Redside... Best side? Right??

[Lunar Ronin]

33 minutes ago, Chris24601 said:

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).

 

I don't think that would tell you much, other than for some role-players.  All of my non-gold side characters are Rogue, but that's because I want to do blue side content with friends.  If Villains could go blue side, I'd just stay Villain.  I have a feeling that many players who have Rogue-aligned characters are like that, for the convenience of being able to do blue side stuff with friends, not because of villainous content or role-playing.

[Blackwell]

Red side areas are harder to digest, less pleasing to be in. Steel canyon and atlas park are my favorites - they’re bright, easy on the eyes with clear visuals etc. Redside you start out in gloomy, dirty areas, and it continues that way, with fog and such. Blueside you make excursions into areas with these visuals to fight baddies and then return to the nicer areas.

 

In addition to the stories, I’d say a big aesthetic drawing me towards redside would be the ATs. Similarly for blueside. When I make a character, I make it a hero AT blueside or villain AT red. And I don’t much like seeing villain ATs blueside. Because of this availability, I also don’t see redside as very attractive. There’s nothing unique to it apart from the stories and those I’ll experience as I suffer from lack of co-players and endure the lack of comfortable home zones.

[Blackwell]

What’s there to make me gather with other people and say “we play redside”? There’s RP and feel. Used to be there were ATs you could enjoy more or less than the blue ones. “I couldn’t play red because I just love controllers”. Redside ATs had less team play design. That was a cool identity. An important part of the feel. I miss that.

[Chris24601]

5 hours ago, Lunar Ronin said:

 

I don't think that would tell you much, other than for some role-players.  All of my non-gold side characters are Rogue, but that's because I want to do blue side content with friends.  If Villains could go blue side, I'd just stay Villain.  I have a feeling that many players who have Rogue-aligned characters are like that, for the convenience of being able to do blue side stuff with friends, not because of villainous content or role-playing.

It’s still a datapoint, particularly in relation to the ratio of heroes to vigilantes.
 

Speaking from personal experience, I have many straight heroes in my roster and I have a few rogues. I have no villains or vigilantes; the latter specifically because I see no advantage to the alignment’s access to redside over just being a hero.

 

I don’t have any straight villains because I find the villain options; including villain tip options; repugnant enough that I’ve re-rolled redside characters over getting stuck on a repugnant mission chain… I’d rather redo 30 levels than have some stains on my PC.

 

And I don’t know how fine grained you could get on a database query from the dev side. Maybe you could filter the ratio through the presence of certain badges (ex. Rogues with TF completion badges vs. those without… rogues with or without badges or soveniers you gain from specific villainous arcs) that might better indicate whether a character is rogue for playing with friends convenience or out of some content preference.

 

Speaking again personally, I find the Rogue tip options in the Isles to consistently emphasize your character’s wits and cunning along with avoidance of unnecessary cruelty.

 

The villain and vigilante options remind me consistently of the SWTOR darkside choices; i.e. let’s be petty or blind to broader consequences. They’re like choosing to play the character the Graves’ arc writes you as.

 

As stated by someone here previously, Imp-side might be the preferred faction over there, but most of those players make mostly lightside choices. The devs over there have gone so far as to say the ratio of light to dark choices over there is essentially 90% light.

 

This tracks with some other media preference data as well, which is that something like 90% of general audiences prefer traditional story construction with the protagonist as the “hero of their own story”, while only about 10% of general audiences was interested in choosing to experience subversions (which would include the protagonist being an outright villain who gets away with harming innocents).

 

Basically, the main thing holding back Red-side is natural human preferences. The only reason it’s closer to 20% than 10% Redside is probably that it IS possible to, with work, play a more traditional protagonist over there (the Danny Ocean or Deadpool taking on people who are even worse than them). Avoiding the Peter Thermaris and Westin Phipps type contacts, deliberately failing Marshal Brass’ mission, working with Hardcase, LOTS of Rogue tip missions when content gets thin, etc.

