What do you think ruined the game?

[yood 345]

Communication, or lack thereof. There are so many people with great ideas, or good reasons to not like an idea, that were effectively ignored. Game changes were implemented that nobody wanted, and game changes everyone desperately wants were never even talked about by any of the red-names.

Performance. If you had average or worse computers/internet, little hiccups would occur all the time. If it were a coop game that's fine, but when you're about to make a game-deciding kill and your client decides to freeze for a split second, you can't help but feel pretty pissed off.

Open world isn't fun. This is a big draw for new players, who are interested in GTA-esque free roam fun times. Alas, APB is not as similar to GTA as people who have never played it expect, and they find out there are barely any open world activities with over 10 minutes of content to them, and the only one that does is faction limited and nothing but a grind for cash.

Matchmaking, population, and mission fairness overall. Basically, missions were often skewed towards one team. Way, way too often. This is a very effective way of making a game not fun at all. Population is lumped in this category because without enough players to choose from, the matchmaker is going to struggle. However, this was further limited by the fact that matchmaking was per instance, only offering up to 45 people per faction. This always made it difficult for the game to make evenly matched games, even before the addition of...

District/Threat segregation. Worst update in the history of APB, as far as I'm concerned. This update resulted in rewarding dethreating too much, so many more players participated in it. With the rampant dethreating, the threat accuracy of players who didn't dethreat was also rendered inaccurate, because they fought players with lower threat too often, not to mention the games they won because enemies forfeit. This further messed up matchmaking, resulting in the chaotic mess it was towards the end of my time playing APB.

But the real game-breaker, from my experience playing this game for so many years, and having an active role in the community (SPCM)...

The players.

First and foremost, the playerbase of APB is not newbie friendly at all. The community constantly drove new players away. And without new players, population does nothing but decline. Which, of course, is literally what people are talking about when they say a game is dying.

People here and there would help out new players, but often they were left to fend for themselves. APB is actually a very hard game - it requires an immense amount of map knowledge, reaction time, situational awareness, and positioning skills to stay on top. So even if everything else was all well and good, the fact that so few people were willing to play with, help, and mentor new players was a pretty big issue.

But it gets worse. Not only do people not want to help new players, they actively drive them away. Dethreaters play the game just to relentlessly destroy new players. And when this happens there's a large amount of toxicity about it ("you fucking suck" etc). You might think if they're naturally skilled enough or put in some effort they can get out of the newbie environment, but because of threat segregation thre's two newbie stages. Once you reach a threat level that kicks you out of your home and into the realm of what I call "superfreaks" (those 10,000 hour golds everyone thinks is hacking), suddenly you feel like you're the worst player in the world again. And then those players stomp them relentlessly, and often with even more toxicity than the non-top-tier players. Which is especially fucked up, since you'd think people who have invested 10,000 hours and probably thousands of dollars would want new players to stick around and improve so the game doesn't die and they eventually get some new competition.

Then there's the whole "hacker" atmosphere. This comes down to the players too, but honestly not in the way you expect. Yes cheating exists, and yes it's been a massive problem in the past. But the truth is APB doesn't face anywhere near as much cheaters as it once did, during the dark era, but everyone still thinks it does. Imagine starting playing a new shooter game, and every now and again you run into a player who seems like he's outright psychic, and kills you faster than you think is possible in the game. Maybe, if you're reasonable, you'll think you just don't know anything about the game. But what if you see the chat window filled with nothing but "hackusations"? You don't know any better. You might think the game is full of cheaters, to the very brim. The truth is, there was a pivotal point in APB where there weren't quite so many cheaters, but the game was still being damaged by the belief that there was. A new player joins APB, and gets absolutely stomped by a player that has thousands of hours, knows the map like the back of his hand, and has all the little nuances of aiming and positioning down. This player is just practiced, and has a massive amount of APB-specific skill over this player. However, the new player believes that he's a cheater, because he believes the game is full of cheaters. This happens dozens more times. Eventually the guy gets sick of it, and one of two things happens - either he never plays missions (or APB) again, or he goes and downloads a cheat program. Because the community is so sure everyone is cheating, more people will cheat because it "evens the playing field". Hackusating people is literally creating more hackers. It's a stupid vicious cycle that nobody seems to comprehend. But more than that, hackusating so repeatedly is making people leave the game, thinking there's more cheaters than there are. But the truth is, APB is hard, and there's usually just a giant skill gap (and/or luck, if we're being honest here lol). But people don't see that.

APB is my all-time favourite game, and I've met some wonderful people in there. But the truth is, far too many of the mission players - the publicly vocal ones anyway - are terrible people, who have done probably irreversible damage to such an amazing game. I'm not saying most people in the game are terrible people, I don't have the statistics - but there's enough of them, and they're loud enough, to make it look like most of the player-base are all jackasses and morons.

p.s. I am not the author of the text . reddit.com .

 

Am I the only one that hates gold players?

I started playing again after six months to see if this game has gotten better and I’m in the silver class and so I log into the silver servers, but yet every time I get it a match I always get paired with a gold plus I’m ALWAYS facing a gold, and all of them a equipped to the brink with hi-leveled guns and mods. And so either I lose or I get kicked by the group’s leader (who most of the time, is also too a gold rank) because, let’s face it the chances of me killing a gold is pretty much a 1 in 5 chance and the leader wants to win so badly he’ll kick the weakest member.
I.E: me

and I hate to admit to this but I’ve too joined the bronze server just to have a simple match with a chance to win, but lo and behold there are golds there too!

