Crey's Public Relations

My Arcs
-----
Mission Architect Handyman

The Paragon Protectors are not supposed to be shown in a positive light.

Also, I think the design intent is that the player never approaches Crey thinking they are the good guys.

Not to player characters, anyway.

Yeah, they're pretty much set up as the Bad Supercorp from 8 o'clock, Day 1. Countess Crey is very much in the "latter-day Lex Luthor" mold - a pillar of the community who will lie, cheat, steal and kill to get what she wants, but who has more media sockpuppets and better lawyers than anyone who tries to expose her to the general public, so that the best the crusading hero can hope for is a bloody draw. (q.v. the story arc where she SPOILER REDACTED the player character for SPOILER REDACTED.)

Yes, but not very often. There's a Cadao Kestrel mission where you have to rescue PPs from the Circle of Thorns. You even get a thank-you note from the Countess herself.
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Cadao_Ke...rcle_of_Thorns

There was a thread about this on the EU forums a while back, and people suggested it would be nice if Crey spawned as friendly units, rather like police units, in non-hazard zones. Then in missions and hazard zones they would spawn as enemy mobs. It would better reflect the supposedly good public perception of the Crey, rather than having the public cowering and fleeing whenever they get near a Crey unit, and Crey attacking heroes at will on the streets.

A lot of people probably don't notice this, but one of your helpful contacts in the hero tutorial is a Crey security guard.

That's a pretty slick idea.

I suspect that Crey's inclusion early in the game pre-dates alot of the later content where we get missions with allies, etc. Otherwise, some early missions where some Crey guards or a PP seem to support you (who knows what they are really doing there? *cue mysterious music*) would contrast nicely with that you learn later. Maybe in the mix with some of the Hollows repeat missions, or they would have been a nice fit in 'aiding' the faultline recovery. Something like that.

You're right, it is sort of left hanging.

I think part of the problem is that the devs have one too many "support" groups in the game. You have Freedom Corps, which are the "official support" people, you have Manticore's secret (don't tell anyone) mercenary group called Wyvern, you have the Sky Raiders acting as a militia group in places like Terra Volta, you have the Legacy Chain showing up in the Hollows...

It's easy to see how Hero Corps gets left passing out difficulty levels and the occasional mission (Atlas Park) and the store (Steel Canyon). Maybe this can be resolved in subsequent updates?

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

This, this, a billion times this. Crey, not Nemesis, is the most clumsily handled faction in the game. As I like to put it when I'm on Manticore Task Force teams, "Crey is a joke." Put aside the fact that it's an Eeeebil Corporation (since it sells things, does that make it an Ebil Marketeer?), which is pretty darn cliched; cliches have an important place in the superhero genre. The problem is that everything it does is an evil plot. All its products are designed to control people's minds. All its employees are either evil drones serving the Countess (those in missions), individual blots of corruption (street spawns), or whistleblowers who get murdered, mindwiped, or whatever to preserve their silence (a couple of hostages, plus the Doctor). All its attempts to do things in hazard zones are a deadly danger to the city (this one I've never understood, but whatever). Even in CoV, where things tend to be a bit more nuanced, the point of the Public Relations spawns is to show that Crey is really the one initiating all the hostility. I've often joked that the reason Crey never really succeeds at anything is that it spends all its time on subtrefuge, espionage, and double-blind plots instead of occasionally just trying to grub some money in a more straightforward way. Honestly, I can't figure out how it supports any of its villainous ventures, let alone why it apparently requires background checks to ensure that everyone it hires possesses few or no redeeming qualities. The one time Crey is portrayed in anything resembling a nonhostile, let alone positive, light is in the hero tutorial, where Lieutenant (lieutenant of what?) MacReady is standing around while some scientists rip apart Rikti Drones, apparently with the full approval of the nearby Unaffiliated Scientist and PPD.

This is a shame, because Crey has a lot of potential. Its archvillain, in particular, is one of the more interesting characters in the game. I'd like to see not only a few helpful Crey, but also just some non-evil Crey, hanging around and doing the ordinary stuff that forms the "cover" for its villainous activities. After all, it's much easier to explain why Crey isn't erased from existence after the umpteenth Crey story arc if doing so would put thousands of innocent people out of work. Moreover, it'd be nice to see a little variety in "helper" NPC's, quite apart from anything to do with Crey.

For my part, I tried to weave Crey more fully into Paragon City in one of my story arcs, in which Nemesis basically decides to conquer the city through brute force. One of the groups fighting against the Nemesis army (in a series of "battle" events), along with Longbow, Vanguard, and the PPD, is a group of Paragon Protectors. Of course, unlike the other groups, the Paragon Protectors are hostile to both the Nemesis and the player characters.

***

As for Hero Corps, I always assumed that there was originally meant to be a higher level arc in which it's revealed that they actually sponsor crimes in cities where they exist. The plaques about them vaguely imply this. After all, they're paid, not volunteers like those Longbow everyone loves, so they must be eeeeeevil! (For those who couldn't tell, that was sarcasm; most players seem to think Longbow is one of the most immoral of factions, which makes me wonder what people would make of Hero Corps.) Remember that originally, there were no difficulty slider NPC's, so Hero Corps presence was limited to the two contacts associated with it, both low level characters. I imagine there just wasn't sufficient time to develop this thread of the story back before release, so several stories that would have been about Hero Corps may have been reworked to feature Crey or even Malta instead. I hope Hero Corps gets left out of future stories, simply because I think it makes for interesting characters (I have one character who's a Hero Corps rep). The tension between the need to earn a living and the desire to perform heroic acts is a staple of the genre, and I find the idea of being paid to perform heroic acts an interesting variation. I wouldn't like to see Hero Corps pop up in, say, Going Rogue, and require every character to make a choice between one and the other. I wonder how binary the morality of Going Rogue is going to be . . .

Yeah, I always assumed he was there because Crey salvaged and is now providing those decommissioned Rikti drones you can use for target practice in that parking lot. That would suggest that Professor Hoffman works for Crey as well.

And, when you think about it, that's just the kind of thing Crey would do. They can give the appearance of Trying to Help with the whole Outbreak situation, without actually doing anything useful or running any risk.

Actually their Paragon Wiki entry give them a little different spin than just being bad guys. They see themselves as militiamen, still trying to carry out their actual mission from the 1990's.

It's all a Crey plot!
Seriously...there's so many groups with loose ends like that that could be diamonds with a bit of tidying up.

More arcs, more conflict, more awesomeness.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Considering Hero Corps is "Heroes for Hire", I think they'd be perfectly suited for the task if CoH ever implements something akin to Guild Wars' "Henchmen".