August was a little crazy, and our timeline is about to start moving pretty quickly, so this month I want to recap some of the biggest things coming your way.

In August, Little Orbit reached terms to sell the APB IP to a company in Hong Kong named Unit Game. This is a 'Best of both worlds' deal where Unit Game will take over development for an all-new APB mobile game starting with the Asian market, and then expanding world-wide, while Little Orbit will keep the rights to the current APB Reloaded title on PC, Xbox One, and Playstation 4 so they can continue to develop and expand that title.

This is ultimately good news for you guys. There will be no change in management or disruption to the Engine Upgrade. I realized that developing APB Reloaded, doing an APB mobile game, and working with the Australia team on an Unreal 4 version of APB was all just too much for us. This deal gives us full control of APB Reloaded in perpetuity, and will allow us to focus on delivering everything we have promised so far.

You can read the full thread on our forums here: https://forums.gamersfirst.com/topic/10907-apb-brand-and-ip-expanding-in-asia/

I want to take a brief moment to remind all our players that only the Advanced Launcher has been approved by Little Orbit. This program only makes changes to the config that any normal player can make by hand editing the config themselves.

Use of the Advanced Launcher has been temporarily approved until we can integrate these features directly into APB Reloaded, and then we will not allow it any more.

Players should only download the Advanced Launcher directly from us here: https://media.gamersfirst.com/gamersmedia/apb/Advanced_APB_Launcher.zip

If you are using any other 3rd party programs that modify the APB game files then I recommend immediately uninstalling both the launcher and APB, and then reinstalling APB from scratch so that your game files are clean. Running an unapproved launcher puts your account at risk of being automatically banned by Easy Anti Cheat.

You can read the full thread on our forums here: https://forums.gamersfirst.com/topic/10905-recent-ban-wave-and-approved-launchers/

After a somewhat uneven start, I think we've found some good stats for the OCA and RFP.

The plan going forward is to leave these changes in place without pushing them to Live districts and to keep adding new variants until we're completely done with the Weapon Balance. Next week, we'll be adding a new round of weapons, and to spice things up we'll also be running an event in Test Districts to allow players to earn Joker Tickets for helping us test. Stay tuned for that announcement soon.

In September, we will be disabling special characters (Cyrillic, Latin, etc) in character and clan names and flagging all names that contain special characters for a forced name change.

After the Nekrova merge, we found several issues with the /report and mail systems that didn't work with special symbols in names of characters. We explored a number of ways to fix this without changing names, but in the end we are somewhat limited to the characters enabled across all our players’ keyboards, and we need to standardize things for some upcoming changes.

Since we took over in 2018, players have been asking how to claim old unused names, and that time has finally come.

This is your 1 month notice.

Effective October 2nd, we will be releasing any character or clan name that hasn't been logged into for a year or more. So if you want to keep your name (assuming it doesn't have any special symbols in it), then all you have to do is log that character in, and you'll be fine.

Please help us spread the word to older players. I don't want anyone to be surprised. Again, this effort is necessary to make some upcoming changes more smooth.

In October after releasing names, we will be finally consolidating Jericho and Citadel giving our players the ability to play any character in any region.

This isn’t like a traditional server merge. This is a significant architecture change allowing us to expand more Action Districts so that North American players can play with other regions and so that our Asia-Pacific, South America, and Russian players can have better latency.

We haven’t nailed down specific locations for new Action Districts, but we are evaluating options for new servers in Los Angeles, New York, Moscow, Singapore, or Rio. These Action District servers will be marked in the Advanced list by region, but will be available to all players to join.

This is a prerequisite for mission phasing and matchmaking changes that will be launching after the Engine Upgrade.

You can see the full thread here: https://forums.gamersfirst.com/topic/10872-cyrillic-nick-name-change-jerichocitadel-merge/

This remains our #1 priority, but I'll try to keep the details fairly straightforward.

Last month we had reviewed and accepted either the 3.0 or the 3.5 version of more than 1500 packages.

This month here is where we are:

• All packages, code, and content have been fixed and upgraded from Live to 3.5
• All multithreaded optimizations for rendering and the game thread have been completed
• The District Select and several other screens had to be re-worked from scratch
• There are still lots of bugs, but SPCT should start testing and benchmarking the new PC build the week of 9/2
• Console builds were kicked back due to crash bugs, but we have fixed those and resubmitted new builds to our console publisher

At this point I haven't seen enough testing to have a realistic OTW Beta date, but I'll update the community as soon as I know.

Our friends at Razer have launched a fun new project called Razer Customs, which makes print on demand merchandise from your favorite games.

APB Reloaded was selected as one of only a few launch titles, so we chose some of the coolest character concepts and made Enforcer and Criminal themed cases. This is just an initial set of merchandise. We are hoping to support player-made art and more phone models in the future.

Pick out a custom, high-quality phone case, and make it truly your own by adding your gamertag. Get inspired and start designing here: http://rzr.to/customs

Lastly, with all this news, a lot of questions have come up, and it's been impossible for me to answer them all.

So on September 8th at 10am PST, Kempington will be hosting another Question & Answer session with me, but this time we'll be doing it on Little Orbit's Twitch channel https://www.twitch.tv/littleorbit. Feel free to pop by and hopefully I'll be able to walk through everything in more detail.

Thank you,
Matt

[PC] PATCH NOTES 1.20.0 (1159 & 1158)


Patch 1159 contains some updates and fixes from last week's patch, which have also been included here.

