Why don't you play on the Villain Side?

[BZRKR]

I like the "red side" quite a bit. At the time that City of Villains was released, it was my favorite side, and remained so until I stopped playing (I think I drifted away right before "Going Rogue" went live. At least, I don't remember making a Praetorian character until Homecoming).

 

I always thought that the twisty, garbage-strewn, back alley and claustrophobic feel of the Rogue Isles was more "realistic" than the comparatively neat and orderly ninety degrees grid layout of the city zones in Paragon City. (There are spectacular exceptions to this, but I mean the Galaxy City>King's Row>Steel Canyon zones that most of my Heroes got very familiar with. Also, I really liked how you could see every stereotypical Dilbertesque "No one of us is as dumb as all of us" corrupt ruling party trope in how the structures in the Rogue Isles are piled up on top of each other. One look at how the Arachnos bases are just stabbed into the landscape with their weird sections of catwalks and walls and you know that you are in a place where environmental concerns are ignored and unfettered mad science is the norm. It looks different and cool and the same as where you live, except now you have superpowers. Of course you don't mind robbing a bank for a guy who hangs out on the docks. Wheee!

 

Anyway, I think the Rogue Isles aren't designed to be universally appealing. I think they are a work of art designed to feel like a place where villains are in control. And one of the things about art is that not everyone likes it.

 

2 hours ago, Peacemoon said:

A big thing for me is the dominance of arachnos. I hate their architecture. I hate their constant presence. And I have no idea why it has to be so prevalent. When you play blue side you are not constantly surrounded by longbow in every zone. It’s just a city with villains in it...

Well, it isn't "just" a city with Villains in it. Arachnos is everywhere in the Rogue Isles because Lord Recluse isn't just a powerful Villain, he's the Ruler, the The Guy in Charge of the Biggest Gang™

[Chris24601]

13 hours ago, BZRKR said:

Well, it isn't "just" a city with Villains in it. Arachnos is everywhere in the Rogue Isles because Lord Recluse isn't just a powerful Villain, he's the Ruler, the The Guy in Charge of the Biggest Gang™

Perhaps, but I think that was actually a significant design mistake that may have doomed Red-side from the start.

 

I often wonder how Red-side would have gone over if; instead of Latvia, complete with its own Doctor Doom analogue, the setting had been more like Gotham.

 

Organized crime and corrupt cops/government officials everywhere while the uber-elite look down from the safey of their penthouse towers and pretend the city hasn’t gone to hell since the Waynes were murdered. The only thing even remotely holding things together is fear of The Bat, but even he and his many sidekicks/imitators can’t be everywhere at once.

 

Basically, a completely overwhelmed corrupt city that your villain with a revolving door prison... a place your villain has chosen to come and try to make a name for themselves; to be the next Catwoman, Penguin, Mr. Freeze... or Joker.

 

Your primary adversaries would be the cops, private security (including super-powered security) and enforcers for competing crime bosses.

 

Your contacts would be snitches and informants with rumors (missions) of various crimes you might be interested in committing (and other informants who might know of other opportunities).

 

Instead of origin-based contacts like Blue-side, they’d specialize in certain crimes; the burglary contact, the confidence scheme contact, the armed-robbery contact, the killer-for-hire contact, the city/world domination contact, etc.; so you could choose the level of villainy you’re comfortable with and, just as importantly, be the one deciding which schemes to pursue.

 

Arachnos was created to provide a pseudo-order to the Red-side setting; a force too powerful for even a supervillain to challenge to explain why the entire isles haven’t been destroyed by all the supervillains.

 

But it also highlighted, I think the rather one-dimensional vision of villainy the Jack had (and the idea that Blue vs. Red as teams in PvP would be a major part of the game going forward) which greatly hamstrung that setting.

 

For contrast, compare the villainous content in 1-20 Praetoria where there’s a massive spectrum ranging from the mostly good guy Wardens to the sometimes have to do bad things for the greater good Responsibility Loyalists to the willing to fake attacks on civilians just to get fame and recognition by stopping them Power Loyalists to the burn it all down (with a Neutron Bomb!*) of the Crusader arcs.

 

*Seriously... name me one Red-side arc that involves setting off a Neutron Bomb in a populated city to make a political statement or;

 

- gassing a police station to murder everyone inside.

