This thread is good and pure.

I think the biggest problem Harec has is one general to the Broken Planet Locals character faction - having 60 HP. This is fine for long-range gunfights, because they're also really stealthy, but causes them to die in two punches. There are three solutions I can think of for this - give them stronger melee attacks to turn them into glass cannons, faster and farther dodges to help them go defensive, or give them enough melee damage resistance (like the Fifth Council gunfire resistance) to let them take one additional punch. I like the second of those, myself.

It seems like the trick to being a good Antagonist is to be a sneaky saboteur. You aren't really meant to win head-to-head confrontations (I got into a couple of Konstantin-versus-Konstantin "stand and hose each other at short range" scenarios as a Raider, and the Antagonist seemed to go down well before I did).

I was in a match that only had three Raiders in it from the start, for some reason. The enemy durability and population seemed to be the same as with a four-man team. I guess they're going to have to get 2- and 3- person balances in there, before they can work on the matchmaking side of things.

I could see that value in making certain weapons, particular Dark Side-styled weapons, require Antagonist ranks, but I think those should be the exception and not the rule.

They were extremely vulnerable to being gunned down to a wounded state and then finished off with melee in the earlier versions of the beta, so maybe this was an attempt to make them less glass-cannon-ish? I've noticed that enemy health seems to vary, depending on whether you're playing solo, in a team, or in a team against an Antagonist. Maybe we're expected to focus-fire them, now.

When I join a multplayer game, the server seems to keep making me the host. This is a terrible mistake, as my crappy DSL connection has an amazing upload speed of ONE mbps (the two matches I played where I wasn't the host went perfectly, by the way - I can keep up fine, as long as I'm not hosting). As a result, at least one person is disconnected from the game every time this happens. The game balancing responds very poorly to this player-dropping... which is to say, it doesn't respond at all. In my most recent match, we made it to the reactor core, before being completely swamped by an ever-increasing enemy population, because the reinforcement timer and output continued to assume a full four-man team. This black comedy of a match presents a series of problems:

1- If I can't tell the game to not make me the host, or volunteer to migrate host status, several people are getting screwed over, at once. I got a nice little message at the beginning telling me that the others are reliant on my connection and behavior, which, while I understand the intent, just seems like a Kafka-esque "remember, this is going to be YOUR fault," in context.

2- Disconnected players still count as being in-game, for purposes of enemy strength and numbers. If even one guy drops, be it due to connection issues or rage quitting, the game seems to have no way of compensating, and everybody has a bad time.

3- By a similar token, I suspect that an absentee Antagonist just creates an Easy Mode for the Raiders. If this is true, people will find a way to abuse it.

All in all, I think the matchmaking system suffers greatly from its inflexibility. Four or five players are locked in a room, and just about any adjustment or reorganization requires aborting the entire session.