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.
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