 - 3, Silver 1 - 5, Gold 1- 10 and even a completely new threat like Master or something like that with the top 100 players of the server. If we had this system and including some great rewards when you rank up your threat, this game would be awesome.
 

And today new Master among 100 is our (insert dictionary word) thanks to his triggerbot/aimbot/wallhack/all of above (choose), joining the elite of cheating elite!1!
But in all honesty, how you imagine that master being given? On what basis? Just because you killed silver team based on current matchmaking, you can be gold. So... how do you want to solve it? Master championships? And gold threat already punishes golds... now let's punish the best by matching them up with cheaters? Will be fun... Eherm... also this will make dethreating problem even worse. Edited September 21, 2018 by Mitne

[Lato 188]

There is nothing to play for, you can buy everything with money so idk, that's boring

[zekter 11]

21 minutes ago, Mitne said:

And today new Master among 100 is our (insert dictionary word) thanks to his triggerbot/aimbot/wallhack/all of above (choose), joining the elite of cheating elite!1!
But in all honesty, how you imagine that master being given? On what basis? Just because you killed silver team based on current matchmaking, you can be gold. So... how do you want to solve it? Master championships? And gold threat already punishes golds... now let's punish the best by matching them up with cheaters? Will be fun... Eherm... also this will make dethreating problem even worse.

Why would you even dethreat when it's a ranked mode? I'm pretty sure my post lacked information but what I'm really taking about is a "new" mode, with ranked threats making you able to grind from bronze to masters. I'm not talking about the grind we have atm, I'm talking about points. MMR-based matchmaking, the kind of stuff that almost every new game has. If you're a casual player and don't want to play ranked mode, the open-district would be your solution, that's all. I'm giving some ideas based on what I've seen on other games, I'm just a player that wanted to see new stuff on this game. Anyway, to make my idea possible they would have create a lot of stuff and I don't think it would be possible even with the new engine. I'm sorry if I didn't add anything useful to this thread, I was just dreaming without considerating our current situation.

[vsb 6174]

1 hour ago, displacement said:

Just imagine APB with more threats like Bronze 1 - 3, Silver 1 - 5, Gold 1- 10

friendly reminder that each threat color still has 10 threat levels, it’s just not visually shown