From Your Mouth to Our Ears

It's crunch time once again at Reloaded Games. It’s been a pretty hectic week with "Settle the Score" getting ready to make its way out the door, not to mention the recent announcement of APB Vendetta. You should check out the Vendetta Kickstarter (if you haven't already), to find out more about the exciting game in the making, inspired by the APB Reloaded universe.

But first stick around!

We're going to talk about the process of how our Community team reports issues and ideas from our forums, twitter, Facebook and blog back to our Development team. We're also officially introducing you to the new Contact, Speedball, who will be joining us in the version 11 update.

Manning the Floodgates

One of the things that we're really working on this year is the quality and frequency of communication that goes on between Reloaded Games and our community. We're constantly striving for new and better ways to communicate with you guys, and it’s always good to see feedback on our efforts, be it positive, negative or (in some cases) outright weird.

Trouble is, there’s a lot of information coming in, so the community team needs to filter through a lot of the noise and try and get the strongest signal to pass along to the development team. What are the real concerns or ideas that the majority cares about the most, and how do we tackle those ideas?

We have a page on our Reloaded internal wiki that details the top ten issues in the community with links on how we intend to actually fix those issues. We're aiming to start crossing off more and more of these throughout the year. Some of the issues that we've got plans for are (in no particular order): server performance, new content, mission balancing, and in-mission spawning.

Cool Community Stats

We keep track of a lot of stats in APB Reloaded – just about everything that players can do in the game is tracked and collated into spreadsheets that we access and use to analyze player behavior. Recently we compared a list of the most lethal weapons over a week long period on Joker NA East before the weapon balance patch, and then again after the weapon balance patch when we saw a similar number of players on.

Over a 24 hour period on NA East we saw 203,055 kills; that’s 141 player deaths per minute. The most lethal weapon in the game was (prior to the weapon balance patch) the NTEC-5 with the STAR 556 coming in a close second. Shotguns accounted for slightly more kills after the balance patch than they did before, and the STAR and the NTEC had swapped places. Keep in mind that these stats don't reflect the lethality of particular weapons, rather they reflect their popularity. These stats also didn't include kills caused by vehicle explosions that were triggered from weapon damage.

Also, the total number of Easter Eggs delivered this year was a staggering 10,543,233 - that's over 8 eggs per second for the entire duration of the Easter Event! The person that delivered the most eggs was Colby’s DonCostello. Well done DonCostello, you had some tough competition!

The New Dealer

Who's this new Contact hanging out in Social? His name is Speedball and he works for the new faction, Joker Associates.

Speedball is a character that we're very proud of because everything about him has come from the community! The appearance of the character was taken from the winner of the Almost Famous contest that was run on the APB Reloaded forums for Reloaded Day 2013. His look and biography was created by Darrell Kayne from Obeya, his voice was provided by Bumbleton from Joker, and the outfits that he sells at the moment were created by players from all over the game.

Speedball will be selling player made content for various upcoming Joker Associates contests, as well as stuff that we find in the community that we think the rest of the world deserves to see and use. If you think you make stuff that other players would love to have, then keep an eye on the APB Reloaded forums for more Joker Associates contests in the near future for your chance to win. Together we can all help Speedball build a decent stockpile!

Winners of Joker Associates contests will get listed as the creator of the item in-game, and they'll be sent the new, super-exclusive Joker Associates weapon skin (props to Vivianne from the APB Reloaded forums for the inspiration on this skin!), as modeled by Gumball below. So far only twelve people in the entire game have this weapon skin, so it really is as exclusive as it gets!

That’s everything from the Community team for now. We hope this has given you some insight on what we do and how we work, as well as helping to bring you up to date on the latest in 1.11. Our next blog post will be up soon and should have details about a much requested item that’s finally going to see a release. Some sort of… dessert scarf? How the heck would you wear a dessert sca - 

Oh... right. Desert Scarf.