Is COH: Freedom Putting the Cart Before the Horse?

You get out of Cyssor! You get out right now! Do I have to hack someone's Mag Rider?

...on that note about villains, there's been several recent studies that indicate given a choice of options without any outside influence, people tend to pick the more altruistic ones. These decisions then build and construct societies rather naturally.

I'm with you there. I bought a combo pack with both games, and didn't touch CoH for the first couple of years. Nowadays my toons mainly play heroside, but it's only because there aren't many people playing villianside. I much prefer CoV and hope that the influx of new players will revitalize the Rogue Islands.

I think the problem is the more strict storyline red-side [it's gotten better recently]. The more pro-active nature of villains makes it harder to write for. Mako did a good job with what he had, but it ran up into the problem of having to tell the player what the character's motivation was. And unfortunately, for a lot of content red-side you're resigned to being a gopher. It's gotten better, and I suspect that the changes to Mercy Island will also improve that situation with regards to being Arachnos's Predestination Paradox.

And signature stories should help to provide other story lines that are mostly free of the 'Thug for Hire' syndrome that much of Redside suffers from.

So I'm hopeful.

I still have this



What did you think of the new trailer?

Honestly, when speaking to the majority of the playerbase, I am not sure the majority even read any mission stories at all.

No the situation here is as follows. You guys have made the game so incredibly slanted towards making the heroes so much better in terms of almost every aspect. As a result redside was pretty much doomed from the start. The problems are as follows.

1. Perma-overcast in the majority of the game. No sunlight in many areas = depressing game. I am not saying everything has to have rainbows everywhere but red side is depressing with all the trash everywhere and grundgy look it has.

2. All original villain ATs came pre-nerfed out of the box, the the gimmicky inherrents tacked on to make the pre-nerf not seem so bad. The worst of this was dominators but alot has been done to fix that issue. Right now the biggest issue is stalkers which the devs for some reason will not recognize at this point as needing the most help in the game right now. For some retarded reason they think stalkers have aggro issues but the issue is damage.

3. All the content is so much harder on redside. Villains have to deal with insane smashing/lethal resistances alot early on. Psi defense and mobs with higher mez resistance. The higher mez resistance thing is why I will never ever roll another dom on redside or play there ever again. To me its like your punishing players for doing their jobs. It would be different if this was done against controllers who have a secondary to fall back on for protection but doms do not have this so its too unfair to make the mobs have higher mez resistance especially at lower levels. Lastly just look at the longbow. What were they thinking when they gave them grenades that can drop you resistance beyond zero when you have fully slotted resistance powers?

4. Un-equal rewarding on story arcs and sfs on red vs blue sides. The villain arcs are harder therefore should give more reward despite being shorter. The whole time taken thing is irrelevant due to how its easy to fast travel in this game so the time metric needs to be tossed out. The LRSF is a good example of why the time metric needs to be thrown out.

5. The lack of additional content to get parity in this game. There are almost twice as many hero tfs than there are villain sfs. That needs to be corrected. Fill in every where there is a level range for the. Basically what needs to happen from here on out until parity is reached is add 2 to 3 villain sfs for ever 1 hero TF they add. Also new villain zones like the hollows, striga and dare I say it the shadow shard. And for the love of gawd stop making so many tfs where villains have to be side kick to the heroes. In only a few comics you would have heroes and villains working together like this, realistically the villains would do their own thing to stop whatever force that is intruding on their territory instead of playing sidekick to the heroes. Just for once make a SF where the heroes are actually the sidekick of the villains where they are having to choose the lesser of two evils instead of the villains doing something for the greater good.

6. Lastly the Role-playing aspect of redside. Up until now there are almost no real villain story arcs. Your either barely in the grey area and I would hardly call it villainous. Aside from the Westin Phipps arcs I cant think of anything thats really evil in this side of the game. You do more evil stuff in the short time in Praetoria than you do in levels 1-50 on redside. Now thats just not right in my opinion and needs to be corrected. Reboot the storyline or whatever you want to call it just like they are doing with all the movies in hollywood now so that villains can be evil.

All these things are why red-side sucks and why you have so many people who converted when GR started. You do have a few massocist who like staying on redside but they are not the norm here.

What you can do as developers is look at whats been done and try to fix it in each of the upcoming issues. Otherwise you will end up in a situation similar to one other nearly dead in the NA, Korean NcSoft title which will remain nameless where the devs are offering huge incentives to play the losing faction due to similar imbalances which they took entirely too long to fix. True enough pvp does not matter as much as here as it did in the game where they are doing this but you can see why it happened because they made similar mistakes.

