A dirge for the fallen

At the time of writing this, I have learned that All Points Bulletin is being shut down, and find myself unable to connect to the server. I am assuming the worst, as they said it would be within 24 hours, making this the fastest failing MMO at 80 days.

This is one of the few things in the game industry that actually makes me physically angry. Shutting down APB in it's entirety is like taking good book with grammatical errors and burning it rather than fixing it. During beta APB had some glaring issues that doomed it from the start, issues that would have been hard to fix but were still very fixable.

If I were a developer for APB, here is a list of what I would have done:

1. Free to Play. It was failing, they knew it was failing, they could have converted the game to free to play by making the billboards all around the city have actual ads to generate revenue until the game got to a point where people would want to pay for it. A classic postponing tactic that can save a game.
2. Communicate your issues. Acknowledge your community and what's wrong with the game, players can give you great suggestions. If you want an example on how to do this properly, look at Global Agenda. They send out polls to all their players and former players, great way to find what your player base wants.
   
3. Delete all the upgrades. This was seriously the most infuriating part of APB. Upgrades made way too much of a difference, they essentially removed the element of player skill. The SHAW loaded with Savage 3 (A damage upgrade) and Spray and Pray 3 (A firing rate upgrade) allowed you to essentially destroy any car in less than two seconds.
4. Remove the grind. There was no reason to have a grind for weapons, cosmetic stuff I don't mind, but rewarding players for time played and not skill is not a good model for a game that is first and foremost a shooter.
5. New matchmaking. Four vs Four battles were alright, but when the matches got bigger it was a lot more fun. This is assuming of course that you didn't get a mission that was impossible for a large team.

In summary, APB was a MMOTPS that borrowed all the wrong features from MMOs. Many of us looked upon it as Grand Theft Auto IV in MMO form. The sad truth was that GTA was a far better game.

GTA IV did not have the grind in multiplayer to unlock new weapons, the battles were larger than 8 people if you wanted them to be and all the players were on equal footing. APB should have been GTA in a persistent world but obviously with a different system for weapons. The locker system they had in place would still work great in the new model.

The comparison to GTA is what doomed APB. GTA doesn't charge you a fee to play online, and as my comparison shows had better game play. What APB would need to keep would be it's cosmetic customization, it's array of vehicles, and persistent world.

And so we say goodbye to something that really could have been amazing but instead fell flat on it's face in a puddle of the disappointment of those who had followed it for years. We can only hope some necromancer amongst studios somehow acquires the rights to APB, fixes it and gets it to the glorious vision we all had in mind.