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Patch 1.3.1
GrayGhost79
Member UncommonPosts: 4,775
As you now know, the 1.3.0 bugfix patch is imminent, and shortly thereafter we''ll be releasing 1.3.1 which contains a number of changes which we couldn''t quite get ready in time for release next week. 1.3.1 contains a number of small but significant changes which I thought were worth highlighting.
Changes to mission offers
As of 1.3.1, the following changes will take place:
Criminal v Criminal matchmaking has been turned off
System-generated bounties have been turned off - bounties can now only be entered into by witnessing unopposed criminals. This means that the chances of Calls For Backup being bounty missions will be greatly reduced, so those of you who have said that you generally avoid answering CFB because of the number of bounty missions should be able to relax a little and help out the poor souls who need your muscle.
Changes to weapons in 1.3.1
As ever, when we make changes to weapons, it''s not simply as a concession to people raising concerns on the forums. When weapon balance issues come up, we correlate these with feedback from our QA department and from team members who play regularly on the live service. After some discussion, we''ve decided to make the following changes:
N-Tec:
Base accuracy has been reduced slightly.
Movement penalty has been reduced slightly to compensate for base accuracy change.
Number of shots before accuracy degradation is applied has been lowered (becomes less accurate faster).
Maximum level of inaccuracy the weapon can reach has been slightly increased.
Benefit gained via Marksmanship mode has been slightly reduced.
OCA-EW:
Minimum damage percentage at max range has been increased slightly.
Base accuracy has been reduced slightly.
Max Range has been reduced by 5m & Effective range reduced by a further 2m.
Number of shots before accuracy degradation is applied has been lowered (becomes less accurate faster).
Magazine capacity of the weapon has been reduced from 34 to 28 rounds.
Both of these changes are an effort to reduce the effectiveness of continuous full-auto fire.
NL-9:
So I guess this is the hot topic. After some considerable discussion, we have decided to remodel the NL-9 to behave the way it looks - as a Less Than Lethal shotgun. The NL-9 has been reworked to behave almost identically to the JG-840 shotgun - short range, two-shot stun, with a pellet spread.
http://na.apb.com/en/news/2010/07/30/changes-coming-in-1-3-1
The 3 weapons that many complained were OP'd are being balanced a bit.
Comments
Updates are nice but those are just the tip of the iceberg of problems that APB has. The fact that they are still avoiding the major issues is disturbing and unfortunate. They seem very short-sighted as to what they are doing to their IP(or not doing as the case may be).
What major issues are they avoiding?
Match Making still needs addressed..
A new player with no upgrades can be thrown into a match with people R 250+ with full upgrades.
It should not be too hard to have 3 brackets 1-100 101-200- 200 +
They still have far too many afkers in the action districts.They sit there and answer any mission with a script then call for back up.There are ways around this.One person said to invite them to your group and by default with the script running they will accept then just join the social district as a group and that removes them but there really are far too many afkers to do this.When they arent afk botting there are people car jacking/ram raiding.
Two of my main concerns.If i run into people in general not helping after calling for back up i just go and team kill them until the mission is over.If its going to be 3 or 4 vs 1 because of afk's and people who just dont care about the missions and im going to be getting the same xp as them i might as well have my fun and against multiple people alone isnt my idea of fun.
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.
http://na.apb.com/forums/showthread.php?t=72482
They are working on Matchmaking.
Automating any element of APB is a breach of the EULA and is warrant for a ban. If you have evidence of people AFK farming then please report them to support.apb.com
http://na.apb.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1236705#post1236705
If you report those that are afking they will be reviewed and dealt with. This has been addressed many times. Dealing with the afk progression is hard to do without impacting legit players negatively. But they are not ignoring the issue.
Until they implement the off-duty on-duty toggle my statement remains the same.I'm not the one crying over the match making system by the way.It is one of the main complaints you see both in game and on the APB forums around how a R 20 player got apded by two or three R 250+ people.The fact is a bunch of players have been doing this purposely to farm win's/kill death ratios for the weekly rewards.I cant count how many high R players ive come across time and time again farm us lower R players.
Until its added to the game then it will remain one of the top complaints from new players..Balance that is.
As for the afk players im going to start inviting them then joining the Social District like someone told me to do.That or just continue to team kill them and end the mission faster.
I asked what RTW was ignoring and you replied under me so I assumed you were trying to say Match making wasn't being addressed since this wasn't a thread on matchmaking. My bad for making the assumption. And yes, people will continue to complain about it until it's fixed thats the nature of the impatient or those that are not aware that they are working on it.
In any case since you were not replying to my comment about what RTW was ignoring and were simply going off topic with complaints you had.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/285372/Upcoming-changes-for-APB.html
The above thread is discussing the matchmaking changes among other things if you wish to state your concerns about that issue there.
Still waiting on Chaos ruleset. Doing small-team missions is boring to me.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
While you're spot on, we all know they're bringing in patches to solve this. I for one, am looking forward to this. It takes time to change a system you thought would work.
Same, Chaos and Pureskill are 2 I'm eagerly waiting on lol.