APB: Finally, I Can Be A PUNK!

[Chinchilla]

Man, I don't know if they did a patch (I saw some files changing) as of Sunday 7/18, but last night my damn game crashed twice before I even got to log in.  It kept kicking me off of the server as I was trying to get into the server.  I hope it gets resolved or my PC gets its shit together.  Gonna look around for a better laptop.  Just need to get the $$.

[LK]

I'd play this game if it had a persistent, destructible city with a finite number of cars available. That way all the mayhem would have deeper meaning, as the city slowly turns into Escape from NY.

Incidentally, I should totally get into the games design business, I have such great ideas. 

That could work if you could select an instance based on up-time, avg. # of players, and whether it's a fresh instance or not.

[Mrbloodworth]

Combat as a whole is undergoing a fairly extensive facelift at the moment. We''re looking to improve both the immersiveness of the combat experience and the overall balance between the various weapons.

First and foremost, we''ve started work on adding recoil to all weapons. Even the first iteration of this that we''re playing internally at the moment makes combat a much more intense experience and adds an extra layer of skill to the game. As well as recoil, we''re experimenting with Depth of Field, some new camera effects and beefed up VFX and SFX to round the whole experience out.

We''ve also done another round of weapon balancing which seeks to diversify weapons more and the addition of the recoil effect allows us to give each weapon much more individual character.

Various other improvements on the cards include new animations to allow players to jump directly out of vehicles from the combat position rather than having to go back in through the window and then open the door, a more fluid response from crouch and marksmanship controls and a revamp of combat messages to clean up the HUD and give players more immediate feedback about kills, stuns, assists etc.

We''re very excited about how combat is going to look and play once we''re finished, and we hope to have something for you to play with on PTW before too long.

We''ll be posting about plans for Upgrades in a separate post later this week.

[Azazel]

That would be a great Dev Post if it were still Beta.

As a "we-just-released-oh-shit" scramble post. Not so much.
 



How resistant devs and publishers unfortunately are to the lessons told by Hellgate, WAR, that arena-PVP one, Auto Assault, and so forth...

[Threash]

Honestly, i rather they left it alone.  Maybe boost some of the more useless guns a bit and tone down a couple of the more extreme LTL weapons.  I would like more content than re balancing.

[Kageru]

I suspect the "online activity" graphs they are looking at encourage promising changes in the near term. I'm still fairly impressed their "we are gathering info on exploits" line during beta has pretty much become "we've never turned PB on, best to stand back".

[Furiously]

Using the /pop query. Populations are down about 1/2 from release week. They have no feedback methodology to determine why people are not playing, so it should be interesting to see what effect these changes have.

Last night I arrested a rank 1 criminal three times in a row and he sends a tell, "how am I supposed to win a fight against that gun." I reply his best bet is to get in close with a oca or shotgun. I'm guessing a lot of people quit just from unfair fights which the matchmaker seems to do a lot of. God knows I've sen and won a lot of 2 vs 7 or 3 vs 5 fights.

[Threash]

If you get up close you get hit with instant two shot secondary stun gun.  Those things are ridiculous and need severe nerfing.

[UnSub]

Last night I arrested a rank 1 criminal three times in a row and he sends a tell, "how am I supposed to win a fight against that gun." I reply his best bet is to get in close with a oca or shotgun. I'm guessing a lot of people quit just from unfair fights which the matchmaker seems to do a lot of. God knows I've sen and won a lot of 2 vs 7 or 3 vs 5 fights.

This right here is why PvP MMOs will always have a hard row to hoe. In the snow. With a bow.

Key question for any PvP MMO: how are you going to keep players engaged when they lose a high proportion of matches? Designing tattoos isn't going to cut it for a lot of people.

[Mrbloodworth]

Last night I arrested a rank 1 criminal three times in a row and he sends a tell, "how am I supposed to win a fight against that gun." I reply his best bet is to get in close with a oca or shotgun. I'm guessing a lot of people quit just from unfair fights which the matchmaker seems to do a lot of. God knows I've sen and won a lot of 2 vs 7 or 3 vs 5 fights.

