Redside... Best side? Right??

[ranagrande]

1 minute ago, Rudra said:

Per the Live devs, the game only has 2 alignments: Hero and Villain. Rogues and Vigilantes are still Villains and Heroes, but cludged to be able to get to the other side's zones. Praetorians are another cludge and aren't Hero or Villain, as best as I know. And if you give them the ability to get one of the alignments before they finish the Praetorian content? Then they will only be able to do the First Ward and Night Ward content (when they get to an appropriate level to do so). So, there is a reason why Null won't even give the alignment change option to Praetorians.

In the code, I think Loyalist are Villains and Resistance are Heroes.

 

But couldn't it be made to work with Null to switch back and forth between all of them?

[Rudra]

1 minute ago, Luminara said:

Make a high quality nude skin with jiggle physics that changes to a low quality skin with pixelation over the no-no bits if the character is moved out of the Rogue Isles.  Absolutely guaranteed to increase the population there tenfold, and the slogan is catchier.

 

Red side, breast side.

 

See?

*suddenly pictures Atlas Park flooded with female characters running around wearing censor bars* 🤣

 

It'd be like that one game at the arcade where players typed in a code for their name and got a naked female wearing censor bars. That game was highly popular at the time.

[Rudra]

2 minutes ago, ranagrande said:

In the code, I think Loyalist are Villains and Resistance are Heroes.

 

But couldn't it be made to work with Null to switch back and forth between all of them?

Not entirely sure, unless they have a Hero alignment with an added flag that prevents them from going to blue side zones. (Edit: And similar for Villain alignment.) If I remember (and understand) correctly though? I think Praetorians have no alignment. (But do have a flag that lets Pocket D missions see them as having one?)

Edited February 10 by Rudra

[Clave Dark 5]

1 hour ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

 

I'm not sure if you've played on other servers where he isn't available, but this has the opposite effect of cultivating a redside population there.

Other servers also have much, much lower population, so I'm not sure that's a great example.  OTOH, knowing players, I can see that most of them would just ignore redside anyway, if they found out how hard it is to swap sides for Scorpion Shield.  I'd suggest we rework the side-switching so it's not quite so onerous an undertaking, while still not something you do on a whim.

[twozerofoxtrot]

3 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

Other servers also have much, much lower population, so I'm not sure that's a great example.

 

I am.

The population size doesn't really matter when you look at percentages of population by alignment. Our own shards prove that.
 

3 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

OTOH, knowing players, I can see that most of them would just ignore redside anyway, if they found out how hard it is to swap sides for Scorpion Shield.

Yes, this is what they did.

Literally everyone would roll blue. Do the Vigilante tip missions while leveling up, eventually flag Vigilante, and then that was it.

 

[Clave Dark 5]

But it's circular logic to say "this caused redside population to plummet when it was done elsewhere, and redside pop is also zero (where it hasn't been done.)"  So the one wouldn't drive it down here, because there's already "none."

 

And "literally" is inaccurate since we did have and still have people rolling red.  I'll agree that a large number of the players ignore redside, but not "literally everyone."

[twozerofoxtrot]

30 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

But it's circular logic to say "this caused redside population to plummet when it was done elsewhere, and redside pop is also zero (where it hasn't been done.)"  So the one wouldn't drive it down here, because there's already "none."

 

Fortunately that's not at all what I said. Let's be clear about that before we try to twist words for the sake of a forum victory. 

 

My point:

 

-Null doesn't exist on other servers. 

-There are fewer Redsiders as a percentage of population on other servers than Homecoming (implied: Excel and Everlasting)

-Therefore, evidence to the contrary, getting rid of Null or removing this feature on HC likely won't grow the Redside population, as the poster who brought it up suggested it would. 

[twozerofoxtrot]

36 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

And "literally" is inaccurate since we did have and still have people rolling red.

 

And here I was merely using common hyperbole to speak about other servers (Rebirth specifically). 

 

It wasn't litteral there, either.

[Clave Dark 5]

Arguing on a forum for whatever victory one might hope for isn't my style and wasn't what I was after, not exactly friendly to accuse me of that. Maybe you weren't clear enough, maybe I misunderstood.  Anyway, I understand what you're saying, you have a great day.

