Why did you Ninja-Nerf the OCA Whisper? [RESOLVED]

[Kewlin 692]

*IMPORTANT EDIT*

I am very sorry about this, but it would seem that due to not owning any Whispers myself, I have became too comfortable and careless in my use of db.apbvault.net, which while an amazing tool and an irreplaceable gift to the community, is under constant development and is bound to have some minor errors from time to time. While I could easily try to pass some of the blame off onto the site and its creator, I take full responsibility for posting about this on the forums before trialing an OCA Whisper to test it out myself, or more closely looking at the page. To be specific with what happened, some time back there was a very helpful feature added to the site that allows people to preview the changes to guns on the test versions of the game, where you can go between the tabs for the Live, TestA, and TestB stats. On the OCA Whisper in particular instead of "Live" the tab is named "Whisper," which caused the site to instead start on the TestA tab, thus showing stats that are not on the live server.

 

I take full responsibility for this, but I just want everyone to know that I had no intent of creating an un-just outrage against Little Orbit, and I sincerely apologize to you all, especially the Little Orbit team. This is an amazing lesson in only trusting totally what you can prove for yourself, and I hope I, and all of you, can learn from this in the future. I should be better than this, and I will try harder in the future.

 

I will leave this post here in its entirety for future reference, but please note that everything I said in it is based on a mistaken perception of reality.

*END OF IMPORTANT EDIT*

It would seem that during the balance changes, Little Orbit simply replaced all of the OCA Whispers with standard OCAs without saying anything about it at all. The only thing that indicates this beside the stats themselves is that they did this is that they butchered the descriptions of most or all of the Whispers on ARMAS (unless I'm mistaken and they said they did this somewhere.)

 

Now I understand that some people think it's bad that the OCA Whisper had unique stats, and I understand their concern of it being better than the normal OCA, but let's be realistic here. . . the silencer is shitty on the OCA and there's no reason to own an OCA Whisper except its unique stats. The OCA has barely any recoil, so that upside is worthless, and even if tracers did come back it's a CQC gun so it's not going to be any harder to find who's shooting you without tracers really (note that you can A. hear and see the person, B. see them on the radar, and C. see where any shot that hits you comes from.) So is there any good reason to use an OCA with a preset silencer over an OCA with CJ on it? 'Cause I don't see one.

 

As it is, honestly, having a 50-55m dropoff doesn't actually allow the gun to be really effective past the 30m of the normal OCA's dropoff, and the 0.8 crouch modifier is certainly not enough to extend the gun's range far (and consider how slow you move while crouching, completely removing the point of an SMG, which is being mobile.) So overall, I can't say I think the OCA Whisper or any of its variants were OP, so I'm just left wondering. . . why did LO nerf it without saying anything?

 

 

I would very much prefer all OCA Whispers be reverted to their prior stats. In addition, while you're at it, please make the OCA-EW 626-SD NFCP3 a Whisper as well, as there was already a Whisper with 2 open slots so the OCA SD 2-slot might as well be a Whisper too (I DO NOT, however, suggest making the OCA-EW 626.2-SD "Silverado" into a Whisper, as that could easily be overpowered since it has CJ2 as well.) If nothing else, it's a huge issue that LO nerfed the OCA Whisper like this A. because anyone I know who bought an OCA Whisper bought it specifically because they thought its different stats were cool, so you're just ripping people off essentially with a bait and switch who bought something for one reason and then entirely removing that reason, and B. because it was a ninja-nerf, and ninja-nerfs should never ever happen under any circumstances. I honestly see this as roughly the same as if LO suddenly, without saying anything, just made the FAR use STAR stats instead.

 

For reference, any OCA with 'Whisper' in the name used Whisper stats, the one exception being the PDW-57 'Kris' which used the Whisper stats without having 'Whisper' in the name.

 

If you think the Whisper is OP, give it an additional downside beside the silencer, but don't just effectively remove the gun from the game. Changing the OCA Whisper to a standard OCA is not only sketchy as fuck, it removes variety from the game, which is something APB sorely needs.

 

 

Can any LO staff please make a comments on this?

 

(Note, before someone makes a comment about how I'm just whining because my OCA Whisper got nerfed, I do not and never have owned an OCA Whisper, as I've never been big on playing OCA. I simply thought it was a cool gun and am sad to see it effectively removed from the game.)

