Preview from Matt: Mobilize

Hi everyone,

The second half of 2024 has been quite a journey for APB. In August we launched New Horizon, which added a lot of great new free content to the game alongside our first new Legendary in a long time - the ISSR-C "Kingdom". We overhauled progression, and continued changes to matchmaking. In October, we spiced up Halloween by bringing back the 2018 Epidemic event, and now just before the end of the year, we are back with another sizable update.

APB v1.32 "Mobilize" will culminate with upgraded mini-games and our Holiday 2024 event starting on December 18th. I'll have a separate blog outlining all the goodies we have planned, but today's patch already includes two significant features. Our goal is to get these released ahead of the event so we have time to work out the kinks.

1. Cross District Matchmaking

Since APB launched, we've had threat districts attempting to band players together by skill so we could give them decent matches. Unfortunately, threat has been disabled for quite some time due to low population. But effective today, they are now gone for good. Players can now be matched with any other players across districts of the same type.

Cross District Matchmaking has been in the works for over a year. It required multiple steps of moving the code out of the districts themselves and also rewriting some of the logic so it could be integrated with other new systems coming online.

In theory, that means we have now eliminated the impact of the district cap on matchmaking. Instead of a total potential pool of 50 opposite-faction players (maximum), you can now be matched to the entire game's population of opposite-faction players who are in the same type of district as you.

In practice, that means if a player wants to rank up in Financial, then they can join any Financial district and queue up for a mission without regard for how many players are in the district instance they choose. There is no need to button mash and try to get the last spot on a full district anymore. Players can simply hang out with friends, mess around, or even engage in faction-based gameplay while they wait. Then once their match is ready, the players from both teams will be moved to a new server!

It is worth noting that this was a massive undertaking. I expect there will be bugs and edge cases that we didn't implement correctly. Unfortunately, it's a very difficult thing to test in our test environment. We had to launch it to really see how it performs with a lot more players. It's my hope that we can address any issues quickly with emergency patches.

2. SARD Anti-Cheat

The other big addition to today's patch is a working anti-cheat. We've hit quite a number of different stumbling blocks in creating an entirely new approach for APB to cheating. As of today, all three anti-cheat modes are fully online. That means we are doing regular inspections, kernel driver detections, and backend server-side analysis. For some of these modes, we are getting real-time detections. For others that require more analysis, we get those detections less frequently but still once a day.

If you were among the players who complained or even temporarily took a break, then know that I heard you. I agree. The situation with APB's anti-cheat was awful.

So effective today, I'm amending our public policy on cheating.

• If we have 100% confidence that you are cheating, then you can be banned at our discretion. We have found that there are some players who cheat at a level there is no other solution. We have to ban them. It's unfortunate, but we can't ignore it. Cheat at your own risk. You may lose your account.

• For any detection of less than 100% confidence, our system will be assigning Cheat Points. I've spelled some of this out in previous blogs, but Cheat Points are now being used to segregate or feature-limit cheaters so regular players don't have to play matches against them. Effectively, cheaters will play against other cheaters. That segregation may be through matchmaking or it may be feature bans where we prevent you from entering or participating in some kinds of districts until your Cheat Points have come down.

This is a big undertaking, and just like Cross District, I expect there will be hiccups. Cheat Points were designed to insulate those hiccups. If we hit a false positive or two, the vast majority of players won't notice because they won't accrue enough of them for any sanctions to occur. If an innocent player does get segregated, then the system should course correct fairly quickly, because the Cheat Points expire on a regular basis which would automatically shift that player back into the regular player pool.

We will be heavily monitoring this new system to ensure that everything is running smoothly. Feel free to ping Discord mods if you see anything that needs to be called to our attention.

Lastly, Cross District isn't the end. We want to continue expanding matchmaking so that you can queue from any type of district. That would allow players to hang out in Social or even Fight Club while waiting. And from there, we want to enable Cross World matchmaking which would truly bring the entire player base together.

As always, I appreciate you guys giving us the chance to keep improving the game. I hope these changes will help course correct the balance of matches back to the level of fun we all want.

Thanks,
Matt

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