Hello! I posted about this briefly on discord, but I’d like to put here and go into more detail on a map by map case.

Something needs to be done to spice up AI spawns.
Predictable doors and dropships where you can clear the entire mob of enemies as soon as they come out are bad for antags because they’re entire support for the mission is anticipated and dispatched easily.
And it’s bad for raiders because it’s well..... boring.

The worst offenders of this are:
Hanging by a thread.
Short Fused.
Mouse and the snake first phase.
(Literally one drop ship with 3 enemies at a time)
Fistful of sand, Second Phase.
Weapon from the past.
Destroyer of worlds.
Enemy within.

I believe increasing the number of spawn points and the randomness of spawns in these maps will make for a more exciting gameplay experience.

Hanging by a Thread:
The first phase is very easy to camp the doors. While there are about 6 doors total, 2 of them seem to only spawn engineers. And on top of that, the time between enemy spawns gives raiders plenty of time to readjust their positions and dispatch the enemies from that door. As an antagonist this phase can be very frustrating because often times there is nothing between you and the raiders guaranteeing your 4 on 1 demise.

Hey there! After spending some time with the newest update, I’d like to share my thoughts on the current state and suggestions for the future.

Let’s start with Kill Points:
They’re relatively easy to come by, I average about 600-1000 per match. But they’re not without their issues. The biggest thing being the increased competition among your teammates(which can actually be kind of fun sometimes 😝) is causing even more players to disregard objectives and bosses and just go for kills the entire match. And in a lot of cases, they won’t even pick something that can damage the bosses. This has been an issue since the introduction of personal score, and has worsen with killpoints added.
The solution would to simply reward players for objectives and boss damage.

We absolutely need the game to track boss damage delt by the player. When the boss is KO’d, each player should be awarded killpoints for the % of dnage done to the boss. And a personal score parameter needs to be added to the mission reward screen. People who pick the boss killer character and take on the role always sacrifice their own mission score and rewards to ensure a successful completion of the mission.

Same things need to happen for objectives.
Say for example you run the bomb on short fused, your team mates get all the kills and the rewards. Players need to be awarded score and KP for objectives completed, aleph deposited, healing done, etc.

These two things will help encourage teamwork and compensate every player in the match, regardless of the role they choose.

Weapon mods and advanced features:
Overall, I like the new crafting system. Although, it can be a little intimidating and confusing at first. I’d suggest making a tutorial video on how the system works. Explaining what the different symbols are, how to use the random copy spaces, how to use a negative multiplier, etc. make the video play in game when a player first opens the mod menu.

As for the advanced features and weapon balancing, damage for pvp feels a lot more balanced and in check. Aside from one pretty big thing.... You guessed it, Toxin! After being on both ends of max toxin guns it feels very over tuned. Many times, my hits of toxin damage will do more damage than the gun did in the first place, which to me this feels like it should be flipped with Echo. Echo should be one big hit of damage when I stopped firing, Toxin should be multiple smaller hits of damage.
Most mods feel good(echo feels pretty weak) but there’s no reason to use them when toxin is so good. I don’t know if the damage stacks too high or is multiplied too high or what but it really needs to get in check.

Speaking of PVP, let’s talk about that for second. With the removal of passives and the smaller impact of forge level on your guns pvp feels more balanced (aside from toxin 🤢)
But we still have some kinks to work out.
Matchmaking for antagonist above 50% mmr: it’s darn near impossible to find a match once you’re above 50%. And when you do, you nerf the raiders difficulty so much they get a cakewalk of a mission. I do recall earlier in 2019 when you guys opened up matchmaking at 50% to match with anything higher. Is it possible that when this change was made, that players above 50% only match 50% and higher? This would explain the 3-8 hour queue times at 50% because the average player seems to be around 30-40% nowadays. Maybe lower the gate to 40% to fix this issue.

Another recently emerging issue is raiders holding an antagonist hostage for killpoints on maps like hanging by a thread in the second phase. They’ll refuse to complete the mission objective to farm kill points off the antagonist and grunts. It’s possible you may need to add time limits to these sections to discourage this hurtful behavior. Or maybe the longer a match goes, the more powerful an antagonist becomes with passives or spawn times? The downside is this hurts the honest players who may genuinely stall in these sections as they may sometimes be tough.

Last thing I’d like to talk about is monthly rewards/milestones.
Kill points, and talent points really need to be added to monthly rewards. Either every single month, or rotate the 4 currencies every month or so. Most players I know have more gold than they know what to do with, but talent points are still a struggle. And kill points are a little too new to judge, but would definitely help to get a large sum of KP along with your blueprints at the end of the month.
Also, personal scoring needs to be adjusted(ties in with the points made earlier way up there somewhere👆) to benefit the players to play boss damage or objectives. If you’re the one guy who always ends up playing the boss killer or objectives, it’s really hard to get your monthly score up. Also if your mmr is too high, you can’t get antagonist matches to get your antag scores. I’ll see players throwing matches to lower mmr (who are good players that shouldn’t be at low mmr) just so they can get antagonist matches and get their scores every month.

Anyways, this about sums up everything I have to say right now. Sorry it’s a novel. But thank you MSE for taking the time to read this and I hope this feedback helps shape a better spacelords for all.

