How long will the exploits go on?

Probably zero. Citizens are invincible after all.

Well there is step one to fixing villains.

Most of my villains have an overwhelming urge to cross their legs when you talk about "fixing" them...

Agreed. Especially when the pedestrians run screaming from level 1 Infected, but wave hello to level 50 Incarnate Masterminds and her army of walking dead.

I played to 50 on Red side exactly once. It was because, for concept reasons, Oedipus Tex is a Dual Pistols/Dark Corruptor. I did this when Pistols first came out, so that meant being stuck on Red side. I still cannot tell the Red side zones apart. I literally cannot tell the difference between Port Oakes and... give the name of some other Red zones? The only two that I recall in any sort of detail are Mercy Island (which I HATE beyond reason--like, this zone should be the warning to all designers of new MMOs on how not to design a lowbie area--but which might be better now that you can warp around from copter to copter) and Grandville (which is actually kind of cool looking, and would be x10 so if the same themes weren't on constant repeat in the other zones).

In Paragon, I can immediately tell the difference between Atlas Park, Steel Canyon, Talos Island, Brickstown, and Founder's Falls. They may not be the best looking zones in MMO-dom, but they at least feel a little different from each other. And the color scheme is not all-gloom-all-the-time. There is variation.

I had no market participation to speak of during my stay on Red side. I did get one purple drop, sold it for like 750 million infamy, and never used the markets beyond that (not enough of them were for sale for me to buy anything anyway.) Two days after GR came out I got the heck out of the Isles and haven't looked back. My main Controller meanwhile went Vigilante for a while, discovered he was gimping himself by missing out on Hero Merits, and switched back. That leaves exactly one of my characters on the Red side. For concept reasons I hate to switch, but I may anyway, since finding teams has been very frustrating compared to my blue side characters.

All of that is a longwinded way to say that Red's problems, at least in my mind, are no longer the markets but almost entirely a hazard of the player base being split into rival factions, with one side being immensely more thematically popular than the other.

I'd be very happy if you all left me in peace.

Wow I am like the exact opposite. I think the Rogue Isles are so much more interesting and varied, and that almost all of the Paragon City zones look exactly alike (although some have different hued backgrounds!). I like the 'natural' look of the Rogue Isles, and I like the landmarks that every zone has that, imo, are far more distinct than anything in Paragon ("Lets meet by the giant hero statue."). Dr. Aeon's tower and all the crazy power lines coming from Mt. Diablo in Cap, the Casino's in St. Martial, Grandville's awesome music and Recluse speeches, the thorn tree in Nerva. Heck I even like Mercy Island, it's just a very thematic zone (as opposed to say, Dark Astoria, which is just like any other hero zone.... but really foggy).

I like red side so much more than blue, but sadly spend the vast majority blue side since that's where all the people are.

This alone makes me feel inadequate--I can't even steal a purse from an old lady or frighten a child.

At least you made it to 50. I've yet to get a villain to 20. Every time I tell myself I'm going to play one of my villains I'm lucky if I can handle the Rogue Isles for an hour.

For me, though, it's not just how much I hate the lowbie zones. It's the fact that as a hero, I have contacts helping me be heroic.

As a villain, I have a bunch of people who would be going on the "list of people I'm going to kill when I'm more powerful" because I'm treated like a henchman who should be licking their boots.

This is why I was really sad when they moved away from the original concept of CoV taking place concurrently in/around/underneath Paragon and moved it to its own game with zero contact with other characters except via the PvP zones.

Many of us wanted to play/RP villain nemeses to other RPing Heroes. Being completely cut off from them meant that we had actually been *better off* when we were RPing Hero ATs as being evil than if we went to the Rogue Isles and sat in our glass box.

When the playstyle in question is all about breaking the game (to (a) get at the sweet sweet candy immediately and, IMO, without real effort and (b) to show that you're better, more clever, etc than the people who made it), then yeah.

I confess that some of my negative reaction is because I play this game to try to escape reality... but as soon as I log in, I'm surrounded by people, acting like people, with all that implies. Atlas Park broadcast on many servers is a fine proof of Humans Are (lazy, greedy, selfish) Bastards, as if we needed more.

Throwing the detonator out the window is awesome in the movie, but let's face it: most people here would mash the button immediately if it meant saving their level 50s, and [bleep] everyone on the other ferry. Doubly so if you actually got xp for them. The Devs' biggest sin in creating AE was trusting and having faith that the players would be better than that. Well, you sure showed them, huh? That'll learn 'em to ever give you the benefit of the doubt!

So yes, for me at least, it comes down to anger and disappointment at my fun being (partly) spoiled by my fellow humans' petty (not Epic) FAIL.

I lost most of my zeal to play red side the first time a citizen walked by and mocked me while I was impotent to do anything about it.

Yeah, that's not my idea of super-villainy. Now I just play the archetypes long enough to move them blue side.

