Here's a thought. Whereas CoX had Hero-only areas and Villain-only areas and different missions, etc, wouldn't it be cool if we just all inhabited the same areas and did missions for the same or similar contacts?
If this does happen, I just had a thought that it might be cool to have some kind of "WANTED" thing for villains (or even Heroes for that matter *dramatic music*). The idea being that a person who is a hero in good standing cannot team up with a WANTED person, or they become WANTED too, at least until the thing making them WANTED is dealt with (mistaken identity, crooked cops arresting heroes, J.Jonah Jameson printing lies about heroes, etc). WANTED people are treated publicly as villains, meaning NPC bystanders flee from them on sight, NPC villains ignore them and will generally let them pass undisturbed, and NPC goodguys (cops, NPC heroes etc) treat them with hostility and even attack them in broad daylight, spawns of cops appearing to try to arrest you, etc. For the other side, you could have "MARKED" men/women, and by that I mean there's a bounty/contract out on you and one or more NPC villain organizations are willing to pay for your head. Same thing, but no public reaction by bystanders, just more aggro from environment mobs, and random mob spawns of villains coming to annoy you until the MARKED condition is dealt with (put Fat Tony in jail, prove to the boss you aren't hitting on his girlfriend, etc).
This also brings up the idea of operating at night to avoid being spotted, etc. Also, you could allow heroes to team up with villains freely as long as the villain isn't WANTED (for fear of guilt by association) in which case the Hero immediately becomes WANTED too until the mission or whatever is successfully completed. Likewise, villains can normally team up with heroes, but if the Hero is MARKED then the villain get's MARKED too because word spreads fast in the underworld about people working with MARKED men/women.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Okay more on this: Your toon can possibly also be TRUSTED meaning that the legitimate authorities trust him or her and allow them to make arrests. This gives you some ability to summon perhpas a spawn of niot terribly effective cops once or twice as backup (or just at the end of a mission to arrest the evildoers and finish the mission). Or your toon can be FEARED meaning that badguy mobs treat him or her with respect and might be willing to take orders from him or her (summon mob of badguys).
When a villain commits a crime in front of a legitimate authority figure, in broad daylight in public, or while teamed up with a TRUSTED hero, they become WANTED. When a hero teams up with a FEARED villain and doesn't do as he's told, he (the hero) becomes MARKED.
Heroes can become TRUSTED by doing certain missions, or arcs, or TFs, or even a full-blown cadre of things worthy of an Accolade, same for villains with FEARED. Certain missions could make a hero WANTED or MARKED or both, temporarily, same for villains.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I like the idea, but I think that a wanted man should be able to team up with a hero, and vice-versa. I'll make an exception if CoT doesn't let people on opposite ends of the alignment matrix team up, but otherwise it would just be a stupifyingly infuriating thing. Besides, why not let anti-heroes/villains get a little lose? :-)
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How about we give some of these kinds of missions a betrayal option? "I knew I said I'd help you get the McGuffin / wouldn't arrest you, but..." Naturally the hero or villain would be hit by the appropriate alignment adjustment(s).
I do believe we'll have mixed zones, for the most part. Starter zones may be villain or hero specific, although it would be cool if there were opportunities to see higher level characters go about their business and perhaps even fight (e.g. a rooftop battle that doesn't interfere with doings of the low level characters).
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Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
In an open world where you CANNOT PVP anyone there's no reason not to have mixed zones. In that world a suypervillain is just a superpowered person who breaks the law. There's no reason these people have to do that out in the open. Maybe they break the law secretly and then walk/leap/fly/teleport around the City like they're just another superpowered guy (or maybe they hide their powers even).
In that world the thing that is most "suspension of disbelief" is when a player runs across another player who is of opposite alignment. In those cases, the lack of PVP is an issue, but again, if you are to pretend that you don't KNOW the other guy is a villain, then you're ok. In fact, alignments should probably be secret for that reason.
