Dear Little Orbit

[ShadowXS 130]

7 minutes ago, BXNNXD said:

its fine tbh, im not gonna say i dont enjoy arguing 

I  definitely enjoy debating on topics that interest me, especially since I know I'm not always right about something so i enjoy getting contrary opinions and backing up my own to get a better understanding of a topic, learning something new or getting a new perspective from which to look at certain things. I normally don't post on these APB forums though because it's shit-post city, and I'm not particularly passionate about APB itself, but i see every mistake in the book being made and I'm just left there wanting to scream down LO's throats with solutions to more than half of their problems, which have already been suggested here on the forums before, but ignored. I've been tempted many times to jump into threads but I've managed to remain a lurker for a while. 

 

I don't know, something about reading the title of a Staff thread; "Premium changes!", going into said thread, and finding out that the only change being made was a more efficient way for LO to make money off of a cow that's already bleeding and dried out, rubbed me the wrong way. I then read every subsequent post and about 90% of the responses are people sharing their disappointment that it's not what they requested as a change, which was to reduce the cooldown of utility items for non-premium members, or vice versa; increase the cooldown for premium members to be the same as that of free members, as it's actually a p2w feature by definition.

 

And the only responses in that thread that were addressed by Lixil were the ones asking for things that would tempt them to buy premium, such as pause their premium time or helping someone understand how the new subscription system works. Completely ignored anyone suggesting the p2w cooldown feature, though. Not even acknowledge and respond with "I'll ask about it" or "We can't make that change because blah blah". Just ignored, like every other suggestion I've seen on this forum that has a very valid backing and ground beneath it, such as, once again, 2-factor authentication.

 

So here i am, debating at 7am before having to leave the house. I'm bored now anyway, so this'll be my last response on these forums. I gave my 2 cents and then some, it'll go ignored by LO, and then hey, see you next quarter and we'll see where we are at then. Will absolutely love to talk to you again then and see who can say "told you so" to the other person. I hope it'll be you, cause i do enjoy some APB from time to time.

 

/rant

[Excalibur! 207]

2 hours ago, Frosi said:

Marketing and selling Premium helps them fund the future development of the game

I actually would not pay to someone who makes shitty changes to weapons and splash it in our faces like it is something reasonable.

They have their kids games to suport this rot.

[LordVegeta 35]

1 hour ago, Xcillent said:

Ok the problem with this post is, you don't work at Little Orbit, you can only make suggestions from the outside looking in. Everything you said is the cliche "easier said then done"

 

All you had to say was "I don't agree with this update I suggest they prioritize bigger more meaningful updates instead" and go on with your day.

 

All this "the game is dying" "fix your shitty game" stuff doesn't help anyone and has been said hundreds of times.

 

Sure you can look at steam population stats or can't play a game during the day because of low population. 

 

But let's be honest here this game is 8 years old. And developer support dropped years ago. The only people who play the game are real fans of the game.

 

Little orbit is trying their best to revive an 8 year old computer game and since they've taking over they made weapons balances, server stability, a new weapon, trading systems, and now a holiday day event. Just because YOU don't like all the updates, that doesn't make them invalid

 

At the end of the day this shit takes time, and the remarks on using/wasting resources, money they have, and money they are receiving you shouldn't have any opinions on because, again, you don't work at Little Orbit.

Amen to that. People think all changes can be made with little time & money invested when in reality it takes much longer than you think. Also, what may seem like an easy implementation may turn out to become more complicated than what was anticipated. I've seen things happen like that many times in animation production. Im sure game production is no different. 

[HighSociety 148]

I still got > 365 days of Premium left...

but for some ppl it maybe will be a good thing dunno.

I feel like they do something so just see what is commin in the next months.

[Valkyrja- 55]

3 hours ago, ShadowXS said:

Productive response. This is what is left of the APB community now, congratulations LO.

