Incentivize playing a villian

Currently, the majority of players play as Heroes. This painfully clear when trying to form a party on the villain side vs the heroes side. This then compounds the issue of people playing heroes over villains.

Suggestion: Try various incentives to try and balance the server. IE: An additional experience or infamy passive and always on boost. Reduced prices at the stores. These incentives can swap back to heroes if there are more villains than heroes playing.

I am sure other people can give other/better suggestions on how to help get people on the villain's side.

I think one way to do it would be with more villainside content, i.e strike forces.

I think there is already a decent amount of villain content. It's more the normal content...as a villain, I think we fight more villains (Soldiers of Arachnos) than hero side does. Consider how annoying they can be to fight, I wonder how the distribution would be affected if 75% of hero missions were filled with Arachnos.

I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority here, but I actually thought it worked better when AT's and Powersets were restricted by hero/villain. I liked that there was something to differentiate them.

I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority here, but I actually thought it worked better when AT's and Powersets were restricted by hero/villain. I liked that there was something to differentiate them.

As a habitual stalker player on one of the smaller servers back in the day, I hated… absolutely hated... being limited to the red side of the City only. I learned to solo. I soloed a lot. Because I pretty much had to.

Being able to have a rogue and bounce between the two sides was just a glorious thing to me when it was introduced. Being able to build a natively blue-side Stalker? Also excellent. I FINALLY got to play my favorite archetype *with my friends*.

That's not something I'd be willing to give up at this point.

Currently, the majority of players play as Heroes.

Incorrect. Many play blueside as villain archtypes. And considering it's extremely trivial to switch sides, if you're not finding groups redside, switch to blue, and then switch back when done.

I love this idea.

Specifically, I like the suggestion of increasing merit rewards for redside strike forces -- in fact, an across-the-board merit reward increase for all villain-facing content (contacts/arcs too!) would be, in my opinion, the way to go. Tempt people over to the dark side!

Rewards should be balanced between the sides. Doing an activity of equivalent time, effort, and difficulty on each side should return the same rewards. To get more people playing red-side, we need to understand WHY people don't play as much on the villain side. I personally don't think it's because rewards aren't as good, but rather that the content is more satisfying blue-side. Most blue missions feel heroic, like you're doing things a real hero would do. You react to villains and take them down.

A lot of red-side content does not feel particularly villainous. A lot of it is fighting other villain groups, working for someone else to get them ahead, or reacting to things Longbow or Wyvern are doing. There are a small number of missions where you, as a villain, are the big bad of the arc and are seeing your machinations come to fruition, but most aren't. There's a lot of "do this thing for this other villain for the promise of future rewards", the payoff of which never comes because of the way the game is designed (it's usually a souvenir which does nothing mechanically or introduction to a new contact who just repeats the chain). You need only look at the difference between the Kheldian story arcs vs the Soldier of Arachnos story arcs to see the difference. As a Kheldian, you take down the Nictus and save the world. As a Soldier, you make yourself a Destined One so that you can ultimately... beat up Statesman once and maybe set the stage for taking down Arachnos (you know, the thing you're a part of) for some reason.

If the redside content isn't as fun, increasing the rewards won't really help long term. It'll just make people who want the rewards force themselves to play content which is less fun. That's not good! Instead, the content should be improved so that people want to play it as much as they play the blueside content.

Of course, it could always be that people just don't want to play villains that much and won't really like it even if the stories are well written, make you feel villainous, and give equivalent rewards. Which means that there isn't really a good solution to it.

There's already pretty good reward balance. Early arcs have better merits on red. Tarikkos is meh but silver mantis and Morty Kal are great merit/minute. Rsf and cuda are much better than their blue equivalents. Prior to i25 taking the pauses out of the respec trials it wasn't even close on those, and the treespecs are still fun and good reward/time. Renault isn't bad. Both sides have their good and bad. End of the go rogue or vidge, run the best of both sides.

To get more people playing red-side, we need to understand WHY people don't play as much on the villain side.

The answer is "because more people want to be the good guy than the bad guy".