[Railer 8]

While we at it can we finally revert the OCA changes that G1 did a while ago? The gun is stupid with its current TTK/bloom recovery. Make it back 0.7 ttk so maybe Cap40 will see some play.

 

k, thx.

[CookiePuss 5377]

Mothertrucker.... this better be a gosh darn mistake.

LO/10 job... again.

Edited November 6, 2018 by CookiePuss

[vsb 6171]

regardless of whether the 50m range is useful or not i don’t really see a reason why it needs to be there, you yourself state it rarely adds anything to gameplay

 

as for why (or why not i guess), orbit has a pretty substantial history of patchy (heh) patch notes which is kind of impressive given that they’ve only owned apb for 5 months lol

[CookiePuss 5377]

I guess this is just karma for defending LO when they fucked everyone over who owned IR3 presets.

That'll teach me.

[Kewlin 692]

17 minutes ago, Railer said:

While we at it can we finally revert the OCA changes that G1 did a while ago? The gun is stupid with its current TTK/bloom recovery. Make it back 0.7 ttk so maybe Cap40 will see some play.

 

k, thx.

 

Yeah. . . I would appreciate that as well. . .

 

 

9 minutes ago, BXNNXD said:

regardless of whether the 50m range is useful or not i don’t really see a reason why it needs to be there, you yourself state it rarely adds anything to gameplay

 

It's a matter of preference, so basically the same reason that there are assault rifles in the game beside the N-TEC and secondaries beside the FBW, .45, and RFP. It adds variety, and I personally would likely prefer to use a Whisper over a normal OCA, I just never bought one and I don't use the OCA much in the first place. As it is though, I'm glad I never bought a Kris since it now is just a straight up worse OCA.

 

[Excalibur! 207]

Or nerfing legendarys and then release another one so everyone is forced to switch to that.

 

Pretty g1 business... well they still are g1 anyways.

 

ps: anyone remember the low yield ninja nerf... really transparent.

Edited November 6, 2018 by Excalibur!

[Scarlet 35]

can we get a refund for this gun?

[Aeronaut 647]

3 hours ago, Scarlet said:

can we get a refund for this gun?

can i get a refund for this game?

[vsb 6171]

1 minute ago, Aeronaut said:

can i get a refund for this game?

can i get a refund for my life?

[Akahi 25]

At this point it seems to be a very dicey thing to get a legendary. Whether you get a gun from opening boxes or just buying in the game marketplace, there is a substantial sacrifice in getting these weapons. It doesn't seem right to change the stats of a weapon you obtained to make it less useful, not without some compensatory balance.

[Kewlin 692]

I am very sorry to you all, this has all been a huge mistake based on a minor error in db.apbvault.net, and I have edited the OP to include my apology.

[vsb 6171]

12 minutes ago, Akahi said:

At this point it seems to be a very dicey thing to get a legendary. Whether you get a gun from opening boxes or just buying in the game marketplace, there is a substantial sacrifice in getting these weapons. It doesn't seem right to change the stats of a weapon you obtained to make it less useful, not without some compensatory balance.

the whisper isn’t a legendary

 

and no, you shouldn’t get any compensation for balance changes - your compensation is a more balanced game 

[Speedz 147]

I am very sorry about that, the whisper hasn't been changed at all. Kewlin already noticed, for some reason the Whisper variants show up as "WHISPER" instead of "LIVE" which puts them behind the TestA and TestB versions and make the website display the wrong version by default. I'll probably disable the feature once I get to it. Weapon testing seems to be done for now anyways.

[LilyRain 671]

6 hours ago, Excalibur! said:

Or nerfing legendarys and then release another one so everyone is forced to switch to that.

 

Pretty g1 business... well they still are g1 anyways.

 

ps: anyone remember the low yield ninja nerf... really transparent.

 

1 hour ago, Akahi said:

At this point it seems to be a very dicey thing to get a legendary. Whether you get a gun from opening boxes or just buying in the game marketplace, there is a substantial sacrifice in getting these weapons. It doesn't seem right to change the stats of a weapon you obtained to make it less useful, not without some compensatory balance.

 

And then few people argue to the bone that APB is 100% free from pay-to-win schemes~~

 

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

 

I’m going to lock this thread because it’s creating confusion.

 

We didn’t nerf the OCA Whisper. It was a misunderstanding on the OP’s part. We take nerfing weapons (of any kind) very seriously, and we try hard to communicate the reasons for any changes in a timely fashion to the community.

 

Thanks,

Matt