Guild Wars 2

Great, because nothing ever takes inspiration from Arthurian legend. Bit broad of a term, maybe? I might as well say that GW2 norn take inspiration from humans.

The people have spoken. We do like Scarlet and I have evidence

Heta.8629:

The people have spoken. We do like Scarlet and I have evidence

I, for one, welcome Scarlet’s mashup of Jormag and Primordus. The Icy Hot Alliance.

Later, tater!

Panzerjaeger.7612:

I can almost let the attendance of all three Asuran colleges go because they stated that she only took part courses.

Been seeing this statement (about Scarlet just dabbling in courses) a lot on the forums. But the quote from the actual event (by Emissary Vorpp) is:

“Of course. I know of this Scarlet. She earned advanced engineering degrees at each of Rata Sum’s colleges in record time.”

If the devs subsequently said otherwise, they’re just trying to do damage control because everyone called her a Mary Sue.

The sudden strengthening of Teq a few months back prior to the appearance of Scarlet Mary Sue is rather fishy. Somehow… something tells me that Anet will reveal to us us at some point Ms. Scarlet M. Sue is behind it.

Yes – I hate Scarlet. Would like nothing better than for this character to go away – doesn’t even matter how. Just make her gone.

I really hope that the lore team can put this silly LS Scarlet behind us and focus on more relevant things – that would be more interesting and more epic feeling.

How about some new areas? How about something exciting. How about we fight something that’s actually scary ( like Dhuum or another elder dragon).
Why must we keep going on with the silly asura-oriented technobabble and Scarlet’s pathetic mecha alliances.

I like scarlet too=3 I wanna know what she does next.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Panzerjaeger.7612:

I can almost let the attendance of all three Asuran colleges go because they stated that she only took part courses.

Been seeing this statement (about Scarlet just dabbling in courses) a lot on the forums. But the quote from the actual event (by Emissary Vorpp) is:

“Of course. I know of this Scarlet. She earned advanced engineering degrees at each of Rata Sum’s colleges in record time.”

If the devs subsequently said otherwise, they’re just trying to do damage control because everyone called her a Mary Sue.

And here’s the Video

5mins 33secs.

I like it.

:)

I suggest we just rename the Living Story to the Scarlet Story. It’s like the personal story, that’s all about you….helping Traeherne be the real hero.

Even fans of Scarlet don’t like her. Just look at the bottom of this post…of the 2 favorite (actual) characters, Scarlet scores 3rd place.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/Favorite-LS-Characters-Why/first#post3298488

Remember that contest with only 2 participants, and the person still came in 3rd? Well guess what: Scarlet did it!

Rhialto.8423:

I, for one, welcome Scarlet’s mashup of Jormag and Primordus. The Icy Hot Alliance.

Later, tater!

That sounds somewhat kinky. Will we see naked dragons in their … natural … habitat?

If we had more variety in events scarlet wouldn’t seem so bad. I think the main issue I and other have is its always her. every time. The Womens got so many back-up Doomsdays devices its started to look stupid. I’d be more willing to believe she was behind things if it was more like The molten alliance days. little manipulation here. misdirection here. Not “Meet my NEW army of the week”

Slip in some stuff like the consortium trying something new. or This guy/girl is trying to rally his people to over throw an area (without scarlet) with some new device they created or unearthed.
or heaven forbid one of these Elder dragon actually do something. For a game whose main story in tied into the awaking the of elder dragons I’m feeling ripped off.
The only thing that would redeem this is if Scarlet WAS this rumored Jungle Elder Dragon or at least being manipulated by it and it was all his doing.

Chaotic Storm, did you see the most recent Wooden Potatoes video? The argument that Scarlet is an intentional “story scapegoat” sounds pretty convincing.

To that end, the elder dragons being the focus of the story would be the last thing we should want.

Jski.6180:

Astralporing.1957:

Jski.6180:

She fills the true evil roll the dragons are not evil they are just focuses. She makes players do evil to what seems to be evil and to make the good players feel good about doing this evil on to the evil players. That is true evil the ability to make others do evil with them knowing it and make them love it.

