Hero vs Villain

[purplejezusjuice]

Rolled villain as I heard the numbers were lower, but seems they are much lower.  Do we know how many villains vs heroes on each server?

 

Might need to incentivize some more villains, or maybe it is just the time I play around since it's usually later in the night.

 

Anyone else agree or just my play time?

[markofantares]

Even at it's height, Villain numbers were down. I seriously think Going Rogue was an attempt to solve that. Incentive people to play Rogues or Vigilantes. I distinctly remember playing, going to Siren's Call or Recluse's Victory and having it be far more Heroes than Villains. We (redside) routinely got owned in almost all PvP.  People would just rather play a Hero (or a Vigilante).  Villains were always a niche market.

[Mikazuki]

As much as i like villains, they have about half the content, maybe even less.

 

For comparison, heroes get around 16 task forces and villains get around 6 strike forces (not counting co-op ones on both)

 

On the other hand mayhem missions are a lot more fun than safeguard missions.

 

So well, lack of content is the biggest reason there.

[Ozium]

played gold and teams and people were pretty rare, red seemed bit more busy but not even close to blue numbers i see now

[Wolf Bonne]

It was like that on live, too. I ended up switching to Virtue from my home on Liberty just so I could be with more than my same very small handful of friends after a year or so. I dunno why that is, maybe it is the lack of content, maybe it's how drab the Rogue Isles can be, I heard many complaints about being a mere lackey nobody as a sticking point, but that to me was one of the reasons why I enjoyed red side.

 

While the content was thinner, it was generally a lot more interesting and varied. You had many more TFs on the hero side, but so many felt samey. The one criticism I side with is the lack of zones and never getting new ones exclusive to it, which would've gone a long way to bring people over, especially post Going Rogue. Also Grandville sucks. I mean, sure, it's cool, but it was such a hostile and laggy place to be in, and it's extra red and dark there. Fits amazingly well for the narrative and themes, doesn't work as being the one and only place you could progress in once level 40.

 

The only thing red side had for many people were the archetypes exclusive to it until GR, and possibly the once exclusive costume options.

[Panache]

My personal issue, which seemed to be shared across a not insignificant amount of players, was that while Blueside could elicit the feeling of being a hero, Redside couldn't quite manage the same feat. Your character(s) certainly performed villainous deeds, but trying to live out a fantasy of an Actual Villainous Mastermind was a tough row to hoe.

[Mjolnerd]

I know it might have technically not needed City of Heroes to run when it was released, but let's face it, folks: City of Villains was never anything more than an expansion to the real game.

 

This is exactly why I never started with the whole "CoX" thing -- The game is CoH, everything else is an add-on.

[Charistoph]

Add on to everything said, and people like playing what they've built up.  Villains and Praetorians were new areas, but they weren't areas that you could take your old characters all the way through, unlike most other MMORPG expansions.  It would be like only being able to play as Draenei and Blood Elves in World of Warcraft's Outland, while your old characters only accessed the Raids.

[markofantares]

All of this is true!

 

However, for some of us; a very select few, City of Villains was our home and our first love. I knew about City of Heroes when it was released, but I never cared much for the heroes in comics. Villains were always far more interesting. And the antiheroes! When CoV came out, I was one of the first people to be there, in Siren's Call and Bloody Bay ready to fight heroes! Unfortunately, there was a distinct disadvantage - Heroes were all Hami-ed out with special Enchancements and Epic powers - We were fucked from thse start.

 

I played City of Villains from 2004 to 2010 almost exclusively - until I switched to WoW. It wasn't even until Going Rogue that I tried City of Heroes!

 

We villains are a small group, but we love our side of the game!

[Venture]

I never liked villains, i just never got on with red side for some reason.

 

I always thought segregating the playerbase this way was a big mistake on Cryptic's part... I'd have had them occupy the same zone but have a flagged system where the options you chose in missions (killing/arresting the big bad at the end) or the missions you chose to complete affected your morality...

 

 

Anyway, please note that you do not need to role a hero, villain or praetorian. You can travel ,to Pocket D on any alt, speak to Null the Gull and he will instantly change your allignment to whichever you want... This makes swapping from Red to Blue to Gold much quicker/easier.

[Heraclea]

Villains had less resources, fewer zones, and it was harder to pick your enemies redside.  Way too much debuff flying around redside as well; Praetoria, of course, was even worse.  Every mastermind I tried to level when they were exclusively redside died when I hit Sharkhead.

