Make enemies situationally neutral in City of Villains

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm kind of getting tired of trying to run missions for a contact of a given faction, only to have enemies from that faction standing near by attacking me whenever I try to talk to the contact.

I've been having a lot of problems with this in Sharkhead Isle; Vince Dubrowski and Lorenz Ansaldo tend to have a lot of Cage Consortum and Family groups just waiting to jump anyone who goes to talk to them. Which doesn't make a bit of sense, especially if you've just signed up for (or just completed) a mission where the Cage Consortum or Family were your allies.

Yes, it does help a lot now that we're able to call them after completing a single mission, but it can still be very annoying or even debt-producing, especially if you're trying to use their store (which you can't do over the phone).

So here's my suggestion: Add a mechanic that makes enemies of a specific faction neutral to you so long as you're running missions from a contact affiliated with that faction. Once you've completed your mission (or your story arc) and they have no more missions for you, they go back to being hostile.

And to keep it from being exploitable, the neutrality of the faction could be reset to hostile as soon as you accept a mission from another contact.

Or they could shift spawns away from the more dangerous contacts.

Ummm, no. The Rogue Isles are dangerous places. The whole point of a dynamic online environment is that it is, well, dynamic.

Besides, if that happened, who would kill the randomly spawned Voids and Quantums when I'm on my Warshade?

not happening.

The devs talked about this extensively back when Going Rogue launched. The tech to make situation-aware neutral enemies is not in the existing revision of the game engine.

The Neutral-Enemies in Praetoria are considered to be a cheat in the system. The enemies are not truely neutral to the player. The exact details of how this cheat works has not, as far as I am aware, been revealed to the players. The common guess back around Going Rogue launch is that these enemies have a power that turns their perception down to zero, forming a "reverse-invisible" status effect. The game works around that engine cheat by placing all Praetorian characters into Praetor White's Powers Division, there-by avoiding the need to create a complex tracking and flagging system.

The developers were very explicit back during the Going Rogue launch period that they had no plans to back-port the status change into existing mobs.

* * *

Now, you probably are wondering, "what's the big deal?"

To start with there is the network transmission overhead. Let's say such a system was implemented. Now what's going to happen when you travel through a zone? How... Exactly... is your flag going to be exposed to the enemy mobs?

Is it going to be exposed by a flag on your player?

In this case everytime you get within range of a mob the server will have to do a look-up on your avatar to check your faction status, then send that faction status to the NPC logic, then feed that status back to you.

In this case everytime you load into a zone the entire database is going to have to reflag every NPC of the faction in that zone, as well as update the flags for any respawned enemies.

• Get a character with Super-Speed.
• Go find a location badge you don't have.
• Don't get the badge yet.
• Start up Superspeed.
• Run over the badge
• Start counting down the number of seconds it takes for the database to record that you got the location badge.

je_saist likes to think everyone should already have a complete understanding of everything about this game, including technical details. If you bring up a valid question or suggestion, you're dumb and they'll show you why.


Anyway, the yellow spawning enemies would be a great addition to CoV. Would allow groups like Arachnos or the Cage Consortium to be on your side, while at the same time giving you the option to turn on them if you wanted to. But the devs have completely shot down the suggestion of using this cool, innovative new tech on old mobs for some reason. No idea why, to be honest, but I imagine it's because old street mobs in CoH/CoV aren't linked to Praetoria enough to warrant their attention.

I have been playing red side for about 4 yrs now and I have only had this problem once. I learned to be careful when going to those contacts. There are ways you can take that won't get you any agro.

Also, try standing closer to the contact rather then as far as you can. They don't mind if you get in their grill to talk to them.

If you drop in from above him, by fly or jet pack or sj, you shouldn't agro anything. Land behind him and you should be fine.

It would be nice to not have to fight Arachnos all the time, we are supposed to be on their side, but the rest of them I understand. I really think Arachnos out in the zones should mostly be yellow targets like PPD in Praetoria. . .