APB All Points Bulletin

[BigBiker05]

Well I can't completely agree with all the issues you bring up Alizee as I think me and you are aiming at different games. But like you said, that article takes care of the 'communication' problem.

I also agree with you on tech support. It would seem at this point they do not plan to have in-game tech support and their forums are getting spammed to hell to show any tech support there. However, I did email their support and got a response back in two days. Sadly, it was a copy paste response. Now selling adverts in game and points to buy stuff is just fine but I do agree with you there should be NO tariff when using RTW points, only $.

Now what I don't agree with you on is:

everything happens a second after you tell it to, your bullets hit things nowhere near where your crosshair, when you do hit an enemy it doesn't register, your steering is either all-or-nothing, with horrible weight coefficients, and mission content is limited to about the same 10 things repeated over and over.

While the servers are craptastic and I have a driving delay of about half to a full second no matter what my ping is, I am having no problems with my crosshair or registering shots. Hearing about shooting outside your bloom is a first for me. And as far as registering shots have you opened up the proper ports? While driving delay is because of their crappy servers, shooting is client side so shots not registering could be because of dropped packets. And sadly, however, repeated missions of 10 or so things to do are what I expected this game to be.

[chaffe[seagreens]]

i am really enjoying this... once you finally get paired up with someone who understands how to play and is willing to work together makes it a blast...still trying to figure out how to add friends..
as for game play... I only notice a little bit of lag only @ certain times.. but I cant really complain, it seems like there would be some room for error due to the fact on how large the city is and how many different things are going on @ once in said city... I will have to look into these port thingys to make the game better and more playable...I just am not to keen on how to do things on my computer...but all in all I am really enjoying it...I know my wife is beginning to hate it....I did though make my character kinda look like her, minus the HUGE boobs... she was kinda flattered... she was always complaining that I dont spend enough time with her...now she can't complain..I spend lots of time with her....

[Boss Llama]

I am having no problems with my crosshair or registering shots. Hearing about shooting outside your bloom is a first for me.

Two good examples of this from my recent play:

A guy was camping the ambulance I had to pick up, sitting unmoving on a box to one side, with his head sticking over the top. I popped my field kit behind a building a block away, swapped to a sniper rifle, and zoomed in to draw a bead on his head. Got the tight bead, crosshair goes red, and I fire. Boom, headshot!... on the civilian who was at least 10 feet down, and a couple yards to the side.

Second occurence, an enemy is camping in a warehouse, where my objective is. After getting killed a couple times, I manage to sneak in a back door, and creep unseen behind some boxes to a place where I have a clear firing lane on him, several feet open on each side. I lean out from behind the boxes, line up my aim, and again get the crosshair to go red. Start firing from my N-Tec, and every single round impacts the shelves a couple feet to the right. I open up full auto, and begin stepping left, and the entire mag goes in to the back of the boxes I was leaning out from behind.

I realize I seem to have more significant problems than most folks playing, but there should not be significant discrepency between what the server tells you you're aiming at, and what the server then calculates you aimed at. These two examples occured on different days, and during periods where I wasn't having any particular lag issues or other problems. In both cases I was firing while standing still, having taken several seconds to aim against a target also standing still.

shooting is client side so shots not registering could be because of dropped packets.

I can check on my ports to be sure, but what I'm referencing is situations where I have open shots on people, and am unloading in to them. I can see the blood fly off of them, suggesting that the server is registering the hits, but a dozen rounds won't take them down. Meanwhile, I get hit two or three times with the same gun, and away I go. As far as trouble-shooting goes, the weapon and personal upgrades don't account for the discrepency, so I can only imagine it to be hits not registering properly. It's not that I can't get kills - I do sometimes - it just feels pretty darn disproportionate given what I know I'm doing in game.

[Darklightr]

APB, by my opinion, isn't a very good game

[Greebo]

I'm still lovin this game, but I've also had zero problems - I'm sure if I'd experience half the bugs the rest of you guys had, I'd be pretty PO'd

[BigBiker05]

So one of the devs made a post that you should when possibly run through the launcher as it will give better performance. My case though, through the launcher I crash on loading any action districts

While I love to play this game, I often rage not over hackers, better players, but performance.

[BigBiker05]

Match-making change

So, before we start talking about what the problems are with matchmaking and how we solve them, let's talk about what it's supposed to do. At its core, the purpose of the matchmaking system is to find groups of players of as close to equivalent skill as possible and send them to oppose each other. Simples.

The system looks at the relative Threat level of each group or individual available to join a match, applies various modifiers such as whether it's a single established group or a 'metagroup' of disparate individuals, and then goes through a series of passes, first of all looking for a straight match, then beginning to include metagroups, and finally considering the same opposition as the previous match as a last resort.