[ZamuelNow]

I agree with many of the things already said and I'm not sure of the exact right thing to do.  I agree with the fact that "more content" is needed redside, even if just for the people already there.  One thing that stands out is the fact that villains don't have Origin contacts.  Granted, the starter content blueside isn't great but it does theoretically start your character out with something vaguely fitting and it does get followed up.  Lore means that this isn't something Arachnos would set up but it feels like something based on origin should exist.

 

I do wonder how much is player side momentum.  In the post about the team members not knowing how to get redside, I remember back on Live that happening even on blueside with people not knowing how to get content.  I also remember people thanking me for showing them content they had never seen before.  In returning to the game, learn to play YouTube videos show you the beginning of blueside but not redside.  I will give @Dacy credit for showcasing where the supergroup registars are for blueside, redside, and goldside in her base building video.  I don't know if there needs to be more advocates for redside specifically and even if so, it probably should be after Issue 27 Page 7 drops.

 

Though with difficulty mentioned,  I gotta say on Live I was gleefully vindictive at the post GR story arc where heroes had to fight rogue members of the PPD that villains had to deal with for years.  Getting glued was an eye opener for some.

[Sunsette]

On 1/20/2024 at 3:16 PM, skoryy said:

I remember when SWTOR launched with Jedi and Sith factions and my mind instantly went to CoH/CoV.  "Oh no. Nobody wants to play a bad guy!"  And then the Sith became by far the popular faction.

 

So, if we want to start there, we can compare the Sith to redside.  The Sith were arguably the devs' favorite, getting better missions, map layouts, etc.  That does lend itself to our situation, with the Isles being the red-headed stepchild of development: Fewer maps, less content, 'Flight Or Bust' map design.  Though a good part of that can be pinned on CoV development having to compete with CoH for dev resources.  HC would need to devote more resources to the Isles than to Paragon to play catch up, and I'm not sure we're in the situation to be able to pull that off.

 

The big difference between SWTOR and CoV is none of that; the missions are fairly comparable in gameplay between the two sides in SWTOR, and the Republic has better visual design (barely).

 

In SWTOR, you have agency. Quite a lot of Imperial Players love the idea that they're on the 'bad side' but they're actually good guys, and if anything they're *more good*, *more special*, than good guys on the Republic side. And because the writing is so oriented around your specialness and power fantasy in general, this synergizes well with who the game broadly appeals to.

 

So yeah, the biggest central problem is that no one really wants to be evil. Player priorities seem to favor some version of Get to Be Nice or a Jerk to Who I Want > Have to Be Nice to Everyone > Have to be a Jerk to Everyone.

 

The other problem is that binary lockouts between factions are inherently unstable and every game to implement them has seen severe landsliding. 

I do not think there is actually any feasible solution with HC's current resources to fix the Red population problem; it's a nearly unsolvable mess without redoing the entire game. Not one dev that came up with the "here's two sides, pick one" in a PvE environment had any idea what they were doing in that regard, in every MMO from every studio. It hasn't worked out as planned for literally any of them. Even in WoW, the concept became completely untenable.

Edited February 19 by Sunsette

[Vic Raiden]

Haven't ever played WoW, so I can't say much, but I do kinda know there are two main factions the players can belong to that try to be at constant odds with each other even though greater cosmic-level threats keep piling on and neither side is actually all that committed to either good or evil barring the oldest questlines.

 

CoX feels somewhat the same, except all areas are also alignment-locked unless you're one of the two "grey" alignments which are just the basic ones except capable of going wherever they want. It's more than a bit problematic in that blueside gets over twice as many zones as redside, and the two sides don't even get to cross over outside of a handful of instanced missions taking place in an isolated fragment of the opposing side's home turf. That's just not all that fair.

[PeregrineFalcon]

23 minutes ago, Sunsette said:

I do not think there is actually any feasible solution with HC's current resources to fix the Red population problem; it's a nearly unsolvable mess without redoing the entire game.

