ZemX

And yet people run ten times more Positrons and CItadels as any redside SF I've seen and that's on Everlasting where you'll also find the highest (or maybe better to say least lowest?) ratio of villains to heroes among the HC servers. Speaking of which, maybe someone here who still believes the population imbalance is due predominantly to people not liking to play bad guys can explain WHY the ratio of villains to heroes is double on Everlasting, the unofficial RP server (where people should theoretically care about in-character issues like this more than anybody), what it is on Excelsior. I just want to see if "Excelsior players are twice as emotionally sensitive to being the bad guys as Everlasting players" is the hill anyone wants to die on. 🤪 And just to be totally clear, this can be YOUR reason for not playing redside and that's perfectly valid for you. The only thing I dispute is the notion that anything approaching a majority of players overall cares one whit about the pretend morality of their pretend characters in this MMO.

It's aesthetically annoying but I don't know that there's an actual delay between activation and damage application or if it's just an animation goof. Haven't timed it. If I think about it, I usually try to draw the staff by hitting AS early, before I reach the enemy, if I plan to AS from Hide. I did notice yesterday my rad melee stalker was sometimes not properly animating AS either and there's not even a weapon involved in that case. Not sure what's up. When it happened, I'd just stand there with glowing green fists until the hit landed. Can't say I noticed that before, but it's been awhile since I've played that one.

I mean, I did try to google it and I found the game show reference which sounded like a joke about people who make up nonsense with numbers so... it didn't SOUND like a compliment. 🤪

The numbers tell you there are fewer villains. They don't tell you why. I am not disputing there are fewer villains. I am disputing the notion that it's because people don't like playing the bad guy. i.e. It's the villainy. The aesthetic of playing the role of a villain. If this is what you believe then it's you refusing to accept that this is nothing more than a correlation. Villains are bad. There are fewer villains. People must not like playing bad guys.

I don't even know what that means but it sounds bad, so I'll just assume you disagreed with me. It's not...er... numberwang. Nor is the lack of villain population an illusion. Anyone can check server stats and see there are around 3-8x more people at any given moment playing heroes as playing villains. So having checked population, most people will say to themselves, "My goodness! If I want an easy time getting a team, I should start blueside, definitely!" So yes, it's self-perpetuating. The larger population attracts more population in a game where people want to team up (which I usually figure most people want to do in an MMO). Are they? I usually join teams advertised on LFG (yeah, I'm a follower... sue me) not shouted out in a zone like Atlas or Ouro. I don't farm, so if this is how farmers coordinate, it's not something I know about. It's not that there aren't more people hanging around those places, but it's hardly what I'd call a big crowd. I'm on Everlasting, so I know the RPers tend to hang in Pocket D, but that's about it. As for what "WoW figured out" really, I don't know why everyone wants to ignore the amount of content available but I keep being told "nobody" cares about it. And yet, MMOs with largely balanced content for their factions tend to have *gasp* reasonably balanced factions! At least better balanced then we have here. What an odd coincidence eh?

You guys are fast. I was going to say Dark Miasma Corruptor or Defender too but... interesting reading. I've never given Darkness Affinity much thought but suddenly I want to try a Mind/Dark controller myself.

This is not what anyone would call a representative sample of a population. So yes, you would need more than that. I would too so I am not saying I am proven correct either. But I am putting down arguments to support my case. All you and anyone else agreeing with you have been doing is saying "Blue is good, Red is bad. Blue has more people. It's because people like playing Good." I can provide precisely the same line of reasoning substituting "has more content" for good and "has less content" for bad. Both are correlations only. Dismissing without reasoning doesn't make your case. These are both sci-fantasy MMOs with factions, swords, sorcery, guns, and superpowers. Attempting to claim there is a fundamentally different kind of MMO player between the two is stretching it. You'd basically have to claim that somehow the type of gamer who plays SWTOR doesn't care about the morality of their avatars' chosen faction but CoH players do. Meanwhile all I am saying is... they have balanced content and balanced (mostly) factions. We have unbalanced content and unbalanced population. Which one of us is really stretching farther to make their case?

You have offered no evidence for the claim that "many" people don't like playing the bad guy. Meanwhile, I can look over at SWTOR and see nobody having any problem whatsoever playing Imperials. WoW players have no problem rolling up undead, orcs, and dark elves. Now, I'm sure having said this people will come running to inform me that their Imperials or Horde are actually not evil, but c'mon. These are both classically "bad guy" factions and no, the vast majority have no problems playing them. Lightside Sith in SWTOR are not "good guys". Still no trouble playing them. Why? Because those games have balanced content. Meanwhile the content disparity in this game is fact, not opinion. You think that people care about the good vs evil but you can't show that's the case. There are hardly zero restrictions. It is simply easier to team blueside if you are natively a blueside alignment. If you prefer to hop into the far more abundant blueside DFBs or low level TFs to level, it's just plain simpler to start blueside than it is to go villain and then rogue. So why would you?