I’m sorry, that doesn’t even make sense.
Scarlet doesn’t make anyone do anything (besides perhaps wanting to throttle the persons responsible for her). It’s the writers that make thing happen by giving idiot balls to everyone, and by gleefully breaking suspension of disbelief left and right.
Scarlet is neither evil, nor good, nor even gray. She’s bland.

What do you call the F&F Air Balder and the toxic alines? She is making them team up and pushing these group to fight vs just laying low going on there own for domination.

No, she isn’t. It’s the writers that created that idiotic “alliance”. There’s not even a hint anywhere that Scarlet ever had work hard to achieve anything in GW2 world. Apparently everything she wants just falls down in her lap.
Even if there’s no sense to it at all. And there is no sense to most of it.
She’s not evil. That would imply her being an actual person instead of a cardboard cutout that is a poster for someone’s fanfic dreams. She’s simply a piece of bad writing.

I liked here at first. But that does not mean she has to be behind after every kitten thing in the game. What is she behind the fall of abbadon too?

Carighan.6758:

Chaotic Storm, did you see the most recent Wooden Potatoes video? The argument that Scarlet is an intentional “story scapegoat” sounds pretty convincing.

To that end, the elder dragons being the focus of the story would be the last thing we should want.

Why? The entire focus of the game’s story was about the threat of Zhaitan. Almost all of the higher level zones have the threat of the dragons present, why not focus on them?

Carighan.6758:

Chaotic Storm, did you see the most recent Wooden Potatoes video? The argument that Scarlet is an intentional “story scapegoat” sounds pretty convincing.

To that end, the elder dragons being the focus of the story would be the last thing we should want.

That video is somewhat in denial. The problem with Scarlet is exactly because she is new and the writers are trying to create something out of nothing. The players are reacting because she came out of nowhere.

Wooden Potatoes goes on to say that he would be more worried if the writers decided to go back to old content. But old lore was already imagined by Anet and nothing new needs to be written, just small reveals here and there. Going back to the dragons and history taps on resources already in game, whereas the lack of history for Scarlet makes her random and arbitrary.

We do not need to face the other elder dragons directly or so soon, but we would definitely appreciate the Pact sending out scout parties and researchers to learn more about the other dragons.

What would worry me is if Anet has their vision for the GW universe so messed up that they haven’t even thought of how everything is supposed to link up. Remember that GW2 took several years to release from GW1, it would be a shocker if no one there considered the story to be important enough to have been thought through in the first place.

Then again GW was supposed to be a PVP game, and the whole PVE element and lore was decided upon later. That is pretty much how I see Scarlet, a character created as an afterthought to pose as a story.

I liked the way the story of Rox and Braham was done, Scarlett is indeed just chaos, no real story there, absolutely agree.

I like her especially the personality they gave her.reminds me of harely quinn

Carighan.6758:

Chaotic Storm, did you see the most recent Wooden Potatoes video? The argument that Scarlet is an intentional “story scapegoat” sounds pretty convincing.

To that end, the elder dragons being the focus of the story would be the last thing we should want.

That doesn’t really make sense, though. It’s not really a scapegoat, more a defensive maneuver on the part of the writers. “Let’s use this kittenty disposable character while we find our feet, rather than ruin any of the existing lore”.

Zhaitan bows to Scarlet in terms of carnage. Tsk tsk , so much for “elder” dragon.

EmanioAmor.1653:

I like her especially the personality they gave her.reminds me of harely quinn

If I may say, that’s the problem! The way her character was introduced, she shouldn’t just be Harley Quinn, she should have been the Joker. Her “insanity” just feels like an excuse for her to say random yet cutesy quips, and rather than becoming some kind of nemesis, she feels more like some recurring secondary villain that exists only to be beaten and run off, angrily shaking her fist and muttering some nonsense about “next time”.

Granted, Scarlet does seem to have a plan. But it’s been months, and we still know jack about it, so I, personally, am finding it extremely hard to continue to be invested in the character. I don’t like Scarlet, for now at least- I think it’s possible for it to be turned around. But to be honest, I’m not very optimistic about it.

