It happened AGAIN.

I love all the QQ from wannbe RPers that complain about the game not fitting THIER character rather then trying to create a character that fits the WORLD.

Let me break it down, if this was a table top RPG like saying beloved D&D, then although sure you got some pretty large control over the character you want to play, there are limits, pre set definations of various aspects of the multi verse of the game you choose to play in.

With the above in mind, there is NO way for anyone to survive the release of the Rularuu. Think multi dimensional Galactus for those not into the LORE of it all. NOTHING can actually match its power directly and the only reason even the mightiest incarnates can last there is thanks to the Kind One known as Faathim, the single aspect of Rularuu that possesses a feeling we can expect aid from.

This game is not mature rated, so frankly be thankful they give even the watered down evil options. Especially when you look at the sheer lack of activity Red Side.

I run alot of TFs on virtue, never have any issue filling them up timely, I go red side, and I cant even count on most on my global friends list as very few didnt go all the way blue to persue hero merits while enjoying the more active population of paragon. I myself am rogue or vig on nearly every character but sadly few are.

Devs can see the stats concerning server population and activity and no doubt have been aware for some time how little interest a game originally titled as a game of heroes managed to really attract with thier red side addition.

Sure many love the ATs, they where designed with the more current game we have then the hero ATs, frequently the vil ATs are the better choice for solo or pvp orientated play. Simply put there is little real reason for them to work on making red side more villainous, when most red siders turn blue at the first oppurtunity. And now few even bother to start red side at all.

Dont get me wrong, I am glad we have it, the option, the ability to play rogue or VIG, all are great aspects that expand our games world and make the younger kid that is champion online tremble in awe at our intimidating vastness.

But most of the people asking here, mainly from what seems an RP perspective, are not trying to be good RPers rather they are trying to treat this game like a single player RPG with the ability to pick and choose what mods should be added. In an MMO your just a small part of a much bigger world. Sure you can try to become mighty enough to yell at the sky and make it hear you, but certainly dont expect it to.

In spite of the stated policy in the ustream yesterday, I think that the (Kill Alexis) dialog tree option in SSA#3 is pretty downright villainous and about as dark as it gets short of torturing children or something.

It's probably a lot easier to RP selfish rogues and insane world-destroying villains than it is for your character to be a cold-blooded killer like that. Even with all the rationalization and emotional detachment that usually comes with playing video games.

My character has already destroyed the world.

"I, the mighty Artiste, have triumphed, but victory is not as sweet as I imagined. In my zeal to conquer this feeble world, I have instead demolished it. The people I would have ruled? Dead, though not entirely gone. They linger in these lands as foul, angry spirits. They hope eventually to find a way to destroy me, but I am not concerned. I am Artiste! I need fear no one, for my power is truly beyond all limits."

Now, as far as the discussion, the whole "push the red button" thing was pretty much a side issue to the real, perrenial issue of "How do we give a satisfying villainous experience while getting the most bang for our developer salary buck?"

This issue is sort of uniquely a red-side problem. You hardly ever hear a player say "Why can't I have a more heroic experience? Why do I have to team with these filthy villains?"

IMO, what's needed is not the opportunity to burn down the world. It's the opportunity for a villain (or a hero, for that matter) to create a plan, put the plan into motion, see it through to fruition, and then reap some tangible reward from it. Think of it as the CoH version of tradeskilling or crafting. Yes, I know that inventions are literally "crafting" but the facet of the crafting experience that they lack is the whole planning portion of the experience.

Essentially, you'd be "crafting" a story arc for yourself, perhaps at certain levels involving PvP, and then your arc rewards would depend on how well you completed the goals of the arc. Given the currency of the game, the reward would probably end up being yet another kind of merit, but some kind of real, tangible increase in personal prestige would be the best kind of reward.

I think a mission instance would work just fine. You destroy/take over the world and when you exit everything returns to normal. Bonus awesome points for cut-scenes. The exit pop-up box could read something like "You grow bored and use your awesome power to remake the universe just the way it was before you destroyed (took over) the world. Perhaps you'll do it again."

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".



