“City of Villains” is the upcoming expansion for “City of Heroes”. During the last day there has been an heated debate about the rumor that the explansion will be sold at full price as a separate pruduct and separate monthly fee, requiring the players who want to get both the “hero” and “villain” experience to pay monthly for both.

Now the second part of the rumor has been denied:

I’m pretty sure the additional fee for coh+cov is somewhere between ‘zero’ and ‘not much’ Our greed is more than outweighed by our fear of angry fans!

My guess is that they’ll offer the possibility to use the cd-key to upgrade an already existing account OR use it to start a brand new one. But I have more doubts about the client. Since it’s a standalone game, will it require to have both games installed separately in order to have access to them? Considering that the game will have PvP, it will require both clients to keep copies of the exact same assets in order to work. Each time a patch is pushed out you’ll have to download all the content twice and it sounds like a waste of space and time.

Well, what hasn’t been denied is the full price of the box. It’s the first time that the players will be asked to pay 49$ twice in order to play a complete version of the game. How will the players react to this? And, in particular, what about the PvP? How can they expect to make it work if here there won’t be just the standard population balance problems, but even a 49$ fee in the middle?

Not only they need to convince the players to leave their heroes to become “villains”, but they’ll even ask another real 49$ before giving access to the other part.