APB needs new players. Ideas? Little Orbit?

[Merody 8]

It wasn't because this is NOT about suggestions for the game. This thread is about... Well, WTF, read the title, or the tl;dr in the main post.

[Zascha 47]

Engine Upgrade to MINIMUM Unreal 3.5, PREFERABLY Unreal 4.0

 

Period.

 

There's nothing the community can do or should do without this game receiving some kind of worth-while update. Anything short of these two possibilities is a complete and total waste of time for everyone, including Little Orbit.

 

/thread

[_chain 176]

2 hours ago, Merody said:

What I was proposing here is to do our thing, collaborating with them if possible. Coordinating these proposals with their marketing at engine update launch is included in that proposal of mine.

Aight. Any ideas for our thing?

 

The best we can do right now is give good reviews on steam, I think they're pretty poor and low overall. People only look at the latest reviews though, and so does the steam algorythm (it first shows you the most recent critics, then the total). But this, again, should be done accordingly and when the new engine drops. 

 

(People are inheritedly scared of bad scores on games, especially with free to play titles.)

[Fortune Runner 796]

Engine Upgrade (EU) is nearly done to 3.5

Matchmaking and threat has been talked about being reworked.

New content was mentioned a possibility and we have had some already.

Different thread was mentioning advertising of some sort needed.

COMPETENT game reviews would help. Too many that do not know the basics give APB a sour taste although some  have valid points. Some community already have channels for this.

Racing district was suggested for years because some people like that for fun. Sounds fine to me.

Civilians that don't look like the walking dead would be nice. Perhaps a customization contest for ppl to design npcs better? Looks do matter after all.

[Haganu 103]

There's absolutely no way the community is going to actively work with Little Orbit to make the game attract more players. 

There's nothing they can do, and even if they could they straight up wouldn't. You can tell people to stop dethreating and those people will blame golds in silver. You can tell golds to play in gold but they will say there's no one to play against then. Neither of those parties are entirely correct - nor are entirely wrong - but they sure as hell put themselves above anything. This sadly caused APB to bleed players for 5 years and counting. In collaboration with Reloaded Productions doing absolutely nothing to combat this.

 

First and foremost: Fix player distribution FFS.

 

After that, a little incentive to have people login could be interesting. Talking about small things like login rewards and small scale events with small amounts of new content for F2P.

Collaborations with other games or media could be an interesting thing for the long future. These are a few small ideas that probably missed the whole point of the thread.

 

Eitherway we can't and won't do anything about the lack of new players.

It's in Little Orbit's hand.

Edited December 30, 2018 by Haganu

[NotZombieBiscuit 3146]

Let's be real. 

 

APBs time has passed. Anyone that will/would have tried the game already has. It is an amazing job that the game has actually survived this long.

[Darkzero3802 606]

Copy and pasting cause this relates

1. Threat and matchmaking. This needs immediate attention to remedy the issues that are improper threats by alot of the vet community causing grief among the new players. The system needs an overhaul as well as how easy it is to threat up. As it stands getting top threat is not only unsatisfying but for many tryhards it gives them an excuse to threat shame anyone who isnt gold threat. This in turn well help matchmaking find better balanced matches for everyone.

2. Community. This has been a problem for yrs, there are alot of toxic players in APB that threat shame others (mentioned above) grief just to annoy others, encourage less then stellar gameplay (cheating and bug abusing) and overall just make the quality of life in APB horrid. LO needs to take a crack at all this to change the APB culture into one that ppl want to be around and that is fun and helpful for all otherwise new players will quickly leave the game and the player base wont improve.

3. Cheating. Simply put LO needs to do more in this front as there are quite afew closet cheaters getting past battle eye.

[LChristy 27]

14 hours ago, Roxane said:

i expect better graphics

Here it is.

 

[SpuzvaBob 92]

Moved thread to correct section.

 

-Spuzva

[Merody 8]

So basically all of us seem to agree that any initiative will need to take place when the engine update is released. I completely agree with that! We can prepare stuff for that date.

 

15 hours ago, _chain said:

Aight. Any ideas for our thing?

