Chad Gulzow-Man

I seem to recall reading (or hearing in the YouTube videos) that your choices during the Praetorian tutorial level determine your starting contact, not the AT you pick.

From there, even if you start down one path, you generally have the option to switch between Loyalists and Resistance as you like, until you get to level 20 and leave Praetoria for Paragon Earth. And despite any choices you've made up to that point, you get to outright pick Hero or Villain... so you could play a hardcore Loyalist from 1-20 but then hop over to Paragon City instead of becoming a Villain (as the Loyalist path implies).

You'll be able to pick any of the ten standard Hero or Villain ATs (Blaster, Controller, Defender, Scrapper, Tank, Brute, Corruptor, Dominator, Mastermind or Stalker) when starting a new character in Praetoria. Epic ATs (Kheldians and Soldiers of Arachnos) are not able to start in Praetoria.

From there, the way you play your character decides whether you will become a Hero or a Villain. You can make a Brute that fights the tyranny of Emperor Cole and works to return freedom to the common people, thus making you a Hero. You could also make a Blaster that works as an enforcer within Cole's regime, subjugating the weak civilian populace and halting the efforts of the Resistance as a Villain.

If I recall correctly, a redname mentioned that once you've chosen your AT and powersets and are ready to start the game, a box pops up asking whether you want to go to Paragon/the Rogue Isles or Praetoria, similar to the way the game currently asks if you want to skip the tutorial.

Nah, it's only standard procedure if someone posts they're leaving in a whiny, <bleep>y way.

Or if they post the same thing in every open topic on the subject, which is against the forum rules and grounds for modsmacking, but hey, he's taking his ball and going home anyway, so why should he care?

Ditto. Especially if it has dinosaurs.

I never got why there was so much Patron Power hate (other than the fact that you couldn't switch pools in a respec until fairly recently). I find that Soul Mastery really rounds out and completes my Stalker in a way that none of the Hero Ancillary Power Pools do.

Of course, there are definite throw-away powers in both groups. Moonbeam from Soul Mastery--while it may look awesome--takes up a ton of endurance, has a ridiculously long (and interruptable) cast time, and doesn't do much more damage than Dark Blast... which sucks because you can cast Dark Blast twice in the amount of time it takes to use Moonbeam.

But things like Soul Storm? A decent hold power on a melee class? Friggin' awesome. And Shadow Meld makes a great "OH <bleep!>" button in a pinch when I'm suddenly getting my butt handed to me and Elude isn't up. Alternatively, I can throw Ingrid (my Night Widow pet) out to take the fall if I've bitten off more than I can chew.

I suppose I could just get rid of all the fun powers and softcap my Stalker like everyone else does, but then I'd be just like everyone else. Even if it means I'm going to fail, dammit, I'm going to do it my own way and I'm going to do it spectacularly.

Not really a discussion for this thread, but the greater number of villains again boils down to mostly the weak one-shot characters that are effectively NPCs. That was a point I intended to make that got diffused by my responding to so many different lines at once, and I admit it could have been developed more. Do you think people would want to play something that gets no more powerful that what is effectively represented in the game by a lieutenant-class enemy? Would you want to play one?

But really, for every big nasty Magneto in the comic universe, you've got ten Shockers running around. Sure, The Shocker is effective against the general populace and isn't going to have much trouble robbing a bank or going up against a non-powered police force, but when Spider-Man shows up he's only barely a threat. Magneto, on the other hand, outclasses Spidey so hard that he needs most of the X-Men or the Fantastic Four to go against him.

Unless of course he receives the Cosmic Powers again.

First and foremost, this is a role playing game. There are many people that focus more on the last word of that title (game) and just play to do as much content or blow through it as easily as the possibly can, but the developers' focus has always been more on letting you create a unique character the way you want and then to play within the game world the way you want.

In essence, there is no way to separate the mechanical from the storyline in the developers' eyes. They know full well that many players who purchase Going Rogue are going to move their characters to the middle of the road so they have more chance to find teams and experience the content, and that many are doing so simply to to check off the accomplishments that they haven't yet completed or finished with other characters.

But the bottom line is, nobody is being forced to switch sides or go grey. There are plenty of players who won't do either for their own characters' story purposes.

Personally, my main character will become a Vigilante specifically to do the redside content. For him, I'm only interested in completion and badge collecting, and there's very little story behind why he'd hit up the Rogue Isles at all (the story being that he and my main Villain had their minds swapped... lame, but it gets the job done). Aside from that, I have one Controller who will almost certainly become a Vigilante and a Brute who will go Rogue, then go Hero, and then go Vigilante, just because that's what fits those characters best.

