Thursday, July 1, 2010

A funny thing happened on the way to fight crime

A friend and I were totally outgunned and outmatched so bad we could not finish the mission.

And therein lies the problem with All Points Bulletin. The matchmaking system in game is totally and utterly borked and FUBAR.

What happens in the game is that when you are doing your thing you could be assigned to fight real people or they could be assigned to take you out. The problem is with the limited pool of people to choose from per instance (100 total) if they have sat at home all day and leveled up their rank (a sort of threat level in game) they will have better weapons, upgrades and equipment than some Joe Schmoe that logs in to play a few fast missions.

Of course in time this will all balance out as people will rank up but right now as the game goes live it is a horrid mess of inappropriately matched ranks and unequal side assignments.

For example last night a buddy and I, not over rank 40, were doing routine missions when we got a hit put out on us and 4 other players were assigned. FOUR. Against 2. And we could not call for backup (the equivalent of looking for more in a heroic in World of BoreCraft). To top it off these players were in range from rank 136 to rank 80. Needless to say we were one shotted, had our car blown up easily in 5-6 shots, had our stuff bounce off them, sniped, humiliated and basically gamed to death all evening. Later that night I was playing by myself and had a rank 120 come after me. It was so bad that after a while he stopped shooting at me and spoke to me in /say chat. He literally let me shoot and kill him three times to give me a chance to win the mission. Not only was that embarassing it was downright frustrating. Yet funny at the same time. At least he was nice and recognized I stood no chance with my crappy weapon.

As it stands right now APB is a great time killer and pretty shallow shooter but I cannot keep playing if this system is not tweaked and fixed much like Blizzard did with WoW to remove undergeared shitty players from heroics.

As for the missions if you are NOT PVP'ing. Boring stuff. We had the "grab the money bags and deliver" mission TWICE in a row last night. ZZZzzzzZZZ.

The game does have its moments where it shines and is a blast if you are equally matched. Also even if you are not involved in a mission with someone else you can still mess with criminals that are not "flagged" by running them off the road and making their day hell. However things should have been fixed before launch and I see no launch day patch which is a bad bad sign.

MMO's have a few weeks to live in this market. You have to launch in a good state or you are TOAST. While this is not a real MMO of sorts word of mouth is starting to hurt it already and it may become another Global Agenda soon. Right now this game is at a 2/5 and I have to say wait on buying it. If the devs would talk, fix and respond maybe I would have faith something would get done but when people's free time runs out to play I do not see them resubscribing.

This is pretty typical for us in the game right now (by the way we won because they all disconnected or quit or something. Another nice bug but either way we will take the free cash):

No comments:

Post a Comment