A chance to do it right

I rest my case.


On topic. You're right that a lot of people would be immensely annoyed by PvPvE.
Honestly? This is one of the things Im on the fence on when it comes to what might be in Praetoria. Theres also the problem of 'who is right'?

I wouldnt even risk betting 50p on an outcome.
(Thats probably 50cents for you yanks )

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.

He said groundless, not mindless....

yeesh.

1. Traditionally, resistance members do not advertise that they are members of the resistance by attacking everything in sight that is not the resistance. Darwinian selection eliminates the few that do.

2. There's also the massive numbers of robotic/android/whatever Clockwork probably programmed, ED209-style, to make you comply with the city ordinances against using superpowers to make a general nuisance of yourself or litter the sidewalk with your blood and brain matter.

Your case is that you seem to be obsessed with PP. Every place PP goes there you are trying to constantly knock her down. Harrassment? Just can't let it go?

PP made a comment based on Peters first line, about mindless speculation.

On Topic: I personally love that we have PvP zones.

What would make them even better would be to make PvP zones Cross Server. If you are on Justice and go into Sirens Call, you would be there with everyone else from any server, ideally including EU servers as well.

I really have ni desire for flagged PvP.

Pretty much. If it's an open PvP area, I'll treat it like RV. I spent as much time as necessary in there to get all the badges and then left, never to return.

Both Razorvines become Razorvine.Virtue and Razorvine.Liberty.

/t razorvine.virtue, test
/t razorvine.liberty, testing

Sooner or later I'm going to lose my teeth repeating that. Just because villains don't get to fight PLAYER heroes does not mean they can't get to fight NPC heroes. No, the problem is that someone decided to flanderise the concept and make the City of Villains a city of villains ONLY. Which makes no sense, since City of Heroes has more villains than heroes in it and yet no-one ever complains that, because there's no PvP, heroes never get to fight villains. They do. Because villains are on every street corner, in every alley, on every rooftop, in every park, inside every building and just basically all over the place.

Segregation and closed-options PvP aren't the problem. If City of Heroes is a city of heroes and villains, then City of Villains is a city of villains and villains. And villains. And THAT is the problem with the game design - single-minded, one-sided, short-sighted design that saw the villainous counterpart to the all-encompassing hero game be rendered with such needless limits. I've taken enough flak to shoot down a flying aircraft carrier over this, but I still say that City of Villains was designed to be too evil, too depressing, too run-down and with too many villains. The actual CITY in City of Villains didn't need to be that much different. Ideally, heroes would live in a crime-ridden city that needed their help and villains would live in a crime-free city that gave them opportunities to be evil. Realistically, both cities needed to have good sides and bad sides. Our heroic city has places where it feels like the heroes have won and only petty crime remains while other places feel like crime has taken over. Villains don't have that luxury. They can pick between dirty places where crime rules, dirty-ish places where crime rules or evil-looking places where crime rules.

To my eyes, Going Rogue won't really add all that much to City of Heroes, as it will add THE OTHER DAMN HALF of City of Villains that should have been there from the start - a nice-looking place to be evil in.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The devs have stated that we will only get to pick our final alignment when we leave Praetoria at around level 20. I think that means that while we are in Praetoria, there won't be heroes and villains, merely people who have differant political opinions. Open PvP in such a setting would not make sense.

Agreed. That and undoing certain PvP changes. PvP on an Empath isn't very exciting when your heals do squat.

I do agree with this. Also in City of Villains you are never really a Super Villain... You're more of an Arachnos or Mercenary thug where in CoH you actually play as a Super Hero to save the world. The Villains never seem to have the same impact on the fate of the world as the heroes. Villains just hang out at the Rogue Islands defeating other villains. No evil schemes. No taking heroes as hostages. Nothing..

On the other hand.. For us heroes it's good to know that the villains won't leave the rogue islands any time soon

Wow, never thought of it that way but very nicely worded. I couldn't agree more.

I didn't mean it as a personal attack on you. There are a lot of threads from a lot of people with a lot of questions and speculation. It's what we all do when we don't have any actual information yet.

