Steaming toward Build 1.5.0, first in Closed then in Open Beta, and then End of the Grief-Truck era!

Another 'phew - what a week' moment!

On the Road Again Still
Since I am still on the road, I will make this short - but we have some exciting items to share, so, at minimum I will get those out before crashing for the night. Our team of absolute fantastic troopers are working their tails off on progressing build 1.5.0 (basically the version which will eventually become Open Beta 1), and while all the core code is now in place, they are working like maniacs to track down some final pesky crash issues and other critical fixes that need to be solved before the game can go live using the new version.

1.5.0 - the Beta Path
Originally 1.5.0 was considered to be "Open Beta." Because of the delay in getting this build live, what we are LIKELY to do is the following, which actually makes 1.5.0 the next build in the closed beta series instead;

1. As soon as the current issues have been worked out, we will release 1.5.0 in Closed Beta Mode to the current 25,000 players.  This will ALSO wipe the current characters and progression from the game (but you will be able to recover them later - see note below).
2. If the initial release appears stable then we will bring the EU servers online (see below) and now all 25,000 players can access BOTH the EU and US servers (though you will have to make new characters for each world you want to play in)
3. If that works ok, then we will mass-invite at least another 25,000 players (for 50,000 total) STILL in Closed Beta mode (that would be a very large chunk of remaining EU players)
4. If that works fine shortly thereafter we will invite ALL remaining eligible Closed Beta applicants. 
5. If that works fine, we will then GIVE all Closed Beta testers a temporary Premium Account (just to test all premium functions system wide) for 24 or 48 hours.
6. If Premiums work fine, then we will ENABLE monetized content (ie leased weapons, permanent mods, character slots etc.)
7. If there are STILL no major issues, then we will open up the floodgates, and formally go into Open Beta!
8. Once we are in Open Beta, we are looking to see if we can let you reclaim custom characters from the Closed Beta. This will likely be the case. Along the way you will ALSO be able to reclaim any of the original characters from the original version of the game.AND it's likely you will get to keep items that you create in the Closed Beta stage of 1.5.0, when you have short access to the REAL premium account status for free.

If anything hits a snag along those 8 steps above, we may pause the roll-out at that step, but at minimum you would know exactly what comes next.

After the OB roll-out we expect we will be in monetized Open Beta until August, and will be iterating on new districts, new content, and more than anything, the new balance, progression, witnessing, rating and spawning that will all be introduced during various stages of Open Beta (some from the very start), all the while we will be introducing newer and cooler premium content (did anyone say "Swat Gear?").

EU Servers
We have FINALLY secured the network equipment's passage. What a freakin ride. SUPPOSEDLY it all gets finally delivered on Monday. Presuming this is TRUE (I am not customs and cannot guarantee this), then we have had a fun 3 week adventure in how not to ship and clear equipment. In fact some of it got returned all the way to the US so we could reship it with a different carrier, one that was actually going to be able to clear it through customs. I am now holding my breath it will be there Monday. If it is there Monday, then it will still take a couple of days after that before we are online in the EU. But it's certainly very close at this point.

The End of the Grief-Truck Era
In addition to major changes to spawning, upgrades, witnessing and so on for the first version of 1.5.0 - it's also very significant for a VERY specific reason. 1.5.0 will be the death of the grief-truck. Many have rightly pointed out that what causes the griefing is the fact that it's very difficult to tell the Physics system NOT to blow you up, since collisions between car and car are tricky to separate from car and house, or car and pole (and those two cases clearly SHOULD blow you up, presuming you were not being rammed in to the wall or pole using a grief-truck). However - Aphadon dug around in the darkest corners of the code, and put in place code that actually fixes the issue. Now, there are a few strange side effects from this fix (the grief-trucker will BOUNCE you off a wall instead of blowing you up), but it basically makes you NOT blow up when a non-opposing player smashes you into the wall (no such luck when it's an opposing player). How will this fix play out? Well I for one cannot wait to see it in 1.5.0 to see how people react to it!

The Start of the User Control Era
Through OB releases after OB-1, we will be introducing new ways for users to take charge of their in-game experience. The improved rating systems will clearly help with some of the experience improvement, but, more so all the new ways players will be able to initiate matches, and engage each other. I will share more details as we get closer to the various systems (Chaos, Turfwars, Racing, DJ etc.), and especially as we contemplate which one of the new systems we will be releasing first.

But before any of that - right this moment, we will continue to crunch to get this next giant milestone delivered! Woo woo!

Cheers,

The Missing Skill-Ratings, and a Thanks to Hackers

Ok - so time has come to lift the covers off one of the core problems in APB; the lack of meaningful ratings that underpin the "threat" and matchmaking systems.

There are various important core issues that the team is working on (such as spawning in your enemy's face in particular, which the team has been working on some really elegant solutions for), but the lack of real ratings is critical since it causes a ripple-effect of problems. Matchmaking now consist of a very smart and sophisticated matchmaking algorithm, paired with a very "basic" (and maybe even "dumb") rating algorithm.

We are fixing all this as one of the reasonably early Open Beta tasks (not the very first OB release, but in the second round of OB or so), and at this point one of the core feedback items from Closed Beta is - "that's some crappy matchmaking." We agree. Let me explain. 

No Real Skill-Rating
For a game that has some really cool and well engineered systems, it was a bit of a shocker to discover that in spite of relying almost exclusively on computer generated match making (unlike games like Counter-Strike where you make your own matches), no real thought was made to create a decent skill-rating system to feed those match-making decisions.

APB has a slew of different level and progression measurements visible to the player with titles like "threat", "rating" etc. This gets terribly confusing since "rating" as used in the APB UI actually means "progression" (or in MMO terms really "Level," not to be confused with APB's use of the word "Level"), and "Threat" is actually supposed to be a rough representation of "skill-rating" in more traditional game language.