Your idea of writing reviews of the game is great. We musn't say in any way that people must write positive reviews, because that could be seen as manipulating reviews and that would be bad, but what we can do instead of some form of a "Reconsider Your Review (RYR)" campaign which can consist in encouraging people to write reviews or update theirs once the engine update is ready, showing others in Steam how nice the game has become once the engine gets updated

 

12 hours ago, Haganu said:

There's absolutely no way the community is going to actively work with Little Orbit to make the game attract more players.

I want to do something. So you just basically point some things that need to be addressed within the game. And I really agree of them. But as you say, these are Little Orbit's bussiness, not ours. What we can do instead is to focus on more stuff.

 

So far, these are some of the ideas we have gathered:

• Gardening the old Wiki. Making it useful and up to date. I am doing this by myself and have some materials prepared.
• Revive the San Paro City Mentors. We may need some help and/or marketing from Little Orbit for this, but it's an awesome idea.
• Promote a Reconsider Your Review campaign for the engine update so there are plenty of updated reviews.

[_chain 176]

49 minutes ago, Merody said:

Your idea of writing reviews of the game is great.

Thanks sweetie, i know

[vsb 6170]

2 hours ago, Merody said:

Revive the San Paro City Mentors. We may need some help and/or marketing from Little Orbit for this, but it's an awesome idea.

afaik this is one of the functions of the new volunteer GMs

[Haganu 103]

9 hours ago, Merody said:

• Promote a Reconsider Your Review campaign for the engine update so there are plenty of updated reviews.

We have no idea how the game will perform in UE3.5. And as countless times said before, UE3.5 isn't going to be that magic thing that will make everything plaguing this game vanish.

Reconsider your review when it's the right time - when the majority of the shit going down in this game is resolved. But that's common sense for anyone occasionally coming back to a negatively reviewed game to check up on if it got any better.

[Sniperturtle 65]

Put new accounts into a newbie district (use green districts for this) up until rank 60 or 10 hours playing time on at least one character, and prevent all other players from accessing it. Also restrict green to new players and make it unattainable once silver was reached.

[Merody 8]

6 hours ago, BXNNXD said:

afaik this is one of the functions of the new volunteer GMs

Can you point me towards those people so I can contact them? Thanks!

[vsb 6170]

2 hours ago, Merody said:

Can you point me towards those people so I can contact them? Thanks!

they're the GMs you see ingame, afaik there was only one application period and they've already been chosen

[VickyFox 353]

9 hours ago, Merody said:

Can you point me towards those people so I can contact them? Thanks!

GMs are chosen by staff members so you'd probably better off going straight to either MattScott or Lixil, Not sure if that's part of Lixil's role though.

Personally I question the SPCM program as before when applying under G1 it felt like you had to be squeaky clean and couldn't be critical of G1.

While I more than happy to hop servers to help new comers and give them advice on where they could improve, or give suggestions about alternative items to try. It felt like it wasn't worth applying for if it meant that one couldn't express criticism.

 

I admit I feisty but It's purely out of loving passion for APB and wanting to see it improve after so many years. But it was just easier to help people on my own terms as I am without a title.

The new SPCT diversity gives me new hope though.

 

Back on topic.

I think the Refer A Friend's program would be really good but to reward new account.

Under GamersFirst, It felt like it was trying to bribe existing users to get their friends to join.

New players get an incentive and a little gift for joining. Personally If given the option, If I genuinely believed and felt like I could wholeheartedly recommend APB then I don't need a reward when I got another friend to play along side with in a game that I love!

 

Others may want an incentive or reward for doing a good thing for the community and gamer overall, then that's understandable too.

[rooq 175]

8 hours ago, BXNNXD said:

they're the GMs you see ingame, afaik there was only one application period and they've already been chosen

There were a bunch of trials on Citadel a few days ago, I think new ones are still being chosen.

[(PS4)grunge76 24]

What APB Reloaded needs is a dev team that actually cares.  Little Orbit promised an update for ps4, to fix issues, in July 2018 that got pushed to August, then September, and finally they stated by the end of 2018.  Today is January 1, 2019 and they never released the update that was promised.  In my eyes they are just as bad as GamersFirst.

