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I feel the issue with newcomers isn’t learning the infantry. More like its patience with people like me who have played for years. Patience for when I steal your tank, patience when plow through you. Patience when I call you an idiot for buying a demolition truck when the base is under attack. And etc. Five things that work in newcomers favor are the player count scaling for defenses, the friendly attitude of the staff, the friendliness of the forums where everyone’s opinion is respected, the teamwork aspect of rushes (easy to buy x and shoot at y), and finally the new server feature that picks levels based on player count. (I’m not as good at strategy as silverlight, but I’ll get there. He uses newbies in tanks as accessories to awesomeness)

It's all very well saying that something is "boring", but if they can't say why it's "boring" other than the fact that certain Infantry match-ups vs Tanks are unfavourable for the Infantry then they may as well be stating the obvious; that's the way the game is inherently designed, with counters in mind. It's not an unknown point that basic infantry don't do well against tanks. They didn't do well in Renegade, they still don't do well in Renegade X (even with C4) and they don't do well in other games in the FPS genre; for example, try taking on a tank in Battlefield using a class that isn't the Engineer and you're going to have a bad time. I can see that the idea of "more variety = better" sounds good in theory, but that isn't always the case. More variety adds more complexity to the game, which in turn drives up the skill ceiling and makes the game harder to grasp for newer players. It's very important that when you are considering to add something to an established game ecosystem that you introduce features that have strong reasoning behind their inclusion. On the subject of APB though, I think the main difference here is that APB isn't trying to be Renegade, whereas Renegade X IS. Obviously you're going to enjoy Renegade X more if you prefer Renegade, but the fact of the matter is the choices made in APB are made in order to give infantry clearly defined roles that have strengths and weaknesses, which makes team composition a LOT more important in rushes and such. In Renegade X, there's not much consequence for picking a single type of infantry class and rolling with it, because: Every infantry has C4, which means they can combat vehicles to a certain extent and attack structures effectively (this is true with Renegade as well). Every infantry has the option to buy a repair gun, which really de-values the role of the Engineer classes. Every infantry has the option to buy additional weapons, which conversely powers up Engineer classes and allows them to do fill in the gameplay roles of other classes (which, in-turn, de-values other classes). It's almost as if there's an active discouragement in infantry unit diversity because the intention is to let all of the classes buy weapons to fill most of the gameplay roles, apart from more specialist units such as Snipers, the SBH, Anti-Tank specialists and the more expensive versions of them. There are no truly specialist infantry classes in RenX (like the Spy or Thief), who can do unique interesting gameplay things that place them outside of the arbitrary roles of: "Anti-Infantry", "Anti-Tank", "Generalist" or "Engineer". Every character class has a gun that is good at shooting a certain type of thing (which is inherited from Renegade) and the buy-able weapons blur the lines across those four basic class categories even more. Basically, if you make everyone special, then nobody is special. I'm not sure what they mean when they say "Renegade X has more features". In terms of vehicles, APB has a LOT more. Granted Renegade X just introduced that commander view feature which seems cool, but I couldn't get it to work properly last time I played, so I can't form an opinion on it. It's very hard to say that one game has more features than another without establishing a baseline of what a feature is and then counting them up. Though both games have a good amount of features, I'd say. tl;dr - Variety is the spice of life, but it's not always the answer. Personally I think the reason that APB has fairly low player-counts is just a problem of exposure. There's not enough people talking about the game outside of the community to generate more interest. It's not a problem with the game itself, because it is really fun to play.

Wouldn't giving all infantry the exact same anti-building weapon (timed C4) provide the opposite effect to the intention of "make them more different" and "make them less boring"? This engine really is not designed for weapon bloat. It's hard enough to use the Engineer right now, they have five weapons and making sure that you can scroll to the exact right one when needed (for example, using clearing charges against mines instead of accidentally throwing your anti-building C4) is awkward. This also why Tanya/Volkov, who used to have binoculars, no longer have them - because it's painful to accidentally switch to binoculars when you want to switch to your C4 as Tanya or switch to your alternate anti-unit option as Volkov. Why should we make this an even bigger issue than it already is? On top of that, one of the things I see new players have trouble with is characters that have multiple weapons. It is very common to see newbies keep using Volkov's AT cannon against infantry, or keep using the LAW/RPG-7 against aircraft when the Redeye/Strela exist and can clearly be seen holstered on the soldier's back. In the past I've considered giving most infantry a LAW/RPG with 1 ammo and nerfing the power of bullets vs tanks to compensate, for the purpose of making infantry against tanks look less silly and giving further incentive for the Supply Truck - but the weapon bloat, newbie-unfriendliness, and homogenization issues just complicate matters. It's still up for debate though; it's probably the only "add more weapons" thing that I'll ever consider, but another problem is that it would shake up the balance of a gameplay area that, as far as I can tell, is in a pretty good spot right now and doesn't need much change. Oh, and if we're supposed to go whole hog giving every infantry a "full loadout" with like 2 or 3 unique weapons each, then we run into the issue of where do we get the weapon models? Most of the old team is long gone and everyone around here with modeling experience is too busy working on stuff for other projects and stuff that's more important than "extra weapons for units that already have a weapon and work just fine with what they have".

The real solution is the introduction of a poorly thought out ranked-matchmaking system. And then add loot boxes. EA would be proud.

I actually do this, but he gets past anyway.

Let me try to fix his post... (Yellow is punctuation/capitalization/spelling corrections I've done.) TL;DR seems to be, "It could be cool, but it might change the game too much to be good."

Punctuation is your friend.