Right now "Threat" - ie what 'should' be rating and what is the critical value used by the matchmaking system - is computed using a mechanic that tries to emulate Premiership League standings (or "soccer" to all the Americans reading this). A win gives you 3 points, a draw 1 point and a loss 0. Then APB takes that score over your last 50 matches, with a focus on the last 20 and figures out if you are above or below your opponents using this crude straight-win system. No regard is paid to how many matches you have played (is this match 52 or match 952?) and no regard for what level of player you have beat/lost to in the past. All wins and losses are treated equally. Even if you were to beat uneven odds (like 1 v 3).

Thus if you have 20 wins in a row, your "threat" (your skill-rating) balloons. Even if all you did was beat 20 newbies. And you will then be tossed into 1 v 3 or even 1 v 4 scenarios as you have a high threat level.  Killing newbies still shoots your "threat" level through the roof. If you had close fought losses against true veterans, those losses are still considered as bad as if you had lost to some really bad players.

Since there is no consideration for the skill of those you beat, the number of people you beat, nor the manner in which you beat them, you are not ever going to hone in on a TRUE skill rating in the current system, and it becomes easy to game the system. For anyone familiar with the XBox True Skill system the above system probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense. We agree.

Chess, Glicko and TrueSkill
The fundamental idea behind a good rating system is to let people slowly hone in on the rating they truly should be over a long period of time, and then try to predict matches that will provide the best experience to the players involved.

I have been involved in many different game companies in the past, and we always ended up going back to Chess ratings as the foundation for our rating algorithms ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_rating_system ). People have been extending chess ratings for a long time, most recently Microsoft's implementation of the TrueSkill rating system, which is a rather complex system, but fundamentally is an expression of Chess ratings applied in online matches.

There are less computationally intensive rating systems such as Glicko ( http://math.bu.edu/people/mg/glicko/glicko.doc/glicko.html ) which strike a balance between the "drifts" that tend to occur in pure Chess ratings and the complexities of the TrueSkill implementations.

So part of what we are trying out, will be a system that uses a LOT of the different characteristics of the above rating systems. It is still going to be a little while with the current wild Threat system (sure - go ahead and exploit it, lose 20 matches in a row, and then go kill newbies if you like since your threat will suddenly seem "low") - but clearly it's a top priority to get this worked out in Open Beta.

This leads to another requrement...

User Segmentation
In Most MMOs (like in Knight Online, another game that we publish) people tend to get grouped into distinctly different combat segments. In KOL the groupings are for levels 0-35, 35-60 and 60-83. The groupings divide players out based on the types of equipment they have and the amount of progression they have made in the game.

In APB this isn't strictly applicable given the hybrid nature of the Shooter/MMO and the greater emphasis on skill rather than progression, but at minimum "protecting" lower rated players from the being "hammered" turns out to be really important.

Therefore the next big thing is going to be creating some basic "skill-level districts." If a player doesn't 'volunteer' to join a higher skill-rated district, then he/she will be kept in the district with the most appropriate skill-ratings for his/her current skill-rating. We'll share more details on how this will be handled, as we get closer to releasing game changes that incorporate this.

Sure a lower level player can VOLUNTARILY join a higher rated district (maybe his/her friends are there), but the default action would be to put you in a district that most closely matches your current skill.

User Control Debate
One of the key items we keep debating internally is the amount of end-user control we should expose to the players in parallel with the Open World systems that will always be the core of the system.

In other words, how "counter-strike-like" we should make the start up of some matches. In Counter-Strike, since you can determine the exact nature of the team and your opponents, you actually are less dependent on a good rating system. So, one potential fix is to permit players the ability to queue-up and start their own fights (of course NOT removing anything from the current city or mission systems, just adding this ability in addition to the the mission systems).

Even though that might seem counter to some of the original APB ideas of launching things under the veneer of the living city, giving people direct game control would potentially let players set up matches that the system would never really promote on its own (who would NOT like 14 v 14 fights if they were available?) Our addition of Chaos rules and Turf Wars certainly adds some elements of session fights, and Chaos and Turf Wars are certainly our next big focus, but in addition to those enhancements, we are also debating if we should add direct match tools to the game. That way you can decide to play Open Missions (the current system), Chaos/Turf Districts or Player Matches.

We are happy to take feedback on this point, though I have a feeling that the true feedback would come in terms of a user trial (ie - we might put some of that in there and see where players go). The timing however, is obviously a little foggy, given the enormous amount of changes we are already working on and the huge backlog of game changes we are working on right now.

Finally - Thanks to Hackers
For the past 3 weeks we have been watching and observing user behavior in Closed Beta. We'd like to extend a "thanks" to the 60 odd players that have been toying around with various hack tools (about 0.4% of the players). Thanks to your hard cheating work, we are now much better equipped to deal with you going forward. How? I guess you will find out.


Cheers,

Quick Friday morning update

First - no - our critical routing equipment is still stuck in customs. Turns out that FedEx is really lousy at moving equipment. Great at moving papers. Lousy at actually getting stuff cleared (unlike true freight-forwarders, which we clearly should have used from the start - a lesson for us). But it's being worked out, and we are hoping to get this through in the next few days.

It's a bit sad since the servers are now all running at full speed in Europe, but the network setup is incomplete until we get the last batch of equipment in place. What we are now operating on won't give us sufficient bandwidth for the live game (we can run and test it from here, but not actually turn on live traffic).

I will provide an update on this Monday.

Also - later today I will make a full blog-post talking about some critical changes that are coming shortly to the game.

And I know that in a few hours our community guys will release something new on our Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/APBReloaded/ so check that out in the meantime.

Cheers,

End of Closed Beta Week 3 - prepping for Open Beta

This will be a very short update.

Right now we have 25,000 testers in the game, and now also well over 250,000 people that have registered their interest in the game. We continue to see between 600 and 1,600 simultaneous players at different times of the day, which is great and a slightly better than expected number from the small population we have let in so far.

We are still performance testing and improving things during CB3 and working on some alternate configurations to further reduce server-frame-lag, but overall we now have a rather stable setup. We'll analyze this weekend's results on Monday, and then decide where we go from here.