[VickyFox 353]

22 hours ago, (PS4)grunge76 said:

What APB Reloaded needs is a dev team that actually cares.  Little Orbit promised an update for ps4, to fix issues, in July 2018 that got pushed to August, then September, and finally they stated by the end of 2018.  Today is January 1, 2019 and they never released the update that was promised.  In my eyes they are just as bad as GamersFirst.

Gamersfirst said that we would get an Engine Upgrade in Q1 2014... PC still on Unreal Engine 3.0 since 2008, PlayStation and Xbox run on Unreal Engine 3.5!

Wait in line!

[CookiePuss 5373]

On 12/30/2018 at 11:49 PM, BXNNXD said:

they're the GMs you see ingame, afaik there was only one application period and they've already been chosen

 

On 12/31/2018 at 8:18 AM, rooq said:

There were a bunch of trials on Citadel a few days ago, I think new ones are still being chosen.

You are both correct. 

The application period is over, but new candidates are still being trialed. 

[neophobia 216]

they didn't run a single promotion campaign yet - no big update steam announcements etc - no press material/releases, no nothing. my best guess is that they want  to get the game in a good shape first. and with the ue 3.5 update, there might be some positive articles about apb coming.

[BrandonBranderson 672]

On 1/1/2019 at 7:59 AM, (PS4)grunge76 said:

What APB Reloaded needs is a dev team that actually cares.  Little Orbit promised an update for ps4, to fix issues, in July 2018 that got pushed to August, then September, and finally they stated by the end of 2018.  Today is January 1, 2019 and they never released the update that was promised.  In my eyes they are just as bad as GamersFirst.

I don't think its possible to be as bad as GamersFirst considering they left us on PC without a real update for years (not including events) with absolute silence and they rushed out your console version in an extremely unfinished state.  Are you aware of LO's roadmap?  First of all they didn't promise the update by the end of the year, Matt said he wanted it to be done by then, but then events and stuff got in the way.  Secondly, the PC version needs to be updated to the same codebase as the console version if they're going to make any real meaningful changes to either platform.  The PC version being updated means that you guys will be getting the features we already have on PC.  You'll be getting the music editor and I'm pretty sure you'll finally have a day/night cycle too.  The PC version needs to be fixed first so then they won't have to develop two separate versions of the game.  I get where you're coming from though, the console version is in dire need of some fixes and performance tuning, and LO hasn't delivered on your platform yet, but they have been like god's gift on PC after what G1 put us through.  I urge you to check out their "State of the game 2018" post.  It highlights what they've done over the past 7 months and what their current plans for Q1 2019 are.  

 

You can read it here: https://www.gamersfirst.com/apb/news/2018/12/29/state-of-the-game-2018

[PedroBruh 0]

Oceania servers?

[ZGC 0]

I used to have an account with the original APB from start 'till finish and I was part of the APB:R CBT, which I would say was the "golden era" of the game.

 (I lost my main account years ago because of an incident involving an adult video link being posted in DISTRICT and not in WHISPER).

 

Personally speaking from what I've seen over the years. The only reason we won't see a resurgence in new players is because of the issue with one large threat level. That level being GOLD. 

 

Because GOLD players are unwilling to stay in the GOLD servers and contain themselves there, it is only suitable that the new development team "Little Orbit" moderate them by force and re-instate the THREAT-LOCK on servers. This will solve two main issues at once. GOLD servers being empty and the loss of a player base due to GOLD players seal-clubbing. If this isn't solved as soon as possible, by 2021 All Points Bulletin: Reloaded may be gone forever. By keeping the game open and (basically) refusing to balance said game, you will be unable to attract a new audience of players thanks to an uncaring community of those who wish to benefit for themselves. The few that do care for newcomers will be unable to keep those newcomers into the game for long if at all since those newcomers will constantly be seal-clubbed constantly by higher levels. 

 

One of the main things Little Orbit should do before they even start on an Engine Update is re-instate the District THREAT-LOCK.