I agree with everything you said here. It also still makes me twitch that the main benefit of "going rogue" is being able to access other zones.

The way I wish it were set up is you could go to any zone you want, but a hero entering red side or a villain entering blue went to a "PVP" instance of the map in question. On the PVP map, players would have the opportunity to participate in "heists." If you get captured, you go to a standard jail/arachnos base for a set period of time (~3 minutes) close to a main area, where rival faction players get to see who's been recently arrested/detained... a kind of "walk of shame."

I also wish villains could build criminal empires, but I'm not sure what this would entail. I definitely think stepping away from the mission-based system and toward something more dynamic would be a huge boon for villains though. I have no idea what that system should look like, and its unfortunate it wasn't done for City of Villains.

That would be cool, but I don't see how they could do something like that, either.

Frankly, I'd be happy if the contacts were set up in a way that made me feel like I were using them, instead of the other way around.

If my villains slapped down every citizen red side then there would be nobody left to worship me when I was in charge. So I let them alone. For now.

For now.

I'd rather just start them blue and not have to worry about the going rogue business. Funny that I'd rather play blue - after having played blue to virtual death for several years - than play red for 20 levels, and that I'm totally toasted on yellow already.

I do wish we could just start any AT on any side. I don't see what's so villainous about a Corruptor that I absolutely must play it villain/goldside for 20 levels, nor do I see the amazing purity inherent to /Axe Tankers.


Shameless plug

I think about starting a Praetorian. Then I think about having to rescue those cops from that stupid tunnel system for the -nth time. Then I roll red or blue.

Lately when I roll Praetorians, I head straight for the Loyalist/Resistance contacts. You may be level two, but you can still get the missions and get started. You just have to know where they are. At level 4 all Scott or Marchand do is tell you where they are physically. THe missions themselves aren't level locked.

I do Maruder's missions last before I leave Nova and I always hit the complete button on the cop mission...always. I hate those guys. They have the survival skills of hydrophilic lemmings.

Honestly, you can just advert for a team and just roll to 20 in a couple hours. I've started doing that when I have villain ATs I want to play now, since I did every single yellow arc at least once already.

Very much THIS. There is alot of detail in red side compared to the majority of blue sides flat, overly bright landscape.

The reason more people are blue is because the whole CoV experience is badly thought out. I don't know who was responsible for making those design calls but they were completely wrong-headed in every way imaginable.

I don't know how many times I've heard that the aesthetic of the Rogue Isles is simply ugly and depressing. Which it is. I can kind of see the point of that, but there are NO bright spots whatsoever, so it becomes unrelenting. Aside from the uniqueness of the maps and apparent "variety" of the architecture, the zones themselves are horribly designed and the worst of them is Mercy island. Whose bright idea was it to create such a complicated, non-intuitive and death-trap-ridden zone for the beginning levels? From CoV's beta onward there were numerous complaints of people getting lost, not being able to figure out how to navigate, and even when they did stumble across the right way to go, they would often end up running from snakes only to find themselves in blind alleys to be shot down by Longbow... only to rez and restart the process. There was so much frustration engendered by Mercy that people simply logged out and never came back. (My cousin was one of them and a couple people from my late, lamented SG joined him.)

But the real death knell for any MMO is to stifle the players' creativity, which is what redside does. It treats the game like a single-player game, putting you on rails to follow the "minion of Arachnos" thread for your character's entire career. You can't deviate from that even a little bit, so there's no way to tell your own story. Roleplayers are forced to ignore all of that stuff and even non-RP players become annoyed at always being a toady. That's why CoV's economy ultimately tanked: people just disliked the game in general.

The bright spots were the new ATs. Brutes and Masterminds and Stalkers... all very cool. Now with Going Rogue, players can choose whether to take those new ATs to Paragon City or the Rogue Isles, and they're still overwhelmingly choosing blue. I'd contend that merging the markets saved redside as much as was possible, because that allowed players to actually get the things they wanted rather than exist in a state of continual frustration.

I save what I know I'll need in future and sell extraneous ones. The problem is that everyone wants the same bits, so those go for a million each. There's no point in selling the 3 or 4 I have because I need them too. On the rare occasion I manage to get, say, an extra Luck Charm, it goes on the market. But those times are few and far between, because you need Luck Charms for essential IOs. Almost no one makes Intangibility or Interrupt IOs, so the salvage used there goes unwanted. But Luck Charm, Masterwork Weapon, Inert Gas and Demonic Blood Sample are used for the more popular IOs like Accuracy, Damage and Range.

It goes back to my issue earlier in the thread, namely that IOs and salvage are "either/or" in terms of desirability. Either the IOs are going for tens or hundreds of million of Inf, or they go for zero. There's almost no middle ground. Same with salvage. It's either 300 grand a pop or there are 1,426 of them sitting there for sale.

I love this post! It is so true...