The dev, design and art teams are still working on a few minor tweaks in CB, but are mostly now focused on the Open Beta build that's coming up.  Most importantly the OB build works out several core issues that we have to solve before going into OB, everything from how to recover previous character data, to how to test taking premium payments, to working on several progression issues.

The IT side is working hard to get the EU datacenter configured for the CB-3 build. Unfortunately we found out at the end of last week, that a pair of critical network components needed to finalize the build have gotten stuck in EU customs, so it's a little unclear when those will be cleared and delivered. The servers are all nearly set up, but now we need those additional Edge networking components before going live. We hope to get an update Monday from customs, and hopefully get our items back in the next few days. As soon as we do we will enable the EU location.

And yes, as soon as the EU launch is imminent, I will post here - and then we'll unleash at least 25,000 people on the EU datacenter as well (and anyone already playing CB in the US can then ALSO play on the EU location, just for the heck of it).

And NO, I know this waiting thing is KILLING you, and it's KILLING us too, so no point in repeating how much YOU deserve to be in the game. We agree. You DO deserve to be in the game.

And we WILL enable the game to everyone as soon as everything is ready. AND we still promise that all those who applied for the closed beta WILL get early access, ahead of Open Beta. And when the EU location goes live, that's when we will NEED all you additional testers to try it out.

Looking forward to seeing you in San Paro.

I will continue to post at least every 2-3 days to keep everyone updated, as well as daily on the message boards along with all the developers and the designers.

Cheers,

Key performance improvement fix coming - or - don't die please :)

After various performance improvements over the last few days (now things are smooth at 80 players per district after all the CPU, speed, OS and core tuning that has taken place), there was still a persistent frame lag spike that seemed to crop up with some regular pattern, causing some rubber-banding on the client.

So Johann/Aphadon, using his great detective skills was finally able to figure out the issue behind some of the strange performance spikes (often seen as rubber-banding on the client when it happens).

Turns out there appears to be a bug in the new death camera. So whenever someone dies in the district and the camera swings toward the assailant, there is a chance the server will suffer a frame-blip/skip/jump during the "look-at-killer" process.

Or, one could say the server is sad for the loss, and will take a brief 100ms moment of silence :). Not a great thing since it drops everyone's performance district wide when it happens. The good news is that we presume it will be possible to fix this spike issue in the next day or two.

OR - we could just ask everyone kindly to not shoot their fellow players in the next 48 hours :). No death = no lag :)

That of course would potentially stop the game from actually being a game, so it could be a bit of a problem.

Once this issue has been nailed down by our fantastic dev team, then we are REASONABLY certain that we have taken care of all core performance issues, and then can start looking at expanding all the district to larger populations (next step: 100 people per district), AND adding more people to the Beta Test!

The team is also of course incredibly hard at work for the Open Beta features and changes, and those are critical to re-introduce logical progression and progress into the game again.

I will post another update tomorrow, and if there appears to be a reasonably quick fix (and rubber banding can be reduced) - then we will patch and observe the build in the wild to confirm this.

We also do see some performance spikes with Punkbuster as it monitors players, but at least those spikes are now within reason, and seems compatible with the overall game performance.

Have fun in San Paro!

Cheers,

Fixes, fixes and fixes

Performance Tuning - Part Deux

In the last 36 hours we have been working on performance tuning, new patch changes and a whole series of changes to the game that will improve server side performance over the next 24 hours. We just made one critical change to how cheat detection is handled, and that was rolled out in the last hour (yes, we are watching what people are doing, just not banning anyone, and that's on purpose...), and next up we are going to perform configuration changes tomorrow afternoon, which we believe will further improve district performance and get us to the stable release we are looking for.

Once we have the new tuned hardware in place tomorrow, we also plan to release the next set of patches. Below are the patch notes for the next patch. I will spend some time AFTER the next update to put together a more detailed status and roadmap for the next few weeks, especially since once we have tested all the core functions, we then plan to roll out all the NEW functions (yay!), starting in Closed Beta, and then moving in to Open Beta.

Again - thanks to everyone who is testing the game out daily. We REALLY appreciate the feedback, and will continue to make quick patches to address some of the basic items.

Personally I cannot wait until we have the NEW GAME MODES in the game, and after Closed Beta has been fully validated, THEN we are going to focus on that as the next really big project.

/TechMech

 1.4.3 (66) External Release Notes

General

• Fixed the mission ‘Just Like Momma Used to Make’, where only one item would drop but two would be required.
• Corrected Enforcer Bomb Defusal role (starting at 50 rather than 500).
• Fixed minor typo with Display Points (was using 'Spray' rather than 'Activate', which is not valid in social).
• Added a building site in the 'killbox' warehouse area behind Wilson Leboyce's spawn zone to add cover and interest to the area.
• Fixed two district server crashes.
• Improvements to the FPS display:
• Moved the /fps and /fpsdetail displays down slightly so they don't render over the HUD.
• Memory usage is now displayed in MB instead of bytes so it’s easier to read.
• We now always render the memory usage in green on 64-bit systems.
• Rewritten the LATENCY calculation code to use less bandwidth and give results closer to the real round-trip time of client-server network traffic.

Vehicles

• Fixed Macchina Calabria 127 criminal variant showing enforcer front police lights as an option in the Garage.

Weapons

• Small fix to rewards to unlock LTL weapons at Ty rather than Grissom. Also tweaked it slightly so the primary comes from Ty and the secondary comes from Chung Hee.
• Fix for Colby PMG-28 open slot versions not having any open slots.
• NTEC: Slightly lower damage, worse base accuracy, worse minimum accuracy, worse movement accuracy, Reduced effective range to 50m
• STAR: Reduced effective range to 50m. Slightly worse minimum accuracy. Slightly better running accuracy (to make up for the min accuracy loss, roughly the same overall)
• Obeya: Worse movement accuracy.
• NFAS: Slightly improved damage per pellet.
• ALIG 762: Worse Damage against players. Increased base accuracy, slightly increased rate of fire (overall a positive effect)
• OBIR: Slightly increased damage. Significantly reduced accuracy loss per shot, Worse movement accuracy (overall a positive effect)
• Joker SR-15:  Significantly improved base accuracy.

