I have not seen the movie, but I did read an interview with the creator who said it was more about really grossing people out - making a spectacle of it so much that people would be uncomfortable to the extreme (something along those lines - nowhere near those exact words). So when I saw Arcana say she compared CoV to Human Centipede, given the fact that most of the storylines in CoV were largely criticized due to making the character "just a thug" (other than Westin Phipps) I got from the phrase that the more evil storylines were spectacles, rather than inhumanely evil, or something like that.
Kinda the opposite, actually. The point I was trying to make at the time was that while
some players might revel in expressing their dark sides, most CoH players I believed were less likely to enjoy that experience except as a novelty. If the devs intended to make the red side as popular as the blue side, they needed, in my opinion, to make the red side not only just as interesting as the blue side but also much more rewarding on a visceral level. Phipps is *excruciatingly* evil, to the point of being uncomfortably so.
Requiem for a Dream might be a great movie, but its not exactly entertaining. I thought there needed to be more opportunities to be, say, Magneto in the first X-Men movie. He's the bad guy, but he's not cartoonishly evil and actually quite relateable. If you could be Erik Lensherr
and win that would be an interesting red side. Or, even better today, if you could be the Erik Lensherr we see in First Class, hunting down the former Nazis that he held responsible for his mother's death, that would be extremely rewarding.
To me, there wasn't anything wrong with the puppy-kicking evil of Phipps or the banal evil of Pither. The problem was that good can be reactive, but evil needs agency. Which is to say, Superman can wait for Brainiac to show up and try to destroy Metropolis. But Magneto can't wait around for an opportunity to be evil. He has to proactively do what the good guys don't want him to do to be interesting. The devs had tools to make us "feel good" and "feel evil" but the "feel evil" toolbox too often tried to make us feel bad about what we were doing. That's counter to the whole point of wanting to play a villain in my opinion.
There's a place for letting us be psychotic monsters. But that's just as interesting in the long run as playing UPS missions as heroes.
I wish there was less symmetry between the blue side stories and the red side stories, and more duality. Which is to say, I wish the red side stories were about making bad things happen that the blue side had to fix and vice versa, and less about the red side and the blue side being ships that passed in the night.