Yeah. I've started most of my characters in Praetoria and most of them have been Stalkers. The number of ambushes is off the scale. Whoever designed these arcs LOVED the idea of ambushes and figured if one ambush was good then nine must be nine times as good! No easy sneaking in and out in a lot of these missions. They also didn't do the best job giving hostages an ability to navigate stair cases. Especially the super long winding ones that lead up or down from the underground levels. Especially fun when a timer is ticking down to another ambush and you're like... "Really? You're stuck on the railing going up the stairs again? We're like thirty feet from the exit door here and you've got ten seconds to figure that out before I leave you right there for the goon squad to find!!!"

I've read your other posts on red vs. blue. You also said you think most people play blueside because they like facerolling easy content. So it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense that you also think they care about the quality of writing. If most people soloed as much as you do and cared as much as you do about the writing, they'd all start either gold or redside and then move redside. But they don't. That's pretty compelling evidence that most people don't share these priorities. This is also a feedback loop. More people choose blueside because there are more people blueside. If they primarily soloed the game, they wouldn't care where the most people are. So most people team up for content, which also supports the idea they aren't reading the stories anymore. Changing that would require some counter-balancing incentive LIKE more content or higher rewards or something. If better writing were that counter-balance, it would have worked a long time ago.

That might be your reason, but we're talking the whole playerbase here and it's ridiculous to ignore the elephant that has always been in the room: CoH has more content. Always has had more content. Always will have more content. And yes, that is absolutely because it came first. Where was their entire customer base when CoV released? Blueside. How much content did CoV release with? Less than blueside. Were they going to spend each subsequent issue release adding MORE content to redside than blueside to bring them to parity on content all the while pissing off their existing customer base that was blueside? Of course not. This got talked to death on the original forums. This is just how it was. Redside wasn't doomed by people wanting to play heroes. They still play heroes. They were playing villains and anti-heroes blueside before CoV was even a thing. Not going to down-vote you because I disagree, but c'mon. You're going to ignore how much more content is Blueside and chalk up the population disparity to... heroism? For most who play, and this goes for pretty much any MMO... content is king.

Seems like nobody actually answered this one yet. The answer is that the cel shading option affects what you see, not what anyone else sees. If I have the option off, I see the same thing you see when you have the option off and vice versa. If you're curious about whether a CC judge is using cel shading ask them. I would suspect most of the time the answer is "no". Some people like it. I don't care for it aesthetically, myself. Which is good, because it doesn't seem to perform all that well for me either. It's just one data point, but all the screenshots I saw of the Anniversary CC were without cel shading. I think it's probably a pretty uncommon option for most. Beyond that, there are certainly other graphics options like character detail level that might affect how someone else sees your costume. But as everyone else has pointed out, it's subjective anyway. Whatever options they are using, they are seeing all the costumes with the same options at least, so there's that.

I said alignment, not side. They are different. A vigilante and a hero are both blue-siders but they are different alignments. What I am curious to know is what percentage plays Vigilantes/Rogues vs. Heroes/Villains. It matters because I think most of the "players don't like being villains" is nonsense. Players just don't care that much about the story, for the most part. They play where the content is and it's simply more convenient to base yourself blueside than redside, even with the alignments that allow crossing over. You still run into annoying cross-teaming issues. Not insurmountable. Just annoying. It might help a little if those last barriers were dropped and you could just make a team of any eight people no matter where they are. If they can gather in one zone they can work together. If not, some have to drop. You work it out. But there's no need to prevent people joining or kick people for the zone they are in. The content the team runs will sort all that out eventually. It won't ever bring the two sides to parity in population though and that's just the way it is. Only the same level of content on both sides would do that... and that ship sailed long ago.

I don't know why people think this is a major factor. Or even the somewhat greater difficulty I sometimes hear. Redside has always been less populated. It started with less content and it's always had less content. The devs weren't going to spend more time bringing redside up to parity when most of their established players were blueside. Going Rogue was them finally admitting, officially, that would always be the case so they just opened the gates to both playgrounds. Blueside has more people because it has more people. It's self-perpetuating. Without some reason to move towards equilibrium, why would it happen? So it makes sense to think of incentives, but I think it also runs afoul of the same reason the original devs didn't try to add exclusive perks or favor redside with more content updates. It's going to upset a lot of people who already play the game and are fine playing blueside. I don't think this is the way. I think the only thing you can do is continue what Going Rogue started by lowering barriers to cross-teaming where possible. If there is a way not to be booted from a team just because you're from different factions, that would be nice. It should all be sorted out anyway when the team tries to gather in one zone. The game doesn't need to prevent the invites from working or boot people from the team because they went to the wrong zone. I don't know about anyone else, but that alone would make it easier for be to home more of my characters redside without having to deal with the inconvenience of joining blue teams and then getting randomly booted for going to Ouro or my SG base. Maybe just fixing those last two, if possible, would be enough. It's not going to magically make redside as big as blueside. Not saying that. But it might help a little more.

