Tuesday, March 29, 2011
CB4 update (release 68)
Hi guys

So today we launched CB4 (build 68) of the game, in order to perform some tweaks before the next big release. I have outlined the release notes below. The key take-away is that we are making room for the new upgrade system, new progression and new rating system, and in the processes we have temporarily 'suspended' most of the current upgrades, so we can slot in the new system seamlessly.

Also, as a further update on the EU servers, we have some continuing bad news; we are still in waiting mode to get the equipment cleared, and at this pace we don't anticipate it will happen until next week. In order to stop this frustrating process we have also taken some drastic contingency measure and are shipping MORE equipment with a different carrier just to get the stuff (at this point ANY stuff) in to the country. If all goes well it will be there first part of next week.

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

CB4 (1.4.3.68) Release Notes

General

* Upgrades: All upgrades except Field Supplier, Happy Landings, Mobile Field Supplier, Blast Radius and Nitro temporarily suspended (set to 0% effectiveness) until we release the next big update with the new upgrade adjustments.
* Bug Fixed: 'SuperCop' and 'Busted' achievements now complete at correct times.
* Bug Fixed: Audio display points show correct description text.
* Bug Fixed: “Just like Momma used to make” mission.
* Kill requirement removed from 'capture and hold multiple checkpoint' missions.
* Kill requirement removed from 'capture and hold item' missions.
* Improved network latency in Social Districts (nearly doubled the frame-rate)

Vehicles

* Dolton Fresno: Slightly raised rear end.

Weapons

* NFAS: Damage Reduced again, slightly reduced spread, increased ammo available.
* OBIR: Reduced Horizontal recoil.
* JG: Improved.
* SHAW: Reduced Damage significantly. Increased accuracy, reduced horizontal spread, increased vertical spread.
* NTEC: Increased Recoil. Reduced Recoil recovery.
* OCA: Reduced Accuracy increase when crouching.
* OPGL : Reduced Kill Radius.
* Joker SR15 Carbine: Improved Fire Rate.
* HVR 'Scout': Improved Damage (now a 2 shot kill, 'just'), reduced fire rate to be a fraction slower than the HVR.


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

Cheers,
Posted by Bjorn / TechMech at 7:33 PM 82 comments
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Friday, March 25, 2011
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,
Posted by Bjorn / TechMech at 5:35 PM 110 comments
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Labels: APB Closed Beta
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,
Posted by Bjorn / TechMech at 9:13 AM 34 comments
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Labels: APB Closed Beta
Sunday, March 20, 2011
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,
Posted by Bjorn / TechMech at 11:47 PM 171 comments
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Labels: APB Closed Beta, APB Open Beta
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Doubling the community again - 10,000 more invites just sent
This morning we have confirmed the stability of the Los Angeles based servers. We have also confirmed that the server-side frame-rate now is holding steady at much higher levels than in the first part of CB, so we have now been able to bump the district population up by 20% in each district as well.

Based on this, we just sent out the invites to the next 10,000 eligible CB applicants. For those that were included in this wave but who were NOT from US-West locations, keep in mind that you are playing from a long distance and at this stage any lag you see should be network specific.

As I mentioned in the last post, the team in the EU are continuing the work on our datacenter locations, and as soon as that's up and running we will start inviting EU and Russian beta testers whole-sale into the EU location. Right now while most new invites went to North American players, quite a few long-distance players have been also included in this current wave, so just keep in mind the distance to your game server when you participate.

Keep in mind that when you have been enabled you also get automatic access to our Closed Beta forums where you will be able to post about the Closed Beta experience (when your G1 account has been enabled in the Cloaed Beta you will be able to see the Closed Beta Forum links here: http://forums.gamersfirst.com/index.php?showforum=630 )

See you in San Paro!

Cheers,
Posted by Bjorn / TechMech at 1:14 PM 182 comments
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Sunday, March 13, 2011
End of Closed Beta Week 2 - CB3 around the corner, new invites will go out as soon as CB3 is live !
Closed Beta Build 3 Status
Unless our QA catches anything unexpected - we presume we will release Closed Beta build 3 (technically build 67) at the start of the week. As soon as that happens, we have queued up another 10,000 new invites to the updated beta to be sent out along with the release of CB3. That doubles the population from 10,000 now, to 20,000 as soon as we go live.

