Hello folks. I'm a recent donor, and while we wait for the alpha test servers to come back, I suppose I will post this.

This is an idea I posted on the CoH forums years ago where it was an incredibly long post detailing every inch of the design for how this system would work. Of course, it was never implemented in CoH, but lots of people liked the idea. I'll try to be a bit more brief here though.

Basically, I am starting from the premise that CoV did an absolutely terrible job on the villain side. And then I got to thinking about why it was so terrible, and that's when I came up with this PvP system. CoV was terrible at portraying villains because villains act, they don't react. CoH was great at doing heroes, because heroes react to things. You give a hero something wrong that is happening, and the hero attempts to stop it or fix it. That's not the way villains work at all, and CoV tried to squeeze villains into the same framework as heroes. 95% of CoV content was pitting villains up against other villain factions, not even heroes or police. It felt like playing a footsoldier in a gang war, not a supervillain. Villains don't follow orders, they don't get assignments. They plan their dastardly schemes and then attempt to carry them out. It's up to the heroes to stop them.

With that in mind, here is the plan I laid out. Villainous game-play should consist of planning their own missions, making their own goals, and carrying them out. Not receiving missions from contacts. This can be done in both PvE and PvP, but I will concentrate on the PvP aspect here as it is the more complex case. I'm sure how you will be able to see how this will be able to apply to PvE content as well just replacing the human heroes with police or guards or AI heroes.

A Villain will start a mission by first choosing a goal. In my plan as I laid it out on the CoH forums, villains would have an object in their hideout called a Drawing Board (That way when they fail, they can say "well, back to the drawing board" ). The drawing board takes the place of mission contacts. The villain goes to the drawing board and brings up a list of available goals they may try to achieve. These will be based on level and other factors of course and can be things like robbing a bank, poisoning the water supply, exploding the moon, whatever. But there is a list of types of things the villain can try to accomplish.

After they choose the type of goal, then they actually have to plan the scheme! A planning window comes up where they can plan the details. they determine where they will enter, direct minions to certain locations, give specific orders to certain minions when they reach their target destinations, basically AI types like "Guard This Thing" or "Run around and Kill any good guys you see" and so forth. They could plan to lay traps and whatnot. All of this is done before the mission starts.

Once the scheme is completely planned, they submit it at which point it goes into a queue. (At this point in the PvE version, the mission would be created and they could enter it immediately)

On the other side heroes who are interested in PvP are in an alert queue waiting for a villain to attempt a dastardly scheme. When one is submitted, heroes will be alerted and will be able to accept the mission to stop the villain from completing it. Once a match-up has been made, the mission begins and they are both sucked into the instanced mission! The villains simply have to do what they set out to do, and the heroes have to stop them. This is all instanced of course.

If the villains complete their goal, they win and the heroes lose. If the villains do not complete it in time or they die, they lose and the heroes win.

That's basically the gist of the idea. Another part of the idea was that more difficult schemes would take more than one mission to accomplish, so one mission might be gathering parts, another is scoping out the security, etc etc so it would be a whole mission arc of missions (which they need not do all back to back. each one would be planned and enter the queue separately)

That's pretty much it.

Take care all.

i really like the concept and i agree that villains needed to be more proactive less reactive.
i think its a cool idea for part of pvp (and possibly pve system with a little extra spice )
setting patrol paths and the like might be a bit 2 involved for server depending how they are planing architect and if they are planing to have a full mission architect.
maybe just having x number of "city sector maps", u v w x y z objectives on each map and a b c forces that you can send in any arrangement to different points, in a preset order. with a smallish list of behavior types aggressive patrol, defensive patrol, hide, ambush, extra.
have each objective you secure giving you some rewards/resources each one heroes secure giving them some rewards/resources, with varying ways to secure objectives depending on the objective that way its very unlikely either side doesn't get some rewards and keeps variety in objectives/replayability while people can be familiar with the general locations that might be attacked, central hospital, the high tech labs the bank extra

From what I've been hearing your character will always start out neutral and your actions will determine whether the world sees you as a hero or villain.

Archanarchist: yes, I agree with most of what you said and of course the system could be modified to work with what is planned in this game. The schemes would be planned in a way that is compatible with and and can be implemented in this game.

The one thing I do not agree with that you said however is that both sides are trying to secure objectives. I think this is completely contrary to the idea, in fact. It's not a big easter egg hunt contest where each side is trying to rack up points securing objectives. The villains are trying to achieve objectives, and the heroes are trying to stop them. That is the natural interaction between heroes and villains. Stopping the villains is the only objective the heroes have. And it's all or nothing for the villains too. They don't get rewarded for only achieving some of the objectives in a mission. They have to achieve all of them. Of course some XP and so forth will be given to both sides for various thing, not the least of which is defeating enemies in the pursuit of their goal. But the idea of both sides trying to secure objectives is completely contrary to the idea.

ZeeHero: This idea actually works perfectly well alongside that. there is no reason anyone can't try to undertake a dastardly scheme regardless of whether they are a hero or villain, but if you're a hero and try to rob a bank... well you're pretty much automatically a villain now. This is the way real life works too. I could decide to try to rob a bank any time I want, and I could go try to carry it out. It's highly unlikely that I would because I don't believe there is a very good chance I won't get caught, and I like not being in prison. But I certainly could try it, and if I did, I would become a bad guy pretty much instantly.

Well yes depending what you do it would affect your repuatation accordingly. if a villain helps the heroes to save the world, for awhile people might view him differently too.