AmusedApricot

Would be nice! Definitely way too much work and WAY too much risk to change all that though! Renaming things in version controlled large software is absolutely abysmal. Tons of stuff stay dev names forever, almost none of the weapons are internally named what they are called in game haha. Some fun examples: spitfire is mp_weapon_lmg, devotion is mp_weapon_esaw, flatline is mp_weapon_vinson, etc. Unfortunately you have to name things when you first make the prototype, before you really know what it will become! One of the silly eternal problems of game / software dev!

I wrote a big comment on it above, but it was mostly as a result of the P2020 and Moz buffs. Long story short, because of buffing the base weapons, we would have to nerf the hopup's power so it wasn't OP -- it's a very strong hopup, the big weaknesses are what keep it in check. Once you do that, it's a pretty lame hopup, because it takes an OK gun and makes it a little better, but not in a way that would make you play differently (just use moz the whole time, no need to swap, not worth swapping to the hopup gun if another gun is out after you break shields, etc.). The hopup only really works as a high risk high reward item, so it just didn't work well anymore. We will be re-evaluating it and trying to see what else we can do with it for the future!

I personally really love the hammerpoints! That's why they've been in since S3 while other things have come and gone :)

However, we really wanted to buff the base power level of the Mozambique and the P2020, and this sort of destroys a lot of the identity of hammerpoints. Hammerpoints really click as a hopup that takes bad guns and makes them incredible, but only in specific situations. It's a very high risk high reward option in many ways. From looting side: are you gonna carry a p2020 around until you find hammerpoints? If you find hammerpoints late, are you gonna swap out your kitted flatline and inventory full of heavy to try and find a P2020 with no attachments or ammo? Do you want to sacrifice a weapon slot for something so situational? From combat side: if the target still has shields, do they have few enough shields you can burn through them and get to flesh before reloading? Are they in range to use the P2020 or Moz? etc.

Once we increased the base power of...

Sorry, we try to cut things down for brevity when possible, and sometimes it gets a little confusing. Let me rephrase! The new marksman weapons category has it's own set of hipfire spread values, which the scout is being changed to. These values are higher spread than the G7 currently has, so the G7 is getting less accurate hipfire. I wanted to note, however, that the 3030 and Bow have better than default hipfire by design, so folks weren't confused why the G7 had worse hipfire than those other marksman weapons. In the future, any new marksman weapons will align with the G7/TT for default hipfire.

Right now we are hiring lots! Trying to keep getting good people to help push Apex onward and upward! Check out https://www.respawn.com/careers

Nuuuu haha we try to catch those but they slip through. The dirty secret is.... internally in code/script it's referred to as a clip ;_; ^{the shaaammee}

Patch notes are usually a translation of documentation of the actual changes, and the setting for mag size is ammo_clip_size, so it gets through sometimes womp womp lol

Not a bad thought, and we looked into that! Hard to explain, but it would be more trouble that it's worth to repurpose the existing system to work in that way. It wouldn't really save any dev time to try to make mags work in a way that doesn't require "reloading", or could "reload while firing", etc. etc. Mags have a bunch of logic that assumes some consistent functionality around reloading and other stuff, and it would be risky to try to adjust what a "magazine" means. In general, it helps stability to make sure systems do a specific thing and do that thing in a safe and consistent way when possible! The more you start trying to have systems do all sorts of different variations of things while being "the same system", the more you tend to get weird bugs and issues.

All in all, the LSTAR doesn't really have a magazine for any of the ways we define "magazine" in script and code. It's cleaner and safer (and probably faster) if we just try to make a system for what the LSTAR...

https://imgur.com/a/fS3nkJb

Thanks all for the comments, sorry I can't go through and respond to each. I don't mean it in a rude way, but suffice to say that if you have thought about it in the time it took to read this comment, I guarantee we have also thought about it as an option haha! I can't really go through and explain each technical piece and why this and why not that for each option, but I promise it's not as easy as "but why not just do this obvious thing" -- if an obvious answer was tenable we would have done it already, that's all ;)!

We're working on it, but we want to do it the right way. There are probably gross hacky ways to fake it and maybe make it work, but that likely leads to bugs and hidden issues that might not crop up until the future. Ideally, we get some sort of stable decent solution that is robust and ready to go for any future weapons we want to do that might also not have magazines 👀

Hope everyone enjoys the new season!

We are trying to work with a similar concept! It's just pretty complicated and risky from a code/script standpoint, so it wasn't ready for this season unfortunately.

That's prettyyyy convoluted, I would imagine very few players would understand what was happening. You'd also have bizarre secret optimizations like "if you have less than 20 energy ammo you should drop it first" that don't feel good and are hidden to most players. Like I said, once you start having to do really complicated conditionals, it's generally a sign you are on the wrong path. It's not enough to have a behavior that works, players also need to be able to understand it (and when players are trying to focus on the game, things need to be AS OBVIOUS AS POSSIBLE! haha). As someone who made an incoming new hopup that's arguably too confusing, I'm very worried about that learnability stuff, and I'm sure you will all make me eat my words here!

