You've already read about our 10th anniversary celebration. Now, we want to make the last two very big announcements that will coincide with that event. To start, we are fundamentally changing our monetization model by removing JMBs and allowing you to rent and obtain Legendaries with in-game Joker Tickets. Alongside these changes, we are going to start the public Open Beta for the new engine on Saturday, June 6/27. Be sure to read to the end of this post to catch it all!



On 6/10, Joker Gunworks started renovating gun rentals, but there's one legendary surprise they saved for last!

After our last update, you may have spotted Anne Partridge lurking around the Joker Store. She's been on the run from RedHill and keeping things quiet, but now she's ready to don her uniform and trade her hacking skills in for Joker Gunworks' protection.



Starting June 24, when you go into the Joker Store, Anne will be your official liaison for all those black-market deals Joker would prefer to keep off the books. She's been hacking shipments to secure more of the prototype parts and weapons they use to supply Legendaries to the public, so now she can make them available for valued Joker Gunworks customers to rent all the time.

Let's take a look!



There are a few things to note about this new menu. First, you can now rent Legendaries with Joker Tickets directly from the in-game Joker Store instead of going through ARMAS. Paying the rental price will unlock the Legendary for 7 days, which means you can try them out and see what matches your playstyle the best.

Anne likes repeat business and she likes to tease her customers. Occasionally, she'll make a "mistake" and not log that you rented the gun. Then you get to keep it for good. This means that, each time you rent from her, you have a 5% chance to permanently unlock that same Legendary for good. Once it's yours, that character can keep it, trade it, or sell it - whatever you want!



But what happens if you don't get lucky?

Don't worry, Anne has you covered! If you test a Legendary enough times, she'll give you the gun anyway as thanks for all the valuable field data you've collected. Here's how it works:

You may have noticed those green bars in the first menu we showed you. With Joker Gunworks' rental loyalty program, each rental where you don't get a permanent drop will fill that green bar slightly. Once a bar is completely full (around 20 rentals without a permanent unlock), your next rental is a guaranteed permanent drop! Whenever you get a permanent version, the bar is reset. For the first time ever, players can save up Joker Tickets to play with Legendaries!



As part of this change, we are finally retiring the Joker Mystery Boxes from ARMAS. We are moving away from loot boxes that never guarantee anything and often result in junk rewards you didn't want. Starting June 24th, if you want to speed things up, you can directly purchase bundles of Joker Tickets from ARMAS at a rate of 100G1C for 500JT.







As a thank you for your support, you get a bonus 1% chance at a permanent Legendary gun from the entire pool for each 500 Joker Tickets that you purchase this way. The advantage of this system is that we get to keep the jackpot moments that you guys love with absolutely no downside. You will always get the exact value for your money, and if you don't get the bonus, you can still use those Joker Tickets you purchased to get the exact Legendary that you want.

We hope that this new system will empower both new and old players to progress the way they want in APB. Whether you build up Joker Tickets through play or support us directly through purchases, all our guns now have a path for you to rent, try, and eventually own.



We are finally ready to open the Beta client to you all!

Our first Open Beta will run from 11am-2pm Pacific on Saturday, June 27th. It will have two districts available for you to use - Social and Asylum. To join, you will need to download the Beta client here and log in using your existing APB account. Please note that we will continue to update the client as we gear up for this test. If you have a limited connection, you may want to hold off downloading the client until Friday.

The first time you enter, we will copy over your characters from Live so you can try out the build for yourself.

Here are some things to remember when playing the Open Beta:

• When selecting a district, the client will automatically connect you to the region with the best ping for you. If you want to change your region manually, you can do so by going to the "advanced tab." Players from Jericho and Citadel can mix and match on any server they want.
  
• The numbers you use for mouse sensitivity and handling in the Live client will not be the same as what you need to use in the Beta. Because numbers scale differently in the new client, we can't give you a 1:1 conversion for your settings. Please experiment and find what numbers feel best for you.
  