CCU climbing, systems holding steady

This afternoon we permitted another 2500 people into the game. The CCU is now climbing steadily and approaching 1000 simultaneous users.

We performed more server configs throughout the day, which required a few restarts, but now we think we have nailed down a configuration which will in fact sustain the CCU without any noticeable server side lag (other than distance lag for those who play from a long distance to the game or on crappy connections from home).

Therefore - if this holds up overnight - tomorrow we plan to be bold, and are thinking we should DOUBLE the invites!

Right now we have 5,000 enabled accounts. Depending on the overnight performance indicators, we plan to enable ANOTHER 5,000 accounts by midday PST tomorrow. At this point we are just going by order of application and meetings certain minimum requirements, so wherever you are, you will have a chance of getting in.

Next week the goal is to work on the European data center (though it MAY not yet be able to handle the traffic for another 10 days or so, but we will update mid next week on the status).

Presuming the EU build-out goes according to plan, we would start the process of shifting people over to EU that "belong" in EU (since we are now permitting people to play in the US even from a long distance) once that datacenter is live sometime around March 15.

Next update will be in the morning!

Cheers,

CB progress update

So after a night of closely monitoring the game (from the US and UK sides) things are looking quite good.

We have a few issues to deal with right away (and we will hopefully address these today):
The PMG-28 gun accidentally blows up any vehicle you point it at pretty much right away (ooops, I think Zak went on a wild design spreed and forgot to "normalize" the gun when he was done having wild fun :) ), Closed Beta Forum access has a bug (so CB testers cannot post there) and we have seen a world-server crash that happens every few hours that needs to be sorted out. Interesting though, the Action Districts all have stayed stable, and the issue is in the user management server.

So the plan is to patch the game shortly (this gives us a chance to actually test the patching process - so that will also be interesting), and then move forward as fast as we can.

We will evaluate this afternoon if we can send off the next 2,500 invites, or possibly hold those until tomorrow morning. In this next wave (once we release it) we will have a random collection of global players to test high ping times. One idea is to pull that in order that people actually filled in the application. We will also prioritize some people from the original run of the game for this next wave.

Beta status update - midnight

So - the very first "mini-wave" of 2500 invites went out six hours ago. Mostly we first targeted US and/or West Coast (but not ONLY West coast) players that met certain minimum requirements.

We instantly saw a spike on the CDN side, with one of our CDN providers presuming we were being DDoS-ed as people performed the update/patching process. But that part of the systems generally seem to have held up well.

As we cycle through various systems, we did see an issue in one of the "world servers," and we think it may have been a memory allocation issue, and it forced us to shut it down to reconfigure and restart it to see if it is quickly resolved, or if it will require major surgery in the morning (or if it's an previously un-identified bug)

Now - if overnight things seem reasonably stable - then we will increase the number of players DAILY. There has been speculation that we would wait a long time. That's not the case. We'd like to ramp up as quickly as possible.

In fact, we'd like to send the new wave of "account enabled" messages Wednesday again (of course unless something is wrong or buggy under load with any current core systems, in which case we will hold off).

The current plan is to slowly increase the CCU count (simultaneously connected players) from a few hundred (what it is now) to just over 2,000 simultaneous players this week (which means close to 20,000 actual invitees). If THAT holds up fine, then the next really big wave is to go to 100,000 players and 10,000 simultaneous - though that leap might take a bit longer.

In the meantime we are also processing data and monitoring information as quickly as we possibly can.

And - as a fun fact - we had a team in India (10,000 miles away from LA) just test the game, and it turns out it is SORT OF playable with 180ms-200ms ping times. Certainly not fantastic, but clearly playable. So - if we want to go really wild we COULD enable the game globally to reach LA, but at the moment that is not the plan (at least not yet).

If anything drastic happens overnight I will post here, otherwise the plan is to slowly turn up the heat until things croak (right now we are at a "1 of 10" and we're trying to get to "11 of 10" :) )
 

End of Week 15 Update : The Closed Beta Has Arrived

The closed beta build is finalized, servers are getting spun-up as I type this, and we are about to release the first wave of Closed Beta in the wild!

Today is a BIG LONG POST with A LOT of information. You guys deserve info. And we hope it will help everyone enjoy the first beta much more (and the release note information should be helpful in getting us the beta feedback we very much need).

Some cautionary notes first: we are rolling the Beta out in waves. Wave 1 is going to be US-West (since that's close to our base of operations), which means US-East and Europe we will have to wait just A LITTLE BIT. But for good measure we will let a few people from Europe and South America actually play on US-West to test high-ping-time traffic as well. Wave 2 will be Europe. And Wave 3 will be US-East. We also have a Wave 4 planned for Sao Paulo, Brazil, since we have a datacenter there - however, that location will probably NOT be live until Open Beta or even later (importing high end six-core Intel hardware into Brazil turns out to be tricky, expensive and time consuming :) ).

In the first few hours Friday morning after we sent out the Closed Beta Application keys, we had tens of thousands who completed the final application step (and no - we have NOT YET notified anyone of their status, and we expect to do so Monday through Friday this coming week). Tomorrow (Monday morning) we are performing the final formal review of who met the min-spec requirements and who did not.

There were some interesting data points in the first 40,000 or so application replies we received Friday morning (which probably represents about half of all completed applications we expect by tomorrow), so I figured I'd skip ahead and share some of those here. We are finalizing the data sets this week, and next week's post is going to be a whole demographic discussion, so this is just a sneak peek;

Initial beta tester responses
(keep in mind - this is a snapshot of those who replied FIRST, so this is NOT the final number for ALL applications, and we expect to have the final numbers later this week):

Demographic Stats:

• 97% Male, 3% Female
• Median age: 22 years old.
• 86% of testers are in the group 18 to 31 years old.
• 10% of testers are in the group 32 to 65 years old.

