Vigilanties should KILL their contacts. Villains, too.

Ok, we have the technology. If you've seen the new praetorian content, they have utilized the ability to "phase" a contact in and out of a players own world view.

This thought occurred to me when I realized that Heroes that turn vigilante ostensibly want to bring their own thoughts on "Justice" (a word they never bothered to look up, but anyway) to the people of low moral fiber. ie, they want to kill criminals. But when you turn into a vigilante, you gain the reward to WORK FOR CRIMINALS. Now, all that said, I think it would be a great idea if you were basically doing all that to gain their trust, and have a mission at the end where you set them up to die at your hands.

If you have ever experienced villain side content, you know what I mean. The sheer condescending attitudes of the likes of Darla Mavis and Westin Phipps. If anyone deserves a lesson in humility, it is them. When I was doing the villain invention tutorial, I kept thinking why would these contacts be so rude to me, when they KNOW that I will kill them just for fun? lol

Think about what this could mean on hero side! Rogues might "kidnap" contacts and open up a trial to "rescue" them, like a zone event or something. Just a thought.

ALL the Badges! (I can get. 1396)

Being a vigilante does not automatically mean you kill anyone for justice though. It just means to take the law into your own hands. While violence is implied, killing isn't a requirement by any means.

So what happens when I kill Weston Phipps and then get a Tip Mission where I can choose to beat th snot out of him? Talk about continuity errors.

Well, Vigilantes wouldn't have red side contacts yet, so they wouldn't be working with Mavis or Phipps. And just killing them outright, even if you went Rogue and gave up your villain side contacts, you could always come around and do them again, by going Villain again. So you don't want to eliminate a Contact that could potentially be important later.

On the other hand, eliminating a Contact after you are DONE with him, that would be a different matter. And I have to admit some of my "villains" I have role played as heroes under cover in the Rogue Isles, I have just assumed that once the mission was done, my hero turned on his Contact, beat the snot out of him and turned him over to Longbow. ESPECIALLY in cases like Mavis and Phipps. There's quite a few of my villains, whether secretly heroes or not, that end up wanting to beat their Contact into the ground, just out of spite. (Of course, there is the greater question of whether you COULD. For instance, I kind of suspect that while Mr. Bocor wouldn't be a problem face to face, you probably would never get the chance to get that close to him)

If that were an optional mission at the end of an arc that would eliminate the Contact, that would be cool.

Of course, the technology is new to Praetoria, and it will probably be a while before it can be retrofitted to the existing content.

A vigilante means that you enforce a law from outside the law. Whose law you're enforcing, and how far outside the formal law you go, are matters of context.

I think people are mixing the definition of vigilante with what COH defines as the vigilante alignment.

They're two different things.

One could be a vigilante and not kill. One could be a vigilante and still be a hero.

COH's alignment Vigilante is more like an anti-hero. But I'm guessing Vigilante/Rogue sounds better than Anti-Hero/Rogue.

"Hi [Insert Name here]. I've heard a lot about you and what happened to others who have worked with you. Notice the 20 snipers I've posted on the rooftops around me who all have a bead on you. Get the hell away from me and don't come back"

this is allowing me to kill Westin Phipps, I will /sign this.
I also want to kill the following Redside contacts:
Peter Themari (Too much like Westin Phipps)
Willy Wheeler (Just way too whiney)
Darrin Wade (Jerk used me to try to free rularuu)
Psimon Omega (Overconfident Jerk)
Operative Rutger
Johnny Sonata
Mender Tesseract
Vivacious Verandi
Captain Mako
Black Scorpion
Lord Recluse
Ghost Widow (Again)
Scirocco (Or at least sock him in the face and say: "Cheer up Emo, kid")

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Well, regardless of one's definition of Vigilante, we're talking, in technical terms, about a metric assload of:

• re-coding existing contacts and rewriting/ creating new missions for many of the contacts already in the game
• addressing continuity errors where previous contacts are mentioned/ contacted by a current contact
• developing additional branching text/ alternate missions for addressing said continuity errors
• linking "phasing tech" to all of the contacts that have the possibility of being killed through player actions
• other code problems I can't even fathom

Hm. One of my issues with villain missions was that often times the contacts would use/abuse/talk down to the very dangerous and obviously superior in skill player characters. They'd treat the villain that just desimated an entire police/military force single handedly like a flunky. In worse situations they'd outright betray you.

In the future I could see this tech being used for villains, as an optional ending. "follow to alley," "submit recording of contact doing stuff to so-and-so," "Bash contact over the head." Basically even if the villain didn't kill their contact, they could scare them away, send them to the hospital permanently, or turn in something that would make the back biting contact in question lose their position due to ill favor from their bosses.