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I would be OK with a bit of wonky physics if it meant having at least SOME entertaining debris issues. Where can I find more info about this Michael guy and his work on it?

That's a good start, I'm wondering how is this being done - finding an old Ageia card and using it with a new version of Windows? Using an old card with an old version of windows? Somehow figuring out how to enable the feature without having the appropriate card? God looking at that debris makes me want to turn on Hurricane and watch it spin around like a washing machine...

Let's take a look at Enhancements, Inventions, and all the fun that comes with them. 1) Enhancement Basics Starting at the basics! Enhancements usually come in five 'types'. Training, Dual-Origin, Single Origin, Hamidon (Special) Origin, and Invention. Training enhancements can be slotted by anyone, but they are (comparatively) super weak. They usually boost most powers by 5-10% or so. They only boost one aspect of your powers. Dual-origin enhancements are specific to two different origins, but they are TWICE as potent as Training (IE : 10-20%). For Example, a DO 'amulet' enhancement may only be slottable by Natural-origin or Magic-origin characters. Single-origin enhancements can ONLY be slotted by a specific origin, but they are twice as potent as Dual-Origin. (20-40%) Hamidon Origin enhancements (Also called 'Special Origin' or 'Special Enhancements') can be slotted by any origin, and they enhance TWO aspects of a power instead of one (Such as Damage & Accuracy, or Recharge & Endurance Reduction, etc). These can't normally be purchased, and are found in special encounters. Each power boost is roughly the same as a Single Origin. Invention Origin enhancements are crafted instead of found (usually) and behave differently than the other four. I'll explain these in greater detail later on. With all these enhancements, you can only use an enhancement that's 3 levels above or 3 levels below you. Enhancements over 3 levels can't be put into your powers, and below 3 levels provides ZERO effect. Enhancements get a bonus if they're higher level than you, and are weaker if they're lower level. So if you're level 20, you can slot enhancements up to level 23, or down to level 17. Level 16 or lower won't have any effect on your powers. Always keep an eye on your enhancements when you level - it can suck to have a power suddenly lose 30% of its effectiveness because you've outleveled your enhancements! Training, Dual-Origin (DO), and Single-Origin (SO) enhancements can be found OR purchased from vendors - but DO and SO can only be bought at higher levels. DO enhancements start appearing on vendors at level 15, so you need to be 12 or higher to buy them. SO enhancements appear on vendors at level 25, so you need to be 22 to buy them. Some trials and missions reward higher-quality enhancements as a bonus for being tougher. All those 'DFB' (Death from Below) groups you see advertised in chat are popular in part because they let low-level characters acquire random Single-Origin enhancements. Other trials, task forces, and similarly challenging content can give rewards normally only available to higher-level players, to encourage group play. Hamidon Origins can only be found from defeating super tough fights, at the end of task forces, and similarly rare circumstances. Until Inventions came out, they were considered the best possible enhancements in the game; even now they're very desirable since many Invention enhancements can be quite costly and rare. Invention Origin enhancements, IOs, change things up from normal enhancements in several ways. First, they NEVER EXPIRE when you outlevel them. Instead of expiring, they have varying power levels based on their level. A level 10 IO will give the same bonus to a power if you're level 10, or if you're level 50. Because of this, IOs early on are much weaker than later. You still can only slot an IO that's at most 3 levels above you. Low-level IOs have roughly equivalent power to training enhancements, mid-level IOs have roughly equivalent power to Dual-Origins, and so on. The highest level IOs (Level 50+) are a bit stronger than Single-Origin enhancements, making them potentially the strongest in the game. IOs won't need replacement as often due to their inability to be outleveled, but you'll want to replace them as you gain levels to ensure they're giving enough of a bonus to be worth keeping. After all, a 7% boost to a power that doesn't expire is not worth keeping over a 33% boost even if it does, right? IOs can affect one statistic of a power, or multiple - they can be part of a 'set' which grants bonuses the more enhancements of that set are slotted, and in some instances do unique things like changing a knockBACK effect to a knockDOWN effect, or boosting HP/Endurance, or even granting a bonus to powers other than the one it's slotted in. IOs are primarily crafted. While it's possible to get one here or there from a trial or other mission, this is very rare. Crafting is a whole system by itself, so let's take a look at that! 2) Crafting IOs - Getting started. So you want to craft an IO! There's 4 things you need - The invention workbench, the invention Salvage, the invention recipe, and Inf. Workbenches are located in very specific places, the easiest way to find them is to go to the University in Cap Au Diable or Steel Canyon. If you are in a supergroup, you can put workbenches in the SG base. The second thing you need is salvage. Salvage drops at random from enemies you fight, the higher class of enemy (Bosses, Elite Bosses, Arch-Villains) have a higher chance to drop salvage than lower-classes (Minions and Lieutenants). Underlings can NEVER drop salvage, so don't try farming easy-to-kill enemies that spawn infinitely. Salvage is also easy to find on the Auction House (Wentworths for Heroes, Black Market for villains). The last thing you need