Sad thing is she isn’t even Sylvari. She’s a Caryophyllid from Cantha.

I like Scarlet as a character. I find her interesting, and compelled to understand her motives as they’ve yet to be made clear.

I dont like Scarlet. The real reason I dont like her is because she reduces the epicness of the game. She needs to start doing some real damage like killing the queen or kitten ing mother tree that would be nice, I could really fear what she can do to Tyria after that.

Shadoekin.3928:

But old lore was already imagined by Anet and nothing new needs to be written, just small reveals here and there. Going back to the dragons and history taps on resources already in game, whereas the lack of history for Scarlet makes her random and arbitrary.

VERY little of the old lore is already in game.
Though you are correct in that they don’t have to invent as much… actually nm, they’d still have to. I would guesstimate that ~90% of the players have never played GW1, and don’t intent to. Word quickly went around that the books are rather badly written (this is mostly based on Edge of Destiny I suppose, as Sea of Sorrows was quite ok), so I doubt many know those, either.

Tons of stuff to write.
And as Wooden Potatoes said, if you don’t know how to write for the format you’re writing in, it makes sense to not use important characters and story elements.

SafiMoyo.5130:

I like Scarlet as a character. I find her interesting, and compelled to understand her motives as they’ve yet to be made clear.

There is no motives. She’s just as random as Anet’s writer. There’s only one conclusion: She is a filler that is forcedly and awkwardly being put to be the mastermind of all mishaps. As to your opinion that she is interesting, I guess we set different bars. Where is the -1 for posts when you need them.

I do not like Scarlet Briar, because she herself is a mismatched alliance of conflicting parts.

1) Scarlet was supposed to fulfill the Living Story role of a dangerous world-threatening opponent, like Zhaitan in the Personal Story.

2) But then Scarlet was implemented into the game with all signs of comic relief villain: Excellent crazy-sounding voice acting, hilarious overpowered abilities, lorebreaking absurd backstory.

Unfortunately 1) and 2) don’t work together at all, and while most players had killed Zhaitan after some month, Scarlet is still around after half a year.

This thread only really shows that for every 1 that hates Scarlet, there is 1 that also likes her. For each reason she is not liked, there is a reason that she is. Each person is different.

I, personally, don’t mind Scarlett. She makes me chuckle; I find her amusing. The story, as far as I’ve understood it does make sense, and leaves me asking questions I desire to find answers to, which keeps me ‘tuned in.’ However, I am well aware that what I like, others may not. To each their own. Perhaps their next villain wont appeal to me at all and I’ll be in some of your shoes.

scarlet isnt acctually a bad character if it was another character we would still hate her its just she is behind everything but apparently (according to wooden potates) the end is in sight for her… hooray

Readers may like or not a character, but they can’t expect to tell authors how to write their books.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

This thread only really shows that for every 1 that hates Scarlet, there is 1 that also likes her.

Actually it’s more like for every 2 people that don’t like her, there’s 1 that does like her (or at least tolerates her). Even if the ratio was 1:1, the fact that a whole 50% of consumers don’t like the character is not a good thing by any standards. Also, seeing as she’s currently the “main” villain, since the dragons are apparently having a tea party and scratching their collective as­ses, the story needs her to be exceptional character to fill the role, not some poorly written, barely tolerated mess that’s compensating by being all-powerful for no apparent reason.

Hermes.7014:

Readers may like or not a character, but they can’t expect to tell authors how to write their books.

GW2 story is not some fanfic. Here in the real world, there are many people involved in the creative process, the most important of which are the people who are giving you money. Games, and the vast majority of books as well for that matter, are written for people, not the author’s self-gratification, so you can be da­mn sure that we can expect to tell the author how to write the story. Criticism is the only way both sides can profit, the only bad thing you can do for an author is to say nothing.

Hermes.7014:

Readers may like or not a character, but they can’t expect to tell authors how to write their books.

No one is telling them how to write. Tell me, who is telling them how write what?. We may like or not like a character, and you can’t expect us to shut up.

Keneth.6490:

Hermes.7014:

Readers may like or not a character, but they can’t expect to tell authors how to write their books.