If everything goes as planned (and most of the performance lag spikes are confirmed as fixed in this build) then tentatively this MIGHT be the last major Closed Beta build except a few minor balancing fixes and possibly some progression updates, while the team now focuses on Open Beta and all the new components that are a part of the Open Beta (including the entire purchase sequence, which of course has a lot of interesting issues that we need to deal with and work out), as well as a lot of new functionality.

The European datacenter status
We have engineers continuing to work this week (just as they were last week) in Continental Europe to finalize all the server configs in the EU datacenter. As soon as that's up and running and all systems are "go" - we will then go live with the EU focused tests. The original plan called for March 15 for start of the EU test, but given the amount of work left after last week's heroic efforts by the team (generally until 3am every night), I am ready to bet its going to be a few days later than that. So a more conservative estimate brings that to March 22-23 or so start for the EU CB release and performance test. But if it CAN be done before that date - then we would of course proceed as quickly as possible and invite everyone as rapidly as we can.

In the meantime - below are the CB3 (build 67) patch notes. With these latest balance and performance updates, we are getting very close to prime time (ie the time when we START the very long process of testing out all the new game modes, districts, progressions modes etc that will come to define the game for the long haul)!

Til the next status update
/TechMech


1.4.3.67 (Closed Beta 3) - Release Notes
General

* Fixed server performance spikes in in death camera code (should remove most remaining server-lag spikes).
* Removed client and server frame times from latency calculation to better estimate network latency and response (can be seen using /fps and /fpsdetail).
* Added new HUD markers and text to distinguish between tainted and fresh targets (i.e. graffiti points that you need to guard vs. graffiti points that you have sprayed).
* Altered HUD markers colours, and switched HUD markers to be more noticeable. Markers are now outlines when player has line of sight and solid when not.
* Moved Checkpoints in Wilson LeBoyce spawn area to new Construction site out back.
* Fixed Cement crucible having an incorrect texture in newly-added construction area behind Wilson Leboyce.
* Fixed an incorrect reward package.

Vehicles

* Cost of Muscle Car Increased.
* Reduced Balkan Kolva Population in both districts down to 1% (Still need to remove a couple of spawners in future builds)

Weapons

* LTL Ammo cost reduced.
* Explosive Ammo Cost Reduced.
* Most weapons now come with more ammo on initial purchase.
* STAR: Bringing the accuracy back up again, but not to the extent it was originally.
* Colby PMG: Increased Base Accuracy, Fire rate slightly increased.



Posted by Bjorn / TechMech at 8:56 PM 50 comments
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Thursday, March 10, 2011
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,
Posted by Bjorn / TechMech at 10:57 PM 61 comments
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Labels: APB Closed Beta
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
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:
o Moved the /fps and /fpsdetail displays down slightly so they don't render over the HUD.
o Memory usage is now displayed in MB instead of bytes so it’s easier to read.
o 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.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011
CB4 update (release 68)
Hi guys

So today we launched CB4 (build 68) of the game, in order to perform some tweaks before the next big release. I have outlined the release notes below. The key take-away is that we are making room for the new upgrade system, new progression and new rating system, and in the processes we have temporarily 'suspended' most of the current upgrades, so we can slot in the new system seamlessly.

Also, as a further update on the EU servers, we have some continuing bad news; we are still in waiting mode to get the equipment cleared, and at this pace we don't anticipate it will happen until next week. In order to stop this frustrating process we have also taken some drastic contingency measure and are shipping MORE equipment with a different carrier just to get the stuff (at this point ANY stuff) in to the country. If all goes well it will be there first part of next week.

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

CB4 (1.4.3.68) Release Notes

General

* Upgrades: All upgrades except Field Supplier, Happy Landings, Mobile Field Supplier, Blast Radius and Nitro temporarily suspended (set to 0% effectiveness) until we release the next big update with the new upgrade adjustments.
* Bug Fixed: 'SuperCop' and 'Busted' achievements now complete at correct times.
* Bug Fixed: Audio display points show correct description text.
* Bug Fixed: “Just like Momma used to make” mission.
* Kill requirement removed from 'capture and hold multiple checkpoint' missions.
* Kill requirement removed from 'capture and hold item' missions.
* Improved network latency in Social Districts (nearly doubled the frame-rate)

Vehicles

* Dolton Fresno: Slightly raised rear end.