- reprogramming the Clockwork to attack innocent civilians.

- taking over the supply of illegal drugs to force the addicts to work for you.

- kidnapping cops to feed to ghouls (then sending said ghouls into a police station with suicide vests).

- re-wiring the brains of kidnapped and abused girls into psychic bombs.

- kidnapping innocents to make someone talk then shooting all of them in the head.

- murdering the city council to throw the government into chaos.

- other plots from other faction missions including trying to blow up hospitals and other high traffic civilian areas.

 

The Crusaders make 95+% of Redside look like punch-clock villains.

Edited March 14, 2020 by Chris24601

[Murcielago]

50 minutes ago, Chris24601 said:

The Crusaders make 95+% of Redside look like punch-clock villains.

The Crusaders are eye openingly bad. Kudos to the dev who was sadistic enough to write that content. 

[Chris24601]

2 hours ago, Murcielago said:

The Crusaders are eye openingly bad. Kudos to the dev who was sadistic enough to write that content. 

It was a very interesting design choice to group the most heroic sub-faction (the heroic ideal of resistance against tyranny without harming innocents) with the most monstrous* while the Loyalists mix “for the greater good” pragmatism with self-aggrandizing glory hounds.

 

The easy writing choice would have been to put the glory hounds and the monsters on the Loyalists side (which would fit with the general post-apocalyptic maps used for Praetoria in the original Hero’s Hero arc) with the Wardens and “do measured bad things for the greater good” as the Resistance.

 

Instead they gave both good and bad elements to both; to the point that my general preferred path to come out feeling moral is Warden right up to the final moral choice to blow the water treatment plant, then go Loyalist, run the Neutropolis Responsibility arc culminating in learning of the planned invasion and going Resistance along with the inspector you’re working with.

 

* for me it wasn’t the neutron bomb; that was just so over the top it was hard to take seriously; it was the mission where you get a guy’s innocent family for leverage in getting info out the guy... then, after getting the info, the leader executes the guy and orders you to murder his innocent family for no reason other than they were the guy’s family (thankfully, you can choose to NOT follow those orders).

 

The shear unnecessary nature of that; neither the guy killed by the leader, nor the family could have done anything to stop the plan; just struck home how big a load of $#%& the Crusader’s ideals are... what they really want is to just “watch the world burn.”

[Crysis]

Since HC and Null the Gull insta-switch, I don’t even know if the morality mission arc that let you go from Hero to Vig to Villain and then reverse it again still exist.  Likely do, but that was a several day journey to go red, get Patron Pools, and then come back to blue side.  Annoyingly long time if you had several 50’s in fact.

 

That said, I still think the one time in this game I truly “felt” the impact of the story was taking my blue side good guy over to the dark side...and back again.  It felt like a comic book episode.  Was a very well written arc I think, and some of the choices I had to make to complete the transformation felt icky and dirty and I really wanted to redeem myself afterwards.  This game has seldom made me “feel” anything other than fun.

 

However, I can’t deny the current QOL ability to swap to redside in minutes, run an arc and then swap back to blue side in another few minutes is amazing.  

[Lines]

8 minutes ago, Crysis said:

Since HC and Null the Gull insta-switch, I don’t even know if the morality mission arc that let you go from Hero to Vig to Villain and then reverse it again still exist.  Likely do, but that was a several day journey to go red, get Patron Pools, and then come back to blue side.  Annoyingly long time if you had several 50’s in fact.

 

That said, I still think the one time in this game I truly “felt” the impact of the story was taking my blue side good guy over to the dark side...and back again.  It felt like a comic book episode.  Was a very well written arc I think, and some of the choices I had to make to complete the transformation felt icky and dirty and I really wanted to redeem myself afterwards.  This game has seldom made me “feel” anything other than fun.

 

However, I can’t deny the current QOL ability to swap to redside in minutes, run an arc and then swap back to blue side in another few minutes is amazing.  

 

It's all still there and now with no time restriction. You can go red to blue in the same day through tips now.

 

Tips missions are quality, too. I think it's worth doing.

[Chris24601]

3 hours ago, Lines said:

It's all still there and now with no time restriction. You can go red to blue in the same day through tips now.

