I’ve been an avid fan of this game since day one and, while I have enjoyed it, I have created a list of ALL of the suggestions I have to improve the experience for everyone.
Antagonist
Everyone has differing opinions on this; some want it gone completely and others love it and I believe the reasons for this is simple...it’s unbalanced beyond belief. Many of the characters have weapons or abilities that are powerful and fun to use, but since the game is primarily PVE, it feels unfair when you use these strong abilities or one-shot-kill weapons on another player.
When you’re killing AI it’s fine because the AI can’t get frustrated and that’s just the flow of the game, but upon throwing another player into the mix, one side will always have a crap time. Whoever uses the most busted load outs will almost always win and even if the Raiders are the ones who win, if they struggled too much their rewards are shafted and it becomes nothing more than a nuisance.
I believe Antagonist should be made optional or certain abilities and weapons should have altered stats or properties in PVP. Don’t force a broken and unenjoyable game mode on people unless you want to turn players away. Making playing against an Antagonist on it’s own queue may split the player base, but if you offer MASSIVE reward bonuses (double currency rewards and more possibility of blueprints dropping), people will still play it when they feel up to the task. Speaking of rewards...
Progression
This is my personal biggest gripe about the game; rewards suck, end of story. At 50% MMR and getting 8.0s and up at the end of most missions you are usually given about 10,000 of both currencies and MAYBE a weapon blueprint. Most players go for either gold or the weapon because most players get the most OP cards and never need faction points again and a lot of gold is needed to buy characters and reforge and build weapons. If there is no blueprint drop or no one wants it, that 10,000 G becomes 2,500 G. For how much effort that you usually have to put in to do that well, the rewards are insulting and this is in an IDEAL scenario; if you get a bad team or the difficulty is too high, the effort to win increases, but the rewards decrease.
Antagonists barely ever positively affect rewards and that causes huge frustration. I have three potential solutions:
1. Massively increase currency rewards and blueprint drop rates while keeping the share function intact
2. Keep the reward amounts the same but make it so instead of sharing rewards you can get a COPY of them (each player can get a reward for 10,000 G, 10,000 faction points, or they could each get a copy of a blueprint)
3. Make it so at the end of each match you all get a lump sum of points and gold depending on performance. If a blueprint drops you can toggle whether or not you’re interesting in rolling the dice for it, similarly to how it works now but you will be guaranteed to at least get some points and some gold.
Difficulty
MMR sounds good on paper, but doubling enemies’ damage and health turns any mission into an unfun slogfest. Make MMR affect enemies stats way less or make each mission have difficulties like a normal and hard option, with hard mode offering more rewards than normal or maybe exclusive blueprints. This makes it easier for someone to just pick up and play a few matches with out forcing them to do something that hate and souring their experience
Balance
There are huge balance issues with the game at the moment and a few of them baffle me. Aliens are borderline useless on higher difficulties or against certain antagonist load outs due to being KILLED (not wounded) in 2 or 3 shots. In my mind Locals are supposed to be glass cannons who can deal massive damage and are incredibly useful, but can’t take very much damage themselves. This is nullified by the fact that they are so vulnerable that they can’t stick their heads out of cover long enough to USE their abilities or guns without dying.
They need more health or need something like a Aleph shield that effectively acts as a second health bar that only begins slowly recovering after you health is replenished. The Locals would keep their lower health bar and glass cannon feel while giving them the chance to take more than a few hits.
Locals aside, many weapons are either absurdly strong or tragically weak. Ignis Fugit, Focus KAA7, JK-5, VINC “EAGER” 23-1, Spinning Coin, MM-5B, and L. Horizons all feel weak in my opinion.
These weapons stand no chance when they have to compete with Rock&Roll, O.Tolchok E10, Javelin Ursa, Schleuder, Aura Mortis, and A’si Dagan. These powerful weapons with some of these abilities and cards, it’s no wonder PVP is so busted. Weapon balancing needs a huge update to make them all feel equally viable.
My final note for balance (and this list) is the leveling stats problem. Any aspect of PVP being directly affected by rank is unfair and shouldn’t be there. My solution is to simply change all of the stat buffs to ONLY affect AI enemies. If my idea for multiple difficulties or making MMR less powerful won’t work, those stat buff could also make higher MMR mission less frustrating.
Make Armor affect AI shooting damage on you, Resistance affect AI strike damage resistance, and Brute force affect your melee strike damage on AI enemies. PVP fights will be more fair and high-rank players can be more stable in maintaining a high MMR and garner slightly more rewards while the game maintains its sense of difficulty without going overboard.
Anyone who got this far, thank you for reading my post and I hope this game keeps going strong.