Ok, so first the idea that "no one really wants to be evil" is contradicted by the popularity of Grand Theft Auto, where the players run around stealing and murderizing people all day long.

 

Secondly, the problem with Villainside isn't that it's too evil or not evil enough, it's that players aren't allowed to play the part of a comic book villain. They have no agency, the missions mostly aren't any different from heroside in that you spend a lot of time defeating other villains instead of fighting heroes, and players can't even do low level thug stuff like beat up a civilian and steal his car.

 

If the developers really wanted to fix this they'd have to come up with a couple of different villain goals (build a secret base, conquer the world, summon an elder deity who shall remain unnamed for trademark reasons into the world, some other specific goal) and then set up a contact to allow a player to pick one of these goals per character. The character would then get a 5 - 50 story arc that goes thru these goals and is written in such a way that the player, not the NPC, appears to be making the decisions and selecting targets.

 

In other words: allowing the player to play a comic book villain. That's what players wanted, they didn't get that, so villainside is dead.

 

Also, I completely agree with what you said about SWTOR. But I won't go into detail as I don't want to sidetrack this thread.

[Sunsette]

1 hour ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Ok, so first the idea that "no one really wants to be evil" is contradicted by the popularity of Grand Theft Auto, where the players run around stealing and murderizing people all day long.

 

Secondly, the problem with Villainside isn't that it's too evil or not evil enough, it's that players aren't allowed to play the part of a comic book villain. They have no agency, the missions mostly aren't any different from heroside in that you spend a lot of time defeating other villains instead of fighting heroes, and players can't even do low level thug stuff like beat up a civilian and steal his car.

 

If the developers really wanted to fix this they'd have to come up with a couple of different villain goals (build a secret base, conquer the world, summon an elder deity who shall remain unnamed for trademark reasons into the world, some other specific goal) and then set up a contact to allow a player to pick one of these goals per character. The character would then get a 5 - 50 story arc that goes thru these goals and is written in such a way that the player, not the NPC, appears to be making the decisions and selecting targets.

 

In other words: allowing the player to play a comic book villain. That's what players wanted, they didn't get that, so villainside is dead.

 

Also, I completely agree with what you said about SWTOR. But I won't go into detail as I don't want to sidetrack this thread.

 

So we agree on the point of agency fundamentally. Much of our disagreement is saying it different ways, highlighting different implementation issues.

 

When I say 'no one wants to be evil', it is in large part in conjunction with my hierarchy of being able to choose kindness or cruelty vs forced kindness vs forced cruelty. Redside doesn't give you a choice in who you are cruel to. Lots of people, in my experience, want to play a bad guy. That's not the same as lots of people wanting to be EEEEEVIL. The number of people who want to play as someone who is a complete raging jerk at all times to everyone they encounter is extremely low. GTA is traditionally an open world single-player game you put maybe a hundred hours into where you assume a single individual's story in a cinematic format. It can present an unusual experience like that for a limited time. Meanwhile, GTA online doesn't focus on people suffering as a result of your actions.

 

Beyond that, though, it's true even for single-player games with no network effects and stories that end. Every cRPG that has allowed players to choose sides has shown an overwhelming preference for players doing good since we started seeing metrics about this stuff with BioWare's Dragon Age and Mass Effect series. It's a tradition that continues to Baldur's Gate 3, a game famous for how much it reflects and encourages the most niche of choices; Larian has even commented with joking disappointment about how much players prefer to do good rather than evil and play "basic" concepts! 

 

Anyway, inflicting mayhem like that isn't really achievable in existing structure. One of the big challenges with putting it in this game is that CoH is infamously easy, and that threatens to turn reasonable implementations of real mayhem into godmode "HAHAHAHA EVERYTHING DIES" which will get boring fast. What are you gonna do? Make them run from the police? Making it work represents an incredible amount of effort that I don't think the HC team could reasonably complete because it would have to redo everything about redside as it stands.

 

Even if you wave ALL of that aside, network effects remain a problem for this 20-year-old game.

 

1 hour ago, Vic Raiden said:

Haven't ever played WoW, so I can't say much, but I do kinda know there are two main factions the players can belong to that try to be at constant odds with each other even though greater cosmic-level threats keep piling on and neither side is actually all that committed to either good or evil barring the oldest questlines.

