I'm missing something here. What does this do?

Also, how do you earn invitations as a campaign owner? Is it linked to Mastery? Would be nice if there were at least a Quick Guide entry for this. I was hoping to earn an invitation to invite a friend to play tonight, but I have no idea how. Is it completely random?

I've had a series of rough, rough games vs Hans, with people who don't know how to handle him, and it's frustrating. So here's a Public Service Announcement. A lesson in how to neutralise an antagonist Hans.

Don't cower in cover
If you're stationary, you make it incredibly easy for him to hit you with his weapon. The splash radius of his bubble gun and rockets are very small, and the projectiles move slowly. If you're sprinting and sliding, it's very hard for him to hit you.

Stay within Line of Sight of your allies
If you can shoot him down before he reaches his target, you can finish him together.

Grapple if you are brawling with an ally
This is a general antagonist rule, but if there are at least two of you, and neither of you are one punch from death: grapple. The only way he can escape is by dodge-rocketing, grappling him will stop this. Which leads me to the next tip.

Stay in pairs
If Hans does manage to down someone, make sure you're close enough to interrupt him from K.O.ing your ally. As he nears your ally, start punching him, don't go for the grapple. He will be desperately trying to get the immunity window from killing your friend. If you delay him for a few seconds, your ally will come out of the downed state and assist you.

Hunt him down as a team
Don't touch the objectives until the antagonist is dead. You'll have a 20 second window to continue with the objective once he's out of the picture. Always have your eye on his respawn timer, and once it's up, locate and destroy him.

Pick the right raiders
Some good counter-picks to Hans are Alicia, Ginebra and Hans. They are very good at hunting him down and tripping him up. Don't pick Shae or Harec unless you're extremely confident, Hans will tear them up otherwise. If your team looks strong or you can trust that they are reasonably experienced, then take a sniper, but I wouldn't advise taking both of those characters together. As a general rule, it is best to try and have a balanced team. Konstantin is a good secondary, supportive pick because his bubble will save a lot of lives. He's an excellent babysitter.

A lot of these tips are good against all of the antagonists, but I had to make this thread specifically because I see new and even experienced players falling into the trap of hiding in cover against an aggressive Hans all the time. Be aggressive in turn and he's helpless.

I've had this bug a couple of times on Shae, Harec and Kuzmann.

Sometimes when punching or grappling an enemy (particularly players), I have noticed that I won't receive any ammo. This is particularly frustrating when playing Antagonist as Shae where players are my only form of ammo restoration and getting melee kills to restore ammo is risky. I've had this happen twice consecutively on player kills while being out of ammunition.

I'd like to suggest the addition of some reward boosting models to encourage people to log in frequently.

Quick Match:
Players will queue for a random map once a day, including paid campaign maps, for increased rewards. This will include F2Pers, however they will not unlock Alien Myths specific content where necessary (such as Shae in In Shock, or certain blueprints). This will widen the map pool and shorten matchmaking times for people queuing for specific maps. An example of this would be Duty Roulette in Final Fantasy XIV. After the match is concluded, a reward is given to the player for completing the daily, separate from any in-match rewards, but it is not repeatable. This would greatly improve player retention, and it would also allow F2Pers to demo the other maps - which would encourage them to buy the campaign.

First Win of the Day:
Grant players a bonus reward for their first win of the day. This bonus could be a flat reward assigned post-match. E.g. 5000 G

Single Player Mode:
There's an option to play offline currently, but there's no reason to do so. Playing offline should offer a small gold amount at least based on difficulty. There are times when people don't want to play against an antagonist, or with other people, or they have network outages. Allow these players to play the single player mode for the reward they would have received playing the map for the first time. It's a decent way to reliably farm gold if you really don't feel like playing online, or can't. Either way, incentivising this mode adds options to players, and also stops this mode from being entirely irrelevant. The Gold rewards offered in single player aren't high enough to draw people away from multiplayer permanently either, but it still functions as a means of slow, stable progression.