is a recipe. Unlike other games, recipes for IOs are single-use. So if you want to make 3 healing IOs, you need 3 Healing recipes. Even different levels use different recipes - you could find a level 10 Healing recipe from a random drop, and purchase a level 30 healing recipe. Recipes for common IOs (Healing, Recharge, etc) can be bought from the workbench while recipes from sets have to be found at random. The AH is a great place to find the rarer recipes, or to (hopefully) get the common recipes cheaper than buying them from the workbench. If you need Inf, you can always consider selling off recipes you don't need! Once you have the recipe & Salvage components, go to the workbench and hit create. IOs tend to be more expensive than other enhancements because the recipe can cost influence, the salvage (if you don't have it already) costs influence from the AH, and it costs money to craft as well. Be aware that trying to replace all your enhancements with IO can deplete your inf very, very fast! One additional tip : If you make enough IOs of a particular type and level, you can MEMORIZE the recipe. Doing so makes it so that you no longer have to pay to purchase a recipe, and as such can craft IO's for significantly less cost. When you craft enough of a particular IO at a specific level, you earn a badge. If you're badge-hunting, then you can earn a total of 45 memorization badges. In addition, certain badges will grant you bonuses in the form of increasing the maximum amount of salvage or recipes you can carry! For details on how many enhancements of a specific level you need to earn the badge, see this wiki page : https://cityofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/Memorization_Badges 3) Invention Sets Sets are different from normal IOs in three ways : First, some sets can be 'unique'. If a set is unique, then you can only have one enhancement in that set slotted in ANY of your powers. Other times, specific IOs from a set might be unique - such as the global recharge reduction from 'Luck of the Draw'. The other pieces of the set aren't unique, but the 6th piece which offers a global always-on bonus is. Second, sets provide different bonuses for different pieces. For the 'Panacea' healing set as an example, there's 6 different enhancements : Heal/Endurance, Endurance/Recharge,Heal/Recharge, Heal/Endurance/Recharge, Heal, and Boost HP/Endurance. The first five pieces are like normal Healing, Endurance Reduction, or Recharge reduction enhancements. The 6th is a unique bonus that boosts your maximum HP and endurance. All together they boost a single power's healing by 97.49%, reduces the recharge by 73.78%, and reduces the endurance cost by 73.78%. Last, sets provide unique bonuses the more you slot them into a specific power. As an example, here are the bonuses for the 'Panacea' set I mentioned above : 2 Slotted : Gain 2.5% endurance recovery, 2.25% smash/lethal resist, and 3.75% mez resist (Immobilize, Hold, sleep, stun, etc). 3 Slotted : Gain 10% HP Regen and 10% knockback resist. 4 Slotted : Gain 1.5% max HP, 3% Fire/Cost resist, and an additional 5% mez resist. 5 Slotted : Gain 7.5% recharge reduction to all powers, and 7.5% range to all powers. 6 Slotted : Boost healing by 6%, gain 3.13% melee defense and 1.56% lethal/Smashing defense. The important thing is these bonuses only apply if the enhancements are slotted into the SAME POWER. If you put 3 of them into 'Heal Other' and then 3 of them into 'Heal Self', you do not get all 6 of the bonuses, you only get the 2 and 3 slot ones. Put all 6 enhancements in the same power and get all 6 bonuses for maximum effect. Now with sets being super powerful, having slot bonuses, and many times unique effects you wonder why would anyone want normal IOs or other enhancements? The tradeoff of course is since set recipes can't be bought from the Workbench, you're 100% reliant upon them dropping for you (rare) or buying them from the AH. Buying from the AH could be difficult and/or expensive when it comes to rare, hard-to-get and popular sets so be prepared to spend quite a lot of money or search for a while to find the recipe you want! 4) Consignments - CoH's unique auction house system Since the Invention system and the AH go hand-in-hand, let's go over the consignment system a bit. The AH system is very different from what you're used to in other games because you go in blind. The way it works is this : Seller puts up a recipe on the AH saying 'Sell it for 10,000 inf.' Buyer #1 sees the recipe is being sold, but does not see how much the recipe costs. He'll place a bid to try to buy it for 5000 inf. This bid isn't high enough to buy it right away, but the bid stays in the system. Buyer #2 sees the recipe and is more impatient, he bids 100,000 inf. Since this is above Seller's cost, Seller gets the full 100,000 and Buyer #2 gets the recipe instantly. Buyer #1's bid stays in the system until he either cancels it, or until someone lists another copy of the recipe for 5000 or less inf. This can mean some difficulty in trying to know 'what should I sell this recipe for?' and 'How much should I bid for this recipe?'. To help that, there is a 'history' where you can see how much previous items have sold for. This isn't perfect, but it's a good starting point. If there's something you REALLY want, you can always place a bid, cancel if it doesn't win, place another (higher) bid, cancel if you don't win, and keep going until you find the price high enough to get that recipe. Keep in mind that selling an item for a large amount may get few buyers, but you might get lucky and sell for a lot of inf to an impatient person - or if it's a very rare and sought-after recipe! The AH lets you sell all sorts of things. Recipes, Salvage, and enhancements (Both crafted and dropped) can all be sold. If you completed a difficult trial but the enhancement you got at the end isn't useful for you, put it up on the AH and get some cash out of it!