Wouldn't surprise me at all to be honest. But something to remember, there is more to a story than just the text. The environment and framing also do quite a bit to tell a story. Older content, predominantly uses the mission text to tell its story.

And, at least in single player missions, the dialog boxes do a bit to force the player to read some of the mission text .

But I am a believer in the need to have the story tell itself through more than just the text. It's unfortunate that the heavily recycled mapsets in this game make environmental storytelling more difficult, but there have been real improvements.

Well, the game is called "City of Heroes"

Free players aren't subscribed.

No, I get your point precisely. My point stands. Free players aren't subscribed. The free game is there to encourage people to subscribe, or alternatively go ala carte as a Premium player. To the extent that free accounts and premium accounts are missing features that would encourage them to subscribe, that is because they are missing features that would encourage them to subscribe.

We will lose people who say "I would pay to have more if I was given more for free, but since I'm not given enough for free I won't pay for what I want" and frankly, that's a good thing.

Yeah that does seem like an odd choice.

I'm afraid the moderators would get (even more) mad at me if I started overtly talking Pside2 up.

*blinks*


*re-reads*


*scratches head*



*re-reads*



*ponders*



{light finally goes on}



Ah. I see what you did there.

PM plz.

In their pretendy fun time maybe...

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

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No, thats because heroes get more stuff out of the game thats why. People arent given enough incentive to be villains. Seriously see all the stuff I mentioned earlier and you can understand why more people play blue side. If all that stuff I mentioned was fixed you would not see so many folks on blue side. It wouldnt be the 90% to 10% we have now, it would be closer to say 60% to 40%. While these are totally made up figures thats what it sure feels like in terms of teaming and activity in the global channels. You see stuff for hero tfs all the time but very few people doing group villain stuff.

Totally agree with you here. I think people who think they are going to downgrade and just going to switch back after they realize what they are giving up and how fun the game is as a VIP. Personally I hate this whole free to play non-sense but I can see how it will bring in new subs eventually.

Another comic book game that launched earlier this year with identical hero and villain experiences - neither side had any more content or perks than the other - and the majority chose to play as heroes - by quite a large amount

I don't think that is the case - it certainly isnt from my perspective - I see it as the Rogue Isles maps are scruffy and dreadful, whereas the heroside maps look great (well most of them - lets just forget Faultline and Skyway and Steel C ..and Bricks and Boomt..) .... ok forget I said anything..

See my previous post

Personally, I don't subscribe to the entire EvilRyu rant above (in particular the "pre-nerfed" part) but I do think the red side experience is hampered by two critical flaws:

1. The PvE content is significantly harder on the red side, and specifically in ways not conducive to attracting new players. Consider that the red side sees far more endurance drain in the early game than heroes do, and endurance drain is notoriously annoying in a number of ways. If inherent stamina is intended to be attractive because you get enhanced recovery from the start, the red side is almost the equivalent of having inherent anti-stamina. Its also much more mez-happy, and critters statistically have a slightly higher number of attacks (critter offensive threat is almost directly proportional to the number of attacks they have, because unlike players they can't slot for recharge: the more attacks they have, the more offense they have, almost proportionately).

2. The red side content doesn't - at least overall - revel in being "evil" its more a caricature of evil seen through good's eyes. Evil almost never actually wins, and when it does it does in a way that makes the skin crawl on probably a majority of the players. The way I put this to the devs recently is that the red side doesn't range from Magneto to the Joker, it runs the gamut from Cartman to the Human Centipede.

I can see myself being Magneto. All I have to do is believe one thing: if I stand back and do nothing but hope for the best, all of my kind will one day be put on trains and disappear. Again. I could even revel in being the Joker: I'm nuts, and I'm out to prove everyone else is just as crazy as I am.

I just cannot relate to Phipps. This is a high level contact asking me to crush a school teacher. And whoever wrote the arc - which is well written for the most part, by the way - wasn't writing an arc intended to make the player happy. Here's what the souvenir says:

Yeah: this is someone who thinks people should enjoy being a villain. I say its well written because I honestly believe the writer really wanted me to feel ill after "succeeding" in this arc, and I did. Well done.

As long as the writers don't believe in it, the players won't either. And this arc is an example of my belief the writers didn't really truly believe in the red side being legitimate.