And if you are counting that means some percentage of players officially told us they were under 18. Clearly that means you CANNOT play the beta (at least not at this time), and during live operation it will be dependent on the rating of the game where you live (ie 16, 17 or 18 depending on your location, since the various rating agencies have slightly different criteria for the game).

Country Stats:

• 34% of all Applicants are from US and Canada
• 39% of Applicants are from the EU (UK being the largest single country)
• 15% of all Applicants are from Russia + the former Soviet republics (Ukraine, Belarus etc.)
• The rest of the world (mostly Australia and Brazil, followed by various countries in Asia) make up the remaining 12% of Applicants.

Oddly enough; 8% of all applicants came from the Nordic countries combined (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland etc.), and slightly less than that (7.2%) came from Germany. That's odd because the Nordic countries only have a combined 24 million people, and Germany has 82 million people. In other words - this game appears (at least from very initial responses) to be 3X-4X as popular per capita in "the Nordics," than in Germany or in USA. Or - maybe it just means that Swedes and Finns are much more timely and punctual in filling out applications than their German counterparts and got their applications in first and got counted in this first snap-analysis? (we'll see next week when the final numbers are actually in).

It could also be that the Nordic hordes just like testing and breaking stuff, more so than their German gamer friends? Who knows? Since I am Swedish myself, obviously this all warms my Nordic heart :)

From a world perspective, the game appears to have huge interest from all corners of the globe, and we are particularly excited to see an even global distribution in our key markets (the US, Germany, UK etc.). We are a little surprised at the interest from Australia. While modest in absolute numbers, there is clearly a bit of a contingent "down under." There are no current plans for servers in Australia, but maybe we may have to rethink this in the future? Or maybe someone with really powerful servers down there want to partner with us on this game (hint, hint?)

To talk more about the final closed beta build (rather - version 64 of the closed beta build :) ), I am introducing you to Scott Stevenson, our Development Producer, to discuss the hot off the presses release notes for the Closed Beta. Now - KEEP IN MIND that all the discussed changes over the past three months are still underway (the new districts etc.) but of course are not in release stage yet. However - as you can see from the release notes below, there is a staggering amount of changes to the game that have already taken place. Based on the upcoming Beta feedback from all you gamers who are in the Closed Beta, the team is clearly going to continue working on tweaks, improvements and updates for many months and years to come. Just make sure you write smart and legible bug reports for the teams to review :)

Happy Beta-ing!

Cheers,
Bjorn / TechMech

---------------------

Hi Guys

I’m new to the blog so I’ll introduce myself; I’m Scott “ScottOMon” Stevenson, now Development Producer for APB Reloaded (and formerly Associate Producer and Release Manager at Realtime Worlds). I’m here to talk a little about the team as we head into Closed Beta as well as giving you a sneaky-peek at the release notes from our initial Closed Beta Build!

Oil Tankers, Crash Diets and Razors
The original APB was a cruel mistress, bringing both unparalleled awesomeness and crushing disappointment throughout development. My take on it is simple. Some not so great decisions were made along the way, some parts of the organization didn't let things occur that probably should have occurred, and, overall, it was just plain-old difficult.

The best analogy I have is that the original APB was an oil tanker. Massive, complex and impossible to steer quickly – with the potential for massive success (large amounts of crude oil?), as long as we could only get the APB-tanker into port safely…

Unfortunately, our course was set long before the end. One hard landing and a pretty spectacular fireball later, here we are – incredibly much leaner and meaner: we are in fact Reloaded.

A new team that loves APB, a team that has added more than a few members that already put blood, sweat and tears into it for some years each. A team now with the opportunity to improve and, if necessary, protect APB Reloaded in order to right those wrongs and turn it into the bombastic game it absolutely has the potential to be.

So, let's just say that the new team is both compact and multi-national at the same time. A far cry from the nearly 200 people that used to work on the game. But, a small tightly knit team turns out to be very flexible and agile, especially when the new management gives us great freedom to simply “Get Stuff Done™”.

Here is an example of how we are much more nimble than before; the original APB had a ‘feature’ where your character would sometimes get into the back seat of an empty car even though your character was standing next to the driver-side door (the door you would actually enter was based on where your reticule/cross-hair was pointing, and not your character location, something really hard to control in the middle of a fire-fight). The problem was known for quite a while – 476 days to be precise and if anyone is counting that is. Plenty of us had suggestions, but agreement could never quite be reached as to what to do. Not even the great Qwentle was immune to this issue. Many were dismayed.

Fast-forward a bit to APB Reloaded, this issue comes up in a meeting (among a million items to be fixed) and we all agree that it needs "fixing." One good suggestion in a design meeting and 30 minutes later Aphadon (Johann) has done just that. Fixed. Job done. 30 minutes. Added to Beta build. Razor sharp. Bjorn was so happy that he even delayed closed beta a few days just to make sure THAT one feature got added in the first public Closed Beta. It became build 63. RC for Closed Beta (the final Closed Beta is actually CB build 64, but who is counting?).


Closed Beta and Not Having It Explode Your Face

The truth is that the original APB’s Closed Beta really wasn’t a Beta designed for taking feedback since the original team was still finishing core components of the game right up until the end of Closed Beta. Therefore there was very little time left to tweak or adjust the game based on feedback from the community before launch day. Something we clearly are NOT repeating with APB Reloaded.

The new team knows exactly what we need to do for Closed Beta. Listen and react. All our team members are active on the forums and every good idea or valid concern will be considered as we move through the stages of Closed and Open Beta. We promise – we’re nice like that. We won't implement every suggestion. We might not even have time to read ALL suggestions. That's just a fact of life. But our goal throughout is to pick out all major enhancement suggestions, and make sure Gamers Have Fun. The end goal is to make sure this game becomes a LONG TERM sustainable game, with sustainable high-level fun for years to come. And a game that makes it not just "Free2Play™" but also "Fun-To-Pay" as well. In other words - if you don't have fun in the game, we don't expect you to pay. If you ARE having fun, then we do want you to pay for some of that fun, at least just a little bit (if anything - to keep the development going and to continue expanding the game world for years to come).


