Notoriety

 is a first-person shooter where you rob places and follow the clients orders to earn money and unlock various upgrades of your arsenal. It was developed by Brickman Nation for the Roblox platform, currently only supported on desktop, although there was previously mobile support. The place was created on January 29th 2010, but development started sometime between 2014-2015. Notoriety was created by Brick_man, originally under the name Payday 2. It has also been known as ' Heist ' before its current name. The game has been visited 190.6 million times and has more than 1,000,000 favorites and 412,000 ratings, holding an approval rating of 91%.

A revamped version of Notoriety (Notoriety Revamp), was released on 22 December 2017, which featured huge changes to the game including maps, weapons, AI and gamepass prices. Many features were also removed and were periodically added back into the game over time. The main change in the Notoriety Revamp was FilteringEnabled.

Gameplay
Notoriety is a first-person shooter with RPG and stealth elements. It can be played in a team of up to four players. Its gameplay is inspired by PAYDAY 2.

Different heists can be approached in different ways, some can be done stealthily (commonly referred to as “stealth” or “Plan A”) while some have to be done with a mass shootout (players often refer to the term “loud” or “Plan B”) and some will offer both decisions, depending on player’s preferences.

Currently, the game contains 21 maps, commonly known as heists, with 2 of which being paid gamepass heists. Currently, 2 maps must be done stealthily, 8 maps can only be done loud, and the rest offers both choices for players to decide.

As mentioned above, there are 2 different ways (stealth and loud) to complete the heist. When in loud, police will arrive at the scene as waves of enemies. Depending on the difficulty, the amount of health and damage they deal will also scale accordingly, along with different types of enemies. They will attempt to slow down the players or eliminate them by shooting at players, taking away their loot, or interfering with their current objectives. However, if the player chooses to stealth the map, they could bypass the assault as long as they are not caught.

During loud, if a player gets shot down by police, they could be revived by a teammate, or an AI bot if the player enabled the option. Typically, when a player gets shot down by the fourth time they will be automatically sent into custody if they haven't used a medic bag to heal up (or if the player didn’t get revived in time when they got shot down), where they would need the other players to trade in a hostage in exchange for the player in custody. Each citizen killed will prevent a hostage exchange by 30 seconds. If all the players are sent into custody, the game will end as a result of failure.

During stealth, most of the enemies killed (or halted on +) will be required to answer a pager upon their death. If their pager was not answered in time, or the player stopped responding in the process, the alarm will sound. The total maximum amount of pagers that players are allowed to answer is 4. If a player answers the fifth pager, the alarm will sound with the reason “The pager operator was not convinced!” To avoid any confusion, the players cannot kill the pager operator himself, as the operator does not exist on the map. However, in some maps there will be a camera operator, where players can kill or hostage to shut down the cameras. Furthermore, enemies and cameras will also become alert in the following situations:
 * Saw any kinds of bag, exposed body, hostage, another alerted guard or civilian, broken camera or glass
 * Heard an explosion, unsilenced gunshot, or drill.

Each heist has an objective or a set of objectives that are required to be completed to finish the heist. For all maps except two (Haunted Forest and Mall Raid), the main objective is to secure a certain amount of bags or specific loot.

After completing a heist, players are rewarded with cash, which can be spent on new weapons or other equipment, and experience (XP) which contributes to their level and amount of skill points.

Skills can be used by spending skill points. They can provide general stat benefits and bonuses or give the player new abilities to use in heists. Skills can be refunded at any time, allowing for the skill points to be redistributed into any of the four-class skill trees:
 * The Mastermind, able to take more hostages and heal the team, along with multiple pistol improvements.
 * The Enforcer, tanking damage with a high armor and hp stat, and access to many shotgun improvements while supplying the team with ammo bags.
 * The Technician, deploying sentry guns and trip mines to protect the team and placing and maintaining better drills.
 * The Ghost, sneaking past guards without being spotted and disabling security cameras with the ECM jammer while being able to do things in casing mode, having higher critical hit chances, and being able to dodge bullets entirely.

Difficulties
Heists can be set to have a lower or higher difficulty depending on if the player wants more or less of a challenge, and more or fewer rewards, with  being the lowest difficulty and  being the highest difficulty.

Higher difficulties will increase the detection capabilities in stealth, the type of security cameras, damage dealt from enemies, the type of enemies that appear, and many others. The reward from heists also scales with difficulty, with higher difficulties giving higher cash and experience.