[Dr. Sinister]

Villain here just dropping in to say hi.  The world will be mine muwahahahahaha

[Kelador]

Rolled a Villain today on Indom well finding a team has been impossible... soon as I can go rogue I will be.

[srmalloy]

Moving around Sharkhead as a MM, unless you were /Dark and could move with Shadow Fall cloaking your pets, was always a rude crapshoot as to how many spawns your pets would aggro following you; it was always safer just to fight your way through one spawn at a time and accept the fact that you couldn't just use your travel power (except, perhaps, for Group Fly). Or dismiss them and resummon them at the door or just inside.

[Mjolnerd]

Suggestion: Let's designate an official unofficial villains server. Encourage everyone to put their villains in one place so they can all team together. I nominate Indomitable, since it's already the official unofficial PvP server so it's the one most in need of villains.

[HoundsTooth]

I rolled a villain and was frustrated by the low numbers of other villains. I changed to a Rogue and now I can play on any team. I'll do villain side when there's enough people and play as a hero the rest of the time.

[Ghostchase]

100% villain, always have been, always will be.

 

Rogue Isle is just so much more beautiful than that awful clinical looking Paragon City.

[MrAxe]

I admire heroes and so that's what I wanted to be. Combine that with the more drab looking villain environments I don't like as much and I went blue side 99% of the time. Although I love my Demons/Poison villain Mastermind. Starting again has allowed me to switch from Necromancy which is nice.

[Jaguaratron]

At some point maybe they can tweak rewards accordingly for side population, if you get X% more xp/tickets/drops/merits as a villain I suspect many would swap over and it would be a self balancing mechanism

[Scrapulous]

I played and enjoyed red side, but their daring zone design choices make for a pretty daunting experience. Mercy Isle is a weak starting zone, where it's tough to build a community and there isn't an obvious central hub. There are also many more vertical challenges in all of the zones and lots of hidden pits and such, not to mention a gloomy atmosphere general. All of these things and the zone design issues other folks have mentioned were surmountable but add to the effort required to make a home red side. One of the things that surprised me when I logged on for the first time last week was that the CoX zones hadn't been tweaked between I16 and shutdown.

 

[davpa]

I ran an RP villain group on Virtue for about 6 years. At our height, which was a solid 4 year run, lasted till one month to shutdown. We RPed till the end but it got thinner as depression set in.

 

Red side was quieter compared to the Blue side, no doubt. At the same time we didn’t have to deal with Capt Noob around every friggin corner as it is Atlas Park. What you think of as “dead” we thought of it as immersive. And for us, we played 3 scheduled nights a week, plus events on weekends. We Rped social in our Hideout, we RPed during missions, we RPed during Strike Forces. We even parterned with two Blue-side hero groups to RP out the Incarnate trial (sadly we never got to do the last trial due to shutdown apathy from the Heroes).

 

We played bad guys. Our characters were awesome. Awesomely bad...but bad in not a good way. Our characters were losers. We were petty. We were neurotic. We had trust issues. We could destroy the Earth but we couldn’t execute our plots to take over the world. We were the Entropy Legion, and we were family.

 

The Legion is reforming on Everlasting. We are rebuilding our guild site from the ashes of the out-of-buisness GuildPortal ( new site is http://entropylegion.guildlaunch.com). If any wants to join the ranks of semi-competent villains, all are welcome. Even if you wish to hang around, we don’t need you to be in our SG to have fun. Just be warned, we stay in-character when we speak in Local chat.

[Kaliselia]

Rolled villain as I heard the numbers were lower, but seems they are much lower.  Do we know how many villains vs heroes on each server?

 

Might need to incentivize some more villains, or maybe it is just the time I play around since it's usually later in the night.

 

Anyone else agree or just my play time?

 

Oh I will get around to creating my villain and since tonight is Friday I just might go onto Titan icon and get the Costume done if there are long queues.

[Charistoph]

Having the Rogue system in place (and Null the Gull) actually helps keep things a bit more balanced.  You can take a Hero through the Villain path and explore that route.

 

Honestly, I always felt that Villain side to have a bit more character, over all.  That's probably because of what they were able to do with it, in terms of technology and making it a rubble heap, while Paragon City had to look like it was trying to keep things sane and clean.