i'm taking the opposite side of most people on the forum, so, i'm waiting for massive rejection, but i'm used to it.
the facts are :
- sorry but your AI is bad.
- mmr system is broken.
- randomness of pvp can be annoying.
make your game a true pvp game with the same achitecture you have in all of them.
-> a full AI mode with drastically reduce rewards and no BP, but with AI antag to get used of the game.
-> an always antag mode with a permanent difficulty for AI (you can add some small variations, but that's not a good thing imo, players will feel their strenght grow better with stated difficulty and it fixe mmr and AI problem at the same time).
no match can be launched without 5 players, so :
- or the antag is choosen randomly among them.
- or you can keep the antag option but if there is not enough antag, you'll still have to to choose one randomly.
so the only ramdom antag is maybe a better choice.
if people KNOWS that there is always an antag and that the game is based on it and he has not chosen it, it makes desappear the first cleavage of the game.
it works like that for ALL pvp games and it wont be a problem on this one neither.
randomness is the problem.
and then fixe cqc and ping and your game will be fixed as well.
imo, all you are doing rigth now, aleph, master of puppets anything... good or bad, are just useless patch, since you are not fixing the real problems of the game.
and i don't undertsand why you don't just start working on them directly and seems just avoiding them.
are you afraid that a part of you community just leave ?
imo a lot already left and the one who stays with random antag will stay with only antag mode because, there will have no bad surprises about it.
it will really be the game core, as you are saying it is.