If you feather the trigger you can fire the LSTAR infinitely

It doesn't seem worth it to completely destroy the thing that makes this gun unique just to fix this bug in my opinion Also, that would take a ton of work! New animations, new sounds, new model work, new rigs, how to make it work on the legendaries, etc.

No problem! I enjoy trying to give some insight on why things are sometimes more complicated and tricky than they seem. The saying "the devil is in the details" is very very true in game dev (and most creative / problem solving endeavors tbh). Games are hard! But, these sorts of sticky problems are interesting and cool to think about, and I enjoy talking about them!

There are big sticky hard questions in design that are project wide difficulties, like "how can you make a game mode like battle royale that heavily uses randomness and variance to drive continued engagement while also wanting that game to be competitive, which requires the perception that the more skilled players will be the most successful". These are the real juicy ones that are very difficult and take a long time to work on, and often you never "solve" them, you just do what you can to find a compromise that works for your target audience. People love to talk about these ones because they are exciting and ...

As noted above, then as a someone carrying a Devotion shouldn't I just pick up and drop every LSTAR I come across? Then I gotta re-pick up the weapon I dropped, and re-add attachments, which is clunky and annoying. But if I don't I'm literally just not picking up ammo that I need, so I feel like I need to do it. The game is actively encouraging me to do something that sucks. Then, since everyone is running around picking up and dropping LSTARs for the free ammo brick, there are gonna be tons of LSTARs I find that don't have ammo anyway, and we are in the same problem, it's just unreliable and inconsistent now!

Care package weapons are a different type of ammo system entirely. Apex weapons use "ammo pools", which is a value we can set on the player and is used so that ammo is a loot item in apex that goes in your inventory. For most weapons, the "ammo pool" for the ammo type (say, energy ammo), is the reserve ammo, but it doesn't count any ammo in the mag. If you have a Volt with 15 rounds in mag and 4 rounds reserve, you have 4 energy ammo in your inventory. If you reload and the volt has 19 rounds in mag, you have 0 in reserve and no energy ammo in inventory. If you drop the volt, it still holds that 19 rounds in mag, so another player picks it up and it has 19 rounds (simplification of some tech stuff here). When you first pick up a weapon, we give it a full mag, so you get some ammo. The issue is that the LSTAR has a magazine size of 0. This specifically makes it act like the "infinite ammo" / "no reload" type of weapon, but then it doesn't have any ammo that "live in the mag...

We are trying to find a good solution for this! It's tougher than it seems. As noted by others, the LSTAR uses ammo in a different way. Most guns have ammo on pickup because the ammo in the magazine doesn't count towards ammo in your inventory, so they can spawn with a full mag and not have it affect your inventory at all. The LSTAR's ammo count is just the amount of ammo you have in your inventory, so if you pick it up with no ammo in inventory, then it's 0 which stinks. Hopefully it's not a problem every time much because guns have their ammo spawn next to them, but it definitely is too common that you get one with 0 ammo and can't use it, which sucks.

There are a few solutions that seem possible but have some pretty big problems that make them untenable. The most obvious one is "what if you got free ammo in your inventory when you picked up an LSTAR?", but then people could get infinite ammo! This leads into "what if the LSTAR only gave the ammo when it was pi...

You're thinking of the console and con vars and the like! This is a separate system built into our script logic and data file parsing.

Yea totally! When we need to make numbers adjustments quick, or disable an item or weapon, or change what drops in what mode and all that, we use this tech! That's how we do some adjustments for pro play too I believe. It's a really great system, great work by designers and engineers of the past who are much smarter than I. We also have a few absolute heroes who are constantly working on testing, releasing, and monitoring these between patch tweaks and changes in addition to all the normal patch stuff. It's a lot of work where you have to act quickly but also carefully, and it's working on urgent stuff constantly. Major props to those folks! (/u/tangentialLogic ...

Would be cool if we can find the time! Last year the gold moz was just a silly thing I threw in on the side. This year had a more time put into it by some other awesome designers due to last year's success, but we still have so much to do it's hard to devote much time to it! It's also tough because we want to limit it to 1 day, and don't want to push through a patch for it then a patch the next day (going through console cert and downloads for players and all that). So, we are pretty limited in what we can do just from a technical side. This year the other fine folks were more on the ball ahead of time and got things set up in the 8.1 patch a while ago, just ready to be turned on. (I might be misremembering, sorry if I'm wrong work friends! I don't know your reddit names so reply here if you want sweet reddit glory!)

Fun fact on that! Last year's gold moz was done last minute using a technique we have to overwrite weapon settings values in a temporary way (we use this for...