 

Tips missions are quality, too. I think it's worth doing.

I did it the old fashioned way for the toon I started red-side to get to Rogue as soon as I hit 20. It was the concept’s natural alignment while in the Isles. I ended up having to run a LOT of Rogue tip missions (and Vanguard) later on as the main content gets significantly more villainous/less rogueish beginning in the mid-30s and especially into the 40s. Ultimately I had to take them blue-side just because I was grinding the same 10 or so tip missions again and again to avoid the stuff that felt truly malicious.

 

Rogue is an interesting alignment; almost the flip-side of the Wardens. They want to achieve their selfish goals, but don’t want to hurt others, particularly bystanders, any more than is absolutely necessary to achieve them.

 

The most interesting variation on this, one that CoH seems to draw upon for its version, was The Flash’s Rogues... who actually had a code against killing people during their crimes in exchange for the Flash going a LOT easier on them than he could have; often even letting them get away once their current plan was foiled.

 

Given the raw destructive power at the hands of many metahumans, that sort of deal; basically turning it into a game of wits instead of one of carnage; seems like a reasonable “unwritten rule” that a world full of supers might come up with amongst themselves just for the sake of civilization (and the survival of anything worth stealing).

[Bastille Boy]

18 hours ago, Chris24601 said:

Rogue is an interesting alignment; almost the flip-side of the Wardens. They want to achieve their selfish goals, but don’t want to hurt others, particularly bystanders, any more than is absolutely necessary to achieve them.

I like playing morally ambiguous characters. Of the two morally ambiguous alignments in CoX, I much prefer rogues to vigilantes. Vigilantes may have good intentions, but they are on the road to Hell, doing 85 mph. And there's nothing charming about all that anger. Rogues, on the other hand, are often charming. Though they aren't good people, they can end up doing good things if the incentives are right.

 

The game and the wiki say fairly little about the Rogue Isles Police. Since there's open space in the canon, I feel free to speculate. Presumably the RIPD is a profit-maximizing organization.  They cannot finance their operations with tax revenue. (Villains paying taxes? Really, now.) They get income primarily from private security contracts and bribes. They also use their jails as a source of profit, whether by extracting labor from prisoners or by renting out cells to people who need a discreet, safe hideout and don't mind spartan accommodations. They have no particular loyalties. For the most part, they'll take contracts from whoever pays them well. They'll even take gigs consulting for the Paragon Police or for Longbow if the price is right.

 

So most of my toons are rogues, and many are either RIPD cops or their voluntary or involuntary guests, out on "work release." I switch my rogue toons to blueside for accolades.

 

My first 50, the escaped convict Bastille Boy, is and always will be unambiguously a hero. (He denies that he is a hero, but of course that's what a hero would say.)

[golstat2003]

On 3/14/2020 at 4:20 PM, Chris24601 said:

I did it the old fashioned way for the toon I started red-side to get to Rogue as soon as I hit 20. It was the concept’s natural alignment while in the Isles. I ended up having to run a LOT of Rogue tip missions (and Vanguard) later on as the main content gets significantly more villainous/less rogueish beginning in the mid-30s and especially into the 40s. Ultimately I had to take them blue-side just because I was grinding the same 10 or so tip missions again and again to avoid the stuff that felt truly malicious.

 

Rogue is an interesting alignment; almost the flip-side of the Wardens. They want to achieve their selfish goals, but don’t want to hurt others, particularly bystanders, any more than is absolutely necessary to achieve them.

 

The most interesting variation on this, one that CoH seems to draw upon for its version, was The Flash’s Rogues... who actually had a code against killing people during their crimes in exchange for the Flash going a LOT easier on them than he could have; often even letting them get away once their current plan was foiled.

 

Given the raw destructive power at the hands of many metahumans, that sort of deal; basically turning it into a game of wits instead of one of carnage; seems like a reasonable “unwritten rule” that a world full of supers might come up with amongst themselves just for the sake of civilization (and the survival of anything worth stealing).

I always enjoyed that aspect of some of the Flash's story arcs. The show took some of that on also for certain villains that made it onto the show. 🙂

[Hedgefund]

I hate that I skew the stats by keeping 95% of my characters Vig.  That's purely for convenience.  Content wise I'm probably 50-50 red/blue.