 

What a lot of people probably don’t want to hear is that if you REALLY wanted to increase the Redside ratios, the devs should go with my “Pick A Side” and make it “The ROGUE Isles” with an express focus on being a witty/charming rogue who’s getting ahead by sticking it to “The Man” while dodging the corrupt military government and its RIP lapdogs.* **

 

A step along the way would then be to go into all those arcs where you’re required to be a monster to complete them and add either deliberate loss conditions (a la Marshal Brass or many of Phipps’ arcs) or outright moral choices to thwart them (ex. a way to NOT go through with Peter Themari’s plan to break Pyriss… that one is failable, but only in a way that’s arguably worse).

 

The hardest part would be supplying such options to the Patron-tier missions where you’re working directly for Arachnos’ top people. That might almost require completely new alternative content; maybe even initiating some sort of “Grand Theft Country” where you seek to actually break Arachnos’ hold over the Rogue Isles (i.e. Arachnos is still around as an evil organization, and might even still hold Grandville, but YOU are the one deciding the fate of the Rogue Isles going forward… just in time to run into the Praetorian invasion and other incarnate wackiness where what you chose for the Rogue Isles to become could be handled with a couple of dialogue flags).

 

 I dunno, I’ve only just started thinking about it.

 

* Similarly, really play up Longbow as gung ho idiot vigilantes who are making things worse by invading a foreign country on the pretext of liberating it from “evil” while employing miniguns and flamethrowers against civilian populations. They’re basically the Captain Hammers (from Dr. Horrible) of Superheroes.
 

** Yeah, I know that’s not what those who genuinely love playing the Dr. Doom’s wanna hear, and I’m not even sure I advocate for it because it would be swiping something away by essentially making that type of play fairly vestigal.

 

But I’m answering the question of “what could be done to increase the Redside population” and the only genuine answer there IS make the content there a lot more “lovable rogue” and way less “despicable villain.”

 

Playing a true villain is always going to be niche. Even the Grand Theft Auto franchise falls behind Mario, Tetris, Pokemon, and Call of Duty (and nearly half of it is just GTA5) and has way more play options than just being a cackling villain regardless.

 

So you either accept it as a niche that only a small percentage of players will ever find interesting and make the best of that small percentage while staying true to that niche… or you compromise the niche to give it the broader appeal to grow it.

[Clave Dark 5]

In regards to "villain's agency" being raised above: this seems to be a "cart before the horse" situation -- how can that be what's keeping people away if if no one's playing in the first place?  It can be a legit thing to say it's something you didn't like that about redside, but first we have to get people on the ferry to the Etoile Islands in the first place.

[megaericzero]

13 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

In regards to "villain's agency" being raised above: this seems to be a "cart before the horse" situation -- how can that be what's keeping people away if if no one's playing in the first place?  It can be a legit thing to say it's something you didn't like that about redside, but first we have to get people on the ferry to the Etoile Islands in the first place.

It would be interesting to see the number of people who have at least one substantial redside character to compare with the percentage of players who play redside.

 

I'm willing to bet there is a good chunk of people who have played redside a fair amount before deciding they prefer one of the other sides - at least in this thread, given the number of responses referencing the contacts/arcs.

[Clave Dark 5]

4 hours ago, megaericzero said:

It would be interesting to see the number of people who have at least one substantial redside character to compare with the percentage of players who play redside.

 

I'm willing to bet there is a good chunk of people who have played redside a fair amount before deciding they prefer one of the other sides - at least in this thread, given the number of responses referencing the contacts/arcs.

It would, but rememer that forum posters are not a large subset of total players.  There's also posters here who say things like "I like redside a lot, but I like to team so I 'have' to play blueside because I don't want to just solo."  That's me.  I hardly ever played red although it's my preferred from Live, until the influx of new people anyway.

[CraterLabs]

This might be dumb, but could redside get a Freakshow Giant Monster?

 

Just... an absolutely *massive* Tank Freak (or other kind of robot body) with a perfectly normal human head built into it somewhere.

 

I'd love to fight that thing sometimes.

 

Or, on a similar note: what about a Family-themed Giant Monster who's an Ice Giant, because he or she or they've been granted a dose of "Sebastien Frost's personal Dine stash"?

[Rudra]

1 hour ago, CraterLabs said:

This might be dumb, but could redside get a Freakshow Giant Monster?

 

Just... an absolutely *massive* Tank Freak (or other kind of robot body) with a perfectly normal human head built into it somewhere.