TLDR (aka The Good Bit)
Enough talking – you’ve been asking for details and we’ve got ‘em! Below are the first Closed Beta 1 Release Notes. We hope you all find something in these that excites you and gets you even more interested in APB Reloaded, but do remember that we’re only at the Closed Beta stage, so expect many more changes along the way. The team are thrilled that Closed Beta is just around the corner and are desperate to hear YOUR feedback on the changes we’ve made so far once you get in to the game.

And having some newbs to kick around San Paro should be fun as well…

-Scottomon

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Closed Beta 1 - Public Release Notes

Progression

Reworked from the ground up, primary changes are as follows:

• Organisation Levelling has been removed from game.
• Leagues removed from the game until we can implement in a less exploitable way (League Display points are now either free or purchasable from the auction house).
• Contacts split into Weapon and Vehicle contacts, rewards split accordingly.
• Adjusted rating requirements for each contact level.  This has decreased at low levels and increased at high levels.
• Majority of Existing Roles moved to Achievements.  All achievements moved to 1 level only and rewards removed.
• Rebalanced Achievement requirements.
• This includes Car Thief.
• Added Roles for each piece of equipment and each weapon niche.  Advancing these roles unlocks weapon upgrades and high level equipment/open slot weapons.
• Levels in Roles and Achievements no longer count towards your rating.  It is now purely based on contact progression.
• Added Random Rewards (that are only gifted once), for unlocking each symbol, some pieces of jewellery, and emotes. Each contact unlocks different random rewards (around 50% chance at mission end, depending on mission performance).
• Reworked item costs for all items. Preset cost lowered, Customisable Asset prices increased. Weapon prices increased, Upgrade prices increased.
• Reduced Costs of Heat Buyoff to a trivial level.
• Removed unused tutorial contacts (Simon Tran/Pagan Bloodrose) from progression trees.

Gameplay and Miscellaneous

• Your group members now show on your radar.
• Fixed the issue where players would accidentally get into the back seat of cars when their characters were next to the front doors (original calculation was based on reticule location). Now only the front doors are considered valid options if the car is empty (note: did anyone ever really want to hang out alone in the back-seat? if so – Closed Beta participants are welcome to weigh in).
• The death camera now rotates towards your killer instead of looking at your ragdoll to provide better awareness of how you died.
• Fixed the railing grid material used extensively in Waterfront originally not allowing bullets to pass through it. Now player can shoot through railings properly.
• Added new roof access to the San Paro Port Authority building in Waterfront.
• Added new splash screen images.
• Added objects to block vehicles from using certain Waterfront areas to jump on rooftops and then exploiting other rooftops with no collision.
• Fixed collision issues on trees that allowed players to sit ‘inside’ them.
• Fixed the Ammo Vending Machine having a far too complex collision mesh.
• Made certain in-game items tradable between players that were previously not tradable.
• Progress indicators (X/Y) added to Roles and Achievement pages to provide clearer progress status.

• Camera position moved out slightly to avoid player’s head overlapping crosshair when moving right (comments for new camera position sought from Closed Beta participants).
• Damage taken from falling increased. It’s now possible to die from impact after falling great heights.
• Slightly increased the distance players need to fall before playing the ‘heavy landing’ animation.
• Negative medals (Teamkill, Killing arrested player, Suicide) are now marked as such and have had their negative effect on rewards heavily increased.
• VoIP now defaults to ‘Push to Talk’ instead of microphone activated (now using “Z” button by default).
• Player now stays in strafe mode for 5 seconds rather than 2 after firing/reloading.
• Pickup task items now lie close to the ground instead of floating at waist height.
• Updated Open World drop off location names; now named ‘Fence’, ‘Chop Shop’, ‘Impound’ and ‘Evidence Locker’.
• Increased Loading Tip Time to 15 seconds from 5.
• Loading tooltips added, describing premium and leased content.
• Players can now jump and fall in marksmanship mode (jump accuracy modifier still takes effect)
• Weapons now have a separate modifier for moving at walking speed (such as when crouching or in marksmanship mode).
• Customisation pods removed from the factional areas in the Social District.
• Disabled Witnessing temporarily until we can fix it (Ready system broke it pretty heavily).
• Players who have been freed from arrest no longer give rewards for arresting or freeing until they die.
• Default keybindings have been changed to more logical layout. See chart for details.

Weapons

All Weapons rebalanced, changing accuracy, shot damage, firing rate etc.

• Weapon Time to Kill lowered across the board (without adding extra 1 hit KO weapons)
• Accuracy model adjusted to put more importance on burst firing with most weaponry.  Weapons mostly start accurate then very quickly hit their minimum accuracy threshold.  The rate at which accuracy is regained after stopping firing is also much increased.
• Balancing with Effective Range reduced somewhat in favour of mainly using accuracy to determine effective range.
• SHAW moved from an anti-vehicle weapon to anti-personnel suppression weapon.
• STAR moved from slow firing long range rifle (analogous to OBEYA/OBIR) to a fast firing assault rifle (same niche as NTEC. Less accurate to begin with, but can handle being fired full auto at close/medium range without becoming unwieldy).
• HVR can once again not switch to pistol until it has completed bolting the next round.
• New weapons added to progression:
• Colby PMG-28: Low Cyclic Rate SMG.
• Joker SR-15 Carbine: Mobile close-medium range semi auto rifle.
• ALIG-762: Low Cyclic Rate LMG, anti-vehicle weapon primarily.

