The Daily Grind: How do you choose a side?

As far as CoX goes, I say start with the hero side. There's much less of a learning curve there, as CoV was designed well after the Hero side, so it's a bit more complex.

Also, the Villain side, unarguably, has better missions, better NPCs, etc. The Hero side is, in the original zones and missions, a bit bland until the mid 20s. But, the good news is that, if you start on the Hero side, and learn how the game handles, when you start on the villain side, you'll see the changes and see how they've tried to update the system a bit.

Also, be sure to get someone to bring you on some of the more epic higher-level missions, either through the flashback system, or tag along on a mayhem mission.

I really wish WoW had divided its classes differently somehow, with three or four factions instead of basically two, e.g., (1) Blood Elves/Undead/Trolls, (2) Tauren/Orcs, (3) Humans/Dwarves/Gnomes, and (4) Dranei/Night Elves.

My favorite races were the tauren and orcs; they seemed to have such a nobility to them in their quests, lore, and general gruff temperament. However, they were allied with the creepy trolls and the even creepier undeads (voodoo, creepy experiments on prisoners, etc.).

WoW would be a better, more interesting game if Blizzard were to create more factions or permit (in future expansions) "Going Rogue"-type realignments.

One of these days, an MMO is going to come along with two (or more factions that with real shades of gray on both sides, who simply are in a battle to the death with one another (Fallen Earth shows some promise along these lines).

I wonder whether STO might just pull this off, as I've always liked the Klingons and have never really considered them "villains" in the traditional sense.

Evil, usually. Good is almost always more popular (WAR, for example, shifted from mostly Destruction (evil) in beta to mostly Order (good) after the game hit shelves and the rest of the MMO world tried it out. The bad guys are usually less common, and less easy to play because the good guys (the majority) get most of the love, and everyone wants to play the hero.

I'm kind of bored of these 2 faction games "good versus evil" "order versus destruction" "light versus dark" "Jedi versus Sith" these all seem to be extremely artificial & overly simplistic, not only that but they leave little room for political backstabbing & intrigue.

If I had a hand in developing an MMO I'd want to impliment a still-simple, but deeper kind of faction system, whereby let's say you had 7 factions, be they called guilds houses political parties or whatever fits the genre & setting & story of the game, you could operate as a mercenary & work for all 7 but only progress so far in your standing with them, but you could also become more devoted to a few whilst becoming less liked by a few, or you could become completelly loyal to 1 & even more disliked that the others, the trick is making each kind of loyalty rewarding in different ways.

To be on topic though, I enjoy playing both good & evil characters & exploring a game world from both perspectives, so in such games I will often create characters of both kinds even if it means on different servers.

I usually go for something weird-looking, side notwithstanding. (It's a running joke that most of my WoW characters are one sort or another of tall and blue.)