Scarlet has been widely criticized since her introduction, and her latest appearance has caused quiet the uproar, but did Arena Net really have the chance to react?
Lets take a look.
While Scarlet feels like she’s been around for forever due to being tied to the Molten Alliance all the way back in spring 2013, she wasn’t actually introduced until August during the Queen’s Jubilee. At the time of her introduction she was relatively well received, voiced by Tara Strong and having a likeable zany personality and a fairly good “Scarlet’s Playhouse” instance, things certainly weren’t bad. However there were already bitter feelings forming and criticism being made at her rather bland use as the ‘grand mastermind’ behind everything that happened to date.
We then moved on to the Super Adventure Box update, unrelated to Scarlet, and Tequatl Rising, also (at least as far as we know) unrelated to Scarlet. A September free of Scarlet, and a month where Arena Net could collect no new criticism about her.
It’s not until October that Scarlet makes another significant appearance in the Twilight Assault update. Honestly, I didn’t participate due to college, it’s the only LS I’ve missed to date . I did play a bit though and continued frequenting the forums at the time and noted occasional threads criticizing her. No uproar yet though.
—I’d like to note that it is at this point a living world team has just started working on one of the December updates, according to Arena Net’s blog post on their company structure—
We then had a rather lovely Halloween with a surprise character who turned out rather well: Bloody Prince Edrick.
Move on to November and we get Tower of Nightmares. Moving forward a bit more and we land ourselves in the previous patch and Scarlet’s next appearance: Nightmare Within. It’s at this point that the criticism against Scarlet becomes heavy handed and starts spreading like wildfire. People who disliked her from the beginning are sighing in dissatisfaction, and large crowds of the general player base are starting to see why.
Finally we have Fractured, the current update and the resulting uproar caused by Scarlet’s appearance in a place some(many) feel she did not belong. But even if Arena Net took the criticism to heart, would they actually have been able to remove Scarlet already? Sure it was only a few lines of dialogue in the Reactor, but changing that would have a wide array of implications on future updates that are already being made.
Widespread indignation towards her is surprisingly recent, impossible to be more then 3 1/2 months old, and realistically not much more then a month and a half, perhaps less.
So is this really a case of Arena Net not listening, or simply a case of them not having time to react? Truly, only time will tell as we see how they deal with Scarlet moving forward.
This is not a thread to further criticize Scarlet, but rather one to take into consideration Arena Net’s company structure and look at how feasible it was for them to react and make changes in time for this patch, as well as a setting a realistic gauge for their reaction time to future problems.