Weapons

* NFAS: Damage Reduced again, slightly reduced spread, increased ammo available.
* OBIR: Reduced Horizontal recoil.
* JG: Improved.
* SHAW: Reduced Damage significantly. Increased accuracy, reduced horizontal spread, increased vertical spread.
* NTEC: Increased Recoil. Reduced Recoil recovery.
* OCA: Reduced Accuracy increase when crouching.
* OPGL : Reduced Kill Radius.
* Joker SR15 Carbine: Improved Fire Rate.
* HVR 'Scout': Improved Damage (now a 2 shot kill, 'just'), reduced fire rate to be a fraction slower than the HVR.


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

Cheers,
Posted by Bjorn / TechMech at 7:33 PM 82 comments
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Friday, March 25, 2011
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,
Posted by Bjorn / TechMech at 5:35 PM 110 comments
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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,
Posted by Bjorn / TechMech at 9:13 AM 34 comments
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Sunday, March 20, 2011
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,
Posted by Bjorn / TechMech at 11:47 PM 171 comments
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Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Doubling the community again - 10,000 more invites just sent
This morning we have confirmed the stability of the Los Angeles based servers. We have also confirmed that the server-side frame-rate now is holding steady at much higher levels than in the first part of CB, so we have now been able to bump the district population up by 20% in each district as well.

Based on this, we just sent out the invites to the next 10,000 eligible CB applicants. For those that were included in this wave but who were NOT from US-West locations, keep in mind that you are playing from a long distance and at this stage any lag you see should be network specific.

As I mentioned in the last post, the team in the EU are continuing the work on our datacenter locations, and as soon as that's up and running we will start inviting EU and Russian beta testers whole-sale into the EU location. Right now while most new invites went to North American players, quite a few long-distance players have been also included in this current wave, so just keep in mind the distance to your game server when you participate.

Keep in mind that when you have been enabled you also get automatic access to our Closed Beta forums where you will be able to post about the Closed Beta experience (when your G1 account has been enabled in the Cloaed Beta you will be able to see the Closed Beta Forum links here: http://forums.gamersfirst.com/index.php?showforum=630 )

See you in San Paro!

Cheers,
Posted by Bjorn / TechMech at 1:14 PM 182 comments
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Sunday, March 13, 2011
End of Closed Beta Week 2 - CB3 around the corner, new invites will go out as soon as CB3 is live !
Closed Beta Build 3 Status
Unless our QA catches anything unexpected - we presume we will release Closed Beta build 3 (technically build 67) at the start of the week. As soon as that happens, we have queued up another 10,000 new invites to the updated beta to be sent out along with the release of CB3. That doubles the population from 10,000 now, to 20,000 as soon as we go live.

If everything goes as planned (and most of the performance lag spikes are confirmed as fixed in this build) then tentatively this MIGHT be the last major Closed Beta build except a few minor balancing fixes and possibly some progression updates, while the team now focuses on Open Beta and all the new components that are a part of the Open Beta (including the entire purchase sequence, which of course has a lot of interesting issues that we need to deal with and work out), as well as a lot of new functionality.

The European datacenter status
We have engineers continuing to work this week (just as they were last week) in Continental Europe to finalize all the server configs in the EU datacenter. As soon as that's up and running and all systems are "go" - we will then go live with the EU focused tests. The original plan called for March 15 for start of the EU test, but given the amount of work left after last week's heroic efforts by the team (generally until 3am every night), I am ready to bet its going to be a few days later than that. So a more conservative estimate brings that to March 22-23 or so start for the EU CB release and performance test. But if it CAN be done before that date - then we would of course proceed as quickly as possible and invite everyone as rapidly as we can.

In the meantime - below are the CB3 (build 67) patch notes. With these latest balance and performance updates, we are getting very close to prime time (ie the time when we START the very long process of testing out all the new game modes, districts, progressions modes etc that will come to define the game for the long haul)!

