My very positive epidemic experience (featuring my clanmates)

[TheHidden-Tember 142]

So yesterday we had a district takeover in the Epidemic district. What is a district takeover? Simply put your entire clan joins the same district and plays missions there under the same voice chat app (in this case discord because teamspeak is dead). We joined in 3 groups for a total of 10 players and let me tell you: it was a blast! (BTW Oversight is recruiting enforcers plz join)

 

What makes it different?

 

I said it was great as a clan event but really from the experience we gathered, it also works if you're in a group of 4. The game changer here is the voice chat. It makes you win, period. You're fighting two armies of headless chicken who have no idea what they're doing, coordination levels are 0. Most of them are busy completing daily activities or defending their points. The reality is that this game mode is all about mobility. The playable area changes constantly, so you need your best available cars and anti-vehicle weapons to win. And being able to actually talk to your teammates (because let's face it no one really listens to the team chat) is a blessing. I actually spent most of yesterday looking at the map screen, directing my troops around. It added a whole strategic layer to our usual APB experience, and in the few cases where our groups were separated into different teams we could still gang up on the third team and betray each other at the end and it was super fun. We also ended up using vernacular locations (as in referring to places by a name like "city hall" instead of by their location like "west of the map") which was an interesting experience.

 

How should you actually play this mode?

 

Capture the City hall. Just do it. It becomes available whenever one of the team reaches 25% infection and has a nearly undestroyable barrel core (at least not at range considering it's inside the building) with a super high up spawn point, the same spawn point that allows you to jump in central park as soon as it becomes available. In a more general way, you should always be ready for new areas to appear and have a barrel to capture them. The game starts with 2 available areas for each team which will generally belong to those teams (although we've managed to blitz them a few times and steal them from their team, they usually get recaptured pretty fast). Then groups of 3 areas appear whenever a team reaches either 25%, 50% and 75% infection rate. The first one to appear at 25% usually has the city hall (so capture it), the kiosk/east park, and the skate park/east mcdonalds. The subsequent captureable areas appear seemingly in random locations but always at those multiples of 25%. Always keep an eye on them, have a barrel ready. You will always have enough barrels to capture all 3 new areas so try assigning one to each member of your group and splitting them for maximal coverage. Whenever one of the team reaches 90%, it is time to attack the park. It doesn't matter how far behind your own team is, it will catch up eventually if you can survive this final phase. EVERYONE GRAB A BARREL AND GO TO CENTRAL PARK. More barrels means more chances of instantly starting to cap it whenever your team reaches 100%. Being there slightly before everyone else means you'll be able to prep the area with ALIGs and volcanoes and car detonators and whatever lame defenssive thing you want. OP weapons don't matter there anymore, only numbers do. Good luck, and may the best team win.

 

What would I want/ not want to see in a future turf wars mode?

 

• Get rid of the fog. It makes sense here because IT IS HALLOWEEN WHATEVER I WONT JUDGE, but really the fog leads to very awkward interactions where you see an enemy who has been there for over 10s and none of you saw each other so the first one who magically sees a red name appear over the other's head will shoot him and win. 
• Give us more substantial monetary rewards and fix that glitch which sometimes makes everyone win 0$. Those are long missions, and you'll be using tons of LMG ammo and rockets, without even racking that many kills. So it would be great if I didn't exit the epidemic district holding less money than what I entered with.
• Allow us to raise our weapon roles rewards. I started this thinking I could get a ton of marksman kills, which I did, but none of them registered in my roles so I soon defaulted to the Volcano JC which is the objectively best weapon in this game mode. In general I believe that most people complete their explosives roles first so in another district they would be tempted to use guns they haven't completed yet. But here, roles don't matter so you see a heck ton of explosives and car detonators. I am confident that raising weapon roles will ensure a more varied weapon pool here. (Also if your decision to disable it was to prevent farming, just stop. EVERYONE in this event was farming for their dailies anyway. You cannot stop the farm. Stop trying to stop us farm. Farmers will always find another way to farm)
• The poison in the areas is a mixed one for me. Sure, it helps to prevent spawn killing, but defending is already easy enough. I found myself categorizing areas between "easy" and "hard", where easy areas are ones where you can just snipe the barrel core with your volcano, and hard areas are those where you need to actually enter the buildings and cross the enemy spawns to find that core. In the first case i'd never enter the poison, in the second case the poison would make it near impossible to destroy the core. My opinion is if you keep the poison, rework all the areas accordingly to make them easily targettable. If you decide to remove the poison, make sure that the barrel cores are inaccessible from the outside and require actual infiltration to reach.

 

Either way, thanks a lot for bringing us this event. It has its issues, but it's nothing that can't be fixed in a later version of it.

 

 

Edited November 3, 2018 by TheHidden-Tember

[Criseya 14]

Nice one!

[TheHidden-Tember 142]

MFW my thread gets nearly zero feedback because i'm not being toxic/complaining about anything or spouting controversy 

[MattScott 15242]

Hi there,

 

Wow! This was a fun read. I love the narrative explanation, and it was great to see how your clan engaged the event.