Why do people always say that blue-side must be better because it has more zones?

Seriously, when's the last time you started in Galaxy City, then moved on to King's Row and Perez Park for 6-12 (without doing radio missions)? When's the last time you went to Skyway to level up to 20? Independance Port to get up to 30? Founder's Falls instead of Brickstown to take you to 40? When's the last time you spent any appreciable amount of time in Boomtown, Dark Astoria, Eden or the Shadow Shard?

Also, don't forget that they're adding a whole new world for us to explore as we either fight or defend the dictatorship of Praetoria. There's going to be a big hit to both the red and blue zones as everybody rushes to discover the new shinies and fight the new enemies.

--there are, but no details have been officially announced yet... more on that in a bit-- You're probably right. There will be a flood of Villains becoming Rogues. There will also be a flood of Heroes becoming Vigilantes.

The path goes Hero -> Vigilante -> Villain -> Rogue -> Hero, by the way.

First off, there aren't a "large number of villains compared to heroes" in the comic book world. There's a lot--a LOT--of henchmen and underlings who go down in a couple hits, but why would anyone want to play them? What comic books DO have is a smaller number of ridiculously powerful supervillains that require an entire team of heroes to take down... and that's just not feasible inside a multiplayer game world.

What we have in CoX is more like the X-Men versus the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, or the Justice League versus the Legion of Doom, with equal but opposite characters on each side of the fence. Or at least, that's what we should have... but there's a large player bias towards playing Heroes (that I'm convinced has nothing to do with the number of zones available to them). I'm sure someone could run a serious psychological experiment using the CoX character creator as a medium, but all I can do is report second-hand suppositions: people generally believe that they are good, and when you put them in a game where they can choose to be good or evil, most will pick good to start.

Moving on... no, I don't think you're being a pessimist at all. I'd hazard to say that for a few months after Going Rogue is released, just about everybody will be starting new characters in Praetoria, switching sides with their existing characters to check out things on the other side of the fence, and generally experimenting with the new options that are available to them.

Just like when Issue 16 launched, everybody spent a few hours at the tailor, changing their power options. And when Issue 15 launched, with everybody rushing to run the new Task and Strike Forces. And when Issue 14 launched, when everybody went into the Architect Engineering buildings and only came out to level up and check the markets.

It's what happen when new content is introduced. By the time the issue following Going Rogue is in beta testing, most players will have settled into the role they're most comfortable with. Many will be fully blue or red, and yes, it's very reasonable to assume that a great number of players might choose to go and stay in the grey, possibly even a majority.

BUT, there are going to be rewards for playing a pure ("exceptional" was the term used in the announcement) Hero or Villain. The developers are adding a system in Going Rogue that allows you to further power-up level 50 characters that are only available to characters who are fully on one side or the other. (They have mentioned that switching completely from one side to the other won't preclude you from earning these rewards, but it will slow down or possibly even reset your progress in earning them.)

As a final note, don't worry so much about what other people are going to do. Play the game the way you want to play it. For every Villain that jumps ship, there will very likely be two Heroes that become Vigilantes who would love to join you on that Strike Force you're trying to get started.

No no no, you stomp them flat and eat kitty pancakes with catsup. >_>

Two colors per costume piece. Except capes, of course, which offer two front and two back colors.

Viv didn't mean you could put a third color in a costume piece, she just meant that a general way that costumes are created is to make the majority of the costume two colors with a third color used for accenting. Simply bi-colored is boring, and adding too many colors makes the costume too busy... both of which are okay, if that's what you're going for.

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And Tal, don't feel bad for not winning costume contests. The main reason you're not winning is that you're not dressed up like a schoolgirl/catgirl/both with tons of cleavage showing.

You should totally "GO rouge." It'll bring out the color in your eyes.

And if you understand what everyone is saying, then why are you still asking? People are saying this: we don't know yet!

Put some pants on?

Sorry, was going by the server list on Badge-Hunter.com. Since there's a Paragon server listed there, and we certainly don't have it on the US server list, I assumed it was an EU server.

I have made an *** out of u and me, and for that, I apologize.

It has been asked, in virtually every Going Rogue thread out there. You are completely correct in your assumption that we don't know how it will work yet, and are probably right that it won't be until it's in beta before we find out.