Til the next status update
/TechMech


1.4.3.67 (Closed Beta 3) - Release Notes
General

* Fixed server performance spikes in in death camera code (should remove most remaining server-lag spikes).
* Removed client and server frame times from latency calculation to better estimate network latency and response (can be seen using /fps and /fpsdetail).
* Added new HUD markers and text to distinguish between tainted and fresh targets (i.e. graffiti points that you need to guard vs. graffiti points that you have sprayed).
* Altered HUD markers colours, and switched HUD markers to be more noticeable. Markers are now outlines when player has line of sight and solid when not.
* Moved Checkpoints in Wilson LeBoyce spawn area to new Construction site out back.
* Fixed Cement crucible having an incorrect texture in newly-added construction area behind Wilson Leboyce.
* Fixed an incorrect reward package.

Vehicles

* Cost of Muscle Car Increased.
* Reduced Balkan Kolva Population in both districts down to 1% (Still need to remove a couple of spawners in future builds)

Weapons

* LTL Ammo cost reduced.
* Explosive Ammo Cost Reduced.
* Most weapons now come with more ammo on initial purchase.
* STAR: Bringing the accuracy back up again, but not to the extent it was originally.
* Colby PMG: Increased Base Accuracy, Fire rate slightly increased.



Posted by Bjorn / TechMech at 8:56 PM 50 comments
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Thursday, March 10, 2011
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,
Posted by Bjorn / TechMech at 10:57 PM 61 comments
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Tuesday, March 8, 2011
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:
o Moved the /fps and /fpsdetail displays down slightly so they don't render over the HUD.
o Memory usage is now displayed in MB instead of bytes so it’s easier to read.
o 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.

End of Week 2 Update : A New Category of Players - the Premium Ones
Another insane week, and American Thanksgiving at the same time. Not sure if the in-laws were more stressful or the job, but hey - this kind of madness is clearly what we signed up for when we took on this task.

So in the spirit of keeping everyone up to date (ie sticking to our core mission of putting gamers first) - this week I am going to share our current thinking about how we will split "Basic" vs "Premium" accounts in APB: Reloaded.

When you turn a game into a Free2Play game, we generally expect that there will be several times more players playing the game than during its original run (mostly because people want to come check the game out, and since it's free the game tends to spread like wildfire once players are having a good time in the game). This is great for the gamers in general (more new players = more cannon-fodder for the experienced players), but clearly puts stress on all our systems (which in the end costs a lot of money to operate). The goal then becomes nudging the most hardcore players into "Premium" account status, in order to help pay the bills, while also letting people lease weapons and perform micro transactions for other items (usually various consumables).

At the same time, we really mean it when we say that we want free players to also enjoy the experience, while giving everyone great perks for becoming premium players. The perks usually involve things like making larger clans (like in WarRock), creating and controlling clans, or otherwise giving you various unique options and rewards (though they have to be meaningful in order to make sense).

For APB we have another great feature (and challenge) that we have to take into account as we design the new Basic vs Premium accounts - the customization system. The customization system can generate incredibly complex objects that at runtime get pushed to all the other players in a session, which means that the more complex the customization, the more stuff has to be pushed to everyone in a particular game.

Therefore one of the original RTW guys (now contracting with us) Johann, came up with what we think is a really elegant solution to the problem of getting flooded with complex content; instead of limiting what you can customize as a free player, you will be allowed to customize almost anything, but you will not be able to store (and share) complex customizations above a certain complexity level unless you are a Premium player AT THE TIME OF CUSTOMIZATION. This has several benefits, first it would limit the amount of content pushed to everyone else in the game from free players (which would reduce the amount of loading required), but it would also let you be Premium for just one month, create a lot of customizations that month, and then use those items later on (even if your Premium membership has lapsed).

There are other issues to consider (for example; we clearly do want people to still make content for the marketplace, and also to be able to buy things from the marketplace, without circumventing the limitations set by the Basic/Premium structure). The solution to that issue might be to make customized items have some automatic price correlation to the complexity of the item, but if you are a Premium player you get a discount when buying complex items (non-Premium players would pay more for complex items).

