In groups, the group leader is the one who accepts missions, so a player might be gaining status with a contact they aren’t pledged to because of All Points Bulletin . There are two ways to form a group. You can form your own group or you can get automatically put into a group. A group’s maximum is four players, although a mission has a function called ‘Call for Help’ which allows more than four to join a specific mission. The reason for this would be if four low level folks are pitted against one or two people much higher in rating than they are, more people can be added to the single mission to even out the sides. This is based on a threat level rating, which uses only two components to calculate – mission wins and kill to death ratio. The system takes the last 20 missions to determine the threat level on a scale of 1-15. Most seasoned players will end up around 8-10. Using this threat level, players are matched against each other in missions. Enforcers always get to accept a mission, but Criminals can periodically be thrown into a mission (based on a Notoriety system).

This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as information on the game. There’s so much more to it and we’ll go into further detail in separate articles later this week. Reading our series of previews on apb gold will completely prepare you for when the game hits open beta, coming very soon. All Points Bulletin is scheduled to ship on June 29, 2010, so we won’t have long to wait to get the full experience. In the meantime, enjoy the two exclusive screenshots we reveal today within this article.