Incentives for being a Villain?

I know I know, there's been hundreds of threads on this subject, don't care, time to talk about it again. If you do not like this subject, move on to another thread.

For the rest of us, put your thinking caps on and let's see if we can come up with some ideas.

I suggest there be incentives for completing an instance as a Villain that you completed as a Hero. Maybe extra feats?

Every Hero has a Villain adversary. Some have alter egos. Maybe we could create alter egos for our toons and both could benefit from you playing the other.

Just a thought, maybe someone has something better.......

There are tons of incentives to be a villain already. Imo villians have far better missions and quest. Their story line is great, if a bit evil Going around torturing citizens and stealing souls is far better than the junk hero's do. Most of their content is also harder and more challenging. The basic meta human challeng has you move captured people around and activate stuff to beat super girl. The hero version just has you beat up the bad guys.

Hero A&B final boss is far easier than villain again. In Villain side you fight Saint walker and have to deal with his massive AoE dmg and push latern effect, hero side is a tank and spank run with Sinestro and hank who at best only really kills one person at a time with his charge unless your far to close to each other.

The only real downside to being a vilian, and the one that stops most people, is the lack of a large player base. Getting stuff done can be more of a chore as a villain if your not in a tight nit league. So hero's have more players, so they get more of the new players. It's an endless cycle that won't really change. After all most of the hard core top tier players have been with the game for years and most are not going to start from scratch as a villain after over 3 years of work towards their hero. Sure you can buy a lot of feats with replay badges now, but it's not the same thing.

If people really wanted to balance out the two factions all the Dev's would have to do is release faction respect badges, allowing you to switch between hero and villain. Of course it would be a nightmare in feats, styles. That more than anything else have kept such a feature from happening. After all as much as the Dev's love to make money the two things you can't respect remain your faction and your mentor.

After being a villain for 3 years now. myself and 2 friends switched factions. after a week we found a great league, and we started realizing that villains are just a stepping stone for a heros story. It seemed at SOE Live that's how the DEVS felt that aswell.
So even though villain side is highly under played, if it weren't for villains there would be no reason for heros other than cats in trees.

In many of the cases the DLC story line seems to follow the villain side of things, as if the hero's failed a lot of their earlier missions. Other wise things like trigon getting released for Sons of trigon DLC wouldn't really be happening.

My biggest dissapointment with that story was Circe released him, used his power, and locked him right back up. The demon that could take on brainiac, the other big baddie we've heard about since beta! And we didn't even get a chance to actually fight him, other than sealing off his magical barrier.

As much as I hate to admit it, that has always been this games down fall, they failed to separate the heros and villains. villains just seem like under recognized heros in this game.

to add on to this on the villain side you will find better players overall at least on USPS. besides villains generally do better in pvp too at least they used to doesn't look like it changed to much though.
villains for life

I am under the impression that for some reasons villains, when reaching cr 100+, are the more skillfull players. Whenever a villain participates at ring war (and there are not three or more high-cr heroes), villains win. Okay, okay, that's generalizing. Just an observation ... ;-) Isn't THAT an incentive?

But the idea of an alter ego, maybe done with a transformer in your very own base, looks intriguing. Step in as villain into the transformer and come out as a hero, new styles included (you could start with the neutral one from the very start). There could be different wardrobes for villain and hero styles, easy to be switched. It fits into the story as well, if you receive the mission from your mentor to use the transformer to spy on the other faction by mingling among them, doing what they do. This way you could collect new (style) feats, do all those hero alerts, raids and operations. You could optimize your main character even further without going through months / years bringing up a new char.

For SOE the thought might be attractive, too, because I am sure, MANY players could not wait, to buy such a transformer from the market place ...

wait what?

And Circe actually won in Sons of Trigon too since she tells Queen Hippolyta that she charged the legendary victory stone. This is why people should serve Circe because serving her is serving a winner.

Trigon could have took on Brainiac but could Circe have taking on Trigon when it was over. She wants to rule and while stopping Brainiac helps her, freeing Trigon fully just creates another problem later for her.

The point I'm trying to make is the other big bad guy everyone wanted to fight, and villains here about the entire time they're leveling, you end up locking away, and not even fighting! the devs could have easily had circe enchant us to trigons size and actually fight him, rather than fight WW at the end.

AFP1 is finally a story where a villain is winning, but there's a feeling in my gut that even villains are going to loose when P3 hits, even from their story perspective.