 

I'd love to fight that thing sometimes.

 

Or, on a similar note: what about a Family-themed Giant Monster who's an Ice Giant, because he or she or they've been granted a dose of "Sebastien Frost's personal Dine stash"?

This should really be its own thread. This thread is about trying to get more players to play red side.

[megaericzero]

18 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

It would, but rememer that forum posters are not a large subset of total players.  There's also posters here who say things like "I like redside a lot, but I like to team so I 'have' to play blueside because I don't want to just solo."  That's me.  I hardly ever played red although it's my preferred from Live, until the influx of new people anyway.

Right. That's why it would be interesting to have the statistics from the servers themselves on who has played redside. That way we get a better picture than forum respondents on who hasn't touched villains before versus those that have but don't play it, in response to your question "how can that be what's keeping people away if if no one's playing in the first place?"

[Vic Raiden]

Such statistics would only work if every player only got to have one character. But many of us have dozens, some even have hundreds... I suppose statistics should show the total blue-to-red-to-gold character ratio, or the amount of time each player spends playing some character of a given alignment.

 

Unless there's something I don't know about.

[Chris24601]

2 hours ago, Vic Raiden said:

Such statistics would only work if every player only got to have one character. But many of us have dozens, some even have hundreds... I suppose statistics should show the total blue-to-red-to-gold character ratio, or the amount of time each player spends playing some character of a given alignment.

I think you misunderstood what they’re asking for; multiple characters has no bearing.

 

What they’re asking for is “what percentage of players have ANY character that is Redside aligned?”

 

What percentage of players have never even tried Redside?

What percentage have a Redside character above level 10?

Above level 20? 30? 40? How many have Redside 50’s?

 

That’s useful information to have.

[Vic Raiden]

Right. I did say I'm not sure if I understood that post correctly. And when you put it like this, I suppose it could be of some help.

[Vanden]

Reside, best side? No, I’m afraid that’s a lie. A delusion that players inflict upon themselves to avoid facing the truth: redside very much not best side.

[Rudra]

5 minutes ago, Vanden said:

Reside, best side? No, I’m afraid that’s a lie. A delusion that players inflict upon themselves to avoid facing the truth: redside very much not best side.

That's a matter of opinion. I personally vastly prefer red side over blue side. I just avoid Peter Themari and Westin Phipps. (And often Dr. Graves as well.)

[Dev Unitas]

Absolutely agree that it's a matter of opinion. Personally I've always adored Redside for its abundance of Arachnos (love the costume design for Arachnos on a primal level) and the interesting, unique tone the setting has. Can't say there's many video-game cities that replicate the feel of the Rogue Isles!

 

That said, been enjoying this thread folks, thanks for the discussion so far. Mostly been expected sentiments, but definitely the sort of conversation worth having. As expected, people's perspectives on Redside and its flaws/lack thereof are often fairly opinionated (not in a negative way), quite diverse, but typically sharing certain similar talking points. Even as a fan of the Rogue Isles and the levelling experience to be had there, I can't say I'd even disagree with many of the gripes people lob at it. Even the distaste for the 'gloom', fair enough. Certainly not an atmosphere for everyone, and I don't think it really needs to be.

 

Anyways, carry on! Just felt like musing since I haven't chimed in for... dang, 9 pages! Good stuff!

[jkwak]

I think the reason is that most people just like to be the Hero.

And I have seen people make and RP characters who would definetly fit more in to the red side, not naming anyone. But someone who RPs murdering a bunch of gang members for fun isn't RPing the classic Super Hero trope right, except it if they actually aim for the type of modern Super Hero you see in Invincible, Kick Ass or The Boys

[Chris24601]

7 hours ago, jkwak said:

I think the reason is that most people just like to be the Hero.

And I have seen people make and RP characters who would definetly fit more in to the red side, not naming anyone. But someone who RPs murdering a bunch of gang members for fun isn't RPing the classic Super Hero trope right, except it if they actually aim for the type of modern Super Hero you see in Invincible, Kick Ass or The Boys

RP-wise, I’d say that “murdering gang members” character is a Vigilante as the game defines alignment (villainous ends justify means, but still nominally with altruistic ends in mind).