Yup. It really is. Including yourself

[឴឴឴឴឴឴឴ 23]

2FA is needed only for bank accounts and other private information which can get you in serious trouble IRL in case of hack/leak.
If you are smart enough to have super strong, uncrackable password like admin420, qwerty123 etc and got "hacked" it's your own fault and NOTHING will save your account from "hacking".

[EMilika 41]

Again you elitist snobs in dead NA , try to dictate how we all need to play.

[AsgerLund 1271]

2 minutes ago, EMilika said:

Again you elitist snobs in dead NA , try to dictate how we all need to play.

Hey, back off bro. Off topic one-liners, ignoring what is actually going on in the thread, is kinda my turf.

[HardStyler3 36]

i really like this change i can purchase premium without buying g1c everytime now its nice

[EMilika 41]

3 minutes ago, AsgerLund said:

Hey, back off bro. Off topic one-liners, ignoring what is actually going on in the thread, is kinda my turf.

Come at me

[Excalibur! 207]

23 minutes ago, EMilika said:

Come at me

Jokes on you im watching black lagon right now (exactly this episode). Roberta is the way to go, Revy is a weak fuzzy bunny.

Edited October 11, 2018 by Excalibur!

[MattScott 15242]

I can appreciate the OP’s frustrations. We are not perfect, but I do read the forums, and we do our best.

 

For the record:

- this was requested by players

- it was already implemented for Fallen Earth, so it took very little effort to just standardize the code for APB

- we are working on 2FA

 

Thanks,

Matt

[Nitronik 348]

15 minutes ago, MattScott said:

I can appreciate the OP’s frustrations. We are not perfect, but I do read the forums, and we do our best.

 

For the record:

- this was requested by players

- it was already implemented for Fallen Earth, so it took very little effort to just standardize the code for APB

- we are working on 2FA

 

Thanks,

Matt

Any word of getting rid of the P2W cooldown reduction for Premium users?

I am pretty sure it's the only P2W-by-definition feature in APB. Is it being held up by balancing concerns? (e.g. do we give everyone halved cooldowns, do we keep them the same, do we tweak cooldowns etc..) Anything else?

Edited October 11, 2018 by Nitronik

[neophobia 216]

7 hours ago, ShadowXS said:

[quotes]

 

ye, just kick out the website team etc, hire new people (especially all the experts on conversion from ue 3 to 3.5 (to 4) (especially those familiar with apbs custom code (hint: the former group is not very big either))), once you don't need these anymore, dump them, just hire new ones.

 

this is not how hr etc. works.

 

it's not like there has to be a huge investment made to implement a service like this

 

ofc there are more important things than premium subscriptions

 

Edited October 11, 2018 by neophobia

[Haganu 104]

1 hour ago, MattScott said:

I can appreciate the OP’s frustrations. We are not perfect, but I do read the forums, and we do our best.

 

For the record:

- this was requested by players

- it was already implemented for Fallen Earth, so it took very little effort to just standardize the code for APB

- we are working on 2FA

 

Thanks,

Matt

Any news regarding the progress of 2FA? Still in R&D, or already working on implementing it? Which company will you decide to work with? Google (the go-to service)?

Standard requirement or optional with a small bonus for people that use it? (referring to PSO2's OTP storage for one)

 

I don't intend to add more to what has been said by OP so excuse me if it seems like that, but I feel like in terms of communication there's still ground to win, and that's not because my questions don't get answered. I see a lot of threads are still left with a decent amount of speculation rather than hearing an official word.

That sometimes does make it feel like there's a bit of silence going on from LO's end regarding the discussion. It's not like you have to read every thread though, but a a little bit more would be appreciated.

 

Edited October 11, 2018 by Haganu

[UrsulaRex 20]

So, they think about how better grab your money, instead of fixing the game. What a nice devs.

