I doubt the developers will read or respond to this, simply on the premise that they have refused to listen to logic and reason ever since this game reared its ugly head into existance, and yet the only thing that's happened is that the game started to die a slow and painful death from the moment it released.

The forced pvp in this game needs to go, I have absolutely no idea what genius thought it was a fantastic idea to force pvp on players that have no intention of ever wanting to participate, do you know what happens when people discover this? they leave the game immediately, do you know what they did in this game? yep, you guessed it, they either all left, or didn't bother playing at all on discovering.

There needs to be 2 queues in this game, one for casual pve, and the other for an antagonist to play with. The casual pve queue also NEEDS to have no player requirement to start a game, if I want to start a game with 1 or even 2 friends then simply let us, if me and a single friend complete a mission and you as developers care so damn hard about the end-game rewards, then simply reduce all rewards by 50% to simulate the idea of all 4 players selecting gold at the end, the same goes with if theres 3 players, reduce the rewards because of lacking 1 member and we're all good, and once again for if I'm playing solo.

I have 2 other people that are mildly interested in playing the game, but we're not stupid enough to waste our time trying to play, and we're definitely not daft enough to part away with our money to buy all the campaigns just so we're going to be stuck waiting for an eternity to play the game, and then get stuck with some experienced player as an antagonist to ruin our game and make us uninstall it out of our lives for ever.

Please, consider actually listening to this vital feedback into why your game is on its death bed, far too many of your potential players don't care for the forced pvp, at least not before we've even learnt the basics of the game, the characters, the maps, the objectives, and obtaining those cards to make builds with, no one enjoys getting stomped, but yet Mercurysteam seems to think that's exactly what we want, get our faces stomped just so we can uninstall.

I've played for 3-4 hours today, and my overall thoughts that I keep repeating to my self is "turdy gameplay".

The ideas of the things in the game are good in general, but the implementation is just so poor in that I honestly just can't stand most of it, if this game ends up as a buy game then I wouldn't dare buy it if these features and mechanics stick into the final product.

Antagonist is a good idea in concept, I remember having this in a game called Global Agenda in which is was an optional PvE mode and you got extra rewards for the added difficulty of having a player also trying to kill you. The problem here though is that you're forcing a PvP concept into a PvE mode that's already very difficult as it is, especially when you're playing with random people we have no communication with.

I have no idea if the Antagonist has infinite lives or what, but there's nothing more boring than being killed by someone pressing E, it's bad enough that some specific enemies do it to you in which you're forced to run away like an idiot and keep dropping some bullets behind you, but killing them is the most un-fun thing I've ever had to do, they charge at you for all eternity until they hit a wall or something to jump up.

Antagonist players on the other hand will be barraging into you when a bucket load of enemies have spawned (which is already far too often as it is and with no set areas after you've already cleared the area) and either meleeing you or just press E if its from the side with no time for them to reliably react, but even then when the game is lagging with a poor connection you can guaruntee that the person trying to grapple you when get you regardless.

When you run out of lives and need to survive the time limit to come back again, the huge problem comes in when it's possible to deal with the AI during the given period if you play smart, having an enemy player makes this virtually impossible to survive due to the map layout, how aggresive the enemy AI are, and that melee/grappling is impossible if they're starting directly at you.

What I honestly hope gets taken out of this game is grappling, it's 100% not fun to die to it, it's barely a little fun to actually pull off considering how the AI will always melee you if you're directly infront of them, meaning it's mostly an assasination tool from the side/behind, what I've found is if something is incredibly un-fun to die to and it's not removed, players will simply leave the game, this is even more of a given when Shae just makes her self virtually invisible to you and jumps you with a grapple, result? frustrating and not fun.

This brings me onto my second point here, Antagonist should be its own mode, there needs to be a strict PvE only mode, and a second PvE mode that allows players to come in as an Antagonist at any point in the match, you will be hard-pressed to find people like me that will play the game if Antagonist is there by default, because I don't enjoy dying to heavy cheese gameplay, especially when that cheese is lagging.

TL;DR:
Antagonist needs to be in a seperate/optional PvE queue, many players do not like dealing with odd modes like this when the game is especially not balanced for that kind of gameplay.

Grappling should be reviewed and possibly taken out of the game, it's very un-fun to die to, by both Antagonist players and AI chargers, it's a no-skill ability that kills you while the enemy that grappled you is fully immune to damage while the animation is happening, leaving to counter play for an obviously stupid ability.

P.S I've been unable to find any difficulty selection, this could really be a problem when the AI are very aggresive and deal so much damage to players from both shooting and meleeing, technically speaking every individual AI has a very good chance to kill a player, average/casual players will not enjoy dealing with what I'm assuming is the default difficulty.