 

Sadly redside is a textbook example of a death spiral.  "I find it hard to find a team, so I'm not going to play in the RI" kicked off a vicious cycle.  It's too bad.

 

Anecdotally, I do know some folks that don't play red because they don't want to be "the bad guy".  I suppose there might be some people with the yin to that yang but I'm betting they're far fewer.

[Touch]

On 2/21/2020 at 10:20 AM, srmalloy said:

Mostly this. You're broken out of the Zig because you -- and/or any one of the hundreds of others broken out with you -- may prove to be the Destined One. Once out of the Zig, you become a legbreaker for low-grade street thugs. Prove yourself competent, and you move up to being a legbreaker for higher-grade street thugs. And this continues, with you becoming a legbreaker for bigger and more powerful masters, reaching your peak when you picked one of Lord Recluse's lieutenants as your patron. All without ever becoming a villain in your own right.

 

I play villains WAY more than heroes. But for reasons I'll get into in a minute. First I'd like to address srmalloy: WOW THIS HIT A NAIL ON THE HEAD! 

 

Not as a reason I don't play redside, but as a reason I play MISSIONS redside. I tend to RP bad guys who are villains. My villains tend to be old school Saturday morning bad guys with some good old fashioned Marvel comics / Batman's rogues gallery grim twistedness. I run the streets Redside. I love that I don't have to discern targets. EVERYONE is targetable. I love the look and feeling I get of having a mastermind (teenage necromancer or his granny the demon summoner) use the walk animation to stroll casually down a busy street while sending pets to maul and dismantle any and all bystanders. I love dropping out of the sky onto the top of Fort Darwin with a low-level brute or dominator and seeing how fast I can mop the floor with all those peppermints before I'm overwhelmed or my rage is sated.  I. Love. It.

 

What I don't like is the stories. My main is an extroverted teenage necromancer with sociopathic tendencies who only wants to get powerful enough to make his family healthy again. Half my toons are his family members. That half is not prone to being minions or flunkies. They're nightmares-in-the-making. They same level of greatness our hero toons are destined for.... our villain toons are on that path to infamy!

 

I may be barking at the moon if nothing can be done about it, but if I had my druthers,  it'd go like this:

 

City of Villains would feel like a blend of three places:

1. Comic book Gotham with a very serious Penguin who controls the underworld

2. The old school island of Genosha with Magneto at the helm.

3. Latvia with Dr. Doom reigning at his peak.

 

Sorry for writing so much.

I think Redside is dope. I think it is a more robust RP environment.

I just think at a certain level, you should get a bonus power that auto-casts FEAR on mobs that are more than 7 levels below you. People should cower in the streets when you go by. 

I don't know. But Redside isn't the problem for me.  Like SrMalloy said above, it's about how Redside treats Super-freaking-VIllains.

 

 

 

[Sir Myshkin]

Redside depresses the hell out of me. The atmosphere, the color toning, the sky, all of it, depressing. Why can't I rob and steal and villain-it-up with a little sunshine and rainbows?

[siolfir]

12 hours ago, Sir Myshkin said:

Redside depresses the hell out of me. The atmosphere, the color toning, the sky, all of it, depressing. Why can't I rob and steal and villain-it-up with a little sunshine and rainbows?

That's what the mayhem missions are for.

[warlyx]

i play as rogue mostly no1 does Strike forces sadly

[Dreamboat]

Wanted to say in here that I've been playing redside the past week as a new character and I'm having a lot of fun, I've managed to jump into a few RP Mayhem groups and they've been a hoot. Had to be a Rogue, though, so I could still go back to sunny, happy Paragon when I wanted...

[Psyonico]

I play redside, just not that often.

 

The problem with Redside is the Invader accolade.  Hero Slayer is kind of annoying to get, so I feel like the easiest way to do it is to do a mayhem mission every five levels, and if your're teaming one of two things happens

1. your team doesn't want to do the mayhem mission

2. you out-level the content before you can do it.

[AboveTheChemist]

Prior to last week, I only had two red-side characters. A (mostly retired) spines/fire farmer, who didn't see much red-side content beyond the early story arcs., and a stalker. I never really got into the stalker, and mostly ended up doing other folks content (via the old electrical team-ups on Everlasting last summer) with him.

