I'm still somewhat skeptical about all these changes, as well as the game going Free to Play. I was going to weigh in with my opinions earlier, but I was just waiting for more details. I'm guessing this is the final update video before the game becomes Spacelords, so I may as well say a few things.
Reward System Changes
Reward sharing, as it has been since September, is generally one of the major things cited in negative reviews of the game. No one really wants to spend 10-20 minutes in a game to lose on a Blueprint roll, or have to split Gold rewards three, or sometimes, four ways.
Whilst having individual rewards is a step in the right direction, this new system doesn't seem to be without faults, at least from the brief snippets that I've seen.
Looking at this video, as well as the 3rd 'Inside Spacelords' video, the results screen showed that players only earned 3338 Faction Points for beating that particular mission. Whilst the Alicia player did receive 7875 FP, most of that was from the Daily reward. My initial impression of this is that running missions that aren't one your Daily missions is not going to be worth your time. At the moment, I would say that most maps offer around 10-12k FP and 7-8k Gold. Assuming a two way split for both resources, it seems the current system offers more rewards than the new one, unless you're doing Dailies.
Acquiring Blueprints does seem a bit better under this new system, since you don't have to roll against anyone, but I don't quite like how you have to play as the character whose Blueprint you're after. Certain characters and weapon combinations have trouble contributing much on some maps. From what I've seen, it seems that there are going to be three missions that offer Blueprints everyday. If say, one of those missions is Enemy Within or Beast's Lair, and a new Hive, Ayana or Doldren player wants to play those missions with their default weapons, they're going to struggle dealing much damage to Uras' ganglions or to Marmalade. This means the rest of the team is going to have to compensate for them, and work much harder to win. But, at least, rewards aren't shared.
If everyone has the same Daily missions, it could also be that another player picks a character that you wanted to farm a blueprint for, meaning that if you beat the mission, you're going to have to do another Daily to try to get a Blueprint you want. Additionally, with the general threat of Antagonist invasions, or the possibility of new/bad teammates, I wouldn't feel very confident picking 'weak' characters, just because I want one of their Blueprints. I've also doubled up on a lot of Blueprints already, so I'm not quite sure what will happen if I get a Blueprint that I already have. Does it get converted into gold, or perhaps a free weapon reconfiguration?
Also, if everyone does have the same Daily missions, Antagonists are probably going to queue up for those levels. If those Antagonists then lower your score, it may be that you lose out on a weapon Blueprint despite winning that map, and have to do another Daily or wait another day.
Despite the new changes to Blueprint acquisition, it is still somewhat random. You may not win the roll, or you may not get the weapon you want at all. You may not even be able to pick the character you want.
I'd rather have the new Daily system be akin to the Quests and Contracts Board in Vermintide. Players would be able to earn 'tokens' doing Daily missions, and then would be able to spend them on specific Blueprints that they want to acquire. It would be a bit more flexible, and you wouldn't be forced to play as certain characters to acquire their weapons.
Overall, I imagine that people will just do their Daily missions, and then either stop for the day or play in Solo mode, unless the rewards for completing non-Daily missions are decent. This may affect matchmaking somewhat.
Antagonist Mode
There's no doubt been a lot of discussion about this mode since the game's inception. At least the way I see it, there is no real incentive for a Raider team to want an Antagonist in their game. The Raiders acquire no bonus rewards for the increased risk involved, and oftentimes get lower scores even when they win, due to time delay and deaths. I don't feel particularly enthused or excited when an Antagonist invades, it's just a chore, and a headache.
This whole mode just seems forced to me, with heavy handed design. The developers have remained adamant that this is supposed to be a 4v1 online PvPvE game, yet I have no real reason to want to participate in it. Personally, I find anything below around 65-70% difficulty to be pretty easy. If I therefore have the option to breeze through a 40-50% difficulty match with no Antagonist, and get over a 9.0 score in 5-10 minutes or less, why would I want anything else? If I was playing with a 4 man squad, I also wouldn't have to put up with queue times. Throw in some Affililiation and Bounty Hunter weapons, and the Raiders can earn way more rewards than Antagonists can. A typical Antagonist win with a score around 8, gives about 4k FP and 3-3.5k Gold. Even with sharing, I can earn more than that playing as a Raider. Even in cases where the Raiders instantly surrendered when they saw me, the rewards were about 7k FP and 6k Gold.
The only reason to play Antagonist before the Hades update was to earn some PvP ranks to craft a weapon, and after, the only reason was Affinity, Aequilibrium and Blueprint acquisition. It seems with the Spacelords update, Blueprints can be acquired by doing Daily missions, so now there's even less incentive to play as an Antagonist.
It just seems to me like the whole Antagonist mode was shoehorned in to make the game stand out from just being another online cooperative shooter. The forced PvP is one of the other major criticisms of the game, and has likely been one of the major contributors to its low number of players.
I would suggest again, that PvP and PvE be separated, but with the offering of major/exclusive rewards for players who opt to be invaded, as well as boosted rewards for Antagonist players.
In a vacuum, the mode seems fine. But having one player waste four other players' time without their having a say in it, just doesn't seem right to me.