[Vincci 24]

intresting post 

[Keshi 436]

10 hours ago, Frosi said:

Marketing and selling Premium helps them fund the future development of the game. In my PoV you're just clearly overreacting, the Engine upgrade can only do so much and I rather have a hand full of devs working on it rather than the complete mess that we had many years ago when it came to updates because nothing was organized properly and things were pushed without being tested due to it.

 

What they're doing is allowing passionate players that want to support the game in the long term to buy premium at a reduced price which is something other games such as World of Warcraft do aswell.

^

[Nite 261]

10 hours ago, ShadowXS said:

Wildstar being the latest example. They released as a subscription-only game despite being told they would fail if they didn't go F2P. Six months later they were forced to go F2P due to a staggeringly low number of subscribers. The game got hyped up for a while, another 6 months later they were struggling to retain players. The remaining players later suggested easing the difficulty of the games PvE content to be more attractive to casual players, to boost the population for those who aren't as hardcore, the refused once again, a few months later they reduced the difficulty of all PvE based content, but by then it was too late. Now they're shutting down permanently. And i see the same course for APB.

That part I highlighted in bold, when did all this go down? The only aspect of Wildstar's "difficulty" (and it wasn't really) I know of being a community-agreed issue was the raid attunement, which was in fact changed for the F2P relaunch.

 

I know your overall point is how the Wildstar devs were ignoring the cries of playerbase, and yeah I agree, but this example aint it chief.....

[LordVegeta 35]

5 hours ago, UrsulaRex said:

So, they think about how better grab your money, instead of fixing the game. What a nice devs.

You do know that companies need money in order to run right? What, you think all this work is done by magic pixie dust that fairy god mothers just sprinkled?

[Similarities 226]

4 minutes ago, LordVegeta said:

You do know that companies need money in order to run right? What, you think all this work is done by magic pixie dust that fairy god mothers just sprinkled?

Nah man, the programmers can program so they must be magicians too, they'll just say a few words, pull a sheet up, and there will be a stack of money there. That's how it works, right?

[Sophiie 50]

You clearly have no idea what you're talking about, OP. They had a subscription service for Fallen Earth, all the code is likely written to support such a system on the G1 backend. It was likely a few lines of code to even support this type of thing, and only required one web/platform engineer. The rest of this was likely political.

 

Plus, the team and code knowledge needed for the game systems is completely and utterly different compared to game logic. It's likely a PHP backend, which means most gameplay programmers aren't going to touch it unless they absolutely have to. It was likely done by the web/platform team, which has been incredibly busy especially when you look at the front page of Gamersfirst. The rest of the team is likely working on the engine upgrade.

 

You think LO must be incompetent because an engineer likely spent some of his free time trying to help his company obtain money, and because of that, you believe Little Orbit to be a bad company.

 

Here's some facts: Subscriptions give potential investors and the company itself numbers regarding whether or not they should invest in a product. Subscriptions give a recurring charge so you can estimate how much money you are guaranteed to get at the end of a month, day, or year. This is incredibly helpful from an analytics perspective; if you know you have, say, 100 people signed up for that day, and you have guaranteed income on that day, you may be able to pay x y z employees with that money, or invest in a b c systems. It's all about the bottom line. This is actually a great tactic on LO's part. It means that they get free analytics info about who signs up for their product, it provides another means to convert players to paid status, and provides an easier, manageable subscription service that players can utilize and cancel whenever they want.

 

Imagine you're Little Orbit. F2P games are a wild market. They might give the company $5,000 revenue one day, and the next day, they may give you $50. A subscription guarantees you get that money, or at least have a way of tracking subscriber numbers.

 

What I do not agree with, from a business perspective, is Lixil even entertaining the idea of adding an option to pause premium in another thread. This is a net revenue loss, even though it would be nice for the customer, it destroys the concept of premium. If you have to provide that service, they should be going through customer support and the refund should be one-time only. She should have talked to her coworkers instead of making another blanket statement that gives false hope to the community.

