NaoGal

Thank you all for answering my questions, though I am not sure I completely understand your reasoning on some points... (But that's me, not a reflection of your ability to explain yourselves...)

So it all boils down to a couple of simple things...

-The text isn't really suited for how some villains would play or act.
Honestly, I see this less then is portrayed here, since most of what NPCs say throughout the game seem rather neutral to me. How you interpret the way your character says those words (or even if they actually say them) is up to you.

-Too many co-op zones geared towards 'Hero' content.
The Rikti Warzone... Where both heroes and villains alike are told point blank when they first arrive to basically stow whatever grudges they have with each other, against an enemy that attacked /everyone/ regardless of which side they were on...

Cimerora and First Ward/Night Ward... Stand alone areas that really have only a loose connection with anything else. Imperious doesn't really care who you are. He just wants his position of authority back. And not to mention Sister Aurelia, who only deals with villains...

Apex and Tin Mage TFs... Again, fighting against an enemy that didn't care which side you fell on. If anything, the Paragon City got the short end of that stick because because they got hit more then the Rogue Isles did.

The iTrials... Striking back against an enemy that has already attacked Primal Earth in the above mentioned TFs. Perhaps more villains would take all that far more personally if they were interrupted by the Praetorian offensive while they were out trying to get a hotdog... (No, don't take that comment too seriously, I'm trying to inject a touch of humor here...)

Fighting against Mot and all of Dark Astoria... Again, dealing with an entity that would basically devour everything and everyone, regardless of whether your a hero, villain, or Joe average civilian. And during which, despite what some might say, allows for some pretty dark, despicable choices to be made…

The battle against Emperor Cole... Why would you want to side with somebody that would eventually destroy you and replace you with one of his (much more controllable with much less free will) Olympian Guard? Or at best, keep you around under the control of a very harsh thought police, and Praetor Tillman, who has no issues what so ever with cutting out those problematic, troublesome parts of peoples psyche that lead to silly things like free will.


(This last part is nothing more then my own point of view… As always, take it or leave it as you see fit…)

All this (and more) being said... hey... it is, in the end your opinion that matters to you (just like mine matters to me.) If your playing someone that honestly, truly didn't give a damn if the world was destroyed or not, then hey, that's your prerogative. I can't fathom that kind of character. I've tried. It doesn't work for me...
Despite what has been said here, /all/ characters are forced to do things a certain way at times. To point out the Incarnate content is silly to me, because you are pointing at the... what? The last, 5 to 10% of the game as an entire whole? (And even that amount is being generous, I think...)
This game allows players to do more then most other MMOs have ever even pretended to offer. Everything from creating your characters back story, to customizing their appearance, to giving them multiple story-arcs to follow as they progress on their way to level 50, and even beyond with the inclusion of Dark Astoria and the iTrials.
As harsh as this sounds, the reasons people have given as to why they are unhappy about how villains are treated are nothing more then perceived slights against them. Nobody is forcing anyone to play through, and/or acknowledge anything in this game. If someone is absolutely adamant about no longer paying for this game on those grounds… Well, nothing I or anybody else says will likely change their minds…

Last, (and most likely, least on this entire subject…)
It’s been stated that some would love to see co-op content where the heroes are forced to do something despicable ‘for the greater good’… Really? It has been stated again and again how villains have been forced into doing heroic-type stuff ‘for the greater good’, which you say is wrong and not fair… So you’d want the same thing to happen in the other direction? By that line of thinking, two wrongs somehow make things right? That sounds less like someone wanting to make the game better, and more like they would rather try and spread their unhappiness to others...

Honestly and without any snark intended, I have to ask two questions...

1) Why are you playing villains that are so vehement against helping defend their home when their very lives and existence is on the line?
Are they really that bat-**** crazy that they don't care of they die? (Which I suppose is a viable answer, but then I have to ask why you do any content at all... aside from just street sweeping and killing everything in sight... And also... why would you really want to play such a character anyway? o.O)
Or, are you ignoring the limitations of the game and saying something along the lines of 'Yeah, my villain is just going to pop into his little pocket dimension and giggle like a school girl as the world burns.' or 'He would never die. He could take on the Battalion on his own with one hand tied behind his back...'
Which kind of leads into my next question...

2) Why are you insisting on following the lore of the game to the point where it starts to hinder your enjoyment of it?
Yes, there is an overall meta-story to the game. Sure, some people don't like it. But /WHY/ are you insisting that it must all apply to your character in some way, shape or form, if it's hindering your enjoyment of the game?
Why on earth would you get so worked up about the perceived way some words are displayed by an NPC?
CoX gives you, the player, the wonderful ability to pick and choose what story elements actually apply to your character.
For example, you could run the Magisterium trial to unlock your Hybrid Slot, beat up Tyrant, get the badges even... But nowhere does it say you have to acknowledge that you have done it.
That's just one example, and probably not the best one out there, but you get the idea...

If this ends up sounding harsh.. well.. we all have our opinions. Yours is going to be no more valid then mine. So take what you will from this. And yes, I play characters on both red and blue side, and also playing through gold-side as well, so while I claim to be an expert on nothing, I have experience with most of the playable factions in the game...


So basically, the general gist of the complaints I get from wanna-be villains is that you can't be villains.
There is nothing 'villain-y' about teaming up with wanna-be heroes to fight off a universal threat that would crush both sides if it could...
The problem becomes one of simple practicality, really.

