The problem with how Tyrant is defeated.

You can't in a persistent shared world

Except in Dark Astoria, you do.

--
Pauper

What, you mean that one temp power?

So it's possible.


Now why can't we do that more often.

Don't forget ol' Morty and the buff that lasts until 50 when it becomes a NotW.

Except that's not co-op content. The actual redside content is good for the most part.

But it is grabbing power (that blue has no version of none-the-less) and holding on to it, DA was just given as an example of getting something for your villainous efforts.

Heroes can do the same thing in DA, though. That's why it's called co-op. They can make the same power grab.

Sure you can. If the genre and setting were any excuse, the Magisterium would be nukeproof. Since it's a persistent shared world, the fact that I can go through Pocket D to Nova Praetoria and see Marauder taking on new Powers Division means we can never win against Tyrant, right?
Of course not. For the same reason, there's nothing really wrong with plot developments being based on the idea that an enterprising Incarnate villain has, say, taken complete control of Warburg in Blitz's absence.

Timeline-wise, the Magisterium Trial takes place after the 1-20 zone content
.
But that becomes difficult for the meta-story - that's why it was Darrin Wade who killed Statesman, and not the red sider players - there need to be certain basic events that can be used for future content - so while a playe could help Arachnos take over Warburg again, they couldn't become ruler of the island.

Because you make the kind of sweeping generalisation that really gets under my skin, and you couple that with the glee of seeing "heroes" slighted. I know what you're getting at, but I really, REALLY dislike that approach to the problem. It doesn't solve problems, it just hurts feelings. I know "good deal of forumgoers" did this a few times, I don't disagree. But turn tour ire against the attitude, not against "heroes" because I too play heroes and I too would be pissed off if "heroes" got burned. Please, let's not cut off our nose to spite our face. Making the situation worse does not help. It just makes the situation worse. What we want to achieve is get more people to play and appreciate villains, not fewer people to play heroes and thus the game period.

Villain-side does get the short end of the stick, but that's not the fault of the people who play heroes any more so than Tankers not getting attention is the fault of people who play Brutes. Glorifying hurting people who peruse the content you see as at fault just ends up hurting innocent people who just happen to enjoy that content with no ill will towards the content you like. I certainly don't enjoy it when, say, Defenders fail to get anything new for a while because "Haha! Now you know how my Masterminds feel!" I really, really want to simply approach this problem from a constructive, positive direction.

Oh, the "heroes are more popular" angle has always been ********. I'm not saying they aren't - they are - but it's a vicious circle. Heroes are more popular so they get more content so they get more popular so they get more content, etc. Unless you happen to be a struggling developer who has to cut corners like the studio did back when it was down to 15 people, there's really no excuse to abandon the less popular and focus on just what's being run more. Of course people will keep playing heroes when the majority of content is on the hero-side and hero-slanted when it's shared. Duh.

A smart studio takes unpopular content and improves it to make it popular, rather than just tossing it in the bin and pretending it doesn't exist. A smart studio also plans ahead and does not construct three separate paths of progression when it clearly struggles to support even one. A smart studio does not toss base raids, PvP, arenas, gladiators, hazard zones and villains into a black hole and focus on just the small subsection of what it can support.

Villains need more content that's villain-specific and unavailable to heroes. Period. And when I say "content" I don't mean an arc or two spanning six missions between them. I mean a whole new zone, I mean a number of new Task Forces, I mean entire new storylines that tie into the fabric of the broader story. I mean serious content additions. Yes, I mean a whole Issue of nothing but villain content. Because as it is right now, the side needs this to catch up.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I think you've pinpointed the problem right there. I'm still amazed that the Devs introduced four new moralities with Going Rogue (Vigilante, Rogue, Loyalist and Resistance) and then failed to incorporate their perspectives into future content. That just seems incredibly short sighted.

I'm honestly beginning to wonder if I preferred the content when there were only 15 people working on the title...

The 2 Praetorian ones weren't meant to be new morality types - they made a point of converting them to blue or red at 20, so that everyone would be aligned properly for the dimensional war - and the Vigilante and Rogue ones can operate quite easily with the Hero and Villain choices that come up on missions - like the choice to arrest or kill Aaron Thiery, or letting Captain Muldoon live in First Ward, or sparing the life of Taskmaster Carlyle, as well as the various "flavor" text options, where you can be polite and helpful, or aggressive and threatening.

What amazes me is Matt Miller seems to be going back on very legitimate fears he himself has expressed in the past, in regards to overstretching the studio's resources. In relation to "end game," for instance, he has been very clear that there's no real point to adding 10 more levels when it'll take the studio months to create content for them and players would blow through it in a week, if not in a day. This isn't just about end game, though, because the same applies to adding a whole new "side" to the game. When they added villains, they essentially doubled their workload by making their game "wider," and the stress this put on the studio was IMMEDIATELY obvious. It was clear even from the word go that they Cryptic Studios simply couldn't work on both sides at the same time, so they took to alternating between sides with each Issue... For a couple of Issues from 6 to 8. Then I 9 brought Inventions to "everybody," then I10 brought the Rikti War Zone as co-op content and it's been co-op pretty much ever since.

