Kelenar

Dark Miasma is crazy good. First set I ever played to make me go, "Hmm, it's a hazard zone spawn of +2s with three bosses... I think I can handle this."

Several of my friends have probably gotten tired to death of me making the same complaint over and over--at the end of the day, my villains don't feel very villainous. The vast majority of the villain missions fall into the categories of either doing people's dirty work (apparently for money, though very few really directly mention that) or trying to kiss up to Arachnos. Really, it feels more like City of Ill-Tempered Mercenaries than anything else. Some of the most traditional villain goals, like world domination or just grabbing yourself a big old chunk of power, are almost totally unrepresented in the game.

I've heard people argue a lot that the reason for this is that these can't really be represented in an MMO. In the strictest sense, that's pretty obvious--if a character could actually conquer the world, it would cause some pretty basic problems. On the other hand, heroes get to outright save the world a time or three on the path to fifty. Shouldn't villains be able to at least get a taste of conquering it?

So, that's what this is. Two different ideas I've had to put more of a villainous feel into the game. Before anybody jumps on me for it, I'd like to point out that I am fully aware that these would take huge amounts of effort, and thus don't expect them to ever ever ever happen. Or even be considered. I expect they'd both be comparable to the Mission Architect in terms of effort. Consider it more a thought experiment in how an MMO could do the villain thing better. Not should. It's a proof of concept that I think we could still get more villainous feeling in the game without killing the MMO aspects. That said, I've purposely made sure that both ideas are similar enough to existing systems that I think they could actually be done. I've also tried to make sure that they don't add in much new griefing potential, hence the lack of anything strictly PvP.

Idea 1: Conquest, or your own personal Latveria
The Isles are, presumably, a large place. We have a decent bit of evidence that Arachnos doesn't really rule the entire thing with an iron fist, so why not let the aspiring world dominators take little chunks for themselves?

It'd go like this. At level 5 or so, you'd be able to scout out an area of the city that Arachnos doesn't particularly care about. Ideally, the player would be able to choose: A run-down Mercy Island area, a Nerva jungle one, whatever. This area becomes available to the player as an instance, basically a personal base, except it happens to look like an outdoor area.

It would, of course, be initially infested with Hellions, Snakes, and all those other undesireables that are all over the Isles. Every five levels or so, the player could get missions to drive out their competition, beating up prominent gang leaders in their personal neighborhood and such.

After enough of these, the player would cement their hold over the area, making it their personal turf. This would open up the second stage: Basically, the base editor, except with buildings and such, so the player could personalize their conquest. The options could be fairly basic to begin with: a bunch of run-down buildings, trashcans, dumpsters, whatever they could browbeat the denizens in their new turf into building or stealing. Later missions or badges could open up more--maybe beating up 25 turrets in Grandville lets you build your own, or you can get a mission to beat up Doctor Aeon and learn some architecture from him, thus letting you add Arachnos-style buildings to your territory. Really, the only true limitations here should be what's vaguely within reason and the limits of the engine. If the player wants to build a stone ziggurat surrounded by parking lots on the beach, let them.

At this point, the missions could get more interesting. The player's efforts would start getting a bit more attention, so maybe the missions become 'Stop Arachnos from bombing your territory into a wasteland' or 'Chase Longbow inspectors off of your turf.' Now that they control the area, they'd need some street-level enforcers to keep it safe, so there could be missions to ally with various villain groups, resulting in those groups spawning friendly patrols within the neighborhood. Perhaps they could attack neighboring areas in mayhem-style missions to annex them, essentially giving them a plot size upgrade.

Idea 2: Reigns of Terror
This is sort of designed to be a catch-all for villain goals. Essentially, we know that finishing a task force can spawn a zone event, thanks to the Lady Grey TF and its associated Rikti raids. So, why not let villains purposely trigger such things in Paragon? You could have a series of new contacts, probably at least 40+ or 50+ (see below) who would act as facilitators in helping villains achieve their grand goals. Upon finishing the arc, the villain's work would be unleashed on Paragon in the form of a zone event. There would probably need to be a wide variety of potential end events to encompass as many types of villains as possible, but some examples:

• Giant robot attack - essentially, a beefed up giant monster.
• Zombie curse - Prolonged zombie invasion + Dark Astoria style fog.
• Orbital bombardment - Heavy-duty Rikti bombing without the dropships.
• Zone Invasion - Groups from a villain faction of the player's choice move in on a zone and start fighting the street mobs for supremacy, in the style of the 5th Column vs. Council war. These would probably have to be invasion-coded to con even to everybody.

The villain should probably be able to see their work pay off, which could be done one of two ways:
1. (Realistically) - Let them go into the hero zone as an invisible, invincible spectator, arena-style. They can watch the event unfold, but are unable to participate.
2. (Ideally, but griefable) - For zone events that unleash mobs, let them go into the hero zone in Gladiator fight mode. They're invincible and can't use any powers, but they can control up to eight of the villains they've let loose into the zone. However, this opens up griefing potential, so it's probably not a good idea.

Ideally, the villain would also be able to choose what area of the city their event happens in--not only for those who have a grudge against Talos Island or something, but also because it would be really lame to spent hours trying to get your reign of terror unlocked only to unleash it on an unsuspecting Independence Port. Which has one guy in it. And he's sitting in the tram. AFK. Doing so would however, open up some griefing potential in the form of 'I know guyIHate's Synapse task force is getting ready to fight Babbage... time to drop a zombie invasion on Skyway!' (You already have a pretty good shot of disrupting a Numina with a well-timed LGTF, though.)

You would also need some method to keep people from spamming these. Obviously, there are some problems if every single villain can do one with a few hours of commitment, since every hero zone would be about quadruple-invaded at any given point. Some ideas on gating the content a little:

• For those who want a new money sink in the game: Make your villain need X million infamy to fund their project.
• Alternatively, make there be significant expensive construction involved with it. Perhaps building a giant robot requires 30 Synthetic Intelligence Units, 200 Ceramic Armor Plates... (Probably not a good idea, since salvage prices would go insane.)
• Let characters only do it after level 50.
• Make the arc to unlock them really long and/or hard.
• Make the arc to unlock them a task force that rewards no merits.
• Only let characters do it once. Or once a month. Or whatever.

Mix and match these restrictions until you like them!

For scrappers, I'd say /elec would be ideal come i16. It's basically the endurance king, and about the only hole you really have against them is a slight weakness to negative, which they don't do much. About your only worry is getting hit with one of the debuff masks, so you'd probably still do better on anything softcapped, but /elec would have good performance out of the box.

Courier: Font of the gods.

Spaaaaaaaaace present.

Arguments about MA aren't innovative at all.

My character gets Blaze, Seismic Smash, Psychic Shockwave, Rain of Arrows, Shield Charge, Dark Regeneration, Power Sink, and Seeds of Confusion!

My inexperienced friend can take Blaster Frozen Aura, Psionic Dart, /Poison's Poison Trap, Serum, Burn, Lucky, Smoke Grenade, and Black Hole!

Maybe the IO could just set the power's KB to below the knockback threshold? Instead of 'multiply it by 0.5' just make it 'set it to 0.6' or something. No idea if that would be easily possible.

Not quite a perfect solution, but I get the feeling it's about the best we could see. It would still annoy me quite a bit if I wanted to make a 'teaming' build or something for my energy/energy blaster and ended up needing nine or ten slots for the things.

There are also some balance concerns, I'd expect. Make Hurricane into a knockdown with no repel? Yes, please!