 

The biggest problem with Vigilante in CoH is their tip missions mostly require you to either hold the idiot ball or RP as an already high-functioning psychopath to choose it over the hero choice its placed next to.

 

By contrast, the Homecoming original vigilante mission has a much greater degree of nuance to it in terms of, is it justice to let the villain get away with murder (he’s still going away for other lesser crimes, but it’s a slap on the wrist compared to his true crimes)?

 

What this thread has really helped me realize is that you can actually lay out CoX’s alignments on a pretty basic grid of means and ends;

 

Hero = Altruistic ends, ends do NOT justify means.

Vigilante = Altruistic ends, ends DO justify means.

Villain = Selfish ends, ends justify means.

Rogue = Selfish ends, ends do not justify means.

 

It’s also worth noting that, in terms of external observed morality, the means used (immediate impact) are often more important than the ends (long term impacts) as far as how an audience views things and their appeal.

 

That’s why the dashing rogue is even a trope. Objectively Danny Ocean is a criminal who’s robbing a legitimate business to get back at the guy who took his girl.

 

But he’s charming, he’s targeting a business in a field widely regarded as virtually legalized crime with strong ties to organized crime, headed by an asshole victim who chooses money over the girl, and he pulls it off through a clever plan and his wits rather than violence. So when he ends up with both the money and the girl the means used make his entirely selfish goals feel justified to general audiences.

 

If he’d organized a crew of killers to go in; shoot up the customers, kill security guards for just doing their legitimate jobs, and took his ex-wife back at the barrel of a gun after blowing the casino owner’s brains out… well, he’d be the villain of the story and normal audiences would be left wondering where the hero of the story is who’s going to stop him.

 

How many members of the audience would be okay with that story? The criminal gets out of prison, organizes a team of murderers who rob a casino, kill a bunch of bystanders, kidnap the criminal’s ex-wife… and get away with the money and the ex-wife scott free?

 

That’s the main reason Red Side is 20% the size of Blueside… and would be only 10% without enough rogue content to keep some of the more general audience satisfied.

 

Lack of agency is, I think, a convenient excuse. There are plenty of stories of roguish characters being swept along by events and having to use their wits to keep from meeting a sticky end. Some of the worst villains in history were “just following orders.”

 

The biggest turn off to Redside, at least in my opinion, is that human nature includes a sense of justice. We don’t like injustice. We want to see people get their just deserts. Most people just don’t enjoy stories where injustice is allowed to stand; where the bad guy gets away with it.

 

Which is why in fiction intended for mass consumption so much effort in stories with a less than heroic protagonist is spent on justifying their actions; to satisfy the audience’s desire for justice.

 

It’s why the target in nearly every heist story is an asshole or unfeeling corporation at best (and often a worse criminal or corrupt corporation than the one pulling the heist).

 

It’s why stories where the protagonist is an assassin focus on some wrong the target has done to deserve getting put down.

 

The big problem Redside is a lot of content is you getting away (or being materially complicit) with crimes against people who don’t deserve it and those no clear labels for which content does or does not comport with that sort of minimalistic standard of a target who “deserves it.”

 

Sidebar: one thing CoV did get right in this regard was make Longbow overall just enough of an asshole/international war crime for violence against them to feel justified (ex. using miniguns against civilian targets/in areas packed with civilians, using flamethrowers period, invading a foreign country as an NGO for purposes of instituting regime change, deciding their hurt fee fees make it justified for them to overrule and attempt to destroy a UN-sanctioned peacekeeping force… and this is before you get to some of the rank hypocrisy and corruption of individual members).

 

Part of this is indeed due to the lack of agency. The game’s structure just doesn’t allow you to begin and engage in schemes at your whim. You only have the choice of accepting or refusing contacts. Heck, you even lack the agency to back out of story arcs if you find yourself tasked with kicking puppies and giving cancer to children.

 

The worst case for a Blueside character is you end up fighting a boring or too difficult enemy group, but you never have to worry that your actions will be justified by the mission/arc.

 

For a Redside character there’s a chance with each mission, unless you’ve played it before or went to research it on the wiki, that you’ll be locked into something you might consider to be crossing the moral event horizon and essentially ruining your enjoyment of the character thereafter.