Yeah, that's one way to handle it. People can wander around the zones together, being on opposite sides but not knowing it. As I recall, SWG was like that. You didn't necessarily know someone was a member of the rebellion or an imperialist. But in that game people could turn on their PvP flag, and then fight each other in the streets, IIRC.* You're thinking something more like a game-wide Pocket D?

I thought it was interesting that the devs said at herocon that the Clockwork would be neutral unless you attacked them, unlike the Arachnos soldiers in CoV who will always fight you. But that raises a question: if someone does get into a fight with the Clockwork, and a Loyalist wanders by, are they allowed to jump into the fight and help the Clockwork out?

If yes, then we have a problem with potentially unwanted PvP. If no, then we have a problem with immersion. It would be like a hero standing there watching police get shot and not being able to intervene.



* I haven't actually played SWG in years, so I may be misremembering the details. It is a similar situation though. Hidden rebels fighting an evil empire.

Pretty much this.

I understand the desire for more immersion, and agree it would be silly to see a hero stand by and watch the police get beat up (although I have seen this happen in the current Paragon City), I loathe the idea of PvP breaking out spontaneously right next to me, or worse yet, involving me when not my choice.

To me, the real problem was City of Villains is really just a reskinned City of Heroes. It has not that different of a relationship to CoH as the Korean version of CoH had to CoH. I recognize why that was done, and I recognize that attempting anything else would have taken five times as long, but I think CoV was a lost opportunity to engineer totally different gameplay for the villains, which would have made the red side something more than just "the red side."

To me, heroes are reactive and villains are proactive, which subverts the attempt to use identical gameplay mechanics. What I would have liked to see is a more "Dungeon Keeper" approach to CoV: villains start off as small-time villains but eventually rise to criminal masterminds (you know what I mean) that engineer large scale plots that the game throws ever increasingly tough heroes at until the villain is eventually vanquished and has to launch a new plan. Villains always have to "lose" eventually, but "lose" is a relative term: they could escape prison, they could kill a beloved hero before making their escape, they could leave an entire dimension lifeless with their ultimate weapon.

I think that would have added a lot more to this game than just a red-skinned hero game with nastier contact text.

See, I keep seeing this, and in terms of baseline mechanics, you are technically correct. But this misses a very deep, thematic problem, the very reason why the two games are not the same thing. City of Villains is not JUST a reskinned version of City of Heroes. If it were, it would be a far superior game. It's actually a flanderised version of City of Heroes, in that they took the basic game mechanics, but completely redid the theme into a much, much more one-sided variant. Again, the hero game's theme and settings have both heroes and villains. You have player heroes, you have the Surviving Eight and the Vindicators, you have Longbow, you have the Legacy Chain, you have the police... You have forces of good that you share the city with. You also have enough villains to sink a floating aircraft carrier. The game is diverse in theme, settings, locations and tasks.

City of Villains could have been the reverse, but it ended up being only half of that. City of Villains has almost no heroes in it to speak of. Yes, you have zillions of missions against Longbow, but one semi-hero group (and why it needed to be of questionable ethics is beyond me), but one hero group is still one hero group. The Legacy Chain and Wyvern may as well not even exist for all the missions they show up in. And the whole game is rendered in earthy browns or gunmetal greys. Thematically, it is a City of Villains literally, whereas the hero game is a City of Heroes only figuratively speaking. If they had straight-up copied the hero game and stuck villains in other areas of Paragon City where heroes can't get to and let them commit crimes there, that would have been a straight-up port and it would have been BETTER. Instead, they invented a whole new setting that would have been better for heroes to play through and stuck villains in it.

We didn't need Arachnos. We didn't need the Rogue Isles. We didn't need a bad world for bad people to play in, just in the same way we didn't need a good world for good people to play in. Paragon City is not a nice place. It's crime-ridden, half-bombed-out, poverty-stricken and people are constantly having their purses, souls or body parts stolen. Why on Earth did we need a place even WORSE than that for bad people to matter in even LESS?

