I haven't thought about APB in over a decade, I didn't think anyone else ever loved it as much as I did.
I forgot to mention that the most bullshit pay-to-win gun, the OCA Whisper, was also forty fucking dollars in 2011 money, AND that forty dollars wasn't even a buy, but a fucking rental. You couldn't buy the special guns outright, you had to rent them in, iirc, 30 day increments, so that dude with the no-recoil, laser accuracy, long range SMG paid forty fucking dollars just to fuck with you that month.
I used a gun called the Joker, a mid-range semiauto rifle. I did something akin to jungling in a moba where I'd lurk in weird corners of the map and jump out to harass the enemy from unexpected angles. Everyone thought the Joker was noncompetitive but when my team started dominating people claimed that I had a free-spinning mousewheel that I bound the fire key to to increase the ROF way higher than intended, but that wasn't true, I was just better at positioning any clicked really fast. They nerfed it anyway.
One of my teammates was a real obnoxious dickweed who was known for (and maybe pioneered) a technique called "pistol-switching." No gun was a one hit kill, but one of the sniper rifles did 99% damage, so he would pack the weak but accurate pistol, ding an enemy player with it at long range such that they didn't even notice they got hit, then (with the super fast weapon switch perk equipped) switch to the sniper and kill them while they screamed about hacks. This guy lived in LA and once came on mumble to tell us that he let some Hollywood guy nobody had heard of named Brian Singer fuck him in the ass and wanted to know if it made him gay because he got a new Xbox out of it.
One of my other teammates was this autistic guy from the Netherlands who, as far as we could tell, spent 24 hours a day either clubbing in Amsterdam or playing APB, there was no sleep and no middle ground. His character was grotesquely obese dude in booty shorts that were yellow with purple polka dots, a red fez, and nothing else.
One of the activities criminal players could do was rob stores which would give them items they had to physically carry to a fence to get money, and enforcers could take those items from them and deliver them to an evidence lockup. There was an in-game event where criminal players had to complete a scavenger hunt by collecting certain numbers of these store items ("three guitars, five briefcases, two safes," etc.) and delivering them to a GM. My team decided to fuck with the event by harassing the crim players trying to collect, but we realized we could just grab their items and bring them to the GM ourselves. At the end of it, despite not technically being able to compete in the event, me and my team confiscated enough stuff to be the first to win the scavenger hunt and got like a million APB$ each.
Players could customize every aspect of their character, their clothes, and their cars, including custom textures. When you first start, criminals and enforcers had a default uniform, and new players would often go around in these before they discovered the customization features. I painstakingly recreated the criminal starting outfit and car paint job for my enforcer and tricked so many newbs into thinking I was on their team.
While you couldn't shoot players not in your game, you could drive into their cars. Eventually they patched it so that you wouldn't take damage from cars driven by players not in your match. HOWEVER, there was a dump truck you could drive, and it had a quirk where it would accelerate very slowly but had a very high ceiling, and the maps were shaped like loops, so someone would always jack a dump truck and start circling the map, gaining a ton of momentum, and then ram people on the highway, forcing them into a building or other object which DOES do damage, blowing them up instantly but doing no damage to the dump truck. To my knowledge, dump truck griefing was never patched because it was so fucking funny.
Josh forgot to mention that people would often do emotes (like the handshake emote) to make it look like you were molesting the arrested players while they scream for help from their team.
God I miss this game. I would have done so much better in college without it.