 

Alliance v. Horde is not nominally a good vs. evil conflict, except a sizable plurality of the game's years have reset it so the hero-coded Alliance are heroes and the villain-coded Horde are genocidal. As far as relevance to CoH though, CoH is both more and less content-locked than WoW in factions. The original zones on both sides of City of X are hard-locked and those zones make up a majority of the content available, but the overwhelming majority of recent content from RWZ onwards was faction-neutral even more than WoW. WoW will often run two parallel quest storylines that merely end in the same place. Up until last year, WoW extremely resisted the concept of cross-faction teaming, so this was unavoidable. 

 

And yet, WoW still ended up suffering badly from network effects -- first throughout Classic, where there weren't enough Horde, and then again through Shadowlands where there weren't enough Alliance¹. I think content matters less than social channels when it comes to network effects provided that the content is already cross-accessible (which it is in CoH HC). In WoW, by default, you cannot talk cross-faction in any way except to friends you already have -- and that makes that game feel much harder faction-locked than post-RWZ CoH ever has, especially on HC. 

 

You want people to play both sides more? Here's my suggestions for a reasonable implementation:

- Remove "Countdown to" Alignment Powers -- I park at Hero as much as I can because I like having a "JUSTICE" power even if I never use it. I lose it for a *week* every time I decide to help out a red-sider.

- Improve the Rogue and Vig alignment powers.

- Put some hero/neutral contacts in the Rogue Isles and some villain/neutral contacts in Paragon so that people have incentive to be in each others' zones more.

- Solo morality mishes in the above.

- Visual glow-up of some of the cleaner and more environmental locations to use less dark colorspaces and be 'friendlier' for more visual variety. (Paragon could use a similar diversity pass to make some things dingier but this is not as important). 

- Prismatic Aether from alignment confirmations.

 

Because what's important to you -- is it that more people have a red-side badge on their player unitframe, or that people who prefer to inhabit the isles see a vibrant, living world full of other players who can do things with them? I'd argue it's the latter, not the former, that matters.

 

¹ Building on my earlier assertions, a significant, though hardly the only, motivation for making the Horde eeeeeeeeeevil in a lot of later stuff was that many of the devs fondly remembered evil Horde from WC2. They wanted players to enjoy doing awful things and reveling in how evil they were. ... That didn't work out. The Horde playerbase first went through denial about playing the evil side, and then open revolt about the concept.

Edited February 19 by Sunsette

[Clave Dark 5]

You know... it occurs to me that when we do a Summer Blockbuster, one of those missions is to role play (vaguely) a team of thieves who rob a casino.  As they're gangsters, essentially, it's a bit of a grey area, but.... have you ever heard anyone complain about "playing evil" there?  I never have.

[Sunsette]

55 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

You know... it occurs to me that when we do a Summer Blockbuster, one of those missions is to role play (vaguely) a team of thieves who rob a casino.  As they're gangsters, essentially, it's a bit of a grey area, but.... have you ever heard anyone complain about "playing evil" there?  I never have.

 

No. Most of us don't identify whether an action is good or evil in a vacuum but with social and emotional context: what was the amount of harm, who is harmed, did we see the harm, was the harm reasonably foreseeable? SBB ensures we don't feel the impact of any harm done and the person harmed isn't especially likable so it's not going to trigger a lot of our gut reactions to be anything but escapism.

 

Now imagine that as part of SBB, the game requires you to strike up a friendly conversation with a nice, charming old person who has the thing you need. And imagine that your character resolves they must break this person's leg, because it's fast and safe and effective. And imagine that you get a description of the person's agony played out. And it ends there. You don't see any happy resolution for this person -- your last involvement is making the clicks necessary for this old grandpa that was fond of you to be bleeding out while you rob them.

 

There would still be people interested -- some people might be more interested than ever, and that's legit! -- but you betcha there'd be a lot of complaints (especially since SBB has cutscenes rather than just pure text).