Customization
Notoriety features many ways for the player to customize their experience, including masks, skill trees, and assets. Players could also customize their weapons with different sights and silencers for different experiences while using the weapons.

Masks
Players can buy or find safes which can contain a randomized mask or a free contract, which allows the player to play the heist in the specified difficulty without having to pay for contract costs. Currently, there are 6 types of safe: Cardboard “safe”, Metal safe, Diamond safe, Ruby safe, Infamous safe, and Outlaw safe. Each safe has a specific selection of mask types, which can be in a variety of colors and materials, totaling a huge amount of unique masks. The mask you get from a safe is randomized, so you may get a plain white dominus mask one time and never get it again. Some players may choose to collect masks. However, some safe types can contain both contracts and masks, so check and choose wisely before buying one, as they can be quite expensive!

Masks can be in six different rarities:
 * Common
 * Uncommon
 * Rare
 * Epic
 * Infamous
 * Exclusive

If the player goes through their first Infamy, they are rewarded with a free shades mask and an infamous safe, which has a 100% chance of giving the player a mask of Infamous rarity. The player can then choose to carry on going through infamy to continue getting an infamous safe each infamy. However, if the player has over 100 masks in their inventory, the safes will only give heist contracts unless the player destroys unwanted masks to make room for newer masks.

Skills
Players can pick certain types of skills that complement their loadout to make a build. Using different builds can change the experience a player has when playing a heist, even if they have played it dozens of times. They may choose to pick different skills than they usually would change their playstyle and their role in a team. They may also choose to pick less skills to add challenge to a heist that they find easy.

Assets
Before a heist starts, a team can choose to spend their favors and money to purchase assets. Assets are intended to assist the player in some way or form. For example, certain assets can provide an extra medic bag to the team, or delay the initial police assault to give them more preparation time.

Not all heists may have assets though, and some assets may only be found in a single heist, such as the Thermal Paste, which is only available in the heist Shadow Raid.

Gamepasses
Gamepasses can be purchased by the player for the digital Roblox currency "Robux". They function in the same way a DLC would in other games, providing extra content or features for the player. In Notoriety, this can mean extra maps, weapon packs, or stat multipliers. Note that they are only needed to host the maps, but one can join any lobby without it.

More gamepasses are planned to be released as the development of Notoriety continues.

Criticism
Notoriety has had criticism on some of its various features throughout its whole lifespan.

Pre-revamp
Before the game was revamped, there were various game-breaking glitches in different maps. Some of the more popular ones include:
 * Players getting teleported into the wrong spot of the map on day 2 of Transport;
 * Players being unable to mask up and hence cannot interact or shoot;
 * Guns being broken and not being able to shoot;
 * The ability to shoot lights, and much more.

Notoriety Revamp
On 22 December 2017, Notoriety received a much-anticipated complete redesign of the game, a so-called "revamp". This caused a large amount of controversy in the community for various reasons. One of the major reasons is that certain heists (i.e. Fave Breakout, Terminal, Transport, World Bank) were removed, causing dissatisfaction among players. Another reason is that their saved data were globally reset.

Data Loss
In the early stages of the revamp, a technical problem not directly caused by Notoriety resulted in the majority of players losing their data, causing a huge inconvenience for both parties involved. In response, the Notoriety Team sent out a form asking people to fill out if they lost their data, they would then restore players' data using the information they got from the forms. This allowed the majority of players to have their data restored.

The forms were closed after a certain date, causing some frustration and anger in a minority of the community, as they were not aware of the form. However, the problem was largely resolved in time.

Gun System
With the release of the Notoriety Revamp came the revamp's first gun system, which the large majority of the community believed to be worse than the previous iterations of it, responding to many complaints due to it looking visually worse, having no crosshair, and no large improvements being made on it.

This was eventually resolved with the Notoriety Version 2.00 (The Gun Update), which added new guns, attachments, and animations. However, there were still some problems: there were no reload sounds, certain parts of the gun would not be animated and the bullets would not fire to the center of the screen instead of being offset slightly.

Public Testing Realm
On 27 September 2019, the Public Testing Realm (https://www.roblox.com/games/1584363130/Notoriety-PTR) was opened up to all players to test experimental functions before they released them into the main game. This included new skills, perk decks, revamped UI, smoother animations, and many other improvements to the game. This mainly fixed most of the criticism Notoriety received over the recent years. This could also indicate that Notoriety might make a comeback, considering its state of updates severely lacking recently, and a drop of players overall.