"I aim to misbehave" - Captain Malcolm Reynolds, Serenity

 

 

Paragon's news service continued to feed lies to the sheep about the Rogue Islands.  Zeus still held onto his mad Olympian City.  His minions kept the peace through reporting methods styled after 1930's Germany.

 

There was a quote among the paranoid.  Simply put, "who watches the watchers?"     

 

It was easy to see evil in those that questioned the news.  Paragon's people didn't want to see the paid actors for what they were. 

 

They were idols to many.  Thus, when we recently whacked one PNN demigod, after first removing every last one of his back up clones, there was a large uproar of official sympathy.

 

State funerals are the centerpiece of the drama that holds dictatorships like that of the Statesman's together.  It draws large groups and gives them a common cause to bond or avenge.

 

It also does a wonderful job of leaving the city defenses down.  After all, one can't miss the social event of the season.  One's place in the dictatorship hierarchy is keyed to how loudly you cry or applause at Zeus's words.

 

One hour into the mainframe in Paragon's City Hall was all we needed.  We had the clues on the most likely source of the mad god's power. 

 

Oddly, it had been corporate.  It was something that might have been called dictatorship Inc.

 

Portal Corp would have been the obvious name, but it was just a subsidiary, and the truth seemed to be far older than any might suspect.  A large spidery veined Cancer spread all throughout this multiverse.  It was something where the dead ends came too quickly, meaning, the powers that be, had not housed their main offices or critical holdings within this dimension.

 

If it had been music rather than the dimensional resonance of advanced string theory, I could say we had the note, the pitch and the tone we were looking for.  The truth was more complex, but the metaphor held.

 

Of course, we would need a nexus point to look for this enemy.  The common point centered to listen for.

 

Only one truly existed.  It would need to be under extreme pressure for that to hold true.  The goal would be to herd the heroes into the flux.  The need to avenge the funeral would be the driving point.

 

My instinct was to report this all to Lord Recluse, but I had a gut feeling this had to be avoided.  After all, one didn't know where all the spidery tendrils lay.

 

We'd hit RV, Wednesday, 18 April 2007, from 9 - 11 Eastern.  We'd put the universe in flux and spot the source. 

 

If suspicions held true, we'd bite the hand that feeds our static unbalanced reality.  We'd rock the stability of the verse and we'd start the natural order back to where it should be, rather than the crap that it is.

 

Change was coming... 

 

 

Proposal: A Designated War Server

 

Current Cryptic developer based decisions have made a real balance of level 50 competitions decidedly in favor of Heroes vs the weaker Villains

 

1. APPs are decidedly more powerful than PPPs and have greater flexibility

 

2. There are no Villain ATs with brawl indexes higher than .90.  By contrast, Scrappers have a 1.0 and Blasters have a 1.25

 

3. Villains have no Arena fixes.  Thus: no freebie irresistible debuffs, irresistible damage, etc in addition to inherents

 

4. Due to Fury being virtually unusable in PVP, Tanks actually do more damage than Brutes in most engagements

 

5. Too many other things to waste more typing space here

 

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Ok, Villains get a raw deal.  Thus, for more than a year on most servers, Villain pvp SVGs have been going extinct.  As Rift would have put it they lack ANY elite class toons.

 

This issue tends to even out a bit in large scale conflicts.  However, it's hard for most servers to make large scale events happen consistently.

 

We did rather well with an experiment on my server, known as the Guardian War, which ran for over half a year weekly.  With this event, at its height, we actually had engagements in RV that were larger than 60 versus 60. 

 

What's amazing about that for Guardian's population is that, if you were to who hero both COX and COV, that would be roughly 1 player in 3 attending the event that night.  I've been told that is pretty impressive.

 

The Guardian War unfortunately was a victim of the November - January zone crashes.  By the time the servers were stabilized again, the villain side had lost 80% of their hardcore pvpers and the villain pvp recruits started to dwindle.  The hero side simply grew and eventually it was no longer possible not to be outnumbered 3 to 1.  Thus, the event was retired.

 

It is my conviction that zone events allow for higher levels of community involvement.  It creates a natural bridge to bring in more casual Pvpers and people that say they don't pvp.  I think zone pvp tends to be a solid tool for growth of the pvp community (as long as the zones stay stable).

 

However, due to the imbalances, there is a continuous drain of COV players towards COH toons.  This has created a worse than necessary situation for the rare PVP guilds that are willing to play either side to balance things out.  The imbalance creates zone battles way below their potential, with most villain teams simply getting zerged out of existence. 

 

As players concerned with growing the pvp base, we could do something about this.  There really isn't a point to grinding up a level 50 on every server then fully equipping it.  It is too tedious and doesn't create numbers fast enough to balance things out live side.  There isn't a point to doing it on test, since people complain the lag is worse there than anywhere else.

 

However, we are coming on a time when it will be possible to TRANSFER completed toons in the near future.  So, I have two questions: 

 

1) Which of you are psycho enough to play the underdog side?

 

And

 

2) What server would you recommend we designate as the War server?

 

 

I propose a pre - created large strike force of villains to take RV for about 2 hours every week.  Literally looking to be at least 60 - 80 strong to hold off any Hero zerg, (RV is rumored to cap out at 250, so 125 would be ideal to prevent being outnumbered where one is already outgunned). 

 

I propose we get everyone who'd like to see large scale fights to transfer one toon to the named server (preferably villain).  I propose we test the upward limits of the game by actually ignoring lag issues and testing entire super-powered-armies going head to head.  Thus, I propose we do something with this game at a level never seen before.

 

That's my idea anyway.  Would you all be interested?