 

What I find is that the people who are most attracted to the concept of roleplaying villainy -- not necessarily in City of Heroes, but in general -- is that they're most often attracted to the freedom a villain has to set their own agenda, the excitement of forbidden themes, and the ability to get into a distinctly different headspace from their own.

1. City of Villains does not allow a villain to set their own agenda.
2. Forbidden themes, okay, we got that! 
3. City of X in general is not written in a way that engenders assuming a different headspace. You have your personality mostly written for you in every mish where that might matter, and I've noticed red-side arcs are really bad about that in particular. Now, you can write someone's personality for them in a game, but you have to do so in a very consistent and interesting way that reveals a unique character. Any such effect CoX has on a player in this fashion is largely the result of players taking the initiative to craft such for themselves. The Graves arc shuffled me between multiple different ideas of villainy, I noticed, to the point where I struggled to come up with a unified personality that encompassed all the responses I had to make.

 

There are degrees of this, always. Even as someone who *never* played Red before this year, I knew that I would want to avoid Westin Phipps. He's that infamous among dedicated Red players I heard about it. But it doesn't have to get that bad for it to start turning people off.

 

I hear a lot positive about Dean MacArthur and I have to ask: what do you do in Dean MacArthur's arc that's actually evil? Plan to rob a bank? You don't even *get* to rob the bank until the very end of the arc and only if you want to! All the evil stuff is optional!

 

Edited February 20 by Sunsette

[Rudra]

9 minutes ago, Sunsette said:

The Graves arc shuffled me between multiple different ideas of villainy, I noticed, to the point where I struggled to come up with a unified personality that encompassed all the responses I had to make.

The Dr. Graves arc keeps your character in a set portrayal of villainy. You're a petty, noob villain. Painfully so. You are so severely naive that Dr. Graves, Scirocco, the big bad (avoiding spoiler just in case), and even Crosscut all use you to their own ends. Back on Live, Dean John Yu was so obvious about using your character for his own purposes in the Dr. Graves arc, I felt like screaming "I'm NOT an IDIOT!" every time. (He still uses you, but while he is still relatively obvious about it, he isn't quite as obvious about it as he was back on Live.)

 

Edited February 20 by Rudra
Edited to add missing comma. And again to correct "is" to "was", and to add " "I'm NOT an IDIOT!" ".

[Sunsette]

9 minutes ago, Rudra said:

The Dr. Graves arc keeps your character in a set portrayal of villainy. You're a petty, noob villain. Painfully so. You are so severely naive that Dr. Graves, Scirocco, the big bad (avoiding spoiler just in case), and even Crosscut all use you to their own ends. Back on Live, Dean John Yu is so obvious about using your character for his own purposes in the Dr. Graves arc, I felt like screaming every time. (He still uses you, but while he is still relatively obvious about it, he isn't quite as obvious about it as he was back on Live.)

 

If he's less obvious now, cripes.

 

Yes, you are a petty, noob villain with a bit of edgelord syndrome, a mind like a brick, and some squeamishness who nonetheless shows surprising wit in a number of instances. The character is at once not very fleshed out but also constrains you to a very small range of possible personalities, which I think might be the worst possible combination for this kind of fantasy.

 

It took me a few missions to figure out what the personality was rather than it being at all compatible with my preconceived notion of my character -- and I didn't get any immersive insight into a character as a result, I just finally figured out how I was supposed to read the story at all. That doesn't facilitate most of the things that people look for in villain experiences, which is the point here. 

Edited February 20 by Sunsette

[Vic Raiden]

How much more obvious did that

6 hours ago, Rudra said:

(He still uses you, but while he is still relatively obvious about it, he isn't quite as obvious about it as he was back on Live.)

 

How much more obvious did this use to be?

 

6 hours ago, Sunsette said:

 

If he's less obvious now, cripes.

 

Yes, you are a petty, noob villain with a bit of edgelord syndrome, a mind like a brick, and some squeamishness who nonetheless shows surprising wit in a number of instances. The character is at once not very fleshed out but also constrains you to a very small range of possible personalities, which I think might be the worst possible combination for this kind of fantasy.