What does it all mean in practice; we presume that some incredibly talented artists will squeeze the living daylights out of the Basic complexity cap no matter what we set this at. In other words, whatever we set this cap at, we expect people to make some fantastic designs using every possible trick in the book, and then those who are really focused on their characters will clearly be very compelled to get Premium status (also for all the other perks we have not discussed yet). And the benefit to the whole game will be less complex characters in the game all around (unless you happen to be playing majority Premium players, which seems very unlikely).

Now I have to go back to eating Thanksgiving Left Overs, so this discussion (specifically what ELSE we will give to Premium accounts) will continue next week. But until then - very interested in hearing your opinions. I do expect there to be both intense Love and intense Anger at these types of suggestions, so keep in mind during the discussion that in the end the game has to actually make money, while being the best and most engaging experience possible for everyone.

Looking forward to all your opinions!















Friday, November 19, 2010
End of Week 1 Update : The Crazy Cat Lady of MMO Publishers?
Wow. What a week.

From the moment we announced on Tuesday morning that we are taking over the IP for the game, and are planning to rebuild and relaunch it, until now (so just about four days) we have been crushed by email, interviews, suggestions and attention. Our leaders in PR (Rahul and Ronjini) have done a great job fending off the mad rush of items coming in through the chute. This is great, though in the short term has been a little hard to manage. We are excited too. Now we just need to focus on getting everything set up to put us firmly on the road to relaunch.


Here are some topics I wanted to respond to from the last post's comments (and keep the comments coming, we all read them to help drive where we are heading with this thing) and some of the new things that have happened this week:


Funny Post? Probably?
The funniest post someone put up this past week may have been the one saying GamersFirst is becoming the crazy cat lady of MMO publishers, picking up all the lonely strays along the road and making a new home for them (9Dragons and now APB). Not sure we agree with that statement as a mental picture, but, sure - we certainly think these are great games that for one reason or another were left orphaned and still have phenomenal potential. I guess the comparison breaks down a bit when you consider that very few stray cats come with multi-million dollar pricetags and big teams to rehabilitate them. But that aside, ok, fine - we might be the crazy cat lady now that I think of it...

Clearly in the case of APB we certainly feel it is much more than an orphaned game, since the game actually had some truly innovative and exciting components, and from our view, it's a great platform to use to launch a lot of new game play features and game modes from over the next several years. But more on that next week (when I will start sharing the design goals for the re-launch).

Game Balance
Making the game Free2Play does not inherently destroy the game balance (if there was proper "balance" in APB to begin with that is) as some comments seem to have worried about. But balance is one of the key things we worry about ourselves (and one of those things that keep us up at night).

Balance is in fact one of the hardest items to manage in any game in general, and in a F2P game in particular, since in F2P it is literally the balance between "grinding" items and "leasing/buying" items. If it's too hard to grind for stuff, then free players give up and leave which reduces the playing population. If it's too expensive or non-motivational to buy things, people don't buy (and in spite of it being free-to-play, we clearly do need devoted fans of the game to find purchases to be a valuable enhancement of the game experience, if not - then the game would risk dying a second time, something we clearly will work to avoid).

There are two types of "balances" that we have to worry about as we go forward; game balance as determined by what can or cannot be bought or earned through progression over time (things related to feeling accomplishment after hundreds of hours of play), and game balance as used to describe matchmaking or team dominance in each individual game session (will I get slaughtered today?). Those two are very different beasts, though related since one deals with the reasons for a person to stay with the game over the very long term, and the other deals with the reasons for a person to play a quick session right now. Sometimes they are opposing forces; if you gave everyone all top weapons from the start, that might be fun for 30 minutes, and then the game loses its long-term purpose (or things might just be so chaotic as to be unplayable). The opposite is also true; we stopped publishing one of our prior RPG games quite some time ago because the grinding factor was so brutal that Western audiences found the game unplayable (the game had hundreds of levels, and really no way to speed up the process). So all the user data we have built up over time in all the games we publish will certainly come in very handy when it comes to setting up the new grind vs buy system for APB.

