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Are you telling me 'Schindler's List' was a mistake?

It has come to my attention that @jonwil does not believe in Santa, and I have his statement as evidence. Unbelievable! Everyone knows Santa's magic is what allows him to deliver toys and presents to all good boys and girls in one night. jonwil is going on the Naughty list. Post here and see if you're receiving Christmas presents from Santa this year or if you're getting a lump of coal.

uhhhh

Sunday 9th of December at 10:30 CET there will be a maintenance window to update our main infrastructure. This will result in a complete downtime of all the W3Dhub services. The expected downtime should be minimal. What will be done in the maintenance window: Core Infrastructure Windows/Linux kernel updates Update of Teamspeak Website: Database will be updated to a new DB version Website: PHP version will be updated

History indicates that the last few times people made lists, things didn't go so well. So ask yourselves, why does Santa need your names on a list? Because the truth is folks, that "Santa" is just some scheming and fat midget-slave hoarder, preparing to go down the lists people send him every year to do both "naughty" and "nice" things in your house, while you're sleeping. And yes, it involves midgets. Oh, the presents you got as a child? Your parent gave these to you. At best, Santa merely touched the wrappings of the gifts. At best. So next time you let someone put your name on a list, think twice of the potential consequences.

Well, this guy... ... told me that I've been a good lad this year, and considering that Santa comes from the above lad, I'd assume I'd be on the nice side of the list.

You have to let go of a certain amount of belief if you want certain units to make their appearance. The scaling issue always existed, just take a look at the Soviet Submarines, they clearly are down-scaled as well but nobody mentioned it because they lack so much detail that people do not notice it. The new ships were made with higher standards (mostly!), but also, they were outsourced, made by an artist not aware of the gameplay in APB. Were the artist to be more aware of what APB is he might have concluded that such ships make no sense on these small scales, because they truly do not make real-world sense. But then, this is a game and not the real world. Sometimes for the sake of gameplay, some creative routes have to be taken. There are a few minor things that can be done to improve the perception of the scale however, such as removing the doors and life vests from the textures, but then you quickly risk another Destroyer situation, so there is a balance to be found, somewhere in between it all. I don't think it is completely correct to say that they have been implemented into Renegade. While the core of W3D still references or utilizes a significant portion of Renegade logic, none of these units could have functioned in actual Renegade. Significant engine-level changes and additions have been made over the years to accomplish most of the things you see in APB or other W3D projects today. So you'd be discrediting the valuable work of the programming team and past contributors by saying 'this is done on Renegade'. The Attack Dog remains a... Curious topic! Interestingly I believe most of the logic already sort of exists, but there is a matter of designing it to be a fun addition to the game. Either way I am sure Pushwall will figure something out. As for the rest, yeah, APB has come a long way, but with remaining pieces it is mostly a case of how to design it to be fun, rather than being a hard-blocked code limitation. In my personal opinion, support powers - including the current Atom Bomb - need to be reworked to step away from the whole "place a signal flare which magically tells a missile where to go", the whole process of poking a terminal to get a flare, traveling to the enemy base, planting it in the most cheesy location you can think of and then proceed to hopefully kill the swarm of dancing engineers, in my opinion, it needs to go away. I believe that such abilities should simply have a price tag, a cooldown, and a focus on supporting a player-driven assault rather than single-handedly destroying half the opposing teams base. In place of flare planting, should be an overhead map which displays all friendly units, as well as the support powers available (and what price tag/cooldown they have left). Then anyone from the team should be able to fire off a support power from this overhead map - which may be accessed by a special terminal within the base of the player, to avoid people from firing off a support power right as they are about to attack the enemy base themselves. This should encourage some teamwork and communication as well to ensure these support powers have the most optimal results, as a random person randomly firing off an Atom Bomb should not see much more success than causing a few defenses to blow up and only damaging critical structures (meaning actual players would be required to finish off the structures). It will have the bonus of being more true to Red Alert in this way as well. But here would be my special twist: The addition overhead map-fired support powers, could push spy/infiltration game mechanics to a new level. Spies could gain new mechanics to deal with sabotaging these support powers, some more simplistic than others. Sabotaging an Iron Curtain could simply involve interacting with the structure to reset the cooldown, but sabotaging the Missile Silo could involve more interesting mechanics such as a Spy first needing to infiltrate other buildings to retrieve parts of the "launch code", forcing the Spy to do a little legwork within the hostile base which will naturally expose him to other players. If successful however, and all codes are obtained, the Abomb could be significantly sabotaged or perhaps even completely disabled for the remainder of the match (effectively destroying the Missile Silo). This is where Attack Dogs finally could come into play in terms of meaningful gameplay. Players could be able to purchase Attack Dog guards and order them to guard specific areas, and then they would do so with a specific and limited 'leash range' to prevent them from wandering off. Spies would need to carefully avoid them, which is good, especially since Spies are already safe from triggering mines, and this would actually counter Spies a little without needing to babysit your own base 24/7 (however a good Spy player can kill the Attack Dogs). But then lastly, you cannot have this Spy sabotage mechanic work for one team only, that would be incredibly unbalanced. So, the Soviets would need a counter unit - like a Sapper or Infiltrator. Mirrored to be like the Allied Spy, it would be different as well. Where the Allied Spy also functions to disable certain things for a time or gather information reports, the Soviet counter unit could be focused on inflicting situational damage or "debuffs" - Such as causing the next Ore Dump to inflict economic damage and reducing the Allied team's credit pool by the equivalent of that ore dump. And instead of gathering information the Soviet counter unit could be placing proximity based or remote control based traps of various kinds that negatively impact Allied players, for example, placing a spike trap that damages the wheels or tracks of the first vehicle that drives over it, effectively limiting the maximum movement speed of that vehicle. Naturally, this would also require the Allies to get access to an Attack Dog equivalent of their own (No, not an Attack Kitten, that would be silly), perhaps a small 'Sentry Machinegun Turret' that can only be placed in interiors makes sense here, and fits the Allied 'higher tech' niche better. So yeah, dogs, sentry turrets, support powers, new infiltration mechanics, and a Soviet infiltration unit - it all makes for a decently cohesive package that could feature a much expanded infiltration gameplay for both teams, a true reason to have Attack Dogs, and a renewed way of doing support powers. In my opinion you'd be tackling the last remaining gameplay block that APB still lacks with this package.

Santa outsources his job to elves in China and so I cannot possibly support him.