 

It took me a few missions to figure out what the personality was rather than it being at all compatible with my preconceived notion of my character -- and I didn't get any immersive insight into a character as a result, I just finally figured out how I was supposed to read the story at all. That doesn't facilitate most of the things that people look for in villain experiences, which is the point here. 

Yeah... Fun as the arc was, I too caught myself seething a few times playing it, whenever I ran into something I knew my character wouldn't do. Closest thing to a workaround I found was spelling the character's ACTUAL thoughts, speech pattern and all, out via local chat.

[twozerofoxtrot]

7 hours ago, Sunsette said:

I hear a lot positive about Dean MacArthur and I have to ask: what do you do in Dean MacArthur's arc that's actually evil? Plan to rob a bank? You don't even *get* to rob the bank until the very end of the arc and only if you want to! All the evil stuff is optional!

 

I can't speak for others, only myself, but I like Dean's arc because it's fun. Dean's an enjoyable character and you have the RP option to either join in with his lightheartedness or totally reject it.

 

You do get to dig into his story and find out what he is, which makes him a bit more interesting than most contacts.

 

And at the end of his arc, you take down a hero, in fact one of the hardest to kill and one of the few remaining members of the Omega Team.

 

(Robbing the bank is the capstone of Leonard's arc, which follows Dean's.)

[Rudra]

52 minutes ago, Vic Raiden said:

7 hours ago, Rudra said:

(He still uses you, but while he is still relatively obvious about it, he isn't quite as obvious about it as he was back on Live.)

 

How much more obvious did this use to be?

I can't quote you specifically what he said, my memory isn't good enough for that. Basically, the start is the same. However, where he now reads the paper, smiles, and then gets stone-faced, he used to actually say the deactivation phrase and explain it as he read the paper, his mouth curling in a smile at your foolishness for falling for what is on the paper. Then he realizes he helped you for free, stumbles in trying to backtrack about the deactivation before finally settling on an explanation that as a super the phrase won't actually help you, then resumes verbally stumbling as he tries to convince you to go fight some Luddites (while thinking the phrase for uhm... mental bomb... uhm... deactivation... thing, yeah, that's it). (Preceding part in parenthesis is my best attempt to remember at least part of what he said.) It gave the impression he was an idiot, and you were worse of one because after all his mistakes and obvious attempts to get you to deal with his Luddite problem for him, your character blithely runs off completely unaware that you are being duped.

[Sunsette]

2 hours ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

 

I can't speak for others, only myself, but I like Dean's arc because it's fun. Dean's an enjoyable character and you have the RP option to either join in with his lightheartedness or totally reject it.

 

You do get to dig into his story and find out what he is, which makes him a bit more interesting than most contacts.

 

And at the end of his arc, you take down a hero, in fact one of the hardest to kill and one of the few remaining members of the Omega Team.

 

(Robbing the bank is the capstone of Leonard's arc, which follows Dean's.)

 

I'm not saying Dean's not a good arc (and I include Leonard since it's all one story) -- but that's my point. One of the most positively cited Red-side arcs really doesn't have much to do with being evil! You're practically on the defensive against Ajax in that plot -- his pathological recklessness due to survivor's guilt and a desire not to face the music for his crimes in Paragon make him a very interesting character, but also one that you can easily justify fighting with no guilt regardless of why your rogue or villain is in the Rogue Isles. Ajax is practically an anti-villain with you having the possibility of playing the anti-hero role. 

 

Dean's story *does* exemplify the agency which people expect from being able to play a villain, though, and which CoV rarely offers.

Edited February 20 by Sunsette

[Vic Raiden]

Going off that, I think we really could use ourselves more arcs which combine considerable character agency seen in Dean's arc with a feeling of doing some genuine, impactful evil. That'd be a start, at least.

[Vic Raiden]

I don't double-post often, but I feel like I need to ask a question relevant to the overarching problem: What arcs in this game, of any alignment, would you say give the greatest sense of player agency?

[Chris24601]

What I would be very interested to know is the ratio of Rogue-aligned to Villain-aligned (and in relation, the ration hero-aligned to vigilante-aligned).