Matt Miller was there. He has to have seen what this splitting the game and splitting the player base does to development resources. With this in mind, I honestly do not get how Praetorian Earth got greenlit in the first place, when it adds a THIRD game for the studio to design for. This is a single studio now designing content for three games, essentially, so of course they can't keep up. But instead of alternating, they simply try to make content for everybody and in the process manage to not make it really fit anybody at all.

Villains feel like heroes, heroes feel like villains and Praetorians feel forgotten. This isn't working, guys. You do good work, but you're tying your shoelaces together by trying to make so many things at once. If you can't work all three angles simultaneously, alternate. We dealt just fine with "half-Issues" being all about Incarnates and regular Issues being about the rest of the game. I'm sure "heroes" will complain if there were a whole issue devoted to just villain content, but you can't please all the people all the time. Matt Miller of all people should know this, because he pretty much coined the phrase, at least around these forums. You can't please all the people all the time, and trying to do so ends up pleasing nobody most of the time.

Seriously, alternate. We'll survive.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

They don't

I'd be completely happy with this solution.

That would be correct if the APP/PPP were mechanically equal with only thematic differences. They are not. The most obvious case being Mace Mastery for corrs/defs. The only epic pool with a Defense based armor toggle AND Focused accuracy for these ATs. Going red to pick up PPPs is a thing that happens.

I did not mention it to suggest that both sides have the same (or even remotely similar) amount of cross morality content that they must do to progress.
I mentioned it to preempt the reaction "if you make my hero do anything bad I'll quit" by saying that it has already happened and is still happening now.

The text "sounds" neutral. The objective is still "stop bad guys" and "save people" for "the greater good".

I already wrote on this once, in this same thread, with some fictional examples.
The problem is not what we are fighting but how and why.

Incarnate content however is 100% of the content needed to gain incarnate progression - the end game system of City.

The problem, for me, is not that heroically written incarnate and first/night ward content exists but that villainously written counterparts of them do not exist. We can choose to ignore the content we do not like. But we cannot create content we would like.
And before you mention Architect, it does not support incarnate difficulty and rewards, league sized content and unique mechanics. And AE is explicitly stated to be outside the in game continuity.

It does not have to be a "wrong". Having to act counter of ones normal morality for a greater goal can be a great source of dramatic tension and character development, if it is used sparingly and written well. The existing co-op content for villains fails on that last part, but nowhere did I say that my proposed additions should fail just as hard for the heroes.

Actually, one could say that this is exactly what a smart (and ruthlessly pragmatic) studio does when they realize they're overcommitted/have too much on their plate as a result of optimistic past decisions, and have to cut somewhere in order to start living within their means - what they can support, vs. what they'd like to.

(Of course, this presumes that they aren't just abandoning half-completed features to chase after the new shiny, which is what this studio has a bad record of actually doing. )

Oh, we do, everytime we're forced to work with the likes of Longbow and their flamethrowers "for the greater good"; by bringing the Red Widow back to life for no reason whatsoever; by empowering schizophrenic terrorists and their imaginary wives because democracy is at stake; by jeopardizing a hostage's life to avoid creating an international incident; by allowing Manticore to go free after attacking the Shining Stars' headquarters...

I'm sorry, but blue-side players have as much right to complain about getting recicled villain content as villains do about ITF or LGTF.

Those sound more like mistakes on the part of the hero than being forced to do something against your morals.

Or Apex, or Tin Mage, or the Holiday trials, or the BAF, or LAM, or Keyes Island, or the UG, or the TPN campus, or MoM, or DD, or the Magisterium, or Dark Astoria, or the end of SSA1... oh wait. (And don't give me that "I live in the world too" crap. That plot-hole filler lost its adhesion years ago.)

Lemme go back to Heather Townshend's arc starter. When first speaking with redside characters, you are presented with the following dialogue options:

"Relax, I'm here to help you out and play nice."
"I'll be playing the role of The Hero today."

So, let's turn that around. Say, for instance, that heroes went to work for someone in a co-op zone and upon speaking with them, are presented with these two dialogue options:

"Step off and shut up. I'm here to break faces and make widows. Point me at something to hurt."
"I'm here to ruin your day, buddy. Either tell me what I want or start running so you die tired."

Would that bother you at all? If the answer is 'yes' you have agreed to the point I've been trying to make, AND demonstrated that the current content has a huge disparity between red and blue.