This right here is why PvP MMOs will always have a hard row to hoe. In the snow. With a bow.

Key question for any PvP MMO: how are you going to keep players engaged when they lose a high proportion of matches? Designing tattoos isn't going to cut it for a lot of people.

Any MMG shooter has this issue. Mainly, how to you contain the shooter tenets, while adding some sort of RPG portion. GA added in PvE, APB has..... I dunno yet. Awesome moments is really all I can tell, and for many it trumps most everything. As evidenced by APB still being #2 top seller on Steam. one of three outlets that I am personally aware of.

Population in game is going down, as evidenced by /pop in game. However the sales of the title do not seem to match the reviews, perhaps word of mouth is trumping the "pros". Then again, we are only in the first month still. As far as loosing, APB does have a few things going for it, you still advance, not as fast as a highly successful win (Because of the win + Medals for the match), but you do advance. The other is a few achievements like "I need a bigger gun" that grants the choise of a light machine gun or a shot gun. I also think the stickiness of the customization they offer is a larger point than you may think.

I am highly interested in how they adjust moving forward, I would like for MMOFPS to be a larger, more sustainable genre to the MMG's. But they have a huge hill to climb, especially to appeal to RPG players, who can't accept losses in most cases.

I suspect the "online activity" graphs they are looking at encourage promising changes in the near term. I'm still fairly impressed their "we are gathering info on exploits" line during beta has pretty much become "we've never turned PB on, best to stand back".

1.2.1 (47) is a small, but very important patch, as we are bringing PunkBuster fully online.

GENERAL

    * PunkBuster is now fully online - We will be using PunkBuster in conjunction with our existing tools to detect and ban cheaters.
    * An exploit where players could enable a debug command has now been fixed.
    * support.apb.com now correctly works via the in-game browser.

[WayAbvPar]

1.2.1 (47) is a small, but very important patch, as we are bringing PunkBuster fully online.

A fucking month after release. That is inexcusable. RTW deserves to lose each and every customer that fucked off to another game after being aimbotted to death once too often. Amateur hour.

[fuser]

1.2.1 (47) is a small, but very important patch, as we are bringing PunkBuster fully online.

A fucking month after release. That is inexcusable. RTW deserves to lose each and every customer that fucked off to another game after being aimbotted to death once too often. Amateur hour.

Same thing that killed BC2 for me, I haven't been back after issues with PB.

[Furiously]

Last night I arrested a rank 1 criminal three times in a row and he sends a tell, "how am I supposed to win a fight against that gun." I reply his best bet is to get in close with a oca or shotgun. I'm guessing a lot of people quit just from unfair fights which the matchmaker seems to do a lot of. God knows I've sen and won a lot of 2 vs 7 or 3 vs 5 fights.

This right here is why PvP MMOs will always have a hard row to hoe. In the snow. With a bow.

Key question for any PvP MMO: how are you going to keep players engaged when they lose a high proportion of matches? Designing tattoos isn't going to cut it for a lot of people.

You give each team different winning critera. Then let everyone win.

[Threash]

A good side effect of a heavily instanced game like this is that you don't notice a population drop in the least.  The last 100 players will be having the same amount of fun as they did when the game was full.

[WayAbvPar]

1.2.1 (47) is a small, but very important patch, as we are bringing PunkBuster fully online.

A fucking month after release. That is inexcusable. RTW deserves to lose each and every customer that fucked off to another game after being aimbotted to death once too often. Amateur hour.

Same thing that killed BC2 for me, I haven't been back after issues with PB.

Not to stray too far off the topic, but have you tried manually updating PB? It seems to fix issues for almost everyone who reports them. I had some problems with BF2 when I got my new system, but that fixed everything for me.

[Mrbloodworth]

Manually updating PB is also recommended to play after this patch.

