APB Property Acquired by GamersFirst; Relaunching As Free-to-Play in First Half of 2011

I'm still going through withdrawals over this game. I LOVED it. To be honest, those who doubt the game or even wrote those negative reviews about the game must not have played it that long. I will admit, the game was frustrating during the newbie levels, but after a month I started to get a hang of it. The game relies a lot on team work as well, the 1v1 was pointless and the 4v4 was epic :) I wouldn't mind if it came back as P2P but a F2P seems like the only option that will keep the game alive. I'm afraid that the P2P will cause lag issues as more people will be inclined to play it as a free GTA-like MMO. But at the same time, it IS a very graphic and CPU intensive game so that reduces the amount of potential players. Also, P2P may create more goldbotters if there isn't a better anti-hacking system implemented. And I'm sure this new company will have ACTIVE admins/mods unlike RTW who let hackers do whatever; in my opinion, this created doubt within the players and thus resulted in a MASSIVE drop in repaying subscriptions. But as many others have pointed out, new marketing, implementation, and a better customer focus will most likely keep this game up a bit longer. I'm sad I have to start a new character over though, spent over 300 hours on this game and it goes POOF!

I highly suggest this game to others, I truly do want to create a bigger APB community as it benefits me by creating a more active gameplay whereas towards the end of first gen APB the servers contained less and less players making the matchmaking system a long waiting period. Such a shame that a game with such creativity, customization, and a whole new approach to MMO's failed miserably and is most likely going to be on the Legendary P2P MMO Fail List. But it wasn't the game play that caused it; it was RTW. So don't hesitate to check it out when it comes out!

PS: APB's future success will also be affected by other MMO's coming out next year; especially Firefall

~Eric
:)