Yes, the majority of the game is about levelling. And that's fine. The thing is, the early levels are super, super boring and suck tremendously because you're missing 80% of your powers, and almost all the best and most enjoyable powers are the ones that come later on. I do rush through levels, but only early ones. Once I hit ~24-26 I slow down because at that point I've got most of the fun stuff and I can enjoy the levelling experience more leisurely. That said, DFB is amazing for so many reasons. The fact that it's such good XP at such a low level is incredible. I've joined a DFB on a freshly made level 1, and exited at level 8. Sure, I could have done contact missions and gotten 1 level every 2 or so missions, but it's a lot slower of a grind. If I make a mastermind, doing DFB three times is enough to get my mid-tier minions which is a major milestone. Then there's the fact that we get a whopping 5 SOs doing it; early on when you're stuck with the measly 8-10% boost from training enhancements, the sudden 33-40% boost from a SO is tremendous. There's no other good reliable sources for that many SOs early on. And those temp powers are pretty great too - the accuracy one is a flat 12% tohit, while the recovery one is super helpful early on before you have SOs in stamina. Just getting them early on can make a drastic difference once you're off doing other things.

I feel like if you want to be the healer that focuses on the team the best option is to be a Mastermind, so you can focus on your heals and let your pets just do their thing. You can focus on topping people off and helping out, while your pets contribute damage. One of my favorite 'pure support' builds is a Thugs/Thermal MM which has zero attacks (I use a blackwand and my apprentice charm during periods where there's little to no incoming damage) but instead focuses on buffing, group-wide topping off health with warmth, cauterize for spot healing, and phoenix if someone does manage to fall. Just because I myself am staring at the team's life bars doesn't mean I'm not helping DPS because my thugs just do their thing. If we need to focus down a specific enemy, I do have an attack button that'll focus them but otherwise they just attack whatever they want. It also means that you can, potentially, do some solo work if you really felt like it. Options are never a bad thing to have!

Ultimately there's one important thing to remember :

I like to think of it this way: There's a specific combination of powers that fits me perfectly, but I don't know what combination it is. I'm going to experiment with different combinations until I find it. Plenty of stuff will feel fun, but nothing yet has been QUITE what I feel like I want, and so I'll keep trying until I get that perfect combo.

Ultimately the question here is, is it more fun to be given access to something or to have to 'earn' access to something. And that's not a question every player will agree with. There's arguments for each - if you 'earn' access to something it makes you tend to appreciate that a bit more. When you only had a single costume slot, and you suddenly unlocked your second - you were elated because now that option that was previously denied to you becomes available. That sense of achievement can make rewards more special than they otherwise would be. Some people really love that sense of satisfaction and accomplishment you get when you unlock a new special privilege, and they look forward to each new unlock for that reason. But it also does mean locking people out of content. People who overlook that second slot mission, people who don't progress to the point where they can do it, and so on - they are left out. Some people can't play much (Time issues and the like) and just want to dip their waters into character customization after hearing how many options CoH has. They don't want to grind to level 20 or 30 or whatever. Granting them early access means they can experiment and have fun and all that, but it also means that now those privileges are no longer 'special', there's no sense of achievement for it. Being given a reward for free versus working for a reward is a discussion that pops up constantly in games, and there's no right or wrong answer for everyone. Personally I prefer to lock the stuff behind missions to give me goals to work towards, milestones to be pushing forward to, and a reason to go out of my way to unlock something I otherwise couldn't have. But that's just because I love that feeling of accomplishment and achievement.