You know you're a hero when...
- You save Zatana and Doctor Fate from Black Adam and Felix Faust and put an end to Black Adam's plans to raise Isis
- You help Oracle and Batman clear out an OMAC infestation in the Batcave and defeat brother eye
- You save Batman from OMAC infection and control by Braniac and drive Braniac out of the batcave for good
- You help superman to free his dog Krypto and gain readmittance to the Fortress of Solitude
- You drive Braniac's forces out of the Fortress of Solitude and re-secure the power core for Superman
- You help Superman re-capture General Zod and his lackies, and trap them back in the Phantom Zone
- You help Wonder Woman rescue the island of Thermascera from invasion by Braniac
- You quell a prison riot at Strikers and put Gorillla Grod back under controll
- You stop Lex Corp from expirimenting with Doomsday in smallville and defeat Doomsday before he can become a threat to the world
- You put an end to TO Morrow's meddling in Ace Chemicals and take out his experiments and Chemo
- You help the biohazard teams in Bludhaven defeat Chemo to start the cleanup of the destroyed city
- You put an end to Ultra Humanite's plans to turn everyone into monkeys and capture him
- You save the moon from destruction and take out Queen Bee and her hive
- You save Coast City from out of controll red green and yellow lanterns
- You stop Ras Al'Ghul from performing his ritual and using the Lazarus waters to scourge the planet
- You stop Mr Freeze, Poision Ivy, and Scarecrow from taking over arkham assylum and re-capture them
- You stop the sons of Trigon from invading gotham city and turning earth into their vision of hell
- You end intergang's crime spree and put and end to Bruno Manheim and the Apocalyptian Chang Tsu

... Oh wait... i'm a Villian not a hero...
hrm... am I?

@ Curse Bringer, X-zero:
Why do I have the impression that you are WAY off the track of this thread, ruining it thus ??

I had posted this a while back once, but I'd like to see a 10 point feat called "Making a Dent" for getting a hero and a villain to level 30.

The 1st time I saw Supergirl put her fists on her hips with that smug pose? I got my incentive to be a villain.....

Villains get to knock around Titanic Trenton on a daily (and some time multiple times a day) basis. What more incentive do you need?

The villian side is great,story lines are funny (especially joker ones) but as most have said the population stinks...i have expressed my opinions as to why before its the community. People are not even willing to extend a hand to help a new player starting out over there from a hero or heck a new player to the game until they 30 or a certain CR. People say they dont wanna invest time in new people who may leave to be a hero or give up the game,if yoru not willing to give people a chance then why complain there no villians? lol. This is an mmo people quit and change factions everyday,but those who you actually show how the game can be and the fun of it,give em a place to call home and friends to game with usually stay,but to put em off and make them level all the way to max level with no advice/tips or peeps to converse with of course they gonna bolt people play mmos to play with people not to solo and just play with people once they already max. And no im not saying you gotta have em join your league and run them throug hstuff thats just being dumb they not gonna learn that way but thats how some people think if they invite someone they gotta run em. But what harm does it do to invite someone to your league to give em peeps to talk to as they level and answer questions as they go, people act like that is such a hinderance and dont wanna bother with people.

Anywho *breaths* sorry rant over lol, and yes somewhat of a generalization but sadly the truth the vast majority of villians have this mentality from what iv seen over course of a month. People dont mostly play heros cause they wanna be heroic its cause there peeps over there and if they got questions or want help or a league most ,even if your level 5 will invite ya and help out. Villian side...*Crickets*.

A green name actually stated that hero and villain adds are not any easier or harder from one another. I interpret this to mean that the difficulty level on both sides are relatively the same. In other words: the difficulty is level either minimal or non-existent that it should not even be accounted for.

Here is the conversation.

Player: yeah... lets see you do that in that time on the villain side of things everyone knows the villains side is expert mode and hero side comes with training wheels

Loche said: ↑

“The NPCs are exactly the same for both sides. We just swap VFX and models. No difference other than visuals.”

Scarlet Rise said: ↑

“Then why did this fallacy start?”

The continual spread of misinformation from people who state things as if they are fact, but really don't have any understanding of how things are built.

So there you go. Here is the link to thread that this conversation took place:

https://forums.station.sony.com/dcu...-alert-official-feedback-thread.215043/page-4

The problem with this game is that the difference in being in either faction is nothing, sane gameplay, same powers, this game really showcases the heroes than their counterparts. When I started this game, I leveled both a hero and a villain. I liked my villain character more, but I had more fun and more people to interact with on the hero side than the villain side. Heroes were more abundant and it was easier to create raid groups and run content only because of the numbers.

To me, the choice was easy. I wanted to do hoodrat things with my friends. Not go to church.

Not at all, I've always stated that villains are just under recognized heros. I would love something that makes me feel more villanious... rather than helping bat man in OC, Joker should have taken the opportunity to hack in, and he become the omac in Inner.

What the point i'm bring up is you don't really feel like a villain. a incentive to give us is actually make us feel like villains