There's good and bad content on both sides. No one (here) is complaining about the likes of Willy Wheeler or Hardcase. But please don't make it out like blue-side is being as neglected as red-side, in terms of co-op content. That's not even remotely true.

As a primarily red-side player, I'd prefer good to bad content, obviously, but at this point any new villainous content would be an improvement.

Don't want to fight for the greater good? But thou must! The really sad thing here is that a lot of these situations can be resolved, at least partially, by explaining around them. Yes, our mission structure is set and I can see how there wasn't enough time and resources to make two separate paths. Let's say we're trying to work with what we have. You know your arc is heroic but you need to make it look like it's working for villains, too. So you need to HIDE IT!

Trouble is our writers are terrible at hiding the underlying game mechanic limitations, and have on several occasions attempted to "lampshade" them with satire, like the infamous "Yeah, yeah, for the greater good, like always!" joke disaster. Hanging a lamp shade on it in the belief that it's still better than just having the bare bulb sticking out of the wall only serves to bring attention to the problem. It is neither an excuse nor a justification, and only really works if your story is strong enough to survive that particular bit of discontinuity. By making jokes about how horrid the imbalance is, all you're doing is making people hurt by the imbalance angry for nothing while people not hurt by it have no reason to care either way. It's a very simple rule of game design that if YOU create the problem, then YOU don't get to poke fun at it unless you solve it, because the people you created the problem for will not appreciate it.

This really doesn't do much to solve the cardinal problem of co-op content, though - you can't have heroes doing villain content. A villain can do a heroic mission and still remain a villain without morality ever coming into it. A hero can't really do a villainous mission and remain a hero because it only takes one real transgression to fall from grace. This more or less mandates that co-op content be hero-centric and eventually work towards some kind of greater good goal.

Which is why co-op content is a MISTAKE. Yes, it's easier to make. Yes, it impacts more people. Yes, it costs less. It costs even less to do nothing at all ever again, but just because it costs less doesn't make it a good decision. It is functionally impossible to make co-op content that works for both heroes and villains that doesn't hurt one, the other or usually both. More than that, it's becoming quite tiresome to have the result of every new content ever be "the world is destroyed" and to have people's justification be "save the world (for myself)" every single time. Even if we ignore the heroic slant to this, that plot thread itself is beyond old now. I like saving the world as much as the next guy, but can we stop tossing cosmic disasters at it for five minutes and focus on a plot which DOESN'T require a coalition of heroes and villains to go beat up some dude somewhere?

Even if we admit that Praetoria and villain-side are going to be dead and not part of the game, the "band together to save the world" plot is old even for the heroes it ought to be most applicable to. The Dark Watcher's mission to "Save the world" is actually pretty good, it's well set up and it deserves all the fanfare. But we can't have an invasion that forces us to band together every other week, lest we have to resort to bringing in the Nexus and have Wade Barret be the Well's champion all of a sudden.

Not every plot needs to threaten to destroy the world and not every plot needs to require people of divergent moralities to band together and fight it. It was funny the first couple of times, but now it's just old... And yet we're gearing up for ANOTHER invasion. What is that, like, the fourth or fifth? We had the Rikti invade... Twice. We had the Soldiers of Rularuu invade. We had the Praetorians invade. We had Axis Amerika invade. Now we're waiting for the Battalion to invade. Enough with the invasion angle, please.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

We've crossed the event horizon of raid content so there's no getting away now. Redside doesn't have the numbers to have their own trials and they're pissed off at always being the hero. Though blueside shouldn't be happy with all these villains gaining cosmic powers either. It's bad enough that the Zig is nothing more than a day spa with a tacky dress code. (See, heroes don't get anything at the end of the day either, excluding permanently dead heroes.)

If the Incarnate system was still using the Alpha system redside could have its own SFs that are appropriately red themed but that ship has sailed and was sunk by a U-boat in shark infested waters.

*edit* Oh yes, forgot. Less world exploding "plots". More fool hardy hero or foolish villain could tackle solo content.

Be careful what you wish for lest you get blue WWD quality content.

How about smaller itrials? Maybe for a team of 4-8 players? Just like Sam was saying above, not every plot has to be about the end of the world. Have some smaller scale incarnate content that allows them to make different trials for both sides. And I mean actually different, not just replacing the longbow NPCs with Arachnos NPCs.

Not necessarily. Raids are one thing, but progress through the Incarnate system has also been opened up via more traditional story arcs, as well, and those could be alternated to have a more villainous theme. In a way, it's fitting that the large, coordinated, "for the greater good" events are hero-centric since that always seems to be the dividing line between heroes and villains when they come together: Heroes band together out of a common goal, villains band together out of necessity and end up betraying each other and losing. It makes sense they'd do well in smaller-scale, more personally-motivated tasks.

In short, so long as we're giving Incarnate rewards for story arcs, there ought to be some that are villain-only.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.