I remember that too; and getting over the cognitive dissonance engendered by realising you should probably just walk on by the random muggings if you wanted to see any content...
I treated City of Heroes like a big interactive comic book (or series of comic books). And I didn't like to simply ignore those areas where game mechanics butted up against comic book themes; not if I could come up with a good explanation for it in my head. This cognitive dissonance was one of those things, but it really stumped me how I wanted to think about it. Logically it didn't make a bit of sense. These gray color-conned punks in lower-level zones wouldn't challenge me, nor would they run away from me. I could walk right up to a group of them in the midst of a crime. And just stand there. Even though I had the "sensation" badge; dinner at the White House was passe for
me. Surely they knew.
Combine this with the fact that the overarching storyline was explicit in the notion that, as I progressed through the game/stories, I was helping to clean up the city and end out-of-control crime. Maybe with my friends help. Just like in the comics, that depended to me on whether I was playing the stories solo or with teammates. Usually I shared the notion that other heroes were out there, helping. But this latter part is fast and loose. An issue of The Amazing Spider-Man where the news reports, "
Spidey 'menace' cleans up crime in New York?" doesn't usually add, "
And don't forget the Avengers, Fantastic Four, Young Avengers, hey come on there's like 1,000 other heroes in New York too!!!"
Anyway, one day, it hit me. All of those gray mobs
couldn't be logical because they couldn't be
real. They were memories. My memories, or recollections of reports I'd heard about those neighborhoods. "That is the corner where I saved a woman's purse. That is the storefront where those grisly murders of 2009 ended." Like in the movies, the way you might see a flashback overlapped on top of the present. Each time I ran through a zone, I was remembering all that had been done to destroy innocent lives there, and all that had been done to save those areas from crime.
Every now and then, I'd let a gray-conning punk be "real". Some poor idiot trying to live the thug life in a city of super-powered protectors. I'd give them one good thump on the chin on my way to bigger and more dangerous threats, and leave them unconscious and tied up for the PPD's "garbage collectors" to pick up.