Everibody who begin playing spacelords and starts to know how antagosist know have the same suggestion/question, why the antagonist has to win to get a decent score/rewards/etc...? As I get to know the game better I understood a little bit why is this the case, and why after all this time antagonist have to win to earn something. But while I was scrapping to get a 1.1 more on my adventure path to get those weapon skin, I start to put some thoughts in the interaction between those two aspect of the game.
In a week I can relaiably get a score of at least 8 in all mission, with most be 9. If from today I queue only antagonist for the rest of the month, maybe I can relaiably get a 0.6, the antag role is hard. If I want those juicy adventure path I need much more. The only way to get an high score relaiably as an antagonist is to hunt noobs and lowering your mmr, this might not give you scores higher than 7.8-8, but it give much more on the adventure score than just do raider or try to be an antagonist fairly. As it stand right now, the win or nothing rewards for the antagonist with the adventure path reward a behaviour that hinder the growth of the playerbase.
I also have a series of gripes with the antagonist system that I foun entangled with each other so let's begin. The raiders can give up a mission if the majority want to, the antagonist must endure wathever the matchmaking serves him. Especially considering how much more frustrating antag is than raider, true the raiders would get a free win so my next gripes is that. It make no sense than if the antagonist run the raiders automatically wins, there still is a level that would not complete itself antagonist or not. In this times if an antagonist run, it wasn't very influencial on the match to bengin with. It's not chess the pieces will still moves even if the opponent isn't there, unless we talk about the mission altered difficulty wich can be altered during cutsene (Indeed the game already do that in small amunt). But I have a bigger gripes with the altered difficulty, little annectode first:
"A breath of hope" my mmr at the time 44%, I have a friend with me of mmr 36% wich is also the average mmr of the team. There is an antagonist of mmr 20%, the game set the difficulty at 40%. The antagonist was awful, but the two other members of my team (and my friend to) start to brack like toothpicks for the sheer spawn rate. The antagonist leave after the first monolith is acrtivated. He could have stayed in a corner doing nothing and we would have lost the mission.
There should be a cap on the maximun difficulty based on the lowest or second lowest mmr (or it could be the ighest difficulty at wich the second lowest mmr won a mission). You can introduce an lower cap as well.
In general I think that every palyer should have two mmr one for raider the other for antag. The reason is my current mmr is valued at how good I am to carry noobs as raider, because I mostly avoied play as antag. And this can be said for most of the newer playerbase. If I start mathcmaking as antag however the skill required is to 1v4 people with my same skill (at least in theory), you can't expect that a 40% mmr raider behace like a 40% mmr antagonist.