Hey there! Just wanted to pop by and show you this bug with the attractor stat. It will sometimes make the sound and visuals as if you recieved aleph when in reality the skill did not trigger and no aleph was recieved.
I’ve had this happen on two maps and multiple times on each map. I only recorded one instance of this happening though.
https://youtu.be/jSKk8Q3fv8I

Hey there! I’ve notices since the last update, that objective markers tend to disappear when in playingnas Antagonist. Can be kind of frustrating when those pesky raiders sneak by with the encoder when I could have stopped them. I don’t have a particular instance saved, but I can list off a few places I’ve seen it happen.

Encoder and Schneider on Medias res.
Canister Bomb on Short Fused
Location Points on Enemy Within

I have noticed with the objective you carry, that they their markers would sometimes disappear after they were dropped once.

Hope this helps, thanks.

Hey there! We all know MMR is probably the most complained about topic. Biggest issue being it is too easily manipulated. Here’s an idea I had. which maybe even if you don’t use it, may open up internal conversations to lead to something better.

You could removed MMR% from the player’s account, and instead attach to the daily mission rewards. Higher the reward = higher the difficulty %. The game would still take the average % of all players to make mission difficulty. And you could also set the % to be higher for higher tier players and lower for lower tier players on their rewards. Once players finish their daily rewards and get to the 6th match with low rewards, leave the difficulty at a casual playing level like 30% or so.
Pot could fluctuate based on how much is in there.

I feel like these changes could add some stability and predictability to the play experience of spacelords. And manipulations from players would have smaller ramifications on others.

Anyways, thanks for reading. I hope this will inspire something with you guys at MSE.

Hey there! Just wanted to drop by and give my 2 Cents on a few things.

First off, the eclipse seasonal event is awesome. Really cool to see the red hue on some missions. And getting free cosmetics for monthly score is really cool. I can’t wait to see what the next event will be like. Im hanging on to my MP in hopes of event item flash offer

I see a lot of people having a hard time getting blueprints in the game’s current state. I realize heavymetal is coming soon, but in the meantime I think if you brought back hourly refresh on the rewards it would help alleviate some player’s dismay.

When it comes to natural aleph deposits, I don’t mind the system, but I believe spawn rates may need to be tweaked per mission. For example I played a match on white noise yesterday. The first phase took a little longer than it used to, which is fine. But the second phase is when it got a little too hectic. The aleph spawns in the map require precision platforming jumps, that are really hard to do in the thick of the battle. And the spawn rates felt too slow that when the aleph appeared we had to ignore all the enemies and antagonist and make a mad dash for it, which ultimately led to our loss. I believe the spawn rates for aleph on that map need to be more frequent.

For the Schneider rework, I haven’t personally played with it yet. But on paper, it might be a good idea to give his pea shooter gun a little bit more power while the drone is not deployed.

Reactive shields on bosses. It’d be nice to have a visual representation on the boss’s health bar of how much reactive shield is on the boss. Like a blue bar that goes over the original bar.

Also, I’d really love to see Talent points as a monthly milestone reward. They’re typically harder to get than gold.

Last thing. It feels like mission difficulty is being over compensated while there is an antagonist again. It was good for a while, but I’ve had some insanely high differences lately. Maybe if you could program in a minimum difficulty and maximum difficulty when an antagonist is present to keep the game from balancing too far one way or another. Maybe between 35-70% or so.

Anyways thanks for reading and thanks for the hard work!

Being a man down is always gonna suck, but Cortez bros is a nice feature to help out with this. I am thankful for it.
Even though they rarely kill anything, it’s nice that they aren’t a liability for you lives and can take enemy Agro for a short time.
That being said, having a cortez bro on your team is a huge drawback for the fact that it’s one less person to complete objectives. It’s very hard for an undermanned squad to kill everything and complete objectives in higher difficulty matches.

Example: I just played a match ‘In Medias Res’ at 65% and the game gave me 3 cortez bros. I couldn’t make it to the second barrier with the encoder because there were just too many enemies for me to kill and then try to pick up the encoder.

I think since we can now start matches with Cortez in our team, maybe look into solutions to Help them carry their weight.
You could simply buff their attack or health, or maybe even decrease match difficulty by a flat % value for each Cortez present.

With the latest update (identity) we were brought a rework to The Whip
“  - Whip has been reworked: The quantum projectile won't react to Valeria's shots if she's not nearby.”
I personally believe that this effect should be applied to Shakura. Because as it is currently, a player can camp an area with Shakura without ever consuming ammo or even showing their aleph signature. This is insane for Antagonists in certain choke points, such as the first Bridge in Beasts lair. Or the second choke on Medias Res. It’s nearly impossible without the proper raiders. If a proximity activation were added to shakura, it would encourage a high risk/high reward CQC playstyle. Which the gun is very strong when fighting CQC. But being able to do that, and lock down a choke point feels like a little much. If this change were added, I think a color change on the projectile when your in range and out of range to activate the damage would be necessary.

I also believe that the Whip should have its proximity activation removed. Maybe with the trade off of faster ammo consumption or less max ammo. This way, the stationary ad clear playstyle will still exist. But without the strengths of ammo, aleph signature, and CQC.

If both these changes were implemented I think it would help balance out both of these guns and give them both a unique playstyle.

Thank you for reading, I’ll see you on the broken planet