Andreah

Yeah, as I understand it, the weekly rotation isn't automatic, it's set up and rotated by hand by GM's. The notice is awarded once until the cycle rotates, and you can't earn another one until they get it done.

Can confirm; it's still showing the respec trials. It should be: However, the post I linked was "Edited 9 minutes ago by GM_GooglyMoogly" and I expect he's working on it right now.

He set out a methodology and followed it where it took him. I give him props for that -- it resulted in a different kind of video. He could have broken them into groups of still running, not running, miss-classed, and never released. That would have made it easier to follow. Also, the video class of "ranked lists of MMO's" itself was less common back in the early days, and I think that works against games like CoH.

Within the context of the game, absolutely. I'm not sure there's a supernatural force of Evil in the game, but there may well be. Certainly if someone has it in their background I'm not going to tell them they're wrong.

His methodology is the reason.

Can you even imagine "War walls" ? :D Some parts of the game world just make no sense at all. But it's comic book logic.

Whole sections of the city are in total ruin and overrun with chaos and crime, with no hope of restoration.

Isn't a very convincing argument a sort of mind control, too? :D It doesn't work on me though, I see them on those soap boxes and if I'm not in a hurry I just blast 'em.

They do, and you can see them recruiting all around the city. In the back of my mind, I imagine they're using mind-control and a lot of their recruits aren't voluntary. (Otherwise it just doesn't make sense to me.) And this also justifies my not using lethal force on their run of the mill minions -- they wouldn't be in their right minds and acting on their own volition. The groups that are there with "Blue and Orange Morality" that I can't necessarily say is good or bad, just different and rightly opposed; yeah, that's a hard one. They're sort of like the weather -- sometimes it's bad and hurts people. And unlike the weather, we can stop them when they do it. From the Rikti perspective, they're just trying to get home, right? And we're in their way, with our scary magic and superheroes.

I agree. They have a visceral effect on us as an audience since we're still historically in aftermath of WW2, and which also means even while that visceral reaction can be touched on by them, the writers have had to tread carefully in order to stay within the bounds of good taste. This, in my mind, lessens my perceived evil of those game enemy groups, because they've been merely cartooned up to it and I'm expected to just take it on faith from there. The other groups you mention have objectives which are arguably just as bad and perhaps worse.

The CoT are still near the top of my list for the most villainous. I don't know how they choose their victims, but they do displace or obliterate those peoples' souls. And we get to see those ritual soul theft/kills in progress all over the lower level zones, too.

And they're completely lacking in any empathy. They look on people like some resource to be dug out of the ground. It's in a service to a twisted ideal of Dr. Vahzilok's that he can defeat death; and I believe, in game canon, it's given that he is insane. Of the game enemy groups, they're the ones that give me those heebie-jeebies the most.

I concur. Your classical vampire is a criminal, but only on a very small scale, and doesn't come pre-packaged with a vastly greater threat. He may have one, but so could anyone else, it's not intrinsic to his condition.

I don't know that they are, in this setting. Both are tightly tied up with space aliens; and as I read it, their motivations aren't well aligned with mere human ideology any more. In contrast, Arachnos is more clearly a human ideology to me (And still a very bad one).

For me it comes down to means and ends. What is the group trying to accomplish, and how bad is it? How broadly does it apply? To one person, or a city, to the world? The universe? Just for now, or for all of time? Then, what means are they willing to use to achieve it? I mean, if they want to enslave everyone in the world, but only hold up signs and hand out pamphlets, that's less villainous than another group with less ambitious ends, say, for personal profit, but who're willing to resort to widespread deadly force to get it.