[Level9Drow]

You have to surrender when you see a large gap between the raiders and the antagonists, otherwise the AI will be boosted for antagonist who are out-leveled.

And IF your team doesn't accept the surrender I am really REALLY sad to say that you have to suicide. Otherwise you will be in a slog-fest for 40 minutes with little to no possibility of success and you will be rewarded with peanuts. And you will have nothing to show for your time except resentment and the feeling of waste and forced unfairness.

[Imperium]

Just played another game, Hanging by a Thread, where on the 4th phase (putting aleph in the generators) the AI had a ridiculous amount of elite AI spawn. More than I've seen on that level before.

Yes, antagonist was getting destroyed all game, but so were our new players. Between antagonist and AI, they exhausted our lives once during the second stage (shooting those things out of the sky).

But I guess antagonist was dying too much or MMR was too high or I don't even know what. Next thing I know my teammates are getting grappled by back-to-back elite enemies.

Since my teammates were already doing poorly in hand-to-hand the whole game, pumping the map full of grapplers basically stuffed them in a box indefinitely. They barely understood that you can't melee electrified elite unit (aleph boosted).

So now the game AI overcompensates to increase the antagonist's chances of winning by throttling our weak point and putting more enemies on the map than I (or the other guy who was doing well) can deal with.

Again, feels extremely unsatisfying to play a game that punishes you for doing well.

It feels like the system is trying to force certain outcomes.

I queued up for an antagonist game and just threw the game to lower my MMR.

Maybe after I force myself to lose, like the game seems to want me to do, I'll be able to get some decent games.

[Level9Drow]

I think they should have a spawn cap. I can't think of any other way around it. And to your second part, yes, I do the same thing as well. But I actually enjoy throwing as antag because it allows me to see details of the maps I was never able to notice before. You can hear the enemy AI say all sorts of interesting and funny things as well. Throwing as antag isn't as upsetting as throwing as raider. When you do it as antag it's actually relaxing and you can just watch the raiders do silly things, baby Herecs run at electrified berserker elites, 5th councils (except Gin) make jumps over chasms, and just seeing newer players figure stuff out slowly with no level 80 one shotting them every moment.

[Adrian_123]

Well with the Hdes Betrayal update. they said that this was going to be the first of many more changes...

By now it have several flaws to be solved. One is this MMR issue, that I expect to be solved in the next updates.

Thanks for taking the time to express all this issues, me and my group of "raiders" share this opinion.

[LordDraco3]

man I wish I had all this luck that everyone talks about with antagonists getting supported by massive numbers of demon dogs on enemy within. Any time I play that mission against any decent players, it's literally 4v1 the entire map, nothing ever gets a chance to survive longer than 5 seconds to back me up. I played a lot the day Tolchok dropped and played Enemy Within against Sephiroth, and not a single enemy survived longer than 5-10 seconds the whole game, I had no chance of getting anywhere. I took 16 lives from them, but it was pretty much just suicide runs since I only had about 10 seconds per life.

[Nemo]

I've taken a bit of break from this game for a few months, but it still seems that many of the same issues that were talked about a year ago are still occurring, despite the many 'tweaks' that have no doubt happened.

Lower MMR Antagonists still have an advantage over higher MMR Raiders in PvP. I've fought against a few Antagonists this past week whilst playing with friends, and even though those Antagonists were within the 50-60% MMR range, they were still benefiting from vastly overtuned AI enemies.

To put this into perspective, I was playing at around 65-70% difficulty PvE matches with friends, yet the AI enemies during Antagonist invasions were far stronger.

In a PvE match at around 65% difficulty, enemy melee damage was around 20 per Strike, but against Antagonists it was much higher, at around 60-90 damage per Strike depending on whatever factors the MMR system takes into account. Likewise, their overall health and ranged damage was far higher than in a PvE setting. Shotgun enemies would routinely one shot down anyone that wasn't a 5th Council character, and riflemen were doing around 40-50 damage a bullet at close range, and about 20-30 at long range. On In Medias Res, I needed to put over 150 Hornet rounds into a shield to break it, but a single Hades rifleman could take down a shield I was hiding behind in about 2 seconds, from long range. Kuzmann's voltage arcs on In Shock were doing about 60 damage a tick, and his beam damage would down people very fast too.

It's a huge uphill struggle to win in such a situation, and even when we did, our score was around 6 and the matches would take 25-30 minutes or more. It's a huge waste of time, and unrewarding. After a while, if we noticed that the AI enemies were boosted to such an extent during an Antagonist invasion, we would just surrender and queue again. Antagonists don't really need to do anything particularly special to win in such a situation. They can just lurk around and wait for the AI to wound people and then run in for an easy execution. By and large, the AI enemies were getting more kills and were more of a threat than the Antagonist.

