[Whitebleidd]

I've read a lot of people talking about antags ruining thier game, (not so much anymore since the majority of posters here are likely lv150+). I'm wondering if I'm the only one who is having trouble with the opposite experience.

Lvl 150+ here, antags still ruin the game, and get more annoying and hard to stomach with every lvl I gain.

I have played for exactly 1 year now, and antagonist is currently the WORST it has ever been in my entire play time. If you feel like you suck right now, it's because antags received a massive nerf accross the board this patch. The mode is nearly unplayable.

As an antag you are supposed to be losing most of the time, can you imagine if antags in general had even a 50% victory rate, the playerbase would be even lower than it already is, giving victory rewards to 1 person over 4 is not exactly something ppl are going to put up with, MS makes us put up with antags, least they can do is have them have a low winrate so they annoy in the least way possible… So if what you say is accurate (can’t really confirm or deny since I don’t antag) those changes are good for the game.

Anyways I think MMR has improved lately, or atleast it’s back to being closer to what we had post hades.

[LordDraco3]

can you imagine if antags in general had even a 50% victory rate, the playerbase would be even lower than it already is, giving victory rewards to 1 person over 4 is not exactly something ppl are going to put up with

And having some absurdly low win rate because the game treats players like babies when a match becomes pvp is not something antags will put up with.

I know that you, personally, won't care and that sounds good, but MSE has been pretty firm on keeping the antag system as a core part of the player experience. Over time it has become a more legitimate way to progress in the game. It's still painfully slower than progressing as a raider, but it's a lot better than giving 0 rewards back when I started playing.

Even when I do play raider, I get bored in non-pvp games, and now even when they do show up, we just steamroll the antag because the game is absurdly easy. I see no fun in any of this.

But I know the game is ever-changing and the current state of the game is temporary. I look forward to future balance changes because it's currently pretty awful for one side and pretty boring for the other.

[Level9Drow]

I've read a lot of people talking about antags ruining thier game, (not so much anymore since the majority of posters here are likely lv150+). I'm wondering if I'm the only one who is having trouble with the opposite experience.

Lvl 150+ here, antags still ruin the game, and get more annoying and hard to stomach with every lvl I gain.

I have played for exactly 1 year now, and antagonist is currently the WORST it has ever been in my entire play time. If you feel like you suck right now, it's because antags received a massive nerf accross the board this patch. The mode is nearly unplayable.

As an antag you are supposed to be losing most of the time, can you imagine if antags in general had even a 50% victory rate, the playerbase would be even lower than it already is, giving victory rewards to 1 person over 4 is not exactly something ppl are going to put up with, MS makes us put up with antags, least they can do is have them have a low winrate so they annoy in the least way possible… So if what you say is accurate (can’t really confirm or deny since I don’t antag) those changes are good for the game.

Anyways I think MMR has improved lately, or atleast it’s back to being closer to what we had post hades.

DUDE!! Kudos, I never fucking thought of this that way. If it was 50% win rate for antags and raiders only 1 out of 5 people would be getting rewards normally and the other 4 people on average would be getting minimal rewards. Or at least in some capacity less players would be getting rewards overall. For the game to function in a way that people get rewards for most of the time in an asymmetrical PvP game then the antagonists would have to lose more than Raiders. And it's true that if it WAS 50/50 then this game would be in a poor state.

But, as much as I hate antagonists, Draco has a point in which there is a problem. I think that antagonists should get slightly bigger rewards than raiders. I think losing rewards should be larger in general. And I think if Raiders get an antag they should receive more than normal rewards. I think this would fix all that.

[Placelord]

Pohthehd, you dont happen to have a link to the mmr breakdown post you mentioned, do you?

[Placelord]

Well I can tell you that when your mmr is 40 points higher than the Antagonist the map gives them a bunch of terminators. My group was low 90's mmr and antag had 50 and we lost because of all the adds so...that sucked.

