anyways devs teased a bit in discord today and it leaves me very hopeful. Nothing revealed just yet, but at least antags are not forgotten and will hopefully be pulled out of our current purgatory "soon"

There is been some somewhat drastic tweaking being done regarding Antagomatches
Besides the Aurora Thingies thing
I'm not sure I can [explain], since it's not due for the imminent patch release, but after
But before the Aurora, for sure
Huey not extracting has been adreessed
When I said "drastic tweaking" I was refering to some stuff affecting the match's outcome
I know there's being a lot of changes made into matchmaking, but it's such a complex and confusing matter to me
I'm sure we'll have to re-retweak after some of those retweaks
I mean, one of the most notable stuff is a really simple thing
But I'm not sure I should speak about it just yet
But it's a really visible thing you may guess or have thought about, that would make like easier for Antags
It's not some invisible value thing

And it sounds like something better than just "buff spawn rate, buff enemies, etc" since it's not just a value adjustment. Not gonna come this upcoming patch, but soon 

The continued popularity of peaceful antags are definitely a symptom of this, in my opinion. If the mode does not feel rewarding or even possible, many players won't put in the effort.

And yeah Jab, it's likely your MMR. At 70+ I just always get the same 10 players in a constant loop, when I don't have a 30 minute queue, and I get kinda tired of that. Players at that level are too few. I go down to 50-60% and there's nothing for raiders to even do if an antag comes into the game, besides dogpile the antag, because there's no mission pressing against them to impede their progress. Personal MMR affecting who I can queue against is quite an annoying hurdle.
Options are:
Stay low and fight low level teams, or high levels that drop MMR artificially
Stay high and get long queues and always fight the same teams every match

I stand by that before the guild update, antagging felt fine at any MMR. There were still problem maps, but those maps are worse now. The sweeping changes that nerfed antagonists are very noticeable.

I used to quick play antag. Now, under no circumstances do i queue:

HBaT, this mission is a joke. Every change that just happened to it was to raider advantage, to a MASSIVE degree. Antag spawn points are also awful.

In Shock, Beholder is weak, Kuzmann is weak and does NO damage. Even locals can CQC fistfight me in the middle of the arena with kuzmann shooting them and they take hardly any damage. Barrier also makes this fight a JOKE. Why is Kuzmann's AI the dumbest in the entire game?? Should he not advance until he can blitzfaust, instead of stopping his movement like an idiot? Also, with antag present, blitzfaust barely does any damage. It doesn't even wound most characters.

Low Blow, another joke of a mission, free raider win. It has been awful ever since the final platform antag spawn points were moved 50 miles away from the gate that dies in 10 seconds. Stalk is literally the only way to get back up to the raiders in time once they reach the end, if you're lucky.

Weapon from the Past, 0-3 wardogs on the map at any given time. They also always spawn from the same exact places, extremely predictable and easy to spawn camp.

Enemy Within, acolytes are awful support units and it's just a 4v1 tiny arena.

Destroyer of worlds, aneska is a wimp now. I once had a match where they picked all short range raiders. They messed me up easily, but barely hurt aneska, fight took 30 minutes. She used her ULTIMATE POWER 6 times or something like that, and didn't even wound a single raider in any of the attacks. Instead of covering the area with golden death balls, she sprinkles them around here and there, it's pathetic! Oh and antag spawn points are THE WORST.

My wins all feel like either A) I am being extremely cheesy, by stalling timers like Loaht's House or Schneider hacking on In Medias Res, or killing the protector, or B) the raiders royally fucked up their character picks, and can't deal with the mission or myself, or they are low levels.

My losses only feel like I have no support and just get dogpiled 4v1 the entire match with no chance of countering the raider team because my AI support does no damage, trips and jams constantly, just plain doesn't spawn, or in the case of bosses, they are armed with nerf guns and they die in mere seconds. I never feel "outplayed" anymore because I can't call 4 people punching, shooting, and grabbing you all at the same moment to be "playing better" than me, because the rest of the mission is so weak and not threatening that they can just ignore it completely from the moment i spawn, until i'm dead.

Only a few characters even feel viable anymore. Harec, Alicia, and Hans (sometimes), because they all have the power of movement. I used to play Hive and Konstantin and Kuzmann a lot as antag, but they don't cut it anymore due to mobility of being dogpiled, or in the case of kuzmann, the lichtbogen nerf ONLY removed his ability to be antag, it didn't hurt him at all on the raider side.

This is what my rewards look like almost all the time now. I have been asking myself every day I play, "why do I even bother?" because this sure looks like antagonists have been removed as a viable way to play the game and make any sort of progress.

Not my video, but Marmalade dead in 8 seconds with antag present. Bosses in general become hilariously weak when an antag is present. Kuzmann and Aneska also become unable to kill anyone at all, because they damage gets so low.
https://youtu.be/58CGXUOE-Ck

It takes 20 seconds to respawn if you're lucky, from death to full control of character, but the mission objective is over in half that time

Yeah the benefits are debatable due to the values, but they may always adjust it in the future. When the aequilibrium system was first added it was always 0% Raider because you have a lot morep layers leveling up that way. 4 players getting games and XP faster level up a lot faster than 1 person, obviously. So over a couple of updates they lowered how much raiding affects the meter, and greatly buffed how much antag affinity moves it.

Guilds were our most recent patch, so after they have more data, they may adjust how fast it decays

Karen did explain on another post in the forums, that in guilds the aequilibrium will drop when no one is playing towards the 0% sides, in order to encourage playing more often

Hello guys,

It's important to distinguish between the MMR and the Aequilibrium. Jester278, I think you are talking about the Aequilibrium which, precisely, decreases when nobody in the Guild is playing. It's meant to incentivize players to play and balance their Aequilibrium.

This is good to know, I was wondering why my only-antag guild was so far into raider territory lol

IMO the gun has quite a slow base reload. But if you feel reload is sufficient, that's totally your prerogative.

Just remember Dynamic boosts both the reload (which is required for dropping the shields, since it drops the mag) AND the fire rate. More bullets put out = more DPS, and less time spent in reload animations = more time spent shooting.

Also consider this- even though the DPS is low compared to other weapons, the ability to completely nullify all incoming damage means it will win any DPS race. Kon or Schneider shooting at you? Drop a shield and their DPS becomes 0, you will win that firefight. I personally consider it an extremely frustrating and OP weapon to fight against due to the fact that, even with low shot damage, it will win any shootout, or force the enemy into CQC, which is to Mikah's advantage with her clone tricks.