Give XP/Inf bonuses to the side with less people.  This was what they did in Allods Online, and it helps to balance out the factions as it naturally draws people to the lesser side.  It's a simple and effective system.

Too many Heroes: "With all the villains being locked up these days, there's more opportunities for up-and-coming ne'er-do-wells."

Too many Villains: "Paragon is in constant peril these days, now is the perfect time for new Heroes to do some real good."

Let's not be overly reductive here: there's more than one reason people don't play redside.

• Some people simply don't like playing a villain; those people aren't relevant to this discussion, as they won't be playing villains no matter what is or isn't done.
  
• Some people would play more villains if there were more or better villain-specific content; that's a nice thought, but let's be real about the possibility of anything involving the wholesale creation of new game assets -- it's a long-shot at best, and if it does happen, it's going to be in a way that focuses on where players are already (blueside).
  
• Some people would like to play villains, but they don't because it's hard to find a team redside, and it's hard to find a team redside because fewer people play villains, and fewer people play villains because it's hard to find a team redside, and it's hard to find a team redside because fewer people play villains, and fewer people play villains because it's hard to find a team redside...
  

And probably other reasons as well.

But of those three reasons (the primary ones, I think), the only one that can be "fixed" is the third -- the self-perpetuating problem of population imbalance. Increased rewards might help that. Even if this policy were implemented, we likely wouldn't see a huge swing toward redside, but at the very least all the people running around Atlas Park with all-black costumes and names like "Killrazor the Blood Explosion" might consider actually making the thieves and murderers they clearly want to play in the first place, but think they "can't" because they'll never find anyone else to play with.

Here's a thought. Would specially designed neutral TF's and trials help the situation. There's several menaces in the game that both factions team up against. Maybe it's something that can be expanded on starting from an earlier level.

Here's a thought. Would specially designed neutral TF's and trials help the situation. There's several menaces in the game that both factions team up against. Maybe it's something that can be expanded on starting from an earlier level.

To quote myself:

...let's be real about the possibility of anything involving the wholesale creation of new game assets -- it's a long-shot at best...

And even if this were to happen, I doubt we'd see a significant change in the number of people playing villains. We'd end up with a lot of "both sides" content being run by heroes, and the occasional lonely villain allowed to join the team. It still doesn't provide any additional reason to create or play a villain in the first place.

Besides that, the more "factionless" content there is, the less relevant a characters's faction becomes. If we're all running the same content anyway, why does it matter whether you're a hero or a villain? (Hint: you're not a villain. Because it's not like a combined TF is going to be "something extra-evil needs to be done, hey heroes, stop being heroic for a few hours and come help us accomplish it!" It will be "something extra-evil needs to be STOPPED, hey villains, stop being villainous for a few hours and help us prevent it!")

Here's a thought. Would specially designed neutral TF's and trials help the situation. There's several menaces in the game that both factions team up against. Maybe it's something that can be expanded on starting from an earlier level.

 

To quote myself:

...let's be real about the possibility of anything involving the wholesale creation of new game assets -- it's a long-shot at best...

 

And even if this were to happen, I doubt we'd see a significant change in the number of people playing villains. We'd end up with a lot of "both sides" content being run by heroes, and the occasional lonely villain allowed to join the team. It still doesn't provide any additional reason to create or play a villain in the first place.

 

Besides that, the more "factionless" content there is, the less relevant a characters's faction becomes. If we're all running the same content anyway, why does it matter whether you're a hero or a villain?

I think this is spot Mjolnerd...It's unlikely in the short term we true "new" content, and if we did it would be best spent where most of the characters are (4.5 heroes to every villain).  And the sales and usage of CoV has always been much lower than blueside even when the game was live, so I also agree that for a lot of people (myself included) they just don't want to be redside.

Even neutral content, will just people in the same ratios as today.

I'm in favor of giving a bonus to the redside or goldside to incentive people playing that content so that it's easier to team.  It's by far the easiest solution and it's one that can be easily course corrected if everyone decides they are going to jump redside/goldside to get an extra bonus...

Just my $0.02 less Federal and State Taxes and Tariffs...

I think people are "coming back home" still and probably will be for several more months. They are revisiting their main toons and their favorite content and grinding the high end rewards to grape out their sets.

