Going Rogue Thought

Just a thought but if you're able to switch sides sort of on the fly does that mean influence and infamy with be, converted, unified, eliminated? I hope it isn't the later, but obviously too earlier to tell.

First based on the most recent interview Matt gave it will not be on the fly. We can go back and forth but it will be by deliberate actions (I assume missions).

You can read it here http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/74507

I cannot really tell from it what to expect at this point but I cannot see losing what we have as a viable option since a character of any level could be in any of the 3 "worlds".

From what I got from Matt, when I cornered him at Comic Con, you can switch sides but it will not be instantaneous.

There will be a rank system in place.

Heroes will go from Heroic to Vigilante to a possible other rank or simply then to Villainous.

The same will occur for Villains crossing over to blue.

Er, and for monies. I asked about this, too.

In fact, I don't think I asked anything other than market ish.

Matt shrugged and avoided the question. I had better luck with Joe, who seems too nice to be an actual human. Consider the possibility of a robot.

In any manner, Joe explained that their whole focus on influence in the game was not to be a measure of wealth, but exactly as the word is defined. Something more of a measure of how heroic your character is, or the level of notoriety your villain has achieved.

In that sense, it would not be logical for a Villain to retain their notoriety as they are trying to earn the influence of the people as a Hero.

Obviously, this was the intended in-game lore explanation of influence and infamy. Although, it simply boils down to monies and how wealthy one is.

So, with that said, as further detailed explanations resulted in Joe being carted off by the tall Marketing dude, who never once smiled, I assumed the monies will be frozen. It was confirmed that it will not be deleted or lost.

If it is frozen .. I don't know. I try to think of it from a casual player perspective and fail. I only want to do it for manipulation purposes.

Got my fingers crossed for a way to transfer items between factions.

It's not available red-side? Buy it blueside, transfer it over, make millions!

Actually, pretty much any scheme here would revolve around 'transfer it from blue to red, make millions'.

That should say something to the devs about the inadequate market interface and concentration of the embedded base. Then again, I'm just a customer. What do I know, right? :P

my guess is its going to be a 3rd "world" and once you go there you cant come back to coh or cov.

Its funny we were speculating about the movement of items and the like caused by GR in my coalition channel last night.

My thoughts, GR will inevitably cause an normalisation of pricing between the markets if not an outright market merge. (yes please to the latter)

Depending upon excatly how much effort is involved in side switching, I can easily see the following occuring.

Take a character and run the GR missions until you are right on the cusp between red and blue. Say you are blue side, take something which is pretty cheap here, say pet sets. Buy a whole bunch of them, run the one mission to tip you over the edge, then sell to redside.

Then being 'just' red it should be relatively easy to run back up to the cusp. Buy something thats cheap red and more expensive blue (IM thinking luck charm would be an easy example), then run that final mission to bring you back to blue.

There are obvious ways to limit this, Say there are 10 'rogue' points to go from one side to the other (1-5 red 6-10 blue), what you do is instead of putting a new villain at 5 that last mission puts you all the way to 1. Puts a barrier there to some degree, but that just slows the process it doesn't eliminate it.

To go all chemical analogy on folks, the disparity between the markets is an enthalpy difference, it will drive a reaction (item transfer) forward. The difficulty of the side-switch is the activation energy required, make it high enough and only a small portion of players will be motivated enough to transfer items. (The reaction is energetically favorable, but kinetically slow without an external stimulus think burning/oxidation of wood)

If its low enough, there will be a flood of the items, and that will quickly work to normalise the differences, leading to a defacto merged market anyway.

Gamers being what they are, someone will quickly find a way to minimise the effort (activation energy) required, which is akin to catalysis.

As a 60 month vet, a loyalty program member and sight unseen a GR pre-orderer I know I'll be in the beta at somepoint. I'll be paying VERY close attention to the effect on GR on the markets, as well as all the other testing I would normally do.

The whole "inf isn't munny!" pretense drives me nuts.

Keep your RP out of game mechanics, peoples!

I mean, they can call it whatever they want- influence/infamy is as good as anything else.

But please dump the posturing about how it isn't currency, it's reputation.


r/e GR, I expect we'll have some sort of bar to fill with bad deeds or good deeds to get to the 'other side'. the tagging of missions as 'heroic' or 'villainous' seems to support this approach.

And they may as well officially merge the markets, because the minute GR goes live players will start working on the most efficient way to ferry goods back and forth.

I half expect to see optional endings,

Option 1) Take bad guy to jail, earn influence
Option 2) Take parts of bad guy to jail, earn infamy