Eventually it comes up with what it considers the 'best fit' for the mission-owning team and sends out Dispatch invites to all concerned to come and join the party. If it can't find any matchup within the bounds of what is considered an acceptable match, it simply leaves the mission team unopposed and tries again 15 seconds later.

So what's going wrong?
Simply put, not everybody who's invited to the party decides to show up. In fact, we're seeing a much higher decline rate for Dispatches and Calls for Backup than we expected. In a nutshell, this is how so many 'broken' matches end up being made. That 1v4 match that you're in was probably supposed to be 5v4 or maybe even 6v4, but everyone else declined
and you were left all on your ownsome.

So why does it happen?
There seem to be two main reasons (although no doubt there are more). First, there are the stat chasers. These tend to be higher skill players and clanners who are chasing league wins and trying to protect their stats in those categories. This leads to a lot of cherry-picking of Dispatches as these players try to avoid matches against other highly skilled players or refuse Calls for Backup to avoid ending up with mission losses caused by the other players in the mission. Now not all league chasers want to play that way, but the fact that a few do means that everyone has to, to avoid being at a disadvantage.

Next, we have the simple fear factor. Very often when Dispatch offers go out against a high threat group, the majority of players see the threat levels of the opposition and just chicken out, leaving those plucky souls who decide to give it a go all alone to face the music. And of course it then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - the guys who gave it a go last time only to be hammered because no-one else showed up are less likely to say yes next time, and so it goes on. Call for Backup also suffers in the same way - people see high threat opposition and know that whoever is in the mission is probably already getting thrashed, and decide to leave them to their fate. Now it doesn't happen all the time, but it happens enough for it to make the player experience of matchmaking nothing like the one that the system was built to provide.

So what do we do about it?
Well, one school of thought is that we remove the human element altogether. When players enter the district, they're 'Off Duty' or 'unavailable' or however you want to think about it. Once they're done with checking mail or sorting their inventory, they hit a key and switch to 'On Duty'. From that point on, they are at the beck and call of their Organisation, and the matchmaking system decides who goes where and does what. Participation in individual missions is no longer a choice. Your Organisation is sending you to do a job, so get with the programme. After the mission, if you need to get more ammo or respawn your vehicle, just flip back to 'Off Duty' and nobody will bother you until you're ready to go again.

So what does that gain us?
Well, first of all, cherry-picking goes away. Noob-farming and artificially protecting win:loss ratios becomes a much more difficult proposition for stat-chasers, and all clans or league participants are in the same boat, so no-one is at a disadvantage. Leagues become more a true test of skill, since every player has to make the best of the situation that the system puts them in, rather than picking and choosing what they consider easier matches. Next, fear factor is no longer an issue, since everyone who needs to be part of the mission will be added to it. There's always the possibility that people might just choose not to turn up even though they're part of the mission, but side leaders have the option to kick non-participants and generate an automatic CFB to plug the gap. Overall it's bound to be a better experience for all to get rid of badly mismatched missions. This approach also lets us see just how well (or not) the actual matchmaking algorithm is working and allows us to tweak it (and bugfix it) and see the results - the actual effectiveness of the existing system is currently being obfuscated by the factors I've mentioned above.

Along with this we'd need to make a few more changes. First, we would have to prevent players being added to matches in the final stage with only seconds to go (that's a change we intend to make anyway), since no-one wants to be forced to join a mission where they have no chance to influence the outcome. Next, we would have to add a universal cooldown timer to make sure that players don't end up being put into back-to-back missions without the chance to go 'Off Duty' if they need to. To maximise the size of the matchmaking pool, we're also currently experimenting with removing system-generated bounty missions, stopping criminal vs criminal matchmaking, and increasing the number of players per instance.

We're also currently considering some fundamental changes to how Threat works in conjunction with matchmaking to ease new players in more gently and provide high threat players with a much more challenging experience. This would mean a whole different play experience for the teams at the top, with the system pushing back harder and harder as they try to break the bell curve to become the dominant force in the game. On the flip side, newbs who are really struggling would get a little extra help to prevent APB from being a really depressing experience.

So that's our current thinking. There are other approaches we could take, but this seems like the one which best tackles the current problem. That's not to say this is a done deal - that's why we're posting this ahead of time. So give us your thoughts on what I've said here, ask any questions you have, mention any edge-cases that you think need considered, and we'll do our best to think things through together with you to see if this is the right way to go.

Driving/handling change

The most common criticisms we see regarding vehicle handling are that vehicles are too unresponsive (laggy) and that they tend to slide around more than a lot of people are comfortable with.