 

Last week I decided I wanted to explore more red-side content. I have a blue side character whose concept and powers I really like but I never really got into him either. I decided to basically create a red-side version of him (with a sweet name that I was kinda shocked was not taken already) and I have been having an absolute blast with his villain counterpart. There was one story arc that involved the origin story of Ghost Widow that was particularly enjoyable.

 

In summary, red-side is great fun and I plan to spend a lot more time there.

[rolandgrey]

While I do already play on Redside, I would have to say a big part of the problem with it is the risk/reward ratio is terribly skewed.  Redside arcs give, usually, a pittance of merits (6 on average) while Blueside's arcs dole out huge amounts of merit rewards for arc completion (at least 20 a pop, with some of the 30+ arcs doling out 40 merits or more).  It's not just a matter of a lack of content (some Redside arcs are simple "Hey, you did a job for me.  Good."), but that the content isn't as rewarding as Blueside.

[Abraxus]

I had the opportunity to take one of my Blue side toons, over to the Red side recently to do the Patron arc.  It was a blast!  I'll be doing that more often in the future.

[Yomo Kimyata]

Another thing I've learned from my recent forays on the red side:

 

There are a lot more difficult enemy groups, starting early on, and there are a lot more EB/AVs than there are on blue side.  That's the sort of thing that's easily solved by teaming, but red teams are few and far between...

[Paradox Fate]

4 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Another thing I've learned from my recent forays on the red side:

 

There are a lot more difficult enemy groups, starting early on, and there are a lot more EB/AVs than there are on blue side.  That's the sort of thing that's easily solved by teaming, but red teams are few and far between...

I mean, I am all for more Red Side folks coming around.

Maybe I should start a Red Side Weekend and have them come over for some sweet missions and Strike Forces.

[DSorrow]

I play very little red side mostly because it's very difficult to play the kind of villain I could identify with to any degree. Doing bad things just for the sake of being evil? Not my thing. Doing someone else's bad things just to be paid? Meh. Ideally my villain would be somewhere in the gray area doing both good and bad things depending on what benefits the master plan, but the way CoX is set up doesn't really enable that sort of villainy. Just to compare the two sides, even if my goal is to save Paragon from literal evil gods, it doesn't feel out of character to mop up some lesser threats every now and then, but as a villain bent on world domination running errands for a thug seems pretty strange.

 

In summary I guess it comes down to my perception that given a generic "ultimate goal" sort of thing for both a hero and a villain, fighting any sort of villainy tends to contribute to the hero's goal but doing any sort of villainy doesn't necessarily work out that way for the villain.

 

 

[Cix]

It has come up a bit, but I'll say it again here:  I. Hate. Longbow.  They're visually dull.  They play havoc with a lot of character types.  You run a resistance build?  Lol, have a grenade.  You play Mastermind?  Here, have some flamethrowers.  Like to melee?  Here are fifteen Eagles who'll fly away if you give them so much as a dirty look.  All irritation, no excitement.

 

I hate Arachnos.  Other factions have a few scary enemies, e.g. Sappers, but Arachnos has every annoying trick, often several at a time.  I ran a Street Justice/Invulnerability brute through the Faultline story arc not long ago.  Every time I ran into a Fortunata I got smacked down and/or blinded.  Go to the hospital, buy some yellows, back in.  Out of yellows?  Stand in the corner till your eyesight returns.  Yuck.

 

I still play more red than blue, but some days I just can't find the fun.

 

Edit:  The posters below are correct.  Somehow I forgot that Fortunatas and Night Widows are separate.  I was thinking they had psy damage and the smoke bombs on the same enemy.

Edited March 26, 2020 by Cix
Correcting myself

[Dreamboat]

40 minutes ago, Cix said:

Go to the hospital, buy some yellows, back in.  Out of yellows?  Stand in the corner till your eyesight returns.  Yuck.

This, with Night Widows. What even is the length of time on that blindness debuff they do (except the obvious "forever")?

[EmmySky]

1 minute ago, Dreamboat said:

This, with Night Widows. What even is the length of time on that blindness debuff they do (except the obvious "forever")?

Its forever + some

 

😝