Another thing to consider, that I just thought of : Damage types. Specifically, if you're the kind of person who fights a lot of CoT then mercs will suffer badly. CoT spectres have a ridiculous 40% resistance to both Smashing and Lethal damage, which hurts Mercs badly as every single damaging attack that soldiers and spec-ops use is lethal or smashing. I don't know if there's any enemies that are heavily energy resistant off the top of my head, but I know that when I play my Robots I clear CoT stuff so much easier. (CoT spectres take 30% MORE damage from energy, making robots their natural enemy) Thugs are especially bad because even their Boss Minion is pure smashing damage, while the others are lethal. Beasts, Mercs, Ninjas are mainly lethal/smashing with the bosses offering more variety with Boss damage types. Necromancers get a lot of versatility since the toxic damage from zombies is mixed with negative energy and smashing damage. And demons are all over the place thanks to each of their Tier 1 minions having different damage types.

Primarily because there's more content available for heroes. Hero-side there's 11 normal 'city' zones, 9 Hazard Zones, 6 Trial Zones, and the tutorial zone. Villain-side there's 7 normal city zones, 1 hazard zone, 1 trial zone, and the tutorial zone. Heroes can fight off 10 giant monsters, Villains have 5. Heroes have 20 task forces, villains have 10 strike forces. There's 4 co-operative ones. Second, people go where the population is - since there's so many more heroes it's easier to find a team, easier to do groups, and thus more people play them. Fewer villains means fewer options for teams, strikes, et cetera. And a big one is that I do see a lot of people who dislike villain zones. Grandville in particular is bad for villains with little vertical movement abilities. Thanks to prestige powers and abundant jetpack inventions/temp powers from mayhems/etc this isn't as bad as it used to be, but I still see complaints. Personally I love the villain side more, Mayhems are much more fun than Safeguards, but I wish there was more 'hero' groups and fewer infighting between villain groups. Villains spend WAY too much time fighting other villain groups with newspaper and other missions; the only hero groups really are Longbow, Legacy Chain, and Wyvern. If they would have added in another 3 hero groups and give the villains a more active 'evil' role and I'd be so very, very happy.

Honestly I don't care in the slightest about the performance increase/decrease. What I care about is that when AGEIA is enabled, it produces a huge amount of persistent physics objects that otherwise vanish. Used bullet shells, debris from trash cans and destroyed objects in Mayhem/safeguard missions. Leaves from trees. Rocks and rubble from stone powers. They would stick around, and interact with powers in useless but visually fantastic ways. Need to see what I mean for yourself? Here's a couple (low quality) videos showing off what it was like. Without being able to turn AGEIA Physics on, those objects are no longer persistent. The shells eject from weapons but the second they hit the floor they vanish entirely. Trash and debris does its own animation then vanishes into thin air. All I want is to be able to turn on the feature that makes those shells become permanent (While you're on the same map, at least) objects that can be interacted with by powers. The old, old option would actually have a max count of 1500 of these 'persistent' physics objects in the map : I never had an AGEIA card, but I know that old nVidia cards would allow this to be turned on because at one point, ages ago, I had these physics enabled and working. I ran around with a Merc/Storm MM and they'd use full auto to just SPRAY the area with bullet shells, and then use Hurricane to suck 'em up and swirl 'em around. Gravity Controllers were amazing too - Lift would not only grab the target, but EVERYTHING Around the target would be flung up then down. Gravity Distortion would suck up all kinds of things. Super-strength stuff like hand clap would send everything flying in all directions. All I want is for those 1500 persistent physics objects to be present in the world and to be affected by my powers like they always used to.

