Welcome to spacelords where the community shits on each other and then wonder why it's so small! Damn it why are my antag queue so long! "I mean come on I only made like 200 newbies rage quit last week by insta killing them with my breath!?"
Unlike what MSE thinks, I think in the long term having dedicated PvE would actually decrease Antag queue wait times, because the community would begin to blossom.
There are many people who simply don't have the reaction times, positional awareness, or aiming skills to compete in PvP in spacelords. But, The storyline, art, atmosphere, graphics, music, etc is so good they would want to meme/emote around, spend money on skins, flaunt said skins etc. As they meme around in PvE, they increase passives/guns and learn to play better and better, and eventually dip their toes into PvP, which should have exclusive rewards and much higher rewards than PvE.
Noobs don't want to get deleted from gameplay for 10 seconds 19 times a game by a higher rank who has both more skills, better guns, and higher passives. So they move to a different game.
And veterans don't want to play with noobs and have their experiance ruined. I don't like playing as antag. The reason I play online games is to play as a team because it feels good to be a valuable team asset. If I was going to play solo I'd just go play DMC or something. Getting teamed with noobs that do nothing but give the antag a constant stream of immunity is not fun. Or watching the scene for the 4000th time.
By MSE saying "antag is core to spacelords, it stays no matter what" they are cutting out like 75% of gamer demographic right from the start. The COD empire can afford to do that but I don't think MSE can. Think about how many gamers in the world only play Diablo or MMO or RPG that don't have advanced FPS/TPS skills at all. Well does MSE want their money, or do they want to scare them away with Meta tryhard alicia with smoking daisy etc etc.
Well, whatever they are doing I don't think is working. There was a small bump with Sooma and MOP update but now barely anyone is streaming on PS4 again.