So, this is the first time I've had someone corroborate my experience with the diminished rewards, but antagonist rank seems to have no effect on the quality of reward. Basing it on the number of stigmas an antagonist currently has is also a terrible system, but doesn't seem to account for the huge drop in rewards I've encountered. Is it really ok to play a game and win (with an antagonist) for 15-20 minutes to only receive 900-3000 points/currency in rewards? It's the only thing killing the game for me and my friends at the moment.
And it's even worse if there happens to be no antagonist, and we're stuck with 50% difficulty, for half of that measly reward on top of it all.
These high difficulty games can last 30 minutes or longer and offer 300-1000 in reward currency. The way rewards and difficulty are balanced at the moment (if this system is even working as intended) is very poorly thought out. I keep returning to the game every few weeks to see if it's changed, and occasionally I will have a good game with 19k in rewards, but it seems totally random (and VERY rare), and completely independent from the quality of the antagonist. That said, even if the reward WERE dependent on the skill of the antagonist (or how well you scored in the end), for it to scale to such a miserable level is just laughable. It's gotten to the point where a lot of games where it's revealed there's no antagonist, people just drop from the game when they see how hard the enemies are hitting.
Why struggle with grunts that one-shot you at close range with their shotguns (as any character but Konstantin, who can sometimes take 2 shots), and spawn in groups of 10+ for over 30 minutes, for a terrible reward of 600 character points or whatever. I made a thread about this over a month ago and have never heard back. I returned to the game and convinced my friends to come back, but after 5 matches with little reward, looks like I'll be playing solo again, and sparingly. They're not going to join me again when they earn an average of 800 gold a match while they're trying to save up for recruiting the new characters. It will take weeks of playing tirelessly to unlock Mikah at this rate. Thankfully, I managed to farm up points and gold before all these changes hit me like a brick in the face, but I've given up on Mikah at this stage.
I honestly think my account is broken. Why would some games grant 24k+ faction points, and the majority offer less than 4k on the same map under similar conditions, with an antagonist (often high ranking, but that doesn't seem to matter). The score sheet at the end has no effect on the reward, the "skill" of the antagonist has no effect, what exactly IS effecting the rewards then?
