I mentioned in my post that antagonists increase the reward. I'm aware of that much - but this doesn't account for the consistent drop in rewards I've experienced. For the first 3 weeks post-launch, I was always receiving the same level of rewards based on whether there was or wasn't an antagonist. Also, why on earth would a blueprint drop increase the reward? That is yet more RNG, and it's doubling up on the feeling of not getting properly rewarded. I would understand if not receiving a blueprint would increase the other point rewards to compensate, but to operate in an inverse manner? Lol... But this doesn't line up with my personal experience anyway. Unless you're saying sub 1000 point rewards with an antagonist in the game is normal.

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?

I've confirmed that there seems to be some sort of reward scaling tied to my account (in addition to difficulty scaling). I was just playing a few games with a friend where we received the same terrible rewards, I then asked him to queue without me and he received the full, proper rewards in the exact same scenario. Obviously I'm not inclined to persist in playing for rewards averaging about 4000 in-game points (Gold/Character/Faction) over 4 victorious games. If anyone else is experiencing this deterioration in rewards, please respond.

Just want to point out that this problem permeates into the multiplayer in the form of Difficulty Score. The more wins you get, the higher the difficulty will be in the next match. It's really not a well thought out system because I've reached a point where games take forever to finish and it's quite easy to lose the encounter due to grunts one-shotting most characters who aren't named Konstantin. The spawns are ridiculous when 20 no-name guys pop up and steam roll your whole group in one go. It's actually killed the game for me and my friends - because in addition to making matches more lengthy and difficult - which is alright, I don't have a problem with that on its own - the rewards were often below 2000, even when we scored 8/10. I worked it out, and it seems to be giving us exactly one quarter of the usual reward we were receiving 2 days ago.

And to make matters worse, I feel bad queuing with low level random players because it averages out the difficulty and broken rewards, so they end up working harder for less as well.

In before the Mikah is OP thread pops up.

But seriously, I would say Konstantin is the strongest Antagonist in many situations. Hans is definitely a nuisance as Antagonist, but a good Konstantin can ruin his day. I find most of the Raiders are quite balanced with good counters, and I've encountered some frightening antagonists in many different forms.

OK, so an update: After winning a match (after my above post), the subsequent match went up to 46% difficulty and took 29 minutes without an antagonist. The system seems to be bumping up the difficulty by 2% every time.

Edit: Yup, next game was 48%, which was a loss. Pretty tough to beat, you get downed by one shot from a shotgun enemy, and enemies are everywhere.

Still waiting for responses to a few threads. Also, on the topic of a lack of info: would be nice to have some kind of roadmap for when future content might be releasing.