This is me. I attune everything. I even attuned some purples on one of my stalkers! (ugh... that'll be an expensive mistake to fix). But yeah, I am really starting to evaluate my favorite characters by how good they are down to 15 or 20 exemplared. I know you can do multiple builds, but I am not so rich yet that I don't find spinning up a new alt a better use of the available funds.

For me, I have to not think about Vigilante because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense you'd go redside and run villain missions with other villains if you were just a hero that goes to extremes to bring villains to justice. Rogues meanwhile are a lot easier. You can do anything you want when your reason for it is merely self-interest.

Yeah, I mentioned that too. But at least on Virtue, redside pop was, at the game's peak anyway, a whole lot larger than it is on HC today. That's not a complaint. It's just how it is now. I easily found and ran on pick-up groups, one of which ended up resulting in an invite to a VG with a good dozen active players at least. I just miss that. All that dwindled quite a bit by the time the game shuttered, of course. I was mostly blueside at the end because of it.

Doesn't the alpha slot stop functioning below 45?

Well gosh, I'm sorry you decided to play exclusively redside on a server with no redside population. I didn't.

You're honestly better off requiring people to be in zone before you invite them anyway though. Can't tell you how many times I've seen someone added to the team who then asks, in all seriousness... "Uh... how do I get there?" The thing I would like them to fix though if they can is getting dropped from a team for going to Ouro or an SG base while cross-teaming. I would honestly consider playing more actual villains if that were done. I still have a few, but it's a bit annoying to cross-team sometimes and the team wants to move quickly but you don't have a teleport up that can take you to the mission or zone it's in quickly. So you leg it to the transport or a zone boundary while everyone waits for you in the mission map (or doesn't wait, depending).

There are certainly people who play almost exclusively blue or red, but I kind of wonder how many people really do that. I would think most people would want access to content from both sides. Have the devs ever posted alignment stats like they've done for ATs and powersets?

Alignment powers are considered "temporary powers" so it doesn't show when you inspect. Just primary, secondary, pools, epics/patrons, set bonuses, and accolade powers. Another way is to look at Badges though. Market badges will be listed under a category name of either Wentworths or Black Market but this is according to the alignment of the person looking (i.e. you), not the alignment of the person you're looking at. However, some of the badges themselves have a gold W coin type appearance if they are on a hero/vigilante or a golden U.S. dollar sign ($) if they are rogues/villains. Examples are Scrounger and Inspiring. Other badges change name when you change sides to either blue or red (but not between the two same-side alignments like hero/vig or rogue/villain). Badges like Positron's Ally become Positron's Betrayer. Etc. Those are easy to spot in someone's Accomplishments list because of the distinctive all gray badge icon with roman numeral for the number of the original heroside TF. But of course, only if you're looking at someone who has done those TFs. I don't know if there are any badges that tell you definitively if someone is a vigilante vs a hero or rogue vs. villain so unless you see someone with redside badges in a blueside only zone, you don't know if they are a rogue or villain, for example.

It's 10ft for stalkers as well. 10ft radius and 10 target cap, same as everyone else. I can see a Blaster not being impressed by it relative to all the big AoEs they have access to otherwise, but it's a big deal for my Ice stalkers with a 50% chance to crit from Hide, especially considering I can get into Hide multiple times in a fight after Assassin's Strike w/Hide ATO proc.

Don't think I've ever seen that, but I have seen one person duplicated twice, so that part is maybe a little buggy, yeah. I have only been around since March, but I've never seen this on Everlasting at least. Not that people speed run either exactly, but certainly never seen anyone ask to clear that last mission. Who likes fighting CoT at that level, seriously? Nobody who is higher level is farming Posi for XP. They are running ITFs or actual farms. Which means the team is often at least half composed of side-kicks on any given Posi. If the leader runs at plus anything, you are talking someone level 14 (who might have the powers and slotting of a level 8 ) trying to hit up to level 17 or 18 enemies who might be double-stacking Ruin Mage dispersion +def bubbles while a gang of ghosts are -toHit debuffing you down to the floor. Fun!

I don't see any reason to get upset about a suggestion, but I also don't think this would help anything. Redside population, even on live, seemed to be no more than half blueside at any given time. At least after the novelty of CoV's release wore off. Almost nobody would move to this hypothetical villain server from any of the more populated servers. There is simply more to do blueside than redside and it's always been that way. Going Rogue was pretty much the nail in the coffin of any hope that redside would ever be brought up to parity on content.