As we wait for the APB: Reloaded open beta to launch on May 18, Producer Jon-Enee "Neume" Merriex has kicked off a new weekly blog series on the game's Facebook page called "Neume Speaks!" As Merriex puts it, this blog will focus on the "day to day madness" surrounding the development of the MMO.

In his first edition of the blog, Merriex talks about the 3 "P"s of open beta: Polish, Performance and Punkbuster. You can read his entire entry after the jump. Also, that image to the right is of a new preset car that will be added to the game in the future.

If you'd prefer to read about the technical aspects surrounding the development of APB: Reloaded, check out GamersFirst CTO and COO Bjorn "TechMech" Book-Larsson's latest dev blog entry. He talks about some issues that the team is working on leading up to open beta.

Neume Speaks!

Hey Facebookers,

I'm Jon-Enee "Neume" Merriex, the Producer for APB Reloaded. We've tried our best to reach out to our players in many different formats from TechMech's blog to our forums, Twitter and even this Facebook page. This week, we're upping the ante as we launch a new weekly series: Neume Speaks!

This "mini-blog" will be exclusive for you, our Facebook fans, and will focus on many different crazy and fun things including updates about the game, community and YOU our fans! My focus for Neume Speaks! will be more on the day to day madness while TechMech' blog focuses more on the design and technical stuff. So let's get this thing started!

This week the team marches on toward Open Beta! We've been working on what I've lovingly referred to as the 3 "P"s of Open Beta: Polish, Performance and Punkbuster. On the Performance end, last night we made some changes that has improved performance for a number of North American players who were having latency issues. We'll be trying to make the same changes for EU players in the very near future. Keep an eye on TechMech's blog and the APB forums for more updates!With Punkbuster, we've made some adjustments with the help of Even Balance to improve Punkbuster's server performance that we are planning to slowly push out this week. We're hoping this should reduce the connection spikes some players have been experiencing.

And onto Polish - on Friday we'll be putting the "polish" patch for OBT into QA for a release next week. This is mostly a bug fix patch. We've targeted some of the more annoying issues like some Witnessing exploits and the like. Vali and I will also be taking another pass at the Armas item descriptions and adding some things that we hope will make them more useful for you all (such as what Modifiers they have). So lots of things are going on here!

I do want to take a moment and point out the fact that the support team is working their way through the myriad tickets regarding character migration. Please be patient as we've received literally thousands of tickets. We're trying to help everyone as quickly as we can.

That is going to be it for me this week. I leave you with a sneak peak of what our Art team is working their tails off on. This is a new preset vehicle that will be coming your way in the future. You saw it here first!

Remember, APB Reloaded's Open Beta starts on May 18th!

See ya in San Paro,

~Neume