Anyway, those are the overall parameters. What we will do with them are actually the topic of an entire future blogpost. However the general idea is that we will offer items for grinding (progression) that are almost the same as those for sale, but still different enough that it will appeal to two different audiences. Not better or worse in some cases, just different. In WarRock the same is done with guns like AK47, TAR21 and the AUG on one hand (which are generally earned/grinded-for in game) and the Famas and G36 on the other (which are most often directly leased, or only earned if you have a premium account while grinding). Of course there are a lot more nuances to that design in WarRock, with multiple levels of premium accounts and leased weapon slots (for example; slot 3 and 5 can have the Famas, but if you didn't outright buy the gun but grinded for it while using a $5 bronze premium account, you cannot place the gun in slot 5 etc.), but that's the general idea. For APB we are looking for a similar system where Free players will have fun but will have to grind a lot to be competitive, and paid players will have a slightly different progression path altogether. Much more detail to come on this topic in the future (and when we open that can of worms for public discussion, I will be ducking behind sturdy office furniture to avoid angry snipers).

QA Offers from Gamers
One big category of communications has certainly been offers from former clans and teams to help us QA the game going forward. This is great, and specifically the way we normally handle that is by letting people apply through the community boards once those are up and running to be part of the test patrol. But in the meantime we are happy to build a database of everyone who might be interested in helping out with Closed Beta testing, as well as upcoming feature testing. If you convince us through your passionate and reasoned arguments that you are an awesome tester, we are likely to let you try to be one. So argue away about details and features you were passionately for or against, and we will likely give you a shot.

Our Team and Former Contractors
Our team actually deserves an entire blog update on their own. So this post won't cover the things going on with the team. That will come in due time, since as we get closer to launch I actually want people to know the individuals involved in this effort, given the influence key people will have on the title.

But the exciting update this week is that we have been talking to several former APB people that worked on the title, and now have worked out deals with some of those former team members that will be doing some work as independent contractors during the transition. Since we do not yet have a UK entity or UK company, we might be working toward setting that up in the future. We currently have offices in the US, Turkey, Brazil and India, and have been looking to add a European office as well. So certainly the location of some team members is something we will consider going forward (though of course the weather in California beats Scotland any day :).

Overall, we are still interested in talking to additional people that had an affiliation with the original title, so if you are such a person, or know such a person, certainly feel free to spread the word and send us a line.

Final thoughts
Next week should be just as crazy as this one, and in the next round I expect we will start sharing "real" details about the actual game edits and changes currently underway. We want to vet them a little bit more internally but after that our goal is to have quite a bit of public discussion about upcoming changes as part of the relaunch process. I expect passions to run high on all sides, but that in the end the game will be that much better for it. So stay tuned for Week 2's update...

Cheers,
















Tuesday, November 16, 2010
The APB resurrection
Welcome to the APB Reloaded blog.
Over the next several months as we work hard to resurrect APB: All Points Bulletin under the new name APB: Reloaded, I will use this blog to discuss several of the changes and enhancements we are planning to implement in the game, introduce key team members, take feedback from former gamers, even hopefully reconnect with former RTW staff, and also share some of our experiences working with some of the original material as we convert the game form a retail/subscription game to a free-to-play experience.

I will also share some of the wider plans we have as a company for several different development efforts underway that we have not previously shared.

The team clearly realizes the immense scope of the task ahead with APB, so I am sure this blog will cover the many of ups and downs we are likely to run in to over the next several months.

I will update this blog at the end of each week with all major developments, so check back shortly for our "week 1 updates."
Posted by Bjorn / TechMech at 12:36 AM 107 comments

So ihr Lieben ...

Ich brauche unterstützung in der Member-Suche °!°
und dacher wende ich mich damit an euch !
den nur wir zusammen bilden BB4ever ...
also wer von euch kann und will den Clan wachsen lassen ?

Ich freue mich auf einige Antworten

Hi Leute ich wollte nochmal auf den Umgang miteinander im TS aufmerksam machen ....
Ich weiss das, dass Spiele ( APB ) gewisse Emotionen in einem aufkochen lassen können.

Doch wir sind alle Erwachen ... und wer dies nicht ist ... sollte lieber sofort aus dem Clan austreten ... da das Mindesalter 18 Jahre vorraussetzt.

also seid NETT zu einander ...