Anyway, allowing Antagonists to pick their own maps probably isn't the best idea. I imagine maps like Low Blow and No Reservations will be more risky to play through, due to Lichtbogen Kuzmann Antagonists. At least, hopefully, there won't be high level Antagonists invading newer players on Hanging by a Thread like when the game first came out. That probably wasn't giving people the best first impressions of the game.
'Improved Matchmaking'/MMR System
I don't really have the words to express the amount of ire I have towards this game's matchmaking system, and its MMR system. I don't believe I've ever seen a game where its players felt their only recourse was to deliberately lose matches just to bring the difficulty down. It's utterly ludicrous. Damning, even.
There is no incentive to have a high MMR, as it doesn't increase rewards. Moreover, you run the risk of a low MMR Antagonist being carried to victory by vastly overpowered AI enemies. How is a Raider team supposed to win against an Antagonist when the regular AI enemies have 800-1k health, deal 100-250 melee damage and kill even 5th Council characters in a few shots? Let alone having to deal with Elites that can one shot you in melee and take upwards of 12 Strikes to take down. It's a travesty. If I had that level of AI assistance when I invade, I would never lose an Antagonist match. Instead, I get to see a Iune player eat three Strikes in a row from an Elite and lose less than a quarter of her health, and then take him down in two punches. How is this fair matchmaking?
To put this in context, I've beaten levels at 80-85% difficulty in the Hades update, yet the AI enemies that accompany low MMR Antagonists are even harder than those ones.
I've taken a break from this game for weeks now just because of how much I detest this MMR system. Yet, having played recently, the problem still persists. I think I've lost count of how many forced losses I've had to endure due to MMR differences scaling the AI to absurd levels. The MMR system is not really a true measure of player skill, and is exploitable, since people can artificially lower it by forming suicide squads or playing as a friendly Antagonist.
I remember reading about how modern matchmaking systems try to even out everyone's win/loss percentages so that every player gets to win now and again. It's understandable why some game companies would implement such a system, so as to retain players. Regardless, when an Antagonist can literally go AFK and win a match, as has happened to me numerous times, you've screwed up.
I sincerely hope you fix this in the new update. I'd much rather there be set difficulty levels in online PvE, as well as the AI difficulty being set to a consistent level in PvP, like it was before the Hades update.
Solo/Training Mode
It's nice that you can earn rewards from Solo mode now, even if it is only gold, by the looks of it. People have been asking for that for nearly a year now. I don't quite understand why players would have to beat the maps online before they can play it solo though, that seems quite backward.
My main concern is that this may affect online matchmaking somewhat, since players might just choose to play Solo mode more. This possibly depends on the level of rewards offered, however. I would still say it's a good move to give players the option to earn rewards in Solo play, at least.
Moving to a Free to Play model
I'm not really a huge fan of F2P games. Their design is often compromised in ways meant to extract microtransactions out of players, as well as possibly preying on 'whales' and people with poor impulse control. Cosmetics and such, I'll give a pass to. Even if I don't really feel they're worthwhile. Things like having to buy keys to open lootboxes, buying virtual currency, making the game excessively grindy and the like, I can't agree with.
Currently, some of the skin prices I feel are overly expensive, and loadout pages should have the option to be purchased with Gold or Faction Points. Since Gold can be purchased with real money, and is quite the important resource in the game, I worry that farming for it will be made more tedious, just to push people to buy Mercury Points.
Evolve got dragged over the coals for its ridiculous amount of pre-launch DLC, and that was a game with a much higher marketing and, possibly, development budget. The general obscurity of Raiders/Spacelords has inured it somewhat from such criticisms, but at the moment, I think you might turn away a lot of potential players when they find out that there are skins in the game that cost as much as another game entirely.
I suppose I'll just have to wait and see. At the very least, you're picking a business model and sticking with it, and have completed the first season without having to cancel halfway.
This game has had somewhat of an identity crisis this past year or so, which has no doubt hurt its prospects.
Miscellaneous Thoughts/Suggestions
- If you're going to nerf weapon damage when it comes to PvP, I would suggest raising players' passive damage reduction instead, or at least reduce the health boost of AI enemies at higher difficulties. They're quite the bullet sponges at +60-70% difficulty.
- I always thought it would have been better to have the Antagonist player take on the role of the AI director. You could have him choose where and when to spawn enemies, he could buff them up with special abilities that are on a cooldown, issue kill orders on certain Raiders, and then maybe take the field personally, now and again. Perhaps as a different mode or something.
- It would be nice if there was a gun range or training dummy type feature, for weapon testing.
- Add some proper weapon statistics. DPS, Range, damage per bullet, Rate of Fire, Magazine size, Critical rates, etc.
- Some form of text chat, or more chat emotes.
- The video tutorials are good. Hopefully, they give apt advice.
- Maybe some way of 'tagging' enemies or objectives, so a player can get their teammates to focus on things.
- The 'mentor' bonus seems nice, but if I have a high MMR, why would the matchmaking place me with new players?
- I hope I can see Cortez's new menu animations/voicelines, despite having leveled up.
- If there was a 'babysitter' skin for Konstantin, I'd buy it. It's all I seem to be doing these days.
- The Tsiklon and Tolchok don't work properly unless you're the host, or playing in Solo mode. Their bullet damage doesn't increase as the weapon gets hotter. Hopefully this gets fixed next update, it's been months now.
Have a nice weekend, everyone.