 

So you’ve just added an extra burden to the normies who wanna be the charming rogue if they wanna avoid accidentally becoming Homelander… or they can just make another hero and not have to worry about it.

 

Which, again, is why I think the least labor intensive way of getting more people to try out Redside is just provide clear indications of whether a given contact/arc is going to be geared for Rogues (acceptable targets) or require you to be a Villain (harms innocents).

 

Remove that extra effort needed to not have your character turn into someone you’d hate and you’ll likely get more people willing to give a shot at a charming rogue.

[CraterLabs]

54 minutes ago, Chris24601 said:

The big problem Redside is a lot of content is you getting away (or being materially complicit) with crimes against people who don’t deserve it and those no clear labels for which content does or does not comport with that sort of minimalistic standard of a target who “deserves it.”

 

Sidebar: one thing CoV did get right in this regard was make Longbow overall just enough of an asshole/international war crime for violence against them to feel justified (ex. using miniguns against civilian targets/in areas packed with civilians, using flamethrowers period, invading a foreign country as an NGO for purposes of instituting regime change, deciding their hurt fee fees make it justified for them to overrule and attempt to destroy a UN-sanctioned peacekeeping force… and this is before you get to some of the rank hypocrisy and corruption of individual members).

 

Part of this is indeed due to the lack of agency. The game’s structure just doesn’t allow you to begin and engage in schemes at your whim. You only have the choice of accepting or refusing contacts. Heck, you even lack the agency to back out of story arcs if you find yourself tasked with kicking puppies and giving cancer to children.

 

The worst case for a Blueside character is you end up fighting a boring or too difficult enemy group, but you never have to worry that your actions will be justified by the mission/arc.

 

For a Redside character there’s a chance with each mission, unless you’ve played it before or went to research it on the wiki, that you’ll be locked into something you might consider to be crossing the moral event horizon and essentially ruining your enjoyment of the character thereafter.

 

I think there's a lot of insight in what you're saying (honestly, the whole post is great but quoting the whole thing made it hard for me to read on the screen, heh) and I think this is something that Live was starting to address near the end of its run. Some of the devs back then were creating "opportunities to be heroic" or "opportunities to be villainous" that were optional, but even classic redside had a few moments of this as well (choosing to intentionally fail Marshall Brass' mission that one time by just waiting it out, for instance).

 

Unfortunately, there *are* players who seem to genuinely enjoy the puppy kickers out there like Themari and Phipps. Would there be any realistic way to include a kind of "Lines and Veils" thing for redside, like what some TTRPG games do for their tables? I'm not sure how that would work, but maybe some kind of customizable pop-up warning?

[Chris24601]

1 hour ago, CraterLabs said:

 

I think there's a lot of insight in what you're saying (honestly, the whole post is great but quoting the whole thing made it hard for me to read on the screen, heh) and I think this is something that Live was starting to address near the end of its run. Some of the devs back then were creating "opportunities to be heroic" or "opportunities to be villainous" that were optional, but even classic redside had a few moments of this as well (choosing to intentionally fail Marshall Brass' mission that one time by just waiting it out, for instance).

 

Unfortunately, there *are* players who seem to genuinely enjoy the puppy kickers out there like Themari and Phipps. Would there be any realistic way to include a kind of "Lines and Veils" thing for redside, like what some TTRPG games do for their tables? I'm not sure how that would work, but maybe some kind of customizable pop-up warning?

The easiest I think would be to just add (Villain) or (Rogue) after each of the contact names; Ex. Peter Themari (Villain) or Hardcase (Rogue); based on the nature of the missions they give. Particularly important is to include it when you’re given a choice of contacts.

 

Something like that would give casuals (those who don’t want to go research missions on the wiki to see what they call for) assurance that their criminal career will be limited to robberies or smacking down those who deserve it (and those who want to kick puppies will know which contacts to take as well).

 

The next step would be to re-shuffle contact access so that rogues aren’t locked behind villains and villains aren’t locked behind rogues.

 

Perhaps for contacts who do a bit of both (Diviner Maros’ stopping the Cult of the Shaper is roguish to even heroic, some of his later missions like breaking Dr. Theron’s spirit in the name of “destiny” is villainous) maybe label the individual missions/arcs.