I tried these and they work PERFECTLY, thank you! This probably works but holy crap is it convoluted, Healix's way is so much easier

I'd like to make a macro for specific powers to toggle between them. IE : A Macro for a single key that toggles between Fly and Hover. If I am flying and I press the button once, it turns off flying and turns on Hover. I press it a second time and it turns hover off and flying back on. Or the same thing for Super Jump/Combat Jumping. I asked in Discord and was given info but I probably messed it up because it's not working for me now.

Sadly I could find nothing helpful within the profile inspector. This is gonna drive me nuts I can already tell.

I joined a frostfire team over the weekend on my thermal mastermind, we had some fun and killed us an elite boss. Afterwards, I was flying back to Paragon City and noticed a level 11 tanker (I was 18 at the time) getting into a fight with way too many trolls. So being the meddling do-gooder I am, I started chain-healing him. He didn't seem to understand that for all intents and purposes I was making him invulnerable to the trolls, since I could outheal their damage easily, so he ended up running back to get them zapped by police drones. But hey, I tried!

I did some looking into that 'refactoring' that Colette mentioned, and it mainly leads me to SEGS. I'm a bit confused about that. My assumption about SEGS was that they were trying to recreate the server-side stuff from scratch, since the code was never made available. Once the server code was made available, the advantage that SEGS had would have been twofold - being 100% legal by containing no code that was written by the NCSoft employees, and being potentially faster by being more optimized. But all the SEGS stuff I see seems to mainly be server side, and I don't see much about client. So I have no idea if that's going to be a future option or no. If CoH is using the latest PhysX SDK, however, it introduces possibilities. Slight, perhaps, but possibilities. Perhaps there's advanced options using Profile Inspector, I'll head home and dig around there to see if there's anything I can find that might enable support. I know it probably seems stupid to fixate on this, but it was seriously an amazing feature and I had so much fun with it way back when.

That'd be amazing, though I hope that someone out there within the extremely talented modder communities takes pity upon us and create some high res textures. I know a lot of games out there have had 4k retextures, but since CoH/V has been gone there has never been any reason for them to take a look our way. If I could get 4k textures AND the persistent shells and other physics objects? I'd be in 7th heaven. Well I mean I'm ALREADY in 7th heaven having this game back, but I'd be in 8th heaven or something.

If you're that upset about it, OP, just avoid outdoor missions and focus on doing indoor ones.

XP and infamy rewards from killing a mob are based on the percent of the enemy's life you damage. If an enemy is standing in a fire patch and goes down to 25% health, and you kill it - you only get 25% of the XP and Inf, even if no other player attacked it. If you and another player (Not on your team) each do 50% damage to a mob, each of you get 50% XP and Inf. That said, 'kill stealing' is a super minor thing to be upset about in this game because you'll both get mission credit for defeated enemies and even if someone does tag a mob you almost have killed, you'll still get the bulk of the credit and be able to move on to other enemies that much faster. Even then, it's rarely ever worth grinding outdoor mobs for XP/Inf versus just doing newspaper/scanner missions. The only real reason I could see that you'd want to farm specific enemies in an outdoor area is to farm salvage drops, and those are so random it seems like it's better to just do missions and buy what you need from the AH. If you are on a team, the XP and Inf is shared no matter what - otherwise defenders and healers would get shafted. Sometimes, in some areas, there are missions for outdoor stuff that are simply limited. A few that I can think of off the top of my head are many of the 'Kill X enemies of Y type' missions, such as Agent Carter's missions in Mercy (Kill 15 longbow, destroy 5 legacy chain runes, etc) or the anti-Vahzilok missions in Atlas Park where you have to find and kill several of them outside a charity event. Sometimes those specific enemies are easy to find in groups, other times they're semi-rare or not spawning for whatever reason. In those instances, getting mad that someone else hit an enemy you're fighting seems a bit petty. Yes, they took a tiny fraction of the reward from you - but they're just trying to get past that mission same as you. Sooner or later your contact will be giving you an indoor mission that nobody else can access unless they're on your team, so you can move at your own pace and not worry about it.

That is so super disappointing. I kind of wonder if there'd be a way to enable 'persistent physics objects' (Bullet shells, paper and scraps from destroyed mayhem objects, etc) without the Ageia support using some config file or something? I dunno. I know the server source code is out there, I don't know about the client-side and since all the physics stuff was purely client side I have no idea if some bored coder or experienced modder from other games would ever be interested in being lured over to take a look and enable those defunct options.