 

I’ve sent the thread to the dev team to digest the comments at the end. We will be doing a post mortem after the 12th to capture learnings on how we can make the next event better.

 

Thanks,

Matt

[vsb 6171]

positive vibez dood

[Excalibur! 207]

Fog is fine and there is no trouble with it. It prevents long range weapons stomping and spawn camping... but hey "le positive review".

[vsb 6171]

55 minutes ago, Excalibur! said:

Fog is fine and there is no trouble with it. It prevents long range weapons stomping and spawn camping... but hey "le positive review".

the fog rewards long range weapons since it becomes far harder to see who shot you and from where, especially if you don’t have a long range weapon yourself 

 

the event itself trends towards longer ranged weapons too - it’s obviously an advantage to toss out damage at any range you need

[HardStyler3 36]

i actually really like the fog i would like to let it stay it makes the atmosphere better and it fits the infecting with gas and chemicals more realistic

[Excalibur! 207]

4 hours ago, BXNNXD said:

the fog rewards long range weapons since it becomes far harder to see who shot you and from where, especially if you don’t have a long range weapon yourself 

 

the event itself trends towards longer ranged weapons too - it’s obviously an advantage to toss out damage at any range you need

You barely know what you are saying, without fog you are able to spawn camp enemys bases at 100m with osmaw, volcano and opgl. Like, no.

[vsb 6171]

1 minute ago, Excalibur! said:

You barely know what you are saying, without fog you are able to spawn camp enemys bases at 100m with osmaw, volcano and opgl. Like, no.

you can do that right now lol, theres a reason half the district uses volcanos

 

all the fog does is make it harder to determine where the shooters are

[Excalibur! 207]

Just now, BXNNXD said:

you can do that right now lol, theres a reason half the district uses volcanos

 

all the fog does is make it harder to determine where the shooters are

Yes you can, and you can know where snipers are watching the radar, their red nick or by sound.

[yood 345]

TheHidden-Tember your name alone irritates me . Yes, it's a group event, but why doesn't anyone think about the players playing solo ? clans have always enjoyed the advantage .

Edited November 4, 2018 by Yood

[Akahi 25]

@TheHidden-Tember 

 

I wish you guys had a criminal clan! 

[vsb 6171]

5 minutes ago, Akahi said:

@TheHidden-Tember 

 

I wish you guys had a criminal clan! 

i think undersight is the criminal side, he did only say the enforcer side was recruiting tho

[Akahi 25]

6 minutes ago, BXNNXD said:

i think undersight is the criminal side, he did only say the enforcer side was recruiting tho

Well maybe one day ...

[Kominis 26]

Just here to say. Discord is trash(for voice chat), teamspeak is not dead.

[AsgerLund 1271]

7 hours ago, Yood said:

TheHidden-Tember your name alone irritates me . Yes, it's a group event, but why doesn't anyone think about the players playing solo ? clans have always enjoyed the advantage .

Yeah, @TheHidden-Tember. How dare you enjoy this team-based event in this team-based game with friends. Alone the fact that you have friends irritates me.

[TheHidden-Tember 142]

7 hours ago, Yood said:

TheHidden-Tember your name alone irritates me . Yes, it's a group event, but why doesn't anyone think about the players playing solo ? clans have always enjoyed the advantage .

I did say in another thread that playing this solo is kinda bad, yes. the dev team will need to find ways to sort simple things like objective visibility and rewards to improve that.

[GhosT 1301]

The event sure has its flaws, but can be fun.

This is a well-written post.

[yood 345]

TheHidden-Tember . I play solo 7 years , I don't need help in the form of clana and pseudo friends . I played in clans ,I do not like to answer for the actions of the clan partner , I'm a freelance artist , I do only what I need personally . Clans always misused , playing match-fixing , render dishonest assistance to clan members .

 

AsgerLund  I'm having a pretty good time playing the event . in 90 % of matches I am in the top five players of the match .

 

I want to play SOLO with singles like me . I believe that clans kill game . clans should only play against clans .

Edited November 4, 2018 by Yood

[CookiePuss 5377]

11 minutes ago, Yood said:

~snip~

Dear Yood,

 Please stop spamming shitty music over VOIP.

                                 Sincerely,

                                       All of APB

[TheHidden-Tember 142]

4 hours ago, Yood said:

I don't need help in the form of clana and pseudo friends .

._.

[foscor77 169]

Too long to read.

[Tigrix 308]

I think the fog adds a nice element of variation
Lots of long ranged weapons, but also car-rushers etc to counter the snipers and then you got the aligs and volcanos to counter the vehicles.. its imo, a nice balance.
Without the fog, every volcano/alig would be even stronger and destroy any vehicles 60+ meters out, it'd be a boring snoozefest.

[yood 345]

1 hour ago, Tigrix said:

Without the fog, every volcano/alig would be even stronger and destroy any vehicles 60+ meters out, it'd be a boring snoozefest.

complete agreement.  fog is part of the event .