On the other hand, this is a perspective I wholeheartedly agree with. I don't believe it's incompatible with the current game infrastructure, however, which is why I lay the mistake of its lack less on game mechanics and more on short-sighted design decisions. It comes down to WRITING, not PROGRAMMING, to put it in simple terms. I don't know whose idea Lord Recluse and his implications were, but that person single-handedly castrated any potential for greatness City of Villains could have had. The villain game is designed not to foster likeable, respectable villains, but to let us play lackeys, minions and mercenaries. That might be appropriate to a game with a "good or jerk" scale of morality, but City of Villains ought to have the comic book "super hero or super villain" scale. If I want to be good, I want to be Batman. If I want to be bad, I don't want to be one of the thugs he takes out on a routine patrol. If I want to be bad, I want to be the Joker. And I can't, because Lord Recluse is the Joker. The most I can hope to be is Harley Quinn, and I don't feel like shaving my beard at this time.

A "dungeon keeper" approach is something I've often considered for the base editor, and as a more visceral way for villains to grow in power. Sadly, super group design implies that each villain that wants a base has to be a part of a group with other PLAYERS, which naturally precludes each villain from having his own. So if I want to have, say, Cobra Commander, Magneto and the Joker, either they'll have have to be roomies ala the Justice Friends, or we need a new system that allows each villain to have his own super secret volcano island super base. In general, I'd have preferred to see an above-ground design for bases, but that's going besides the point.

Basically, the capital mistake was tying villains into Project: Destiny and charting their progression as rising through the ranks of Arachnos and finally gaining favour. What self-respecting super villain does that? It's less of a problem with City of Heroes, even though it exists there, as well, in that the game has no overall objective or purpose. You're basically biding your time. For heroes, it's excusable, even though they ought to be building bases, creating a legacy or helping reform the world. But for villains to lack one is inexcusable.

And I don't see why villains always have to use. They don't need to destroy the world all the time, but why not claim they destroyed a small island, threw a country into chaos, unleashed a plague that MAY kill everyone in ten years or so. There are narrative ways around this. I certainly hope Going Rogue takes those ways and runs with them, because villains NEED more appropriate choices. Not more killing civilians and murdering hookers. More SUPER villain actions.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

In City of Heroes, the villains are there to give the heroes something to react to. They are the "proactive" ones attacking people on the street, say. In City of Villains, by in large *because* the gameplay is intended to be similar, the players need something to react to, and once again, the role of the proactive element is played (very often) by the villains.

That's what I mean when I say that CoV is a reskinned CoH. Its not just the literal game *engine* but also the gameplay design. Because the gameplay template for both games is very similar, some things cannot be made into dual reflections.

In CoH, the bulk of the core directed gameplay revolves around two things:

1. Following the moral compass of a contact
2. Attempting to stop the actions of an antagonist

To put it simply, we are either working with someone, or against someone. That's simple enough, but the problem comes when to try to translate that across alignments. Its obvious that most of the time, if you are working *with* someone they have to have the same alignment (there are exceptions, but they are uncommon). So heroes have to follow hero contacts and villains have to follow villain contacts, usually. Good so far. But when it comes to opposing antagonists, it gets trickier. You'd think that its obvious that villains should always be opposing heroes, but at least given the stylistic model CoH and CoV follow, its hard to have the heroes doing things proactively that the villains can try to stop. Phipps probably comes the closest to this model, but its a lot easier to write stories where a proactive villain does X, and the player decides to react to that by doing Y, because the villains tend to be more proactive.

I'm not saying its impossible to make the heroes more proactive and give the villains something to react to. I'm simply saying its a lot harder, and contributed to the path of least resistance pointing to having villains primarily react against villains rather than other heroes.

Also, its slightly absurd that heroes are stopping purse snatchers in Paragon City. It would be an order of magnitude more absurd if the villains were stopping heroes from helping people cross the street in Rogue Isles. It really is harder to write good content for the villains, because we seem to excuse a lot more absurdity surrounding heroes. Saving a cat from a tree is a little silly. Kicking a cat into a tree seems far more of an over-caricaturization.