PohtHehd wrote a post in this thread https://www.spacelordsthegame.com/community/index.php?topic=3542.msg15127#msg15127, talking about how he lowered his MMR to 0% and essentially broke the game in regards to PvP and PvE difficulty. Despite a whole year passing, the general tenet of whoever has the lower MMR being the likely winner in PvP, is still in effect. Considering the 'Master of Puppets' update will allow Antagonists to control the AI enemies to some extent, I'm looking forward to being even more horribly murdered by everything on the map.

Looking at some of the previous developer replies of the MMR situation over the past year, all I can really take away from it is that the difficulty of matches, both in PvE and PvP, are constantly tweaked and iterated on a weekly or even daily basis. However, all this does is make my experiences with the game very inconsistent.

As an example, I was playing matches at around 80-85% difficulty with friends in February. Whilst it was a little tricky, it was manageable. However, the next week, despite playing at the same difficulty with largely the same players, the AI enemies had about 50% more health and were dealing twice the damage.

At the moment, you need to play at around 60% difficulty or higher to be able to get a score of 9 or higher, but since the difficulty is constantly in flux, you can never really have a good feeling as to what to expect. It could be that a certain difficulty one week is fairly easy, and then the next week, much harder.

Since the next update seems to be going to introduce a new Career mode, which judges you based on your scores on every map as a Raider and an Antagonist each month, it seems important that the MMR system should be relatively solid, but it doesn't seem to be the case to me. I can simply search 'MMR' on this forum, and see large numbers of topics, going over a year, complaining about the inconsistency and imbalance of the whole system.

Since my MMR is usually quite high, at around 80-90%, if I play solo queue with randoms, I usually get paired up with newer, inexperienced players that I have to carry. Sometimes, a Tier 1 Antagonist will also show up, which usually makes things even more complicated.

This is a recent example, although somewhat egregious, of what solo queue is like for me, taken from a few days ago:



This was a Mentor match that was set at 52% difficulty, despite all the other players being, quite clearly, new to the game. I pretty much had to do everything on my own, since the other players were largely ineffectual. The match took about 20 minutes, with the other players dying about 20 times or so. In the end, in spite of carrying them all, I still only ended up getting a score of 7.3, for a level that usually takes half as long. Very rarely do I ever seem to be paired up with other good players when I'm queuing by myself.

It seems like it will be difficult to get really high scores as a Raider in Career mode if you're playing on your own without friends, since you need to raise your MMR so as to increase the difficulty level so that you can actually be able to score over a 9.

As an aside, newer players may not be able to take full advantage of the Career mode, since they need to level up to unlock all the campaigns and levels.

On the other hand, since it seems I need to play as an Antagonist to get the most out of this Career mode, having a high MMR is very detrimental. I tried queuing as an Antagonist recently at around 90 MMR, and I gave up after about 45 minutes of waiting. Even if I did find a match, I imagine that all the AI enemies will be shooting confetti at the Raiders, whilst falling over if someone even breathes on them. I suppose if I played perfectly with an Ignis Harec I might be able to pull out a win, though it's somewhat doubtful. Even so, if I wanted to play every map as an Antagonist at least once, I'm still looking at spending 14-15 hours just queuing up for a match, unless I spend more time lowering my MMR. Granted, I don't want to play as an Antagonist much, since Raiders gain no benefit when they're invaded, and I can't really support the mode as it is.

It's been a little over a year since the implementation of the MMR system, yet it still seems a rather pointless, inconsistent and aggravating part of the game. Higher MMR doesn't increase your rewards by any measure that I would deem as significant, despite both the game and developers saying that it does. The game simply punishes you for winning too much, by raising the difficulty and trying to force you into unwinnable situations, as well as trying to slow down your ability to acquire rewards. I imagine this is done simply to get people annoyed enough to buy Gold. All I can say is that high difficulty PvE matches now, are a little easier than they were back during the Hades Betrayal and the early parts of the Spacelords update. Players can still artificially lower their MMR by just making a squad and surrendering a whole bunch, so the system is not really a good way of determining player skill at all, and makes the hard to balance PvP of this game even more imbalanced.

I don't think this new Identity update will address any of the concerns I've had for this game, in regards to both the MMR system and the immense grind players need to do, as well as player retention and new player experience. The Career mode may help alleviate the grind, but a cosmetic shop doesn't seem like a high priority to me. Doubtless, new monetization options are probably more important for the developers than they are for the players. I still kind of wish for drop-in, drop-out multiplayer and a Solo mode that actually gives you more than just a one-off reward.

Hopefully, other updates might improve things, but I'm not sure how long that's going to take.

[B30]

Too high MMR does not make any sense anyway, just long waiting times, and the reward difference of having lower MMR is not noticeable. Most of the time it's just an annoyance and brings no benefit at all.