 Vehicles

• Han Cellente (original starting vehicle) removed from game.
• Added engine cut out at 20% vehicle health.
• Improved Turning speed of all low end vehicles.
• Macchina Calabria 127 added to the game as the new default vehicle.  This is a small coupe with decent acceleration, stable and responsive handling, though a low top speed.
• Balkan Kolva (Truck): Heavily Increased Weight of Vehicle.  This improves its ramming power immensely, but heavily reduces its initial acceleration.  Also heavily increased HP.
• Bishada GX 8800 : Renamed to Bishada Rapier and reduced maximum health.
• Patriot Jericho : Reduced maximum health, increased torque in gear 1 (improving starting acceleration)
• Patriot Vegas: Slightly improved health, acceleration heavily increased and weight increased.
• Dolton Montaine (Pickup): Improved health. Increased Top Speed to be on par with Patriot T-25 (King Cab). Increased trunk Capacity to be more than King Cab, Reduced Damping on suspension to make it a little more bouncy. Changed from Rear Wheel to Front Wheel Drive.
• Increased Weight and Health of Dolton Fresno while keeping acceleration and speed the same. Also reduced suspension damping significantly.
• Packer Ceresco (Standard Van) is now Front Wheel Drive and has the best Carrying Capacity in the game (25, compared to Armoured Van 20)
• Charge Mikro: Health very slightly down so it’s just below average vehicle health, rather than just above.  Grip heavily improved. Top speed reduced.
• Packer Vaquero: Health very slightly down. Top speed reduced. Incredibly bouncy suspension.
• Very minor tweaks to Sungnyemun Moirai (Exec Saloon). Upped Wheel turn distance and slightly reduced suspension stiffness.
• Upped weight of Seiyo Espacio
• Updated Nulander Pioneer.  Now a bit slower, with a lower clearance, but a lot heavier (so it doesn't mount cars any more). Also enabled the Limited Slip Differential, making handling easier on rough terrain.
• Enabled the Limited Slip Differential for both SUVs (Charge Sentinel and Nulander Kurai), making handling easier on rough terrain.
• Updated Nulander Kurai.  Pretty much untippable now.  Much bouncier now as well. Ride height increased significantly but suspension stiffness decreased, so it'll rock and sway.  Also, increased cargo capacity from 8 to 10.
• Ambulance updated. Ambulance is now a fast but very light large vehicle.  It leans around corners pretty spectacularly, but doesn't really fall over much.
• Added rating requirement to previously existing pre-order vehicles.  Now can be used at the same level as the normal Cisco/Morai.
• Updated Nitro Effect.  Now much higher effect but much shorter duration and cooldown.

 Items

• Renamed majority of upgrades.
• Renamed all Preset clothing items to better highlight which outfit they belong to.
• Added ‘Creator Names’ for each Vehicle and Preset clothing piece.
• Adjusted descriptions for all Upgrades and Weapons.
• The majority of weapon presets have been renamed.

Upgrades

• Grouped Upgrades: Only one upgrade of each group can be used at a time. This is a little excessive right off the bat (especially for Character upgrades), but will become a lot more important as we add extra modifications.  Groups are…
• Health (Character): Coagulant, Kevlar Implants
• Utility (Character): Happy Landings
• Activated (Character): Field Supplier
• Generic (Vehicle): Explosives, Fast-Fix Chassis
• Chassis (Vehicle) : Chassis Strengthening, Ramming Plate, Steel Plating
• Engine (Vehicle): Armoured Engine, Fireproofing
• Trunk (Vehicle):  Extra Cargo Capacity
• Activated (Vehicle): Nitro Booster
• Magazine (Weapon): Bandolier, Extended Magazine, Magazine Pull
• Barrel (Weapon): Heavy Barrel, Improved Rifling, Cooling Jacket
• Upper Rail (Weapon): Reflex Sight, Hunting Sight
• Receiver (Weapon): Three Point Sling.
• Added tutorial mail explaining upgrades, how to equip, and what groups mean.
• Removed Monolith upgrade (functionally it was identical to survivor).
• Removed Energizer upgrade (LTLs are now weaker than their lethal counterparts).

Premium Accounts & Leased Items

• Set Max Primitive Limits for Free Accounts on Symbol Editor, Garage and Clothing Editor. Initially free player limits set at 25, 5 and 5 respectively. Premium Accounts get 100 primitives per Symbol, 50 Symbols per Vehicle and 50 Symbols per piece of Clothing
• Leased Weapons Added (will be random rewards initially, until the Armas Underground weapons dealer is implemented in the Social District to provide leased weapons):
• N-HVR 243 Scout: A bolt action sniper rifle with a lower calibre round than the 762, but with the ability to sprint and hang out of vehicle windows with.
• OCA-626 ‘Whisper’: A silenced SMG with a scope (we’re still waiting for the audio for this, so initially it might not be silenced).  Silenced weapons no longer have tracers.
• Colby CSG-20 Shotgun: A shotgun that fires a lot more pellets than the JG.  It has the same damage output, but the shot dispersal is a lot more fine so you’re less likely to lose a ton of damage if a pellet misses.
• Scoped N-TEC 5:  An NTEC with a scope on it for a higher level of zoom.  It’s also got slightly less recoil so it feels the same despite the lower FOV.
• ACT44 GM: A gold plated ACT44 with an elongated barrel and a scope.  Same damage potential as the normal pistol, but with an improved zoom and slightly better stability.
• STAR 556 ‘LCR’:  In APB Reloaded, the normal STAR 556 has a comparable fire rate to the NTEC. We’ve added the LCR for players who really liked the old one.
• OSMAW / O-PGL:  Just the base Rocket Launcher / Grenade Launcher.  We’ve allowed players to purchase them as leased weapons if they can’t wait to get them

Client Size, Performance and Other

• Integrated the game with GamersFirst accounts and backend systems.
• Updated and activated PunkBuster.
• Various small run-time memory usage savings totalling ~50MB.
• Client size has been reduced from 8GB for the original game to 5GB for the Closed Beta RC1 (note: with future procedural texture inclusion and patch modifications, the target is to get the full client download to 3 GB without noticeable quality reductions).
• Updated VoIP system to address various voice issues.
• Improved the in-game compatibility checks at startup and install:
• Updated the list of detected graphics cards from the latest compat file from Epic, as well as published lists of cards from amd.com and nvidia.com.
• Updated the preferred compat level for each card to roughly match the expected performance.
• Updated lots of cards that wouldn't be able to run the game but were originally given a supported compat level. Those cards probably crashed in the earlier release (without warning).
• If a component doesn't meet the minimum requirements we now tell the user which component is the problem, instead of just displaying a generic error message.