[LordVegeta 35]

4 minutes ago, Similarities said:

Nah man, the programmers can program so they must be magicians too, they'll just say a few words, pull a sheet up, and there will be a stack of money there. That's how it works, right?

Exactly. They all trained under Harry Potter.

[InspiriaHelix 4]

8 minutes ago, Sophiie said:

What I do not agree with, from a business perspective, is Lixil even entertaining the idea of adding an option to pause premium in another thread. This is a net revenue loss, even though it would be nice for the customer, it destroys the concept of premium. If you have to provide that service, they should be going through customer support and the refund should be one-time only. She should have talked to her coworkers instead of making another blanket statement that gives false hope to the community.

While I do think you're right, I am just glad the company is even "entertaining" us at all, at the end of the day. Regardless of making wrong decisions, I am glad they are even bothering with this IP. One of my favorite games almost silently died, and now it's trying to at least make a come back. But the OP, regardless of how much he is "disappointed" in the company, has to give them that.

[ChellyBean 200]

13 hours ago, ShadowXS said:

An already bypassable anti-cheat.

An anti-cheat method that isn't even implemented in the game because they have not yet tweaked anything.

The game runs like crap, lags EVERY DAY without fail, they can tweak all they want, but it hasn't fixed anything, we're just lucky that the DDOS'r got bored, due to the lack of players to bother.

As i said, they can "tweak" all they want, still broken, worse than before. I also note how you HAVE to use the word tweak instead of fix, because even you are aware it's not fixed. Nothing is.

Wow, they managed to give you an ignore list extender, a feature that already existed in the game, but for free this time. Just wow. It's almost like they are on course to give you a friends list extender too.

Pointless. Adds no value to the game.

Aka a marketing plea to get some quick money. A discount on turd, is still too expensive. And a wasted investment when i won't be able to access my purchased digital content in a few months from now when the game gets shut down.

Same as above.

RE: 2-factor authentication

 

Right, that's why 15 year old kids who manage Private World of Warcraft servers with a higher population than this game can implement 2-factor authentication with Google both on their website and in-game, but LO can't, 4 months after acquisition and countless requests/suggestion posts later. But they have the time to implement and contract a third-party company to process your transactions for money, for their in-game currency.

You ask what LO has done in the last 5 months, somebody tells you what they've done in that time and you say it's nothing?

 

APB is a dusty, cobweb filled machine that's been neglected by the previous owners. LO has to go in, clean up the cobwebs, replace parts (some very major parts), get it working again, and then upgrade that machine to a newer version.

 

In five months, LO has made a lot of effort to clean up the mess left behind by Reloaded and yeah, progress is slow, but they're still working on it. 

 

Heck, that Halloween event they just announced is effectively bringing in territory control, something a TON of people have been requesting for years. Is that still not good enough?

 

Just because we dont see new things every single day on LO's part doesnt mean that they're sitting in their office, leaning back and twiddling their thumbs, stalling. APB is a super complex game, running on a heavily modified Unreal Engine from like 2 generations ago by a company that no longer exists. It's really not surprising that things are taking so long. 

 

Im not brownnosing LO either. I've disagreed (heavily) with a few of their decisions, but the fact is that they're trying. 

 

Plus, the website upgrades WERE essential in their own right, because having a website that looks like its still from 2010 just looks awful. Presentation is key, especially when trying to rebrand a game that's got such a.... "Unique" reputation. Sure, it could have been put off until later, but LO even openly stated that it was a 3rd party who designed it for them.

 

Idk 

In the last five months, LO has done a lot. Not all of it objectively good, but still doing things. The fact that they chose to dust this game off is nothing short of a miracle. 

 

Plus, if everyone stops buying premium, the game is making no money. A business is all about making money, and the ugly truth is that if APB stops bringing in cash, LO has no incentive to keep spending money to maintain and improve it. Why would they?

 

Idk

 

This all sounds pretty entitled to me