So let me just clarify a couple of points. First off, there is definitely a learning curve to the vehicle handling in the game. Driving in APB is a skill, and something which people definitely get better at with practice. In many ways, that's not a bad thing, since it gives players who get good at driving a role to fulfil in groups as wheelmen and getaway drivers. That said, we don't want that to mean that a large proportion of the players have a bad experience driving around in APB. Everybody needs to be able to get from A to B in one piece.

The other thing to remember is that with APB being an online game, latency is always going to be an issue. If we tighten up the handling too much, people with bad latency problems will find themselves turning 90 degrees every time they touch a key because by the time the keypress and release make the trip to the server and back, the wheels have slammed all the way to the lock position.

So, all that having been said, we've already spent a considerable amount of time working on a revamp of vehicle handling which makes the majority of vehicles in the game much more responsive accelerating, braking and steering. Vehicles are largely more stable now too, as well as more maneuverable. A few of the vehicles we've left a little more challenging (but rewarding) for players who like the current system and enjoy handbrake cornerning and powersliding, but there's now enough of a choice to hopefully let everyone find something that suits their style. The weights of several vehicles have been increased to make them behave much more in line with how they look (most notably the Pioneer). In our internal tests we've had an overwhelmingly positive response to the changes, and our hope is to roll these out to PTW shortly to get your feedback

[Boss Llama]

I've already cussed them out on their boards about their proposed matchmaking idiocy. Dumbest fricking idea I've ever heard from a gaming company. "Hey, let's take away choices from our players - that always makes things better!" BS. Tell 'em to talk to BioWare, and maybe they'll learn a thing or two. The matches it put me in today, with no CFB option (so it clearly thought it was fair) involved me at r81 being pitted against people ranging from r198 to r212 with double and triple second and third level upgrades. Yay for using threat levels instead of actual levels, or anything related to reality.

The driving issues I think they're probably handling better, and have an actual grasp of the issues. There are things I could nitpick them on, but it wouldn't be particularly significant in light of what they're aware of. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for now, and let them work on those.

In other news, I was able to successfully play for like 60-90 minutes today in a max population instance without issue, and put in a bit over 2 hours total without crashes. I'm not sure if it's because they did something on their end, or because I removed a router from my home network that I think was causing some unrelated issues. I'm guessing the former, but I intend to do some more testing to find out.

[frostdillicus]

Their matchmaking changes sound idiotic at best. Forcing anyone to do something in an MMO always ends badly. I have never played APB nor done any research on it, so I can't say if there is a good solution. However, perhaps if you refuse too many missions from your faction, you take a hit with them somehow. Not sure how, but it might work.

I dunno. I am currently MMOless, and starting to yearn for it again. My copy of FF14 is pre-ordered, but it's not out until the end of September...you know, after I leave for Japan for 8 months. :\

[BigBiker05]

Well Alizee... the system isn't really out yet. And if you played nearly ANY other MMO you never get to pick your opponents. Maybe MMOs just aren't right for you. And to Frosty, in this game you don't have a character level, your faction rep is basically in-place for this.

Also, they did some handling changes so far but not all of them. I just wish they'd look into my problem so I can play more.

[Boss Llama]

Well Alizee... the system isn't really out yet. And if you played nearly ANY other MMO you never get to pick your opponents. Maybe MMOs just aren't right for you. And to Frosty, in this game you don't have a character level, your faction rep is basically in-place for this.

I've played online games for 21 years, starting with Prodigy internet service in 1989, and MMOs specifically for 15 years. I started with The Realm Online in 1995, a primitive early 2D panel loader. I joined EverQuest when it came out in 1999, and played that for many years, not stopping until 2005. I worked for Verant, and then Sony, as a customer service rep in EverQuest for 5 years. I beta-tested both ShadowBane starting in 2003, which was a generally open PVP world, and also EverQuest 2 in 2004. I dabbled in games like Asheron's Call and Anarchy Online. Not once, in any of those games, did the game force you in to quests/missions that you didn't select. Not once did you show up, and the game compelled you to spend your time doing a specific task. You chose what you wanted to get done, and then you went and activated the necessary things to get started. If you wanted to pause, you simply stopped and did some other quests or hunting for however many minutes, hours, or days, and picked it up where you left off when you were ready again. I would look askance at even a single player game in this day and age that didn't have a more open format. To propose such a thing in an MMO is beyond comprehension.

[BigBiker05]

I don't really see the point you're trying to make in that last post Alizee. Of the games you mentioned that I have played you do not get to choose your opponents in PvP just like in ABP. Similairly, if you wished to stop questing (or doing ABP missions) you could just stop. And if you wish to do side missions such as hunting (or returning stolen cars) you can.

I'm not sure if maybe you're misreading the post or if I am overlooking something.