• Finally, please remember that this is a Beta! Things will break. In fact, we hope you guys will help us stress the heck out of this build. Every issue you find and report brings us one step closer to the Full release, so please be sure to get us all your feedback on the forums. Below are some instructions on where and how to do that in a constructive manner.

Once you've had a chance to try things out, we'd love to hear from you.

We've made a dedicated section on the forums where you can go to let us know what you think, check out our known issues, and leave any bugs you might find. You can check that out here. Please be sure to leave your feedback in this new section and not in the forum's Social District section. There's a lot of stuff to unpack with the Beta, and we want to make sure we hear from every one of you. Posting in the right place will ensure your voice is heard.

This beta test is just one stop on our road to a Full Release, but it is an important one. Thank you for your patience on this journey, and we hope you will join us for this latest milestone.

Hi everyone,

I'm sure by now that everyone has seen the impact of coronavirus (COVID-19) on their city, work, schools, and entertainment.

Starting Monday the 16th until the foreseeable future, all Little Orbit employees will be working remotely until we get different guidance from health officials. We prepped all week to make sure teams had hardware and instructions on how to check in during the day with their leads for tasks and updates.

Come hell or high water, the team is dedicated to shipping the Engine Upgrade, and we didn't get this close to be sidelined by this situation.

I know this may be a little scary right now. And APB is just a game. But since many of you will be temporarily home due to work or supporting family members, we want to insure that the game is online and available for all our players to distract themselves with some missions, fight club, or a little virtual socialization in Breakwater.

I'm also going to be turning on Free Premium for all players.

We will be snapshotting the active Premium days for everyone, and we'll extend those days once everything goes back to normal. Hopefully that will make Social a little more fun for the time being.

I'm also going to ask for everyone's patience with us.
We are going to do our best to make this as smooth as possible.

And most of all, wash your hands. Don't touch your face. Avoid large gatherings.
Stay safe.

Thanks,
Matt
Little Orbit CEO

Hello everyone,

We are doing a hotfix patch on 12/24, 8AM UTC with 2 hours downtime.


Patch notes:
CHANGES/FIXES
- Fixed a bug that caused achievements and roles to not track properly
- Fixed a bug that allowed for the Elf VIP event to incorrectly spawn
- Decreased the Nutcracker event timer to 10 mins
- Updated Snowman marker to be seen at a greater distance
- Updated both the Sugar Plum Fairy weapon skin and the snow effect to reduce the number of particles on screen

Hello everyone,[url=

On Monday 23rd, we have maintenance that will start at 9 AM UTC for all platforms. The estimated downtime is 4 hours. Patch notes will be added later.

Thanks,
Lixil

Starting on December 23rd through January 15th, the holidays have arrived in San Paro.

But a new drug is hitting the streets, will you be able to resist the scourge that is… “Holiday Cheer?” Those brave enough to try and resist the hallucinogenic properties of this powerful drug and fight to keep the kids safe from all that is merry can head to Beacon straight away! Be on the lookout for the Prince of Pushers… The Nutcracker Prince, with his “snow ball” launcher full of “Holiday Cheer.” Will you become dosed and join his army of tweaking Nutcrackers, or fight valiantly to keep this menace off the streets? Either way you’ll be earning new rewards!

Get the full details and list of rewards here

Hello everyone,

A new minor patch is going up onto the Live servers for PC. This patch will be happening on Wednesday 11/13/2019. Patch will start at 9 AM UTC and will last for up to 2 hours.

Public Patch Notes:

CHANGES/FIXES

• Fixed a visual bug related to the Masquerade Mask

Hi all,

Since we took over, I've been pretty vocal about the F2P implementation of APB. Aside from reducing ARMAS prices and balancing the value of G1C, I have always felt that we also needed to finish what Reloaded started.

The changes to the Joker Store were a step in the right direction, but effective Wednesday, September 18th, we will start giving out Joker Tickets as rewards for opposed missions.