I don’t know about you guys but they need to make a better penalizations for golds on lower servers rather than the whole “less rewards” imo their rank itself should go down if they keep killing lower ranks 
Heck a handicap mod/system would be nice too

p.s. I am not the author of the text . steamcommunity.com .

Edited April 29, 2019 by Yood

[Lato 188]

Time

[vsb 6174]

2 yoods? for gods sake who let this happen

 

17 minutes ago, Lato said:

Time

rip apb

[wHisHi 206]

Again one more topic about all issues we already discussed 10 times already?  Yes, game has a lot of issues, G1 didnt do sh**

[swft 356]

G1 took too long to realize the game needed the engine upgrade to be developable again. Now it's too late and even the engine upgrade alone won't change much without changing core gameplay mechanics and gamemodes to be relevant in 2019 and so on.

Edited April 29, 2019 by swft

[BrandonBranderson 672]

That last line was super disappointing for me.  I thought Yood finally wrote a coherent thread up until that point.  Good thing I skimmed over most of that text. 

 

On topic:  A combination of a lot of things.  

-The Uglification of APB that made it look the way it does now.

-Threat segregation halved the playerbase and it never recovered from that.

-Poor weapon balance over the years.  Anyone remember the C-2?

-G1's money grubbing ways in general drove a lot of people away.

-The game was never finished to begin with.

-Years of neglect

 

[ZoriaDunne 327]

Developers who didn't care one bit about the game. (Talking about G1)

[Tako 93]

Gamersfirst

[neophobia 216]

pointless hackusations and p2w accusations (partially due to some items being p2w in the past xd)

lack of content/updates last years

plain milking

[Gothina 22]

For me it was the lack of new content(contacts).

[TheMessiah 430]

In my opinion the fact that G1/RP decide to bring apb to consoles.Because of that everything gos super slow cause is work x3.I knew that will happen and i comment back in 2013 when the blog for engine upgrade and future plans came out.Bassically dat decision ruin the future of this game

[Diabeetus_X 10]

what ruined it for me? that Character Name Change is 1,199 G1C

[TheJellyGoo 343]

2 hours ago, BrandonBranderson said:

[...]

-Threat segregation halved the playerbase and it never recovered from that.

[...]

I really wonder where this comes from. Loved that time and somehow it ended up as a collective dark time of APB?

Tried to do some digging but sadly old blog and patchnotes seem to have been lost due to takeover and stuff.

 

On reddit I found two possible time stamps about introduction of threat segregation:

Quote

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

-Threat segregation *Joker Ticket activities in mission districts

Quote

Friday, July 19, 2013

-Threat segregation

Source

 

As for the end it's luckily one of the first available patch notes

Quote

Posted 18 September 2013 - 04:21 PM

-Players are allowed to move down a district threat level again.

Source

 

Let's ignore the usual seasonal swings and that the gold rush event pushed it's peak in August 2013 I still fail to see the genocide of the playerbase.

In fact it looks like it started to go downhill from threat segregation removal? Am I missing sth. what am I missing?

 

 

 

 

[GhosT 1301]

The fact that there has been barely any content updates besides paid content for 5 or 6 years.

GamersFirst made a LOT of bad decisions, a few larger ones, and a thousand smaller ones.

[Deftonez 125]

- G1

- FairFight

- The inability push out new content when every opportunity to do so was available and do-able

- Massive fluctuation in the population of players over the years

- The community (specifically veterans vs. new players)

- Toxic community

- False promises made by the developers

- Communication between players and the developers

 

the list could go on and on but i think everyone here knows damn well why the game is in this state

[CookiePuss 5382]

This is why I didn't pursue a degree in history. 

I'll never understand how people can continually argue over the same span of time for years and years. 

[Gateron 267]

Persistent mentally unstable edge-lords closeting with obvious cheats when they get rekt is the biggest thing that drove people away imo.

[LittleMoneyFirst 66]

Cheaters, really simple.

[orianso 54]

.

Edited June 10, 2023 by apbstuffs

[Goldtiger 133]

38 minutes ago, Emcitement said:

not doing anything at all with the game to better it.

I'd be more excited to see the simplest balance change in the patch notes than the entirety of riot mode.

Too much of this game is broken and nothing ever gets fixed.

Agreed. This game is a recipe for disaster when it comes to bringing new players in since it's all focused on nade spam, sitting from far away sniping with your n-tec/hvr, or using your broken ir3 nfas or cj3 oca/pmg with your p2w rfp fang. Hey, i'm guilty of it but honestly this game is hard to play with fair weapons. So much things in this game are broken and LO is trying to bring back the playerbase with new content? Yeah people are gonna play the new content, realize the game is still broken, and then leave. I love the idea of RIOT but it seems like the prioritization is pretty bad.

[RCooper 182]

Practically every player have assist to the death of the game(except bronzes),but that really would happen in any game but the developers  stopped it on others game but moneyfirst didnt do anything so that is why the game is like that.

[orianso 54]

.

Edited June 10, 2023 by apbstuffs

[AquaSensei 50]

Did anyone else skip the first paragraph just to read the comments haha

[Fortune Runner 796]

what do i think kills the game? repeated threads like this focusing on what we just covered in one of many different threads

[OnlyOnePro 1]

oh boy the engine upgrade came 2013 and still didn't see the sunlight yeet  and they always missed it up I lost my 2012 account when the new server migrate came FML