[Boss Llama]

Sorry for double-posting here, but this is a completely different subject than the last.

Here's the most recent update from RTW, and THIS is a good one. THIS is what they need to be doing! Fixing broken stuff, not changing or altering working stuff. Oh, and telling us about it! Vast improvement:

1. Make the chat box opaque
A lot of people have been complaining that they miss important information in the chat box because of the transparent background, so we'll be looking to improve readability in this area.

2. Stop solo players getting into the back seat of a car (and be smarter for grouped players)
A big favourite in the dev team as well. The current plan is to have solo players always get into the driver's seat, regardless of which door they're at, and have players in groups get into the front seat unless they are absolutely positively aimed at the back door.

3. Fix the big 4x4 cars to stop being easily pushed over by the small cars (esp. the Pioneer)
This is being worked into our current rebalance of vehicle handling and will be rolled out to PTW shortly.

4. More clothing storage
We're currently looking at how much we can safely increase this in the current system, and as part of a longer-term solution are looking at a ''stash'' system to let players store a much larger amount of stuff overall.

5. Missions with a 5-minute capture & hold (like Siren Song) should reduce the timer if you have no opposition.
We're actually looking to remove any of these kinds of stages in the unopposed sections of missions.

6. VOIP HUD personal indicator, maybe with an audio cue locally as well
Just a little visual or audio reminder to make sure you know whether or not you're broadcasting.

7. Spawning. The spawn system seems adept at placing players in the line of fire of opponents quite frequently or miles away from where the action is.
Improving this really means adding more spawn points, which is something we're actively engaged in. We're hoping to have this situation improved and up on PTW for testing in the next few weeks.

8. Escape missions. The proverbial hot potato. Great when it works and sucks when it doesn't.
We have a number of different ideas for how to improve these missions and I''ll post some up in this forum in due course.

9. Zoning into a district while at Notoriety 3/4 and immediately being dispatched against.
If we end up removing bounty missions as part of the matchmaking revamp, this issue will go away. If not, we'll add a ''safety'' timer to prevent players being bountied against straight away (unless they commit further crimes).

10. Muting other peoples' music playback when in the editors
Annoying, yes. We're looking into it now.

11. More graphics options (32 bit)
This is constantly being worked on. I've asked our technical lead to make a post about the future for 32-bit O/S options in this forum, so watch for it soon.

12. A decal mirroring option for the vehicle editor
A popular request, definitely on our to-do list for the near future.

13. No missions should be ‘farmable’ due to limitless time (e.g. Breadcrumbs)
These missions have all been changed and the changes are going through our QA process now.

14. Better death camera
Another popular one internally as well as in the community. A revamp to the death cam is definitely on the cards, so watch out for more information on this soon.

[Boss Llama]

I don't really see the point you're trying to make in that last post Alizee. Of the games you mentioned that I have played you do not get to choose your opponents in PvP just like in ABP. Similairly, if you wished to stop questing (or doing ABP missions) you could just stop. And if you wish to do side missions such as hunting (or returning stolen cars) you can.

I'm not sure if maybe you're misreading the post or if I am overlooking something.

Ok, so that last wasn't the double-post. This is.

In none of those games were you forced in to any mission, ever, for any reason. If you wanted a quest, you manually started it by talking to the appropriate person, and doing the dialogue, or otherwise taking deliberate action to trigger the event. You chose SPECIFIC quests to do, and disregarded others. You didn't just say "give me something to do" and hope for the best. It's a matter of choice.

In none of those games did a computer decide who you faced in PvP - either you or another human did, by attacking each other. You could see each other, gauge what kind of equipment they had, see what sort of group they rolled with, and depending on the circumstances, even negotiate with them before/instead of fighting. None of these strings of r81-1/0 vs r212-3/3 match-ups with no CFB option like I had yesterday, all computer generated. It's a matter of choice.

Inversely, in none of those games could you not simply run away and abandon the fight if it was unbalanced, unfair, unnecessary, unwise, or unproductive. In APB, you can not abandon a mission midway, nor can you change districts. The only way to give-up is to return to the loading screen. It's a matter of choice.

Those things are problems.

[BigBiker05]

Well the no way to surrender bit is stupid. But as far as balanced goes you're knocking an system that isn't out yet by using examples from the current broken system.

As far as PvE missions goes as compared to those other games mentioned is that this is a PvP game. In a lot of modern MMOs you join matches or open PvP areas where you are pitted against random opponents or you are free bait to anyone who can catch you. This is not choosing your opponents. Now if you had a choice to surrender or run it would be more like most MMOs but this game is designed to be a bit more hardcore than that. You can still always run/surrender but you're gonna have to use skill or avoidance to pull it off and not just click a button.