Devs and CoV:Discuss

SO as people joke, rumors fly...Devs hate Villains...As a sadisitic villain i have to ask..(While not looking for dev love)...Why!?!?!

What is so wrong with villains that it has to be hated so much??
Its the greatest place in game.

Anyone can be a hero, it takes pure awesomeness to be a villain



we have cookies as well

You might as well ask why monorail cat is leaving the station.

I'm sure the devs would love to show villain love, and I hope that the current team will include some new villain only features in the future, but personally I always felt that upon releasing CoV and saying that it was a stand-alone game was the worst mistake that the CoH/V dev, markeeting, or whatever team that made that decision ever did.

I think at the time their resources ($$$, staff, and time) was limited and stretched. Honestly it wouldn't make much sense business wise to support 2 individual games that uses the same game engine, graphics, and was about the same in just about every way except for in-game lore. It would have been better if it was released as an expansion pack that required CoH to play from the get go.

for a perhaps more realistic answer,cov was supposed to have gotten more people in, it didnt, so the developer staff was cut badly(the freem 15) and content was much tighter. villains supposedly had a far lower population, so priorities had to be made. one comprimise was to add mroe co-op content, but that really meant the content couldnt be too nasty or it would have been tough to justify heroes doing it(in comics, villains are a bit more compliant to do good-ish things if it suits their needs). now i play both, and the populations are lower on every server i have been on relative to the hero side, so can you reasonably make the case for a team to commit their limited resources to exclusively benefit a side that has fewer people? if so, then you have an argument.

also, it is a dumb meme based around some very vocal and very annoying posters. there were soem devs ahte heroes stuff going around during issue 7'ish too, and it was dumb there too, the devs do what they can with limited resources, but they are only human, and nothing is going to satisfy anyone. a reasonable mindset is just play both and quit larping a moral dimension. some developers have goofed on it themselves, babs usually.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

An interesting point, and I kind of see where your logic is coming from. If there's less player activity on one side, but more on the other. Then there would be less development for exclusive content on the less active side, and at best shared content would be the only thing present.

However this does kind of lead me to think of some kind of weird "chicken or the egg" scenario. "We need more villain exclusive content, there's not enough players to justify villain exclusive content, villain exclusive content will bring in more players" rinse and repeat.

another point to consider when considering the disparity in content is that the game was heroes only for 5 issues, the quality of that content, particularly for the first 2 issue was very uneven, but it is often brought up as a problem. the question is, do villain exclusive players feel that they deserve 5 issues of exclusive content or they are hated. some have made this argument, and its bat-@#$% insane to expect this, but it is also a reason people feel villains are hated. generally villain content is tighter paced, better written, involves less @#$%ing zoning and in the case of strike forces, has a far more reasonable time allowance than early hero content. so there is more content, no question, blueside, a good amount of it is underutilized or horribly implemented.

in a roundabout way, gr may help dedicated villain players, as the devs will be able to craft content that has villainous elements for the morality meter without having to make it exclusive. everyone gets content, and you get content that vibes better with your character..maybe a win-win?

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Now, this only applies to me, but even if they made a ton of villain only content, I probably wouldn't bother with it. I like a lot of the power sets available red side, but for some reason I dislike the look of the zones. It's nothing I can really put my finger on. They all have their own unique flavor, but I always start feeling depressed after playing red side for a while. Also, for some reason, my frame rate tends to be lower in red side zones than in blue side - might be because villain zones look more "cluttered" <shrug>.

In any case, once GR goes live, ALL of my villains will be moving blue side.

The zones are generally very dreary looking in CoV, and if that isn't your thing, CoV isn't really going to appeal to you. In CoH every zone takes on a very unique character, and despite the fact that many of them don't see as much traffic, they all leave some sort of impression. CoV is constructed much more engagingly, with many unique constructs all over the island, but it's hard to care when, generally, the entire island consists of the same dreary sky hanging overhead a town half littered in trash and fire where Lord Recluse hasn't erected a garish tower to show off his purple fetish.

Furthermore, all the really 'unique' aspects of CoV were eventually transferred over to CoH, which really cut into the appeal of playing that part of the game. If you were going to get all the features of CoV in CoH, why really play it unless you specifically wanted to be a villain?

the Archetypes were also hard to figure out. While I genuinly like most of the villain AT's over the Hero AT's, I'll be the first to admit that I had no idea how to play them, and I still don't really understand how their roles are supposed to mesh together in a team situation, and pretty much conclude that they don't.

Finally, the Market thing is really killing the villain population. Given that the population was already lower to begin with, in part because heroes had more time to establish, in part because I think people just like being heroes more, they aren't helped on top of all their other problems by not being able to find the items they want to build their characters. A market merge would probably help this tremendously, but the devs don't seem to like the idea of momentarily disrupting the market for this to happen.

(and no, I'm not going to get into a market merging discussion with you.)

With the lower population it makes sense that the Devs would spend less time developing the Rogue Islands. Less people play there, due to how it's set up, and it's probably more effective to concentrate on the portion of the game their players are actually playing, than to pull up the section of the game fewer of their players care about.

My opinion? I think CoV was a mistake on several levels.

I don't think it's a good idea to divide your own playerbase into two opposing factions if you don't have as many players as that other MMO. By making 30-50% of the playerbase „invisible“ to each other you lessen the chance of finding other players to team with and you make it appear as if you have a much smaller playerbase than you actually have, which is bad PR.

Having two exclusive sides means you have to develop for each side. Anything you'll add to just one side of the game can only be experienced by a fraction of the playerbase. Thus you increase development costs and risk alienating the fraction of the playerbase that thinks it got less - „Devs hate Villains.“

The design of CoV is inherently flawed. The promise is, that you may play a villain. But the truth is, that it's only CoH painted red. The fundamental problem is in the basic motivation of heroes and villains. A villain is striving for change. The villain wants to accumulate power and ultimately wants to rule the world or something along these lines. Whereas the hero is fighting to preserve. Stability works well for a MMO, change doesn't. Actually I don't think it's possible for a teen rated PvE MMO like CoX to really have true villains. Even the villain NPCs in CoX are quite benign.

There is more. Problems with the ingame economy, artificial limits in co-op play (actually co-op play was a first step to bring the sides back together, GR seems to be the next step), balancing issues and maybe some other things.

Sure, CoV added some nice stuff. But I believe it would have been better to add it as an open expansion to CoH instead of treating it almost like a separate game.

We're villains!!! Who cares!!! YAY VILLAINS!

Biggest things I hear, (which WAH to to them)

Its to dark & bleak(ORLY? Its an oppressed area, its not suppose to be sunshine & happy puppys). Lord Recluse doesnt go out of his way to polish this up, like Tyrant does, its the whole Survival of the Fittest rule on the Isles.

Its to Hard(Go back to blue stop whining you sissies or hang out with my crew & we'll teach how to actually play Redside! )

The Market(Well cuz you sissies wont actually play over here)

The Dev's Hate Redside(Could be, but man up, stop being a sissy)

In my opinion, biggest thing G.R. will do, allow the sissy Bluesiders to take our classes & still play on "yawn" blueside. Which then could reduce population more on redside & of course worsen the market even more.

JJ

i did mention the larping aspect redside exclusive players tend towards, it really gets pretty surreal at times.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

We can't really answer this...only the devs know why they hate villains!

Maybe the Devs hate City of Villains because that is the villainous thing to do and they're merely staying in character?

I am considering taking most of my villains blueside and invade Paragon. I am sure there are players who don't want to see the streets of Paragon full of Masterminds with all their pets lagging Ultra Mode.