Whether or not WANTED or MARKED toons should be PVPable is another question, and I'm firmly on the side of "absolutely no PVP in the PVE zones". This means putting up with some amount of forced lack-of-PVP, even where it might seem appropriate, even if it harshes the suspension of disbelief.
On the other hand, you COULD have a system where people are only ever WANTED or MARKED based on choices they make in the game, and those choices bring with them the consequences of having to put up with the possibility of PVP until such time as the WANTED or MARKED person is "brought to justice" or "taught a lesson". Maybe the WANTED story arc requires you to go to a PVP zone and do a thing in order to rid yourself of the WANTED tag. Then, as soon as you are defeated in that zone, you "pay your dues" and are un-tagged and are no longer WANTED. Maybe it respawns you in a jail, or maybe it kicks you back to the login screen and makes the "incarcerated" toon unavailable for like a day or something. But if you manage to actually navigate the PVP zone and "clear your good name" by defeating the boss or clicking the glowwie at the end of the arc, you get to rid yourself of the WANTED tag without having to "serve time".
There could be thing where if you rid yourself of the WANTED or MARKED tag the "easy" way by just giving up, you have to "do the time" and you just lose the status then, but if you manage to successfully complete the arc without being defeated you lose WANTED/MARKED and gain TRUSTED/FEARED.
I feel like heroes and villains should be able to be WANTED, MARKED, TRUSTED, or FEARED in almost any combination (any 1, any 2, any 3, all 4, or none). WANTED and TRUSTED at the same time seems like a stretch, but every other combination seems doable, in theory. But then WANTED might just mean "WANTED for questioning" not "shoot on sight, shoot to kill".
This brings up another cool idea: if you're WANTED and FEARED that might land you on the "Public Enemies" list, on which you might be able to rise in rank by remaining WANTED and FEARED for longer than anyone else, or by accomplishing missions while WANTED and FEARED. Then conversely, being MARKED and TRUSTED might make you "a rat" and thus you gain stature on the "List of Informants". Being TRUSTED and FEARED makes you a "scourge of the underworld" and you get ranked on that list, and being MARKED and FEARED makes you an "Upstart" which is a list you get ranked on. People who are WANTED and MARKED would be "Fugitives" and people who are WANTED and TRUSTED would be "Framed", etc.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
While I appreciate the thought you've put into this, and like the basic idea of a sort of sliding scale of contacts based on your alignment, I have to cast a rousing NO! vote for any sort of forced PvP. For reasons far too various to go into here.
UNLESS, as they did with Conan, there is a separate alt-ruleset server. I might even play on that server from time to time- I'm not inherently anti-PvP. But personally, I don't want my CORE game to consist of being endlessly PvP trolled because I choose to play a villain character. It's bad enough with the endless duel requests in Champs, where we're all supposedly on the same side.
I am [b] not[/b] an altoholic! I can stop whenever I want. No, really...
And that brings up something I'd like to see, which I've Not seen in other games. We can toggle 'Refuse Trades', we can toggle 'Refuse Guild Invites', we can mark a person 'Ignore", so why can't we toggle 'Refuse Duels'? Heck, lets add that, if the bozo persists on demanding a duel, when we've already refused, he starts Injuring himself.
Really, I don't even want to have to be Aware that some jerk thinks it would be fun to beat me up - Unless he's an NPC.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Wildstar has that option to refuse duels
Just to be clear, I'm against all forms of forced PVP, but if you accept a mission that you know will ask you to go to a PVP area and possibly get PVPed, then that's not forced, in my opinion.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I think the same, *UNLESS* doing said PvP mission is the only way to be able to progress in the game.
I know that in Wildstar, there was a small quest chain which was purely optional to do [1] that involved you using it on enemy (player and NPC) mobs to control, then kill them. You can do this if you are careful enough without getting flagged for PvP.
However, people still complained about it, even those on the PvE servers... because it *could* flag you for PvP.
Carbine ended up making it more obvious that it *could* end up in PvP, even though it wasn't a *pure* PvP mission.
[1] Complete the quest, get a helmet, its an octopus style creature, that talks to you.