I'm curious about whether that only scales to the team leader's mmr or a team average. Like if the team leader is low lv and/or low mmr, is the big raider facing toddler ai scaled to the host? One of the core criticisms I've been repeating is facing a team with a single 250+ and still getting saddled with reduced difficulty. Which I admit I'm just inferring a high mmr based on effectiveness in the field. I'll start noting who's host and what mmrs are in play.

[LordDraco3]

It's always the team average, not just 1 raider. High level does not mean good player, or high MMR. Just like low level doesn't mean low MMR/bad player. Level is only a reflection of time played, and MMR can be manipulated.

[Placelord]

I'm not mad at this point but I think this bears sharing. 1st match of the night and how incredibly apt.

I'm lv 74 antag harek, mmr 46%. White noise. I'm up against a 196 Ginebra, 120 Ayana, 131 Iune, and the 4th disconned in lobby.

First phase: starts with 4 ads. The waves are spaced out at roughly a minute. Each successive wave spawns 3 ads and 1 elite. I couldn't get an accurate figure on the snipers, but there were no more than 2 at any given time. The miner population seemed very usual, not more or less than I'm used to.

2nd phase: anti grav blasts every 20 seconds. The blasts stay steady at that rate throughout. No increase in the ad population or regularity.

I wasn't able to divine any of the raiders mmrs.

Fortunately my 2nd match was far more balanced lv wise.

[PohtHehd]

Pohthehd, you dont happen to have a link to the mmr breakdown post you mentioned, do you?

https://www.spacelordsthegame.com/community/index.php?topic=4606.0

[XjabberwockieX]

I don't understand how a 50 can get paired into the 90's before getting some other team first. I antag a LOT and I'm higher than a vast majority of the teams I fight. If they are ever higher than me, it's only a marginal difference, never 10+.

I mean I've had it happen when I'm raider, but HOW does it happen, and how have I never been that antag???

I can't say with absolute certainty every member was low 90's, I know that I was 92, my fellow guildmates were a 96 and I want to say 88 and the last one mid 80's, that's how I came to the conclusion of low 90's but the Antag on Fistful was 54, I have no idea why there was that big of a discrepancy but it meant a ton of help for the Antag and we would up losing it in the final phase after a horde of terminators dropped in one after another and murdered the protector. The Antag, a lv.96 Shae was a minor nuisance at best and I'm sure was incredibly pleased with themselves.
  As the missions went on we noticed that the non antag matches were suddenly alot harder so we don't know if some high mmr tweaks happened from Mercurysteam but we started tanking the mmr a bit, the game had gotten incredibly easy regardless of the mmr level, so to suddenly get so intense was giving  us whiplash. Draco if you had that kind of discrepancy with the raiders, no doubt you would have a 100% winrate lol.

[Placelord]

The testing conditions are as follows. Lv 76 Alicia with painkiller. I'm prohibited from directly killing, but do attempt to disrupt objectives. The goal is isolate the the difficulty system an examine how it varies from case to case.

It seems obvious that a friendly antag is going to skew the difficulty in the raiders favor. But it's not about how quickly they can win but judging the algorithms merit as an obstacle.

I'm going with Alicia because I can can observe while still being as much of a distraction as I would be otherwise.  I've chosen the painkiller so I can test what effect more health has on the ai's effectiveness. I'm mostly accounting for raider levels, ad proliferation and matchups.

All and all it wasn't a bad time. Watching people acclimate to my wierd behavior was always interesting. Antag is a lot more more enjoyable without the expectation of winning. After 10 matches I can say without a doubt that antag ads are way too low. I'm likely going to try 10 more though just to be sure. Hehe.

[LordDraco3]

For my Hans F-750 stream yesterday I did only antag matches for almost 5 hours, and I think I only won like 2 or 3 of them in that whole time, not counting the surrender within the first 5 minutes of stream. Given my track record, that's....pretty bad.

I did get some very salty hatemail, in-game teabagging, and 3 games where Raiders bought lives though. A wild ride despite all the losses.

[Placelord]

Right, it's wierd how enjoyable it can be when your expectations are adjusted. Not saying that justifies it, but it is fascinating.