Gonna admit, I've been one of those people who were annoyed to no end by the antagonist system. The only fact I liked about it was that it's explained well in-universe. But after almost 100 hours in, It's been growing on me.

And by growing I mean like an incurable parasitic disease whose annoyances I've accepted as a part of my other wise enjoyable life.

 I get it, alright? You want your 4v1 pvp and you want it involuntary. Fine, It's your game and I've had worse involuntary 4v1s in Dark Souls anyways. 
But if you wanna keep that, can we follow the basic rules of pvp design and level the playing field at least?

Passive skills straight up gives you raw stats just for having played longer, the hero killer upgrade point lets you deal more damage to players and you can get more with higher levels. Do I really need to spell out what that means for pvp?

If a higher level antagonist invade a low level game with a character they can't get in range to grab without instantly being put into critical (hive, ayana, valeria, etc.) then game's done. bullet resistance already means they take less damage, not to mention it takes significant time to kill something with shooting alone. All the antagonist will have to do is hide behind cover stalking the objective. Even if the antagonist can be grabbed, they still have the advantage in punches.

It definitely doesn't help that literally every antagonist will be at 100+ because.....well why the hell wouldn't they be? They know being lower leveled in pvp means being bullied.

No wonder a game of this quality still has mixed steam reviews. If antagonists appeared every game, which I'm guessing is the game's vision once the player base is built up, this game'd be dead within a month due to having zero new players.

Now it's not like I don't understand the desire to build a meaningful progression system, and by god is this meaningful, but simply from a utilitarian standpoint with the goal of keeping the game bloody alive, the playing field must be leveled. 

If you want suggestions, here's some, with the best effort put into preserving the sense of progression. Remove the Hero Killer upgrade and make all other damage related upgrades work only on AI opponents. It's gonna be a coding nightmare I'm sure, but it's better than the design nightmare it is now. Do the same with passive abilities too, and make armour work only on AI.

To be honest here, I refuse to believe this never poped up during dev meetings. But still, it'd be nice to send a reminder that the current progression system in regards to pvp is, at best, a ticking time bomb. Best diffuse it now before it becomes a proper bomb that blows up your player growth.