 

The reason I bring it up is because, in my experience, a lot more people wanna be Deadpool or Loki or Danny Ocean (yeah, he’s charming… he’s a also a career-criminal) or, at worst, late-season Walter White, than wanna play The Red Skull or Homelander or Obadiah Stane. Nor do many wanna play the sorta guy who beats up/kills old ladies to steal their wedding rings and releases plagues on cities for kicks.

 

The biggest problem Redside has is that there’s a much greater divide between the Rogue and Villain alignments than there is between the Hero and Vigilante alignments when it comes to tasks and motivations. 
 

Rogues are selfish, but they have lines they won’t cross. Villains don’t have lines.

 

The result is there exist entire red-side arcs that players with a Rogue-like mindset are going to avoid. One of the biggest issues I have with the new Striga missions was the choice to make the new contacts sequential with working for a literal neo-nazi required to get to the more “roguish” arcs there.

 

By the same token, those who DO want to play The Red Skull aren’t going to enjoy being a mere rogue in those arcs.

 

By contrast, thwarting a villainous plot works for both heroes and vigilantes with the only difference being maybe a kill or imprison option after you beat them down.

 

The result is that Redside has a schizophrenic identity crisis where whole chunks of what content exists is unpalatable for your concept just because the Villain and Rogue are so different from each other.

 

Solving this isn’t going to be easy, but like eating an elephant, it can be done if you take it one bite at a time.

The two most viable routes as I see it are;

 

A) Pick a side: Decide whether you want it to be the Rogue Isles* or the City of Villains** and start tweaking and adding significant content for the chosen direction. Leave the older content that doesn’t fit for those who want it, but focus on presenting a more coherent story.

 

If you went “Rogue Isles” for example, it would make sense to rejigger the Mayhem Mission dialogue so you’re not robbing the bank to steal the working stiffs’ savings; you’re after the safety deposit box of someone who “deserves” it (ex. The CEO of Cage Consortium or Countess Crey).

 

Similarly, while you COULD cause mass destruction, arson and kidnapping on the way… if you wanted to be more Roguish; offer a mission bonus (say one of the temp powers you can get from the raiding sidequest) if you complete the mission WITHOUT triggering any bonus time from destroyed objects or side objectives.

 

By contrast, if you wanted villainous focus… offer influence for each object destroyed during the Mayhem Missions… the more destruction, the more civilians you take out, the more infamy you score during the mission.

 

B) Make the divide clear: Run down the available contacts and label them as “Rogue” or “Villain”… so when they come up it’d say “Hardcase (Rogue)” or “Westin Phipps (Villain).” Then rejigger introductions so doing a rogue arc isn’t required to unlock a villain arc and you don’t have to do a villain arc to unlock a rogue arc. Then continue to follow this guideline for future content.

 

While B doesn’t solve the lack of content issues, but it at least steers you clear of starting story arcs where your selfish, but wouldn’t hurt a child, rogue leaves you wishing you could beat your contact into paste instead of saying “yes, I’d love to infect children with a flesh-eating virus for you.”

 

Sidebar: a way to completely drop a story arc without completing it so it doesn’t count against your active total would be much appreciated in this regard. Players shouldn’t have to go read a Wiki just to avoid having their character do things they consider reprehensible when being able to just quit a story arc at the same point your PC would “nope” out of continuing to assist could prevent it.

 

More options to deliberately mess up the contacts’ plans via mission failure or adding a moral choice (ex. instead of waiting 90min to fail Marshal Brass’ mission, you could just add an option like “(Lie) Sure, I’ll take out those generators (deliberately fail mission)” to make the feeling of agency more immediate and less passive.

 

Adding a similar option to screw over many of the more reprehensible contacts like Peter Themari would also be appreciated.

 

* i.e. the default assumption is player characters are selfish, but not completely immoral, rogues trying to get ahead in a nation ruled by a superpowered despot… your crimes are mostly directed at Arachnos and the elites of the Isles who ally with them and other “even worse” criminals.

 

** i.e. the default assumption is you’re a hardened criminal willing to do anything to get the notice of and rise through the ranks of Arachnos to become, in essence, another patron of evil.

Edited February 24 by Chris24601