CHANGES/FIXES

• Swapping out RIOT districts for Weapon Prototype Districts (1158)
  
• Limited the number of explosives you can get from Medium / Large deployable field suppliers. Medium deployable field supplier no longer resupply explosives. Up to 4 rounds of explosives from the large deployable field supplier. (1158)
  
• Adjusted the duration of certain deployables to match thier lifespan. NOTE: While these deployables are spawned, other deployables cannot be spawned. (1158)
  
• Large deployables (Large Field Supplier / Mobile Cover): Duration 2 minutes, Cooldown 2 minutes, Cancelable (1158)
  
• Medium deployables (Medium Field Supplier / BoomBox): Duration 2 (1158) minutes, Cooldown 45 seconds, Cancelable (1158)
  
• Satchel Charge: Duration 15 seconds, Cooldown 45 seconds, Uncancelable (1158)
  
• Gift boxes, Flag: Not linked (1158)
  
• Fixed the JT price for the N-HVR 243 (1158)
  
• Fixed Mobile shield cover to allow deploying (1159)
  
• Made some adjustments to the RFP in the Prototype districts (1159)
  

RFP-9:

Test A:

• Restored to live values then added the following changes
  
• Reduced Effective Range
  
• Reduced Min Damage Range
  

Test B:

• Lowered Heath damage
  
• Increased Magazine Capacity
  
• Increased Ammo Pool Capacity
  
• Decreased Accuracy
  
• Reduced Min Damage Range
  
• Reduced Marksmanship Modifier
  

RFP-9 SD:

Test A:

• Restored to live values then added the following changes
  
• Reduced Min Damage Range
  

Test B:

• Lowered Heath damage
  
• Increased Magazine Capacity
  
• Increased Ammo Pool Capacity
  
• Decreased Accuracy
  
• Reduced Marksmanship Modifier

Hi everyone,

Today marks a significant F2P change for APB Reloaded.

Effective today more than 80 guns in the Joker Store are now permanent items. Additionally, we have removed all APB$ cost to these weapons and standardized cost across the entire line.

Here's how that works:

• Base Primary Weapon = 4,000 JT
  • Each additional open slot = 2,000 JT increase
  • Each additional Permanent mod = 500 JT increase
• Base Secondary Weapon = 3,000 JT
  • Each additional open slot = 2,000 JT increase
  • Each additional permanent mod = 500 JT increase

So you should be able to glean some immediate info from a weapon that costs 6,500 JT - You know it is a Primary Weapon with 1 open slot and 1 permanent mod.

Along with this you'll notice some other changes to help everyone understand exactly what they are purchasing. Thirty of the 88 weapon names have changed so a player knows exactly what the weapon comes equipped with by just looking at the name.

Here's a breakdown of the new naming scheme:

• A weapon with an open slot will have the "JT" designation with a number at the end for how many open slots is has. For instance, a weapon with JT1 is a weapon with one open slot. A weapon with JT2 has two open slots, and JT3 has three open slots.
• A weapon with a permanent mod will have the "PR" designation with a number at the end for how many permanent mods it has. For instance, a weapon with PR1 has one permanent mod, PR2 has two permanent mods, and PR3 has three permanent mods.
• Items can also have multiple of each of these and could look similar to this weapon - Raptor 45 'Hawk' JT1 PR1 - which has one open slot and one permanent mod. Note: This weapon previously had the designation of Raptor 45 'Hawk' JT3 with cost 10,000 JTs and 100,000 APB$. With this new name and pricing scheme you can now quickly understand what this weapon contains and what the price is now 6,500 JT.

Moving forward we'll be looking to optimize other areas of the Joker Ticket store and add more categories of items for purchase.

And we'll be announcing new ways to get Joker Tickets soon.

https://forums.gamersfirst.com/topic/10475-joker-ticket-store-weapon-price-permanence-and-name-changes/

Thanks,
Matt

Hello everyone!


A new patch is going up onto the Live servers for PC. This patch will be happening on Wednesday 5/15/2019. Patch will start at 9 AM UTC and will last for 4 hours.


Thank you all!

Hi everyone,

Bad news - it looks like we're forced to add an additional 3 hours to the downtime. The team is positive this will be the last extension needed to bring the servers back up.

Your frustration is understandable and I sincerely apologize for the wait, hopefully this will be over soon.

Hi everyone,


Unfortunately, we are still working on backing things up properly. The file transfer from the bad server is very slow. We are doing another 3 hours to roughly 9 AM Pacific time.

We are very sorry for the delay.

Hello everyone!

To address ongoing issues we will be bring down our servers to correct the matter. The maintenance starts 1PM PST (around 40 minutes from now). The estimated downtime is 6 hours.
We will post any updates as they develop.


Thank you for your patience as we work to make your experience more enjoyable.

Hello everyone!



As you've noticed we're currently experiencing some issues with our servers. Therefore we will be performing an emergency server maintenance starting asap.



This maintenance will be performed on both PC and our Console platforms, and will last for about one to two hours.

Emergency server maintenance starts 6:45 PM PST. (In about 10 minutes)



We are sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

Hello everyone!

Sorry for the late notice but due to the server issues earlier today we were unsure if we would be doing a patch tonight. That being said, a new patch is going up onto the Live servers for PC. This patch will be happening on Wednesday 3/6/2019. Patch will start at 9 AM UTC and will last for 2 hours.

Patch Notes:
- Minor background maintenance

Hello everyone!

A new patch is going up onto the Live servers for PC. This patch will be happening on Thursday 2/28/2019. Patch will start at 9 AM UTC and will last for 2 hours.

Patch Notes:
- Fixed a bug where Love Lost roll was still able to be ranked up