While most Red Name posts tend to be brief, I found this extended item from Positron fascinating as an insight as to how design work operates on this game (or, sometimes, doesn’t operate), especially over time.
Here’s some detail into the badge systems that several of you have deduced through reasoning and sometimes nefarious means.
When badges were introduced back in issue 2, we had the ability to give them a Name and a Description, and all the badges got these (of course). When City of Villains was in development, it was determined for those characters to use the same badge system as the original one for clarity sake (no sense in having two datasets floating around). We added a couple more fields to the database: V_Name and V_Description. These are used when your character has the “villain” bit turned on.
Now back then, I was the one in charge of all the badges, so I went and looked at all of them and wrote villainous names and descriptions for the badges that villains would be able to earn. In the process I had come across several badges that were “impossible” for the other side to get, “Positron’s Ally”, “Villainous”, etc.
I discussed with Jack and Poz what to do, and we had a plan back then. We knew it would someday be possible for a villain to turn into a hero or vice versa, so it was decided that the “impossible to get” badges should have titles and descriptions entered that reflected your “going rogue” status.
Thus (for example) “Positron’s Ally” has a V_Name of “Positron’s Betrayer”. “Villainous” is the V_Name, and so the Name (as seen by hero) is “Reformed”. The descriptions were entered to reflect a character that started on one side and switched to the other. There are literally dozens of badges with this sort of nomenclature in them.
These went through testing and betas and launched with Issue 6: Along Came a Spider. It wasn’t until the badge system got the pounding of the entire playerbase that a lot of cracks in the system became exposed. Most of these got shored up between issue 6 and issue 7, a couple persisted through to later issues, and one was thought to be fixed, but wasn’t really. That was the infamous Reformed badge. A badge which was able to be earned through a Villain character hitting a Hero character with Confuse while in Siren’s Call, enabling the Hero to now attack, and defeat, Longbow, and thus earn credit for the badge.
Fast forward to Issue 10: Invasion. We now introduced a mission that heroes could take that involves them going up against rogue Longbow agents. Suddenly there was a “legitimate” way to earn the badge. I use quotes around that because earning the badge involves farming the mission over and over to get the requisite 1000 defeats needed for it.
Fast Forward to Issue 13: Power and Responsibility. I am no longer “the man” when it comes to badges. Phil “Synapse” Zeleski has the dubious task of managing these and a lot of the other reward systems in CoH/V. I know how much work this is and how hard it is, and when Phil started delving into the datafiles he had a lot of questions. The Reformed badge was one of them, and I (wrongly) told him that it shouldn’t be available to Heroes at all. Dutifully Phil then put a “requires = villain” on the badge, thus killing any chance Heroes had of getting the badge, however the progress bar’s requirement was left to “any”, so Heroes would see their progress bar, just not be able to actually achieve the badge.
Again Phil asked me how to handle this: remove the meter, or let Heroes get the badge. I made the wrong decision (again!), and had Phil simply remove the progress meter. Yes, I had heard the concerns of a few vocal badge aficionados, and I fell on the wrong side of the argument (it’s amazing, but sometimes being insulted makes you feel MORE right than you probably should).
After sitting down with Phil and going over the history of EVERYTHING badge related with this issue, Phil and I decided to go back and reinstate the Reformed badge for Heroes. This will be in Issue 14: Architect, but your credit should still be being counted from now until that releases. Of course, you have no progress bar, and something might have happened elsewhere that I don’t know about, so if you really want to make progress towards the badge, I would wait until Issue 14 is released to do it.
I’ve been on some software projects like this. “Hey, Dave, why did you design this thing this way — should we change it to this other way?” “Uh … sure.” [Later.] “Oh, crap, I remember why we didn’t design it that way in the first place …”