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In reviewing the older dev diaries, I just had to share a comment Rick Dakan made in one of his Design Journal series of articles from 2002:

Quote:

First of all, rules. The basic system for City of Heroes, comes right out of my pen and paper days. Since its original inception we've refined it quite a bit, but it still retains the core elements that I liked about the original design. You use points to purchase attributes, skills and powers. I'm a big fan of the point purchase system, as it allows players to add as much customization as possible. I've always been a tremendous advocate of letting the player do what he or she wants, and that's a dictum I've tried hard to maintain as we've worked on this game. The second aspect was to separate levels from character advancement as much as possible. I greatly prefer RPGs that let me spend my experience however I see fit (like the Storyteller System), rather than forcing me to fall into pre-set patterns of advancement (like D&D). Again, whenever possible, let the players play as they choose. The way combat works is also a direct descendant of some rules I came up with for a skirmish mini's game that was never published. I then converted them over for a massive sci-fi role-playing game that was also never published. Now they're finally making their appearance in City of Heroes. The basic concept is pretty simple, but captures something about combat that I think is fundamentally true (you know, based on all my years as a trained mercenary). The more skilled you are with a weapon or attack, the more damage you will probably cause. Put another way, the power of the weapon is only half the equation. You also have to know what you're doing. I'm not taking credit for this idea; I'm just taking credit for liking it. And so we have a system where, when you attack someone, the better you hit them, the more damage you'll do. Instead of rolling a die when you hit someone with a club and causing 1 to 6 hit points of damage no matter how close you came to missing, each attack in City of Heroes has a table associated with it. So, instead of rolling a number between 1 and 6, you roll to hit, trying to score less than your skill plus its governing attribute (for example, club + strength). How far below your target number you roll is then indexed to the damage table for your weapon. Thus, the better you hit, the more damage you do. There's a little more to it than that (lots of modifiers and so forth) but you hopefully get the idea.

That's actually pretty cool.

Quote:

Admittedly though, I quickly turned most of the rules stuff over to my cohort, Jack. He's got a head for numbers and balancing and such.

Incidentally, of all the original design features for City of Heroes, the one that I regret not seeing the most, by a wide margin, is this one:

Quote:

The basic philosophy is this; the longer you've been doing something, the better you'll be at it and the more you try and spread yourself out, the harder it will be to gain superiority in any one aspect or skill. Here's how we put that philosophy in action. Each hero picks a starting power. Any power they want. This is your first power, and for the rest of time, this is what your hero will be best at. It will always be easier to increase this power than any other. Your second and maybe third powers will usually (depending on Origin type) come along pretty quickly after that, and it will be a little tougher (i.e. cost more experience) to advance that power. With each successive power you learn, it requires more and more experience points to advance that power. Your Origin type impacts this by determining how many different powers you can ultimately learn, how powerful you can become with them and how tough it is for you to use them. Presto. That's it. Instant, individualized character classes. Players can decide for themselves what combination of powers they want to pursue over time and the system encourages a certain degree of specialization. In many games a fighter can learn some magic (with difficulty, but it can happen), but in our game, you get to choose exactly where your strengths and weaknesses are. When it comes to grouping, everyone will have a pretty firm idea about where their strengths lie and they can talk with their fellow heroes about what their team needs to be totally effective. Admittedly, the formula for putting together a group isn't as simple as fighter, mage, cleric, thief; however, players have the advantage of developing their own, most effective combinations of heroes to fill out the needed roles.

I really wish we managed to get that one, although I'm fully aware of the fact it relies on getting the points system also, and that one was doomed for lack of sophisticated enough tools to implement.

Personally, I think Cryptic should have lifted this idea for their future games, because in my opinion its actually pure design genius.


And on the general subject of the thread, I think this is an interesting quote from Dakan on why City of Heroes didn't have a City of Villains in the first place:

Quote:

Beyond the potential social crises that would arise from such a game, it would require a great deal of extra content for it to be a good game. I think about all the content we're putting in to support our players' heroic activities. We'd have to do just as much extra work to make the villain game as much fun, and that's just not feasible for all the reasons you can imagine. Alternately, I suppose, we could spend half of our time on each and then they could both suck. Hmmmm, maybe we'll do that... OK, we're not going to do that. You know why? Well, first, we're not interested in making a game that sucks. But only slightly behind that are all the ideological reasons I've been hinting at since I began my little tirade here. The first reason is exactly the same as the last practical reason I mentioned. What would you do as a villain? You'd be doing all these horrible, nasty things. Even if they were cloaked in an air of comic book silliness (which nothing in this game ever should be, in my opinion), they'd still be things that every decent person would agree are just plain wrong. That's not at all the kind of game we're trying to make here. I've found that, when a game tries to be too many different things, it succeeds at none of them. I didn't just make that up obviously; it is rather, a truism in the industry. What I'm most interested in with City of Heroes is doing the hero thing really well. I want to simulate what it's like to contribute to the common good, to fight to your last against what's bad, and to rise above the wrong in the world. OK, yeah, that last bit sounded more than a little corny I know, but you gotta admit, there's some truth to it. For the most part, we want to see the good guys win. Also, for the most part, we want to win ourselves. And finally, again for the most part, we see ourselves as the good guys. Put all those most parts together and you get the attitude we're trying to capture with City of Heroes. That's the fun of reading these stories in comics as well; you empathize with the hero and rejoice in his or her victories over the evil forces that stand against him or her. Which hero you empathize with depends on which comics you read, which heroes strike a chord with you. In City of Heroes, we take that one step further. You are your own hero. You create someone you empathize with more directly than any comic character, because this time it's your creation. The second ideological reason is also a high-minded facet of our practical reasons. We want a game that encourages cooperation amongst players. We want a world where heroes can come together to fight the common foes (and boy are there a lot of those). This is, of course, the major appeal of online gaming; you do it with other people. In a free flowing PvP game, you couldn't ever really trust other players. They could turn on you at any moment, and probably do so with very little consequence (this lack of consequence being a big factor that differentiates real life behavior from that of people in games). That is, I think, just poisonous to a game where we're trying to get people to work together. Of course that's the extreme. I can think of ways to work around some of these problems, but here again, we're adding more restrictions to accommodate questionable game play benefits.

You have to wonder, even when they decided to make CoV, were the CoV developers immune to this line of thought? Are the *current* developers immune to this line of thought when they write for villains? I'm not convinced they are.

I side with the OP

I believe that the villain arc should have the villain players not stop Wade, he should destroy the world and they can turn off redside.

On the heroside, the heroes stop him and they can keep playing the game.

Everyone is happy

So much I could comment on here, but so little time. And I mean that in a good way. Lots of good ideas, and good intentions otherwise, at least. My biggest wish for City of Villains, at this point, is just for a dev to read this thread, and ponder on some of the problems and solutions we've brought up. Riptide made a point I wish I'd clarified when I alluded to many villains desiring to "just watch the world burn." It doesn't have to be the whole world in one go. In fact, I lifted the line from the Dark Knight movie; the line is attributed to the Joker's true motivations. Saying "the world" is metaphorical. For the Joker, Gotham City will do.

What if your super villain finished the job that so many villain groups had started at the Faultline dam, laying waste to a revamped section of Skyway City before heroes could stop it? What if the heroes were forced into a position of helping Arachnos against your large-scale plot to destroy many Rogue Isles buildings in one fell swoop--and what if phasing technology could be used to change the outside appearance of buildings? All of this, and I haven't even mentioned co-op plots where the heroes are tricked into helping villains achieve some end or obtain some kind of technology or magic power. What if a great evil attacked Paragon City, and the super villains showed up to help, but their real intention was to take control of the entity and use it to completely destroy a section of Paragon before making off with whatever technology or artifacts the entity possessed? What if they succeeded? If you think frustrated heroes would avoid playing these kinds of stories, think again. Players will play them if the rewards are nice, if the badges are plenty, and if the stories and mechanics are fun and entertaining.

With respect for Rick Dakan, whose world-building genius I can only admire, he began helping to build City of Heroes at the very edge of the beginning of the modern era of comic books. The Dark Avengers hadn't come along yet. If it wasn't for the Dark Avengers series of comic books, I probably wouldn't have any super villains outside of Mission Architect creations. It is difficult for me to go back and read most graphic novel collections from before 2003 or so, when the "big two" started to indulge a maturing audience. In Siege Prelude, a super villain, Doctor Doom, became one of my favorite characters for the first time. Not because of his evil deeds, but because I was so darn impressed by this new age, where super villains like Doom and Osborn had traded their mustache-twirling days in for real personalities.

I say all of this as a Blueside loving super hero at heart: City of Villains has yet to reach its full potential. That can only happen when its player character inhabitants are given tools, goals, rewards, and storylines in which to reach their full potential as villains.

I remember hearing Astro City being cited as a CoH influence before.

I wish with CoV they had run with the original Praetoria and had it be a world like Wanted (had the book been out then).

At the very least, I was hoping for something more akin to The Boys for Going Rogue's Praetoria (but obviously not to the same obscene extremes). You know, compare the excesses of the Roman empire with Cole's own. You get shades of it, with Bobcat and Dominatrix, but they're the outliers. IMO, they were so obsessed with making everything in Praetoria "gray" they ended up up making it all beige instead.



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