Once people have gotten this stage out of their system we'll see two things, a slow decline of server load and more interest in Red side content. (I think we'll also start to see other COH revival groups generating interesting content and drawing off a few folks too.)

Interest is maximally hot right now and nostalgia is setting everything on fire mostly Blue side.

But keep in mind, even on the Blue side with 5 Atlas Parks and 3 Talos Islands and 2 PIs... the Hollows will never again see the likes of the Taxibot service. Sure you can get people to go out and do Frostfire, but I've not been able to get a Transcendence Trial going since we've started back and the zone is essentially empty. Perez Park... wow I remember herding the blobs back in the day... usually only as 2 or 3 people in the whole zone. I've sat chatting in Croatoa for 20 mins on the broadcast channel and never gotten a reply.

That's just the way things are right now.

But keep in mind, even on the Blue side with 5 Atlas Parks and 3 Talos Islands and 2 PIs... the Hollows will never again see the likes of the Taxibot service. Sure you can get people to go out and do Frostfire, but I've not been able to get a Transcendence Trial going since we've started back and the zone is essentially empty. Perez Park... wow I remember herding the blobs back in the day... usually only as 2 or 3 people in the whole zone. I've sat chatting in Croatoa for 20 mins on the broadcast channel and never gotten a reply.

 

That's just the way things are right now.

Some of that is that contacts would force you to the Hollows or Perez Park, and they don't do that any more...

I do remember learning so many life lessons in the Hollows about the game mechanics, and I totally remember patiently herding Hydra's in Perez...

This is totally balanced.

So you think Red side is gimped with numbers? You should really avoid the Gold areas then...

 

 

This is totally balanced.

The ratios are pretty consistent, but the numbers are deceiving as others have pointed out and completely ignore the Gold zones when it comes to separation.

I think extra support for Redside community would go a long way.  A "Villains" top level Forum, and picking one server as the unofficial Redside server, seems like it would help a lot without requiring any dev time.  If most redside toons moved to whatever server has 238 in that pic, we'd have the population of one of the blue servers and a reasonable shot at getting groups.

I can just have my Masterminds, Doms, and Brutes on the hero side so there is no point in being a villain. I never felt like a villain, but when I did Mayhems and Bank missions. You mainly attack other villains.

The hero zones also look nicer as well. I did like my Night Widow though, I will have to play on the dark side at least until level 20.

Redside has been lowpop since redside came out. Nothing wrong with that. Quality over quantity.

I don’t thing throwing incentives onto Villain content would encourage more players to play Villain side. It would encourage some players to switch just enough to do that particular content, and nothing else. Then what? Put incentives on all Villain content? Then it feels like a disadvantage to play Hero side and balance still isn’t met. As others have said, Hero side has had the high population since day 1, for probably a variety of reasons. And it’s never balanced equally dispute how easy it is to switch. Even now, when you can change at level 1 just by walking to Pocket D and talking to a seagull, you still find a disparity in the numbers.

I don’t thing throwing incentives onto Villain content would encourage more players to play Villain side. It would encourage some players to switch just enough to do that particular content, and nothing else. Then what? Put incentives on all Villain content? Then it feels like a disadvantage to play Hero side and balance still isn’t met. As others have said, Hero side has had the high population since day 1, for probably a variety of reasons. And it’s never balanced equally dispute how easy it is to switch. Even now, when you can change at level 1 just by walking to Pocket D and talking to a seagull, you still find a disparity in the numbers.

It might help.  We had double XP when the Homecoming servers first started up, we could give all villain content XP+1/2 and that would help draw some people over.  Heck, my toons would probably be split 50/50 between red and blueside if I thought I could ever find anyone redside.  My experiences so far were like what I was seeing on a low pop server just before shut down.  At 3 am.  Which is exactly when I'm likely to be playing.

But say if someone's standing about in Steel Canyon "35 MM blue LFG, please anybody" and someone pops up to say "Redside team looking for 35ish members", and that someone knows they can get xp+1/2 from that?  People just might join. 

Hell, Null Gull is simple enough (for people who read the forums anyway), what if you didn't even need him to cross over?