Just a quick reminder to folks: forced PvP is not on the menu. That said, having full-world PvP as an option certainly *is* on the eventual menu (I say eventual because there are a whole lot of things that are not purely technical that need to be resolved for it to be sane).
We do have a system in mind for addressing this. We've tested some basics out, but are not yet anywhere near far enough along to be able to talk about it in any great detail, except to say that it takes the whole "see the world through the eyes of " idea that CoH/CoV had started to use, and takes it a quantum leap forward.
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I like this idea, one of the things that always bugged me about C0X is the Heroes and Villains essentially being completely seperate from each other.
I liked how SWG did it with a flagging system.
Flagging makes the most sense to me as well.
Hell, I could even accept it being a bit more *fine grained* in that if you are not PvP flagged, that does not mean that you can attack the opposing sides NPC's and be immune to retaliation from that groups playerbase (ie on a PvE server in Wildstar, you can be PvE flagged for the whole game.. until you attack an opposing factions NPC, then you will be PvP flagged for up to 5 minutes after your last aggressive action. And yes, the the quest that I spoke about earlier on? If you were careful enough, you could do it without getting flagged for PvP at all)
This would mean that *in general* you are not going to be open to attacks from the enemy, but you still have to be *slightly* careful with your attacks as well. Quest mobs *SHOULD NOT* flag you for PvP (caveat, NPC mobs that become *valid* quest mobs wouldn't necessarily flag you for PvP either).
But if you and a group of people want to go around and kill the NPCs? You can...
Wont necessarily be *easy* to do it though. And you would open yourself to retaliation from the opposing playerbase as well.
Well for all the greatness that came from CoH one of its fundamental flaws was that it was forever hampered by its original "hero only" paradigm. Sure when they added City of Villains they did their best to make it all work together. But they never fully managed to mesh the two sides together into a smoothly "united" game the way it needed to be.
This is why I think CoT is taking the right approach to all this: Not only will heroes and villains exist together in the same single "world" from the very beginning but the very notion of locking the game into fixed absolute factions will not even an issue with the way the alignment system will have built-in "grayness". This flexibilty may make the game harder to develop, but I think it'll be a better game for the effort in the long run.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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In WoW, many NPCs in faction bases (cities, towns, camps, quest hubs) have a symbol on their icon (visible when you target them, or on the tooltip when you mouse over them) indicating that if you attack or damage this target, you will be flagged for PVP.
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
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Doesn't DCUO use a similar system? I haven't played it in a long while, but I believe you could flag yourself for PvP at will and disable it after a cooldown, but even when not flagged any attempt to attack an npc would turn your flag on. It couldn't be disabled again until cooldown expired. So no quick murder and hide the flag, if a hero wanted to "avenge the innocent", he was free to do so, and once engaged there was no escaping PvP until the fight was over. Attacking an opposite-aligned pc would proc a warning that you were risking PvP (unless your flag was already on), so you could avoid the consequences if you'd made a mistake. Or am I remembering a different game?
Having not really played DCUO I cannot comment, but the way in which you have described it, it seems to be very similar as to how most other systems work. So even if you are misremembering stuff, you still got it right for at least *ONE* game.
One thing that Wildstar does for PvE servers as well, is that unless you and the enemy players are flagged for PvP, I can spam my attacks left right and center, and not be able to hurt/heal you in the slightest. And even *healing* a PvP flagged person won't necessarily flag me for PvP either (Or so I am lead to believe, I could well be wrong, but I don't play on a PvP server, and have no desire to in most MMO's[1]).
Actually that brings up an interesting point... would healing someone who is dueling another player, flag you automatically for PvP or would the system be setup so that no "external forces" can be used on the combatents ie when the fight starts, all "non player cast" effects drop automatically, to prevent the "buffing from outside the ring" which could happen in duels... Just a random thought that flew through my head to be honest
[1] The exception being for games in the vein of Eve Online, where it is a giant sandbox, and there are no alternate rule sets for the server out there.