If the villain(s) wins, then that means the hero(s) would have to lose. Villains rarely take prisoners, thus the heroes would be killed.
Something like what Reichsman did to anyone that threatened to gain any level of power, if I remember the lore correctly. That ended up coming back to haunt him when he tried to invade Primal Earth, because while he was powerful, he couldn't take on all the super-powered heroes that came to Earths defense... but I digress...
So just for the sake of argument... Your villain wins. Causes havoc and chaos. Sets themselves up as overlord. Watches the world burn. Whatever.
/MY/ hero wouldn't allow that to happen. And she would 'cross the line' if need be by killing your villain to make sure that it wouldn't. (And I'm ignoring the people who say their villain is unkillable/wouldn't die/is immortal/is a twink/whatever, because the game doesn't really allow that. We are all immortal thanks to the Medi-porter McGuffin Devices.)
But that's not fair, right? How so? As it is, the heroes don't always win either. Has anyone been able to save their doppelganger after the fight with Protean at the end of the Jenni Adair arc?

So, what it all boils down to is, your villain wouldn't be helping heroes fight against Cole /NO MATER WHAT!/
Narrow-minded thinking aside (because there are a lot of reasons why villains would fight against Cole and his regime, ranging from 'He's a threat to my future plans to rule the multiverse!' to 'That SOB owes me 10 bucks!' to simply 'Me no like you!') if you really, absolutely can not find any reason why your villain would dare to team up with heroes, all because of a line or two from some NPC... then don't. There is nobody to blame on that but yourself.
/You/ are the one that made your character so crazy/homicidal/anti-social/whatever that they can't play outside their little box. Nowhere does it say that CoX is supposed to be tailor-made to fit everyone's character fantasies.
-The Devs make co-op content because it's simply the most cost effective content they can make, allowing the most number of players to do the largest number of things in the game.-
Would it be great to have villain-only content were you end up not getting screwed over, the bad guy wins and? Sure I guess. Would it be worth the time to implement it? Apparently, the Devs don't think so. I can suppose that if City of Villains had become as big a juggernaut (relatively speaking) as City of Heroes had been out of the gate, then who knows.. Maybe they would be plenty of story arcs where you can unload the stress of real life out by slaughtering innocents, bullying incompetent underlings, and be an all around ***-hole to your hearts content.
I suppose if thats /really/ what makes you happy, you can make your own personal arc in the AE... :P

To the OPs question...

I don't PvP much because I don't care for the mental 12 year olds and D-Bags that seem to frequently gravitate towards it.

Yeah, if I go into a PvP zone, then I know I'm fair game. I'm not going to cry foul if someone attacks me while I'm trying to get a Shivan Shard or what have you. Nor am I going to get worked up if I go head to head with someone and they beat me. Hell, I'd like to hope I could at least put up a decent fight and we can both walk away afterwards going 'Hey, good fight.'

Instead, what I usually ended up with was 'HAHA loser!' or 'PWND B****!!!11!11', or a number of other obscenities that I have had thrown at me, even on the rare occasions when I came out on top.

Sadly, no amount of altering code, fixing game mechanics, or balancing ATs will ever fix that problem, and it will always be there no matter what game you play.

'What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!' - Dracula

My main, Elltenia, has a respect/hate relationship with Battle Maiden and her followers from War Earth.
A bit of backstory on this...
Elltenia is from a fantasy-based, 'Tolken-esque' world where humans occupy the same world as elves, dwarves, goblins and many other races. When she ended up on Primal Earth, all the technology and laws gave her more then just a minor headache!
Fast-forward a few years. Elltenia has acclimated to this world a bit (..shes still isn't all that fond of technology though..) and has been hired by Portal Corps along with a few other heroes to do some exploratory work through their portals. She ends up on War Earth, battling against enemies she can finally understand fully. She ended up fighting against Battle Maiden herself, but couldn't defeat her, so she grudgingly had to retreat. (OOCly, we lost too many party members to RL, and there wasn't enough of us to beat her as an AV. Story-wise, it worked great for my character. )
Fast-forward a bit more, and the Praetorian offensive against Primal Earth begins. Low and behold, look who's leading the offensive against Steel Canyon. (It was a purely epic moment when I Ell charged headlong at Battle Maiden (much to the surprise of the rest of the team, who were going 'WTF?!') and used [Head Splitter]. BM used the same attack, and both ended up getting knocked off their feet!)

To a lesser extent, Elltenia's favorite enemies are The Warriors, the Traitor Cimerorians, and the CoT, simply because they are enemies that she can understand and, on a certain level, empathize with.

400 Paragon Points for the convenience of being able to use Roman costume pieces on your level one characters (or any level characters if you haven't done the ITF...)
Roman Shields thrown in as well...
Plus! The brand new Cupids Bow (which looks really good, by the way... Was that originally in the concept art for the Celestial Set? I seem to recall seeing a bow in those pictures...)

Doesn't seem all that bad a deal to me. A lack of 3 - 4 broadswords and 3 battleaxes (most of which can be gained without ever touching the ITF) is hardly a deal breaker for me.

And for the record, 90% of my characters are weapon-based. So while the missing swords and axes would have been nice, I'm hardly going to jump on the latest bandwagon and crucify the Devs for excluding them.

An amusing little package from the store. I question whether it's actually worth 400 Paragon Points though...

Which Hazard Zones were you trying to get to? The reason I ask is that some zones have a lock of some kind on them.
For example, Cimerora requires you to have not only done the arc to be able to enter the Midnighters Club, but also be level 35 before you can actually enter the zone.
The Hive and the Shadow Shard are other examples where you have to be a certain level to enter.
Or if you are Praetorian, you have to be level 20 and have done the mission arc to be able to go to Primal Earth.
Now I don't know how the details of how all that works, code-wise, but I think the idea was to keep people from getting into zones that they shouldn't otherwise be able to get into yet.

Hmm, looks like the Ascension Armor was a bit of a prelude for some of the things to come. Not that I think it's a bad thing. Really good looking costume pieces shown there.
Kudos to the art team.