Open PVP Server

Paragon City is a city of heroes, but it's a city of villains all the same. Likewise, many heroes interfere within the villainy of the Rogue Isles. Why not reflect this in allowing villains to openly attack other heroes in a separate server -- or perhaps an "alternate dimension", a Test Server style place where you can copy your characters over.

The idea is simple. Paragon City and the Isles can be crossed through via two PVP zones - Bloody Bay and Siren's Call, which will be elevated up to level 50. These PVP zones will have the bases that can be held and captured. If Bloody Bay's Villain Base is captured, the heroes will get a secure ticket into the Isles. If Siren Call's Hero Base is captured, then the villains can enter Paragon.

A Hero in the Isles and a Villain in Paragon will have hard times. If spotted by a police drone or faction NPC (Longbow, Arachnos, PPD, etc), their location will be reported in - they'll be ambushed by waves of enemy NPCs and their location marked on the map for heroes to fight.

All heroes and villains will be able to combat each other at even level, using a con system similar to GMs - higher level = +1 combat level, lower level = -1 combat level. This will prevent higher level villains from "griefing" lower levels and give everyone a chance to help fight everyone else.

Rogues and Vigilantes will have it worse. As Rogues have abandoned the "might is right" ideals of Recluse in favour of their own pursuit, Villains will be encouraged to engage them, and as Vigilantes are law-breakers that murder and steal to protect the city, Heroes will be encouraged to bring them in. Thus, Rogues and Vigilantes will be able to be attacked by every faction - however, Vigilantes in Paragon will not be reported or ambushed by NPCs, and the same goes for Rogues in the Isles.

The benefit of being a rogue or a vigilante is threefold. One, they can access either area without having to capture their bases in the legacy PVP area. Two, they can earn special PVP merits from defeating enemies that can be traded in for PVP IOs and other goods. Three, they may have a "truce" with heroes or villains, and team up with them in order to tackle the enemy faction, being flagged as hero/villain temporarily. It reflects the tradeoff present in these alignments lore-wise: great risk for great reward.

To prevent abuse of the "flagging" function when rogues/vigilantes are teaming with heroes/villains, there will be a cooldown on joining teams after being attacked by an enemy.

When a hero is defeated in the Rogue Isles or visa versa, they will be teleported back to their controlled base - the controlled hero base in Siren's for villains and the controlled villain base in Bloody Bay for heroes.

Certain zones will be "safe zones" - Mercy Isle, Atlas Park, Galaxy City. This may also help prevent high-level enemies from attacking and griefing lower-levels. A villain or a hero will not be able to enter the opposing faction's safe zones. Rogues and Vigilantes can enter either, but cannot attack anyone in those zones and cannot be attacked.

*goes into PVP zones, sees them completely empty.*
*switches servers, gets the same thing, over and over again.*

In the last six months, I've encountered no more than five other people in the zones, and that might actually be a high estimate. I saw two besides myself today, a high for the year though neither wanted to actually fight, and one - oh, about two months ago, perhaps, in Siren's Call who did. Oh, and one a week ago, who came in to siren's, saw that someone else (me) on the opposite side was there, and left immediately.

That's with *four* zones concentrating the population. (Aside from rare arranged times, the arenas are dead, except possibly on Freedoom.) A "PVP server" would have (almost) every zone open, spreading out a meager population *even more.* You'd go from someone trying to find someone else to fight in a four-room house to trying to find someone else to fight in a skyscraper.

PVP is broken. It needs fixing.
PVP has also had a severe lack of interest from the playerbase, even at its most popular (which I'd guesstimate at issue 10-12, with IOs coming into swing and the old ruleset.)

And you think an open PVP server would be a good idea? Modifying the game and dedicating a server (and slowing down development and release of every new issue and powerset to be tested against it as well as the regular codebase) for what's essentially no population? You wouldn't even get all of the PVP-interested population - there are those (like me) that only want to deal with it on occasion, and would find (say) getting killed while trying to get to a mission very irritating very quickly.


Can't call this a good idea at all.

And before there's any counter that "WoW has it," for instance - the game was designed with it, PVP and non PVP servers, in mind from the beginning. COH was not. If it were - it'd still be a bad idea, but only because of the infintessimal PVP population.

(And I'm saying this as someone who *likes* PVP and wants it fixed and more active.)

Edit:
And anyone who has tried a low level in the rikti raids knows the "con" system would not fix that in the least. So your level 10 (for instance, since your safe zones hero side run from 1-5 for all intents and purposes,) Scrapper sees the level 50 - what good are your limited powers, lack of status protection in some sets, and not-fully-slotted TOs going to do you? Even if we bump it to a level 20, there's a severe disadvantage - go ahead, take a 50 and a near-base-level character into Bloody Bay and tell me that's a fair fight as opposed to a slaughter of the lowbie, even though they're "both 25." (With the 50, thanks to the SSK system, having up to level 30 powers.)

See my Guides and Tutorials

This may have worked way back when PvP was added to the game, but not now. The PvP population is too small. From a business standpoint it doesn't make any sense. Would you add yet another server? Change one that is already populated and force all the people off to find a new home? For the small gain in QoL for PvPers, you would upset a much larger crowd. And that is before the slowing of the development time like Bill said.

Seem to remember multiple open PvP server suggestions. Unfortunately, it wouldn't help generate a PvP population at all, especially not with PvP as it is now. Bill already said it in detail.

It is amazingly hard to get anyone on my friends list interested in PvP, not that I am really very keen on it either. For the most part, my experiences with PvP have been very frustrating, (enter zone and die, repeat, or worse, enter zone and find nobody else at all) I really can't see the need for another zone (Let alone a whole dedicated server!) when all the zones we have are all already empty. If anything, I would love to see one of those zones rededicated to full on "Free For All", everyone vs everyone combat!

This idea needs to be floated up every now and then so that it can be thoroughly shot in the head and put back down.

Still /unsigned.

Separate server = separate codebase = more possibility of bugs = longer turnaround time = do not want.

Something else we seem to be forgetting: our powers behave drastically differently in PvP zones. Not just against other players, against ANYTHING in PvP zones, because the powers themselves are altered when you enter into a PvP zone. If you want a PvP server, you have to content with using those messed-up, horrible power rules for the ENTIRE game's PvE, as well. Do you honestly want that?

Quote:

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.

While I personally like the idea of the game having open pvp since it just makes far more sense from a concept standpoint to have villains invading the city whenever they feel like, I have to say no to any suggestion of it. It's the sort of thing that really needs to be in the game from the start (On that note, if there's ever a CoH 2 I hope they do something like this!) Adding it now, you run into the problem of the playerbase being used to the game they have. If you suddenly change it up in a massive way like this, you're going to annoy a lot of people. Not to mention it'd probably require work on the same level as just making a new game to start with. So... yeah. No thanks.