For the longest time, players have only been able to earn JTs from events, Daily Activities and Fight Club. Now regular Free-to-play players will have a repeatable method for earning permanent items within the primary method of gameplay.

As you can imagine, we're approaching this fairly conservatively, so please know that all of these values are subject to change as we collect more data.

Here is how this system will work:

1) Regular Mission Districts
Opposed missions in Financial and Waterfront will offer a random chance to win from 0-10 Joker Tickets. You need to participate and complete the mission to be eligible, but you do not have to win. There is a Daily Cap to how many Regular Mission JTs you can earn, which is based on your highest threat level reached that day.

The Regular Mission District Daily Caps are:
Training - 0
Green - 100
Bronze - 100
Silver - 150
Gold - 200

This means that you can cap out at Silver, but if you reach Gold then you can earn 50 more that day.

2) Weapon Prototype Districts
In addition to the Regular Missions, players can also receive 1-10 Joker Tickets from doing opposed missions in our Weapon Prototype Districts. This doesn't sound like a big difference from Regular Mission Districts, but during our internal development, we were able to rack up tickets a lot faster.

Weapon Prototype Districts have their own Daily Cap and track the JTs earned separately from the JTs earned in Regular Mission Districts. The Daily Cap for these districts is a flat 200 for everyone.

Just to make things interesting, we have two extra rewards that can sometimes pop up if you haven't reached your Daily Cap in the Weapon Prototype Districts:
Weapon Prototype Boxes. Players can open these to reveal a temporary random Legendary for them to try with limited ammo.
A very rare 250 one-time JT reward. This wont count against your Daily Cap.

Once you have reached your Daily Cap, you can still earn Weapon Prototype Boxes.

3) Future Premium Bonus
We're going to watch the numbers, but sometime in the future we would like to add a bonus for players with Premium. This will be a guaranteed amount of JTs per mission that is added to the random reward.

There are still more changes coming. We have a new design to address the gambling issues with Joker Mystery Boxes, and a potential new way for Legendaries to be collected. But rest assured that we will continue adding more permanent character items to the Joker Store and more cosmetic account level items in ARMAS.

In fact, you'll see some new ARMAS items in this week's patch as well.

Thanks,
Matt

Hello everyone,

We are starting some new weapon tests this week and we want to explain the changes to Low Yield Grenades (LYGs) that we’ll be testing. We decided to focus each of the LYGs changes on one specific aspect: Each district variant has had its Health damage, Hard damage, and Stamina damage decreased. Hard damage and Stamina damage changes are the same in each district and we are focusing mainly on size of the explosion and amount of Health damage done.


For Test District A:
These LYGs are designed to be used in a more accurate fashion compared to live. The amount of Health damage has been reduced slightly compared to live, and requires a more accurate throw as we have reduced the size of the explosion. We’ve also decreased the radius of the maximum damage.

For Test District B:
This variant focus more on using the LYGs for area control as they do less Health damage than Test A but are the same size explosion as on live. We also wanted to add in a slight amount of counter-play, so we are increasing the fuse timer by 1 second.

Some other changes that we are making concern the OBIR and FFA. In both districts these guns will both now prevent you from weapon swapping while the re-fire or burst fire timers are active.

We also wanted to update you on the weapons that have previously been in the Test districts: The RFP changes that we are comfortable with and are moving into the next phase of testing are the changes from Test District B. This change will be put into both Test District A and Test District B. The RFP-SD will have the same base stats as the RFP. We are also moving the changes we made to the OCA from Test District B into both test districts as well.


RFP:
Health Damage: 133 -> 110
Magazine Capacity: 21 -> 24
Ammo Pool Capacity: 105 -> 120
Radius at 10m: 10 -> 20
Min Damage Range: 25m -> 15m
Marksmanship Modifier: 0.64 -> 0.32

OCA:
Fire interval from 0.092 to 0.098 seconds
Accuracy Recovery from 5.675 to 5.25

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