[Vanden]

19 hours ago, Rudra said:

That's a matter of opinion. I personally vastly prefer red side over blue side. I just avoid Peter Themari and Westin Phipps. (And often Dr. Graves as well.)

 

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxA6jxHPsj915C7c8Dbvt-HO2PoXuQnM7i?si=CC9yuNKGNFYM4XMM

[Rudra]

19 minutes ago, Vanden said:

19 hours ago, Rudra said:

That's a matter of opinion. I personally vastly prefer red side over blue side. I just avoid Peter Themari and Westin Phipps. (And often Dr. Graves as well.)

 

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxA6jxHPsj915C7c8Dbvt-HO2PoXuQnM7i?si=CC9yuNKGNFYM4XMM

I'm not understanding this. Why did you link a Dark Souls 3 YouTube video?

[Vic Raiden]

5 hours ago, Chris24601 said:

The easiest I think would be to just add (Villain) or (Rogue) after each of the contact names; Ex. Peter Themari (Villain) or Hardcase (Rogue); based on the nature of the missions they give. Particularly important is to include it when you’re given a choice of contacts.

 

Something like that would give casuals (those who don’t want to go research missions on the wiki to see what they call for) assurance that their criminal career will be limited to robberies or smacking down those who deserve it (and those who want to kick puppies will know which contacts to take as well).

Yeah... But there's another problem to the villain layer. There's plenty of ways to be a villain, and very few of them are about doing random assholish stuff purely because someone paid you to. I can't really name anyone who would indeed enjoy that, but well, such are the limitations of the contact system. The lack of agency, in my understanding, doesn't refer to being railroaded into evil or roguish acts the player may not be comfortable with so much as to the very fact player villains simply don't get to do much on their own without being explicitly told to, with the exception of newspaper missions, morality tips and a small number of arcs.

[ThatGuyCDude]

1 hour ago, Vic Raiden said:

Yeah... But there's another problem to the villain layer. There's plenty of ways to be a villain, and very few of them are about doing random assholish stuff purely because someone paid you to. I can't really name anyone who would indeed enjoy that, but well, such are the limitations of the contact system. The lack of agency, in my understanding, doesn't refer to being railroaded into evil or roguish acts the player may not be comfortable with so much as to the very fact player villains simply don't get to do much on their own without being explicitly told to, with the exception of newspaper missions, morality tips and a small number of arcs.

This, this, this.  Tips and Newspaper missions are much more fun in the Rogue Isles than mission chains for two reasons: it's easy to pass on one that's distasteful and the Rogue/Villain has agency in the matter.  The only way to make that sort of feeling play out with the Contact system is to treat the contacts like 'marks': the text would need to be rewritten to emphasize first-person perspective and inner monologue, and the 'mark' would need to be depicted in the role of the dope or dupe (with the end of the mission series being the slam or double-cross).  As written, its often the PLAYER who ends up looking like the dupe; it doesn't feel good.  We want our Villains to seem clever.  A little flattery goes a long way.

There are a few mission chains that do this, such as Fire Wire.  Other chains, though, like the aforementioned Graves chain, depict our villains as reckless, arrogant, and stupid.  Adding a few extra options of dialogue and changing the responses that follow would go a long way to break the feeling that the mission is forcing the player to be a fool, even if there is no other change in the outcome.

Another problem I perceive with the villain storylines is the lack of coherent motivation.  Villains have goals.  City of Villains already has a few very defined goals to follow.  There's the whole 'Chosen' plot, making a fortune (but for what purpose?), and accumulation of power.  Perhaps if the player picked a motivation as a base 'contact' and it recommended other contacts accordingly, the story wouldn't seem so erratic.  It would help keep our villains from bowing to Arachnos in one chain and then picking their pocket in the next one.  The suggestion to flag quest chains is a good one, but instead of Rogue/Villain, perhaps they should be labeled based on Destiny/Profit/Power?

Edited February 28 by ThatGuyCDude
Punctuation Error

[Vic Raiden]

Oh! That reminds me of a couple older discussions about developing more personal paths for villains: 

 

Edited February 28 by Vic Raiden