Updated Control Scheme

Updates to the control scheme are below but all bindings can be customised by the player. A full listing of the default controls is later in this document.

• Movement – “Crouch” is now bound to ‘Left Control’ as well as ‘C’.
• Movement – “Walk” has been unbound from ‘X’. Players can manually rebind this if they wish.
• Combat – “Activate/Deactivate Field Supplier” has been moved from ‘F1’ to ‘5’.
• Combat – “Throw Grenade” has been moved from ‘Left Control’ to ‘G’, and is also bound to the Middle Mouse Button.
• Combat – “Switch Weapons” has also been bound to ‘2’, so that players can use ‘1’, ‘2’, or the Mouse Wheel to switch weapons.
• Actions – “Drop Item” has been moved from ‘Z’ to ‘X’.
• Actions – The “Player Interaction Menu” has been moved from ‘V’ to ‘.’ (period).
• Actions – “Ready for Mission” has been moved from ‘O’ to ‘K’, to avoid confusion with ‘0’ (zero).
• Actions – “Voice – Push to Talk” has been moved from ‘7’ to ‘Z’ to make it reachable without having to move one of your hands.
• Camera – “Look Behind” has been moved from ‘G’ to ‘Alt’.
• Camera – “Switch Camera Side” has been moved from ‘4’ to ‘V’.
• Music – “Previous Track” has been moved from ‘,’ (comma) to ‘[‘.
• Music – “Next Track” has been moved from ‘.’ (period) To ‘]’.
• Music – “Pause/Resume Playback” has also been bound to ‘\’, so that players can use that or ‘Right Control’.
• Interface – “Clan Management” has been moved from ‘[‘ to ‘,’ (comma).
• Interface – “View Support Pages” (Help) has been moved from ‘K’ to ‘F1’.
• Interface – “View Leagues/High Score Tables” has been moved from ‘F4’ to ‘F6’.
• Interface – “Chat Channel Commands” has been moved from ‘F6’ to ‘F9’.
• Interface – “Chat Console Commands” has been moved from ‘F7’ to ‘F10’.
• Interface – “Chat Emote Commands” has been moved from ‘F8’ to ‘F11’.
• Interface – “Screenshot” has been moved from ‘Pause’ to ‘Print Screen’.
• Interface – “Toggle HUD” display has been moved from ‘End’ to ‘F12’.

Full Default Control Listing

Movement

Function	Primary Binding	Secondary Binding
Forward	W
Backward	S
Left	A
Right	D
Jump	Spacebar
Crouch	Left Control	C
Sprint	Shift
Walk

Combat

Function	Primary Binding	Secondary Binding
Fire Weapon	Left Mouse
Reload	R
Marksmanship Mode (Hold)	Right Mouse
Marksmanship Mode (Toggle)
Lean Left (in Marksmanship Mode)	Q
Lean Right (in Marksmanship Mode)	E
Grenade	G	Middle Mouse
Next Weapon	1	Mouse Wheel Down
Previous Weapon	2	Mouse Wheel Up
Activate/Deactivate Field Supplier	5
Put Away Weapon	`

Driving

Function	Primary Binding	Secondary Binding
Forward	W
Backward	S
Turn Left	A
Turn Right	D
Handbrake	Spacebar
Horn	Left Mouse
Activate/Deactivate Nitro	Shift
Vehicle Special Function	Right Mouse
Left Turn Signal	Q
Right Turn Signal	E

Actions

Function	Primary Binding	Secondary Binding
Action	F
Ammo Resupply	T
Drop Item	X
Player Interaction Menu	.
Ready For Mission	K
Toggle Movie Capturing	;
Voice – Push To Talk	Z

Camera

Function	Primary Binding	Secondary Binding
Look Behind	Alt
Rotate Left	Left
Rotate Right	Right
Switch Camera Position	V
Toggle Camera Distance	0
Zoom In	=
Zoom Out	-

Music

Function	Primary Binding	Secondary Binding
Next Track	]
Previous Track	[
Resume/Pause Playback	Right Control	\

Interface

Function	Primary Binding	Secondary Binding
Accept Offer	Y
Decline Offer	N
Call For Backup	B
Scoreboard	Tab
Character Info	J
Groups & Friends	U
Inventory	I
Locker	L
Map	M
Music Player	P
Options	O
Last Hint	H
Clan Management	,
View Support Pages	F1
Leagues	F6
Quick Chat	/
Quick Reply	Backspace
Chat Window	Enter
Open Full Chat	Home
Chat Channel Commands	F9
Chat Console Commands	F10
Chat Emote Commands	F11
Main Chat Scroll Down	Page Down
Main Chat Scroll Up	Page Up
Screenshot	Print Screen
Toggle HUD	F12

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Whoa - this may be the longest post so far. I am guessing next week's post WILL BE VERY SHORT. This coming week is GDC in San Francisco as well as first week of Closed Beta, so we will have a giant amount of work ahead of us. And YES - you WILL get an email with your download and launch status. If you do NOT yet have an email, that simply means we HAVE NOT SENT IT TO YOU YET! So - please do not make one hundred comments with the words "what is my status?" Trust me, you will get an email as soon as your G1 account has been activated for the beta. You will ALSO be told which realm you will be activated in, and keep in mind the three waves I described at the top of the post.

Other than that - we are all thrilled to bits that we are finally here. The changes underway for Open Beta are equally staggering and are getting close to being as long as the list above. However, we clearly plan to leave plenty of room for suggestions from the Closed  Beta to be included, and even after going to Open Beta the goal is constant improvements to the game, until the game is truly a great experience for everyone.

Looking forward to seeing you all in San Paro! 

Cheers,