Red is dead?

Well you could have Territory for Villains and Neighborhoods for heroes.

As a hero it would be his neighborhood the villains are trying to corrupt. The contact work to alert you at early stages but as time goes on you become the one that area looks to for help.

Batman had Gotham and Superman had Metropolis. Obviously as you level other heroes step in to help that neighborhood but you are still in the mix and as I say it adds you to the clone group as you finish the arc.

Concerning territories.

First, if this is going to be a competition, then it's going to be a competition between SGs. Simply put, nothing else is stable. Even if I manage to seize Darwin's Landing for myself by beating up the old owner or running the right missions or whatever, it will change hands way too quickly for it to actually feel like I'm a villainous mastermind in control of something. When I can't even hold onto my territory overnight, it doesn't feel like I'm taking and losing territory whilst building an empire, it feels like I'm competing on a leaderboard.

The only way to take and hold territory would be to join a SG focused on it, and then it's going to come down to a small number of elite SGs duking it out for control over every single neighborhood. Upstarts who manage to seize one for themselves will be rapidly crushed. Even if there are rules in place to prevent griefing (and I imagine there would be) they still just wouldn't be able to compete with the resources of a whole SG.

Now, are you currently a member of a truly elite SG? The kind of group that actually does perform at a dramatically higher level than the game expects them to given their stats right now? Then this new territory system you're dreaming up isn't for you. I don't care if you think you could be elite if you had a reason to bother with it, there are people who have been squeezing all the power they can out of the system for years, and it will be a long, long time before you can catch up.

It'd be much easier and have much the same effect if you just wrote the concept into the missions. In Fort Darwin, they already have you storming a Longbow base with the help of either a bunch of Skulls or a bunch of Infected, depending on which contact you took earlier. Writing things like that, where the story tells you that you're a big, villainous deal in the Rogue Isles, would pretty much solve the problem. Yes, it won't actually be true, and that's a bit of gameplay/story segregation that might grate on the nerves of some, but in this case it's unavoidable, because only a very, very small number of people can actually be the biggest villains around. When you're only improving the villain content for about thirty people per server (tops), you haven't really improved it by much.

If you wanted to add in an actual territory system, I would do a few things.

1) Mobs that con grey won't attack you unless you attack them. Actually, this should apply in CoH, too, and they should stop committing any crimes, too. Redside it wouldn't really matter if they stopped bullying the citizens or whatever. Regardless, this makes certain neighborhoods feel safe and cleaned up after you've outleveled them. As a villain, it automatically makes me think that I have the fear and respect of all the local thugs, while as a hero it makes me think that I've tamed the local criminal element such that they're no longer actively committing crimes. This would actually be a big improvement to both sides.

2) Completing certain missions (new ones, or maybe mayhem missions) should give a villain control of a neighborhood. As many villains can control the same neighborhood at once as they like, and there's never going to be some kind of master list of villains who currently control Mercy City or anything. It's basically like a day job, it's something you just have. Controlling these neighborhoods brings in a steady stream of Infamy while you're logged off, just like patrol XP. However, you cannot get patrol XP and territory Infamy at the same time. There is a toggle between taking the fight to your enemies (patrol XP) and terrorizing your own people to keep them in line (or just for fun, whatever, regardless it's Infamy income).

3) You can also select a villain group to be your personal minions, the idea being that you control a small set out of the total group. So if you choose Arachnos, maybe you're an Arachnos officer, or maybe you control a splinter group, or whatever. Like origins, just leave it up in the air. If you can create your own CVG via AE, you can use them.

4) Occasionally there will be an uprising where a bunch of mobs will try to take the neighborhood back from you. This creates a mission that is always level appropriate somewhere in the neighborhood in question, where your villain group will fight against the other villain group (even if they're the same villain group), not unlike the Fort Darwin mission. The neighborhood's Infamy income will cease until you address the issue. The missions are uprisings generated and do not become more frequent as you gain more territory, so that players won't be constantly responding to uprisings when they'd rather do other content.

5) A quick glance at Paragon Wiki informs me that there are about 25-30 day jobs available to any given toon. If territory is to completely replace day jobs for pure Villains as well as any Vigilantes or Rogues who'd like it to (it should), there should be a similar number of benefits available for territory control. There are about ~35 neighborhoods total in the Rogue Isles, so you could simply give different neighborhoods different bonuses (with some overlap), and then have it work just like day jobs. You log off in the right neighborhood, and you get that bonus when you log back on. After so many days, you get a badge, and certain combinations will give an accolade.

But really, rewriting the mission dialogue to make your villain seem more like he's taking the lead would probably be a much easier way to go.

I always thought that the northern large island in Nerva is wasted. So much more could have been done with that then just having spawns every 50 feet: a few more (vine-covered*) ruins with interiors, some regular stairs cut into the stone going up a cliff, an ape kingdom ( .. been suggested before), boulder traps , etc.

I'd play redside more often if I could play a character rebelling against Arachnos with secret bases/campsites/trainers on several outskirt islands, even those already in the current zones. Longbow's base in Agincourt could be the main staging area (as in some immersive NPC activites and structures, plus a trainer .. could even be a repetitive mission contact for all levels there, too). But then this would require a lot of new contacts and story arcs and missions and ... things to do besides being an Arachnos lackey. Burke seemed to be the start of something like that and then.. nothing. Now we don't even have Burke.



* come to think of it, are there vines any where in the game? With all the ruins, I don't recall seeing any vines on them. Of course, I might not have been paying that close attention. Welp, off to Nerva to take a closer look.