[fuser]

Not to stray too far off the topic, but have you tried manually updating PB? It seems to fix issues for almost everyone who reports them. I had some problems with BF2 when I got my new system, but that fixed everything for me.

Wasn't end user client related. But I think the discussion is still within the thread subject. The concept of punkbuster is fine but the implementation and running of it never jived. BC2 had punkbuster on, then off because of end client disconnects, then on, then off again because it kept crashing servers. Even at about 1 month in the streaming database showed they had banned ~300 users. There were tons of other issues (admin functionality) thats out of scope.

I hope APB fairs a bit better.

[Chinchilla]

How the heck do I find out where this game is installed?  I'm not sure where STEAM installs it.

[WayAbvPar]

Steam stuff is usually here-
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\app name

[Threash]

I see they finally patched in the crippling lag everyone has been clamoring for, so much for this game.

[Chinchilla]

Steam stuff is usually here-
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\app name

Thank you very much bro!

[Chinchilla]

Manually updating PB is also recommended to play after this patch.

Hmmm manual update doesn't seem to work as the game isn't listed on the list of the PB games.

[Mrbloodworth]

Manually updating PB is also recommended to play after this patch.

Hmmm manual update doesn't seem to work as the game isn't listed on the list of the PB games.

Try the repair button?

[caladein]

Manually updating PB is also recommended to play after this patch.

Hmmm manual update doesn't seem to work as the game isn't listed on the list of the PB games.

I can't update it via PBSetup (since it isn't on the list in v3.4), but it's on the EvenBalance site.

[Chinchilla]

I can log on just fine even w/o manual update.  I figured it was probably a good idea to do since you guys recommended it.

Well its official... Waterfront on this PC sucks.  Financial seems to run OK though (well not always, but mostly).  Man I can't wait to get a new PC.

[Azazel]

Needing to manually update Punkbuster for any game is fucking clownshoes. And this isn't a specific dig at APB. I've had to do it for BF2. And it was fucking clownshoes then as well.

[jakonovski]

I have no idea how Punkbuster even gets these big name deals.

[Furiously]

What's the alternative?

[Kageru]

Valve Ant-cheat would be the obvious answer... but maybe licensing or having to buy into valves infrastructure discourages that.

[Mrbloodworth]

I have heard some of the same criticisms about VAC as i have Punkbuster.

Anyway, I must say, ignoring the obvious lag spikes. I had a much enjoyable time last night, there was not one instance of "suspect" that i had seen (as compared to all the time before) activity and the overall game play felt much more competitive instead of mostly one sided. I have a feeling that the lack of anti-hack or anti-hack that was inadequate really tainted peoples impression of balance in this title, it feels much different now. I just hope that it continues and punkbuster can keep up.

But the lag spikes, while not terribly frequent for me, was indeed frustrating at times.


EDIT: My comment about manually updating PB was if you had issues logging on. Sorry I wasn't clear. I simply used the repair button and it worked fine.

[EvilJohn]

From what I am seeing, the lag spikes may be a hardware issue somewhere in the infrastructure, potentially internal or external to the hosting sites, and doesn't look to be PB related. The guys are working on what the cause is and how to resolve it.

I haven't seen the spikes on my setup at home (and my machine isn't top end) - which I connect to APB through normal internet, no work pipe involved.

We're definitely working to get it resolved ASAP.

[Threash]

Well it certainly wasn't there before.

[Der Helm]

So I actually managed to order the North American version of this game, the order was deducted from my paypal account, but I recieved nothing in return, no order confirmation, no product key, nothing. And the account I created upon ordering apparently does not exist. Contacted their support via email, waiting now.

[Furiously]

Clanmate of mine was banned for his cd key for some reason. I am hearing 7 day horror stories about replies.

[Der Helm]

So. My order was confirmend sometime this morning, I am in. Which server and which faction am I supposed to join ?  

Playing on LaRocha, as an enforcer right now. Name is "Hlem"