Zone events, accolades, and villain-side. How to fix this problem?

A little preface, I play more or less exclusively on Justice. Judging by the server loads I've seen at various times of logging in, I would classify it as a medium population server, possibly upper medium. I have no knowledge of how things operate on other servers.

That being said, Justice redside is pretty much dead. You might get a WST going if you ask nicely enough in the global channels for a long enough time, but pretty much all pure villains are going to be solo or very small teams (or later on, maybe co-op) for the rest of their careers. This in itself is not really a problem, CoH is very solo friendly and it's still possible to make reasonable progress.

My problem arises when you consider zone events. GMs aren't so bad (sans perhaps Caleb, for unrelated reasons) since you can usually take them down with a sufficiently powerful small group, but things like zombie apocalypses or rikti invasions are genuinely depressing to behold. Considering the short notice and duration, it's rare for people to drop what they're doing and log over to a villain, no matter how nicely you might ask. I'm not sure of the mechanics but I know you need at least a full team in a single spot before you start seeing the elite boss spawns, meaning the badges are more or less permanently out of reach for the pure villain.

Again, this might not be a problem, if it weren't for the Elusive Mind accolade. Considering that incarnate trials are becoming more demanding on performance, and that all accolades are available regardless of AT or powersets, they more or less get rolled into the baseline performance. There is no advantage to not having the accolade, no power you can pick up instead of it, you either have it or you don't, and if you don't you are worse off.

So currently, pretty much the only way to get this accolade is to switch to Rogue and wait patiently for an invasion to hit a convenient blueside zone at a relatively high population time (easier said than done when you're living in Australia, but that's another matter). I don't believe this is a satisfactory solution, considering the current relative ease of getting alignment merits and being forced to forfeit any of them when switching.

So I was hoping to come up with a few suggestions, and if this thread doesn't get any redname attention I would appreciate it if someone who was attending the upcoming player summit could at least bring up the concerns with the devs. A few ideas off the top of my head, any of which would fix it (only regarding Elusive Mind, zombie invasions are a lesser concern):

• Most obvious, change the requirements for the accolade, maybe some different Rikti related badges that don't require drop-of-the-hat large teams of villains (LGTF badge would be a good start). There is precedent for this - Born in Battle redside was changed to remove PvP requirements, so it can be done. People who already earned the accolade but don't meet the new requirements would still retain it.
• Make the Rikti EBs in RWZ count towards the badge. This would mean the entire accolade can be achieved through a solo grind, albeit a relatively slow and painful one.
• Make the system consider your difficulty settings for purposes of Rikti invasions, so someone set for x8 would count as 8 for the purposes of invasions. This would still leave "lesser" villains out in the cold, and I'm not even sure it's enough to get the EBs to spawn in the first place, so it's not ideal, but it would be a start.
• I hesitate to suggest this, but perhaps sell all accolade powers on the Paragon Market? Not the badges themselves, just the powers. Not sure if that's even possible, but I'm trying to look at every alternative.

On my server, Champion, when I wanted the elusive mind power for my main I got on the forums and asked for help and ended up making an event out of it.

Hopefully your server is also filled with incredibly helpful individuals.

My main is a villain btw.

As much as getting these events can be a pain..consider..

The zombies event is just badges, that do nothing, aside from the pumpkin head.

Elusive mind is easily the most useless 'click' accolade. The psi def and res are not huge and on a timer that long..of limited use.

None of these things are really THAT good. Regard them as nice to have, but hardly worth the effort of changing alignment etc.

Also, consider moving to a server with people on it.

To be clear, I am aware there are ways of getting it, and I applaud the people who persevere with their villains and achieve it. My point is mostly that considering the current population redside (and the current population of the game as a whole, to be brutally honest) the invasion mechanics are a little outdated IMHO. I don't believe the onus should forever be on the players to compensate for outdated mechanics when there are options for the developers to fix it that are entirely plausible.

Now to be fair, I don't know how much work would go into implementing any of the suggestions I posted above, and it's possible something I would think would be a relatively quick job would actually require significant time investment. But that being said, I definitely think it's worth devoting some attention to why redside is deserted and what can be done about it.

Best thing you can do is to try to convince people to play redside.

Getting more zones won't do it, at least not full time, but it might get a small rush of people doing the content for awhile, before going back blueside.

Changing the requirements for the accolades wont help get others over redside, but it might make them a bit easier for you to obtain.

Selling the powers on the market...really not for that...needs to be something for players to actually work for, regardless of time vs convience.

You get one free transfer a month. Come on over to Virtue and see how life is in the big city(where we never have these kinds of problems). Once you get your accolade and other badges, you can always go back to Justice the next month!