If I could add a new zone, it'd be a trial zone similar to the RWZ, where heroes and villains would both be present. Unlike the RWZ, they would not be able to group up together - instead they'd still be separate and competing indirectly in PvE content. It'd be underground vast cavern zone accessable by both heroes and villains. It'd contain five massive rock spires stretching from the ground up to the ceiling, and each one would be controlled by a separate group. One would be a Dr Aeon laboratory (Arachnos & Villain entrance), another would be taken over by the Circle of Thorns. A third would be a living extension of the Devouring Earth. A fourth would be cordoned off and taken over by Longbow (Hero Entrance), and the fifth would be a Nemesis lair. All five groups would be fighting it out in the center, and every so often one of the three non-player groups would release a giant monster from their spire that players could gang up on and attack. The CoT would be a stone golem held together by vines, the Devouring Earth would be a massive headless quadruped slime monster, and the Nemesis would be a huge drill tank. Different enemy groups would drop unique salvage that's turned into contacts on the Arachnos/Longbow sides, and reward unique temp buffs/powers and some enhancements. If both sides hand in enough unique salvage, a special zone event would occur where Arachnos & Longbow's fight accidentally triggers a magma detonation in the center of the cavern that would release a giant magma monster (Arachnos side), and a giant robot (Longbow side) that would battle. Players would fight alongside one monster or the other to try to beat the enemy directly and indirectly (IE : Seal off a volcanic vent to weaken the magma monster), or take down a shield generator for the robot, or just deal a tiny bit of damage directly by fighting alongside your team's monster. The victorious side gaining a substantial bonus in salvage alongside a zone-wide boost for their players. When entering players are warned that the battle has already made the cavern too unstable, adding extra fighting could cause everything to collapse, so they're restricted from fighting one another and instead aiding in the fight against the other groups. If one side or the other lacks enough players and it's horribly uneven, special 'mercenary' contacts will allow heroes to fight for Arachnos, or Villains for Longbow, to even things up.

I never had a separate Physics card myself, but I can say 100% for certain that I have had the Physics enabled in the past. Or rather, there used to be a setting SOMEHOW somewhere within the game that made things like bullet shells actually 'stay' in the world and could be interacted with by various powers. I'm not alone in this, I noticed this post where someone else remembers the same thing. Since I never had a separate card, I'm sure that somehow I got it working with my nVidia graphics card back when they'd advertise that PhysX was a thing. If so, in theory, there should be some way to re-enable this, right? ----- Back in the day I used to run a Merc/Storm mastermind. The mercs would use full auto and just spray bullets and casings everywhere. I'd go through a warehouse, then run back out because there'd be literally thousands and thousands of shell casings littering the warehouse floor, and I'd have fun sucking them up with Hurricane and sending them all flying.

I remember playing the game all those many years ago, I got an nVidia graphics card and it had the PhysX support. When I turned it on, I noticed some amazing stuff - used shells from my (and my pets) guns would not disappear when fired, they'd LITTER THE GROUND. There were shells everywhere, and my powers would affect them. I'd see grenades send shells flying all over the room, storm powers would blast objects and shells everywhere around with gusts of wind. My machine these days is light years ahead of that, and while it doesn't have the dedicated PhysX support it used to I imagine it should have no problems handling the extra opjects. Is there any way to turn all those physics objects back on? To make used shells from guns actually stay around and interact with powers? Is there any way to make all that fun and uselessly cool stuff still happen? EDIT : Here's what I mean! Watch these videos to see why some people think enabling physics is desirable!

So if I understand everything here, if I wanted to be able to group with heroes and do hero shit but still progress through the villain storyline and get a patron, I'd want to go rogue and stay rogue until I get all the powers I want. If I want to feel like I 'earned' the alignment change I do it normally, and if I don't care about that I can just use the magical bird in the dance dimension to change instantly. Then if I want to see all the hero content I missed, I'd go full on hero, go to Ouroboros, and do all the previous arcs. I think I have a plan now, fellows!

Help me out here a bit guys. I played the game religiously from issues 1 through 9, and far less after that. The rogue stuff is a bit unfamiliar to me. From how I understand it, you pick a faction and play it until level 20 - then you get the chance to do 'morality' missions. And in doing so you can join an intermediate alignment (Rogue/Vigilante) where you can access zones from both hero side AND villain side. That's where my understanding breaks down. Let's say I want to make my Arachnos Soldier into a rogue. Does this mean I now have double the content? I can access hero missions AND villain missions? There's no penalty for doing either? If so, why would I want to proceed past rogue into becoming an actual hero?