Time to beat the dead horse... again

While it doesn't fall into "broken" status, the main reason I rarely play my villains is the gloom of the Rogue Isles. It's always cloudy and dark. I put a lot of time into designing a villain and his/her costume, picking exactly the colors I want ... and then rarely get to visually enjoy my creation because the dim lighting everywhere just washes everything out.

I do enjoy the writing redside, though.

This is the entire reason I've never gone back to goldside since getting a Praetorian to level 20 and through the portal to Paragon. I thoroughly enjoyed the storyline, but like you said, the constant faceplanting got very old, very quickly. Specifically, low-level enemies loaded to the gills with knockback attacks, with no knockback protection/resistance available to my characters at those levels. It's like every mission went like this: enter mission, encounter first group of enemies who unload on me with knockbacks. And they keep spamming the same KB attack over and over and over. Repeat, repeat, repeat for every spawn in the mission.

I wouldn't think they'd even really need to phase the opposite-alignment contacts. Just set it up so that, if you're the wrong alignment, you don't see the colored circle on the ground under the contact, don't see the NPCs last name, and you'll see a gray reticule if you target them. They'd appear identical to any other random citizen, assuming they're wearing "civilian" clothing. If the contact is a uniformed/costumed member of an organized group, same-aligned players would see the NPC's name, while opposite-aligned players would just see a generic identifier. For example, in the case of a Longbow contact, heroes would see "Captain Johnson" while villains would just see "Longbow Captain".

The biggest problem I can see with heroes and villains having access to the same zones is this: The "regular" zones would have to remain PvP-free (for many reasons), so there would need to be some in-game rationale for why heroes and villains aren't attacking each other on sight. I mean, when a villain does a Mayhem mission, they arrive in the instanced zone to rob the bank and everybody knows they're there and tries to stop them. So why wouldn't that apply while doing regular missions in Atlas Park? I would apply the same roleplaying rationale I personally use when playing my heroes, in that when I'm patrolling/street-sweeping, I choose to only attack "villain" mobs who are in the act of committing a crime. Those Hellions or Skulls just sitting on a wall or standing around talking to each other in Atlas Park remain unmolested by me (unless they attack me first). Paragon City is in the USA, and to the best of my knowledge, simply belonging to a gang isn't a crime in and of itself. So this would apply to player villains as well, and could easily be handled by player villains simply not having street-sweeping/hunting missions in Paragon City zones so that they're not committing crimes in full view of nearby heroes. Instead, villain contacts in Paragon would only hand out door missions, and any heroes those villains encounter and fight would be Signature or Rogue's Gallery heroes, not player heroes. Of course, player villains in Paragon may still be subject to attacks from the PPD or Longbow.

OTOH, I suppose there would need to be a different rationale for heroes in the Rogue Isles, since villains wouldn't be under the same constraints against attacking on sight.

I was mostly thinking that if there was some Vahzilok contact for villains standing in steel canyon the heroes would be wondering why they can't attack that vahzilok guy who's clearly up to no good. The hero contacts in paragon could still be visible to villains, with the rationale being that they're in enemy territory so they wouldn't want to draw too much attention to themselves. (of course this wouldn't apply to the psychopathic-type villains, but you can't win them all)

As far as a reason why hero PCs couldn't attack villain PCs, with all the side switching going on lately who can really tell who's a villain and who's a hero??