Antagonists Exclusively On Prologue:
This is more of a remedy to an existing problem. I'd suggest removing the confirmation pop-up describing the map when queuing as antagonist. There's a real problem with Antagonists spam cancelling anything that isn't the prologue mission, so concealing which map they're entering would help things slightly. That said, most maps are heavily skewed toward raiders, so you'd be getting a lot more antagonist disconnects. I'd recommend reducing the respawn timer on antagonists to compensate on these maps. I'm just tired of rarely getting antagonists on anything that isn't Prologue.
Update: This change has been implemented, here's hoping it solves the issue.

Antagonist Mode Quick Match:
An added solution to this would be, again, to offer a quick match mode for antagonists, where once a day they will blindly enter a map and receive 2 added stigmas once the game is concluded. One of the biggest complaints about antagonist mode is the lack of reward on a loss. Having a small daily reward of stigmas regardless of how the game went, would encourage more people to play the mode, and be less likely to quit midway, or drop if they get a map they don't think they can win. This won't really affect the hardcore antagonist players, but it will get more casual people to get into the mode, and possibly get them to come back for the daily bonus.

So, Ive been playing a lot of the game and am facing higher and higher difficulties in matchmaking. I'm now getting 44% difficulty according to our scoring screen at this point, and enemies are becoming incredibly accurate, meaty and damaging. It's gotten to the point where an antagonist in our match makes games take 40 minutes. What is going on with the difficulty, and why are we receiving a quarter of the rewards we were receiving 2 days ago? No matter how well we score it feels like we're just wasting time with such long, difficult matches and low rewards(we get 2k on Prologue with a score of 8 and an antagonist).

No matter what I do, how well or badly the game goes, our rewards are a quarter of what they were 2 days ago.

Let me preface this by saying I'm loving the game so far, but I foresee an issue with a lack of content in the interim between campaign releases. Additionally, there have been requests on the forum for some kind of melee tutorial as many seem to be struggling to understand the flow of CQC in the game and the rock-paper-scissors nature of it.

With this in mind, I would like to suggest a small-scale, low-cost addition to the game that can be cobbled together with mostly re-used assets.

It would be easy enough to create a one-on-one arena using the map where players are teleported to during the final phase of The Enemy Within in the Alien Myths campaign. Only a basic backstory would be required: that you are playing mirrored shadow versions of a chosen raider, much like the actual encounter in the final boss fight of the campaign. The set up is that you are fighting "mano a mano" to decide the most ferocious antagonist to go out there and defeat some raiders in the name of the almighty Uras-Beherit, A few lines of dialogue from the man himself is all you'd require to provide some context.

This concept would be simple enough to use as an introduction to melee. That said, it could also be stretched into an additional source of content for antagonist players, considering the queue times are currently far too long. You could either keep the above scenario, and turn it into a ladder or tournament system where multiple antags are pitted against one another to duke it out, and the last man standing is awarded stigmas. Alternatively, a larger arena could be created and players could have a free-for-all with as many characters as the engine can smoothly handle in one map. I would assume 8 would be a safe number in a simple map without much detail. Obviously there are issues here where certain raiders, such as Lycus, are better in melee combat, but having everyone play the same character would even things out. This would still fit within the established lore.

I do definitely feel that antagonist mode needs some kind of supplemental content, particularly because the queue times are so heavily weighted in the raiders' favour. However, there's a consensus that many people don't enjoy the mode for varying reasons, but it's  a strict requirement for weapon and lore unlocks. Instead of removing the requirements, padding out the options available for ranking up would greatly improve the situation. Having an extra "mode" to queue for and earn stigmas with as an antagonist would greatly reduce frustration and queue times, I would hope.

TL;DR Use existing assets to create a melee tutorial for beginners, and adapt this into a full scale additional mode for antagonists to queue for and gain ranks with.