GW2 story is not some fanfic. Here in the real world, there are many people involved in the creative process, the most important of which are the people who are giving you money. Games, and the vast majority of books as well for that matter, are written for people, not the author’s self-gratification, so you can be da­mn sure that we can expect to tell the author how to write the story. Criticism is the only way both sides can profit, the only bad thing you can do for an author is to say nothing.

Indeed, although “I don’t like the character because she’s always around and it annoys me” isn’t criticism, it is personal opinion.
So as long as it’s opinion sharing, then fair and square, but if the authors have a significant role for her (in this case, main antagonist of this living story arc), you cannot expect for them to say “oh people don’t like Scarlet so kill her off and start over”. Allow them to tell their story. If they have seen people didn’t like the character, they’ll learn from it and make sure they will refrain from using characters with similar attitudes in future.
So, people can wish as much as they want to see her dead, but surely that won’t happen until authors decide when it’s time to end her story arc. Those who hate her are going to bear with it, or simply ignore the living story.

Keneth.6490:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

This thread only really shows that for every 1 that hates Scarlet, there is 1 that also likes her.

Actually it’s more like for every 2 people that don’t like her, there’s 1 that does like her (or at least tolerates her). Even if the ratio was 1:1, the fact that a whole 50% of consumers don’t like the character is not a good thing by any standards.

Have you taken a survey of people in the game? From my observations, and again its really all conjecture since only Anet has any real numbers, it balances out between forum and in-game community.

Also, seeing as she’s currently the “main” villain, since the dragons are apparently having a tea party and scratching their collective as­ses, the story needs her to be exceptional character to fill the role, not some poorly written, barely tolerated mess that’s compensating by being all-powerful for no apparent reason.

Do you know what a sub plot is? She is a sub plot, while the personal story is the main plot. Not all sub plots are good, but they do tend to lead somewhere. She has not finished her role, let them spin their tale.

So you don’t like her, that’s you’re right. Not every book or story will be to every person’s taste. To each their own.

Things about Scarlett I like:
1) She’s a Sylvari just like all my characters.
2) She’s hilarious

Things I hate about Scarlett:
1) Her backstory paints her as a Mary Sue
2) She has no story or character development at all
3) For the most part everything she did was form an alliance between two mismatched groups whose reasoning for working together was never explained even though it needed to be. Likewise Scarlett’s purpose in forming that alliance not only wasn’t explained but was clearly nonexistant. The reason why we weren’t told what her actual purpose was is because the Anet team couldn’t figure out what it would be. They were simply passing the ball from week to week to drag out some easy releases in the hope of gaining more time to work on the time consuming content. In short has been no actual story involved in the living story for months.

I mean the reason for all those lackluster releases was because something amazing is coming along right? Right?

Well regardless, once you take into account that Scarlett’s purposelessness was simply Anet’s way of passing the ball back and forth you will come to understand that it wouldn’t matter whom Anet chose to be the villain for any of the living story updates as they were all guaranteed to have no purpose due to Anet not being able to deliver a fully fleshed out and well thought out story every two weeks. So Scarlett wasn’t any better or worse than any other villain would have been during this time period. All the issues can be laid at the feet of the concept of the static living story where your participation is just as irrelevant as the story itself.

Chaotic Storm.2815:

If we had more variety in events scarlet wouldn’t seem so bad. I think the main issue I and other have is its always her. every time. The Womens got so many back-up Doomsdays devices its started to look stupid. I’d be more willing to believe she was behind things if it was more like The molten alliance days. little manipulation here. misdirection here. Not “Meet my NEW army of the week”

Slip in some stuff like the consortium trying something new. or This guy/girl is trying to rally his people to over throw an area (without scarlet) with some new device they created or unearthed.
or heaven forbid one of these Elder dragon actually do something. For a game whose main story in tied into the awaking the of elder dragons I’m feeling ripped off.
The only thing that would redeem this is if Scarlet WAS this rumored Jungle Elder Dragon or at least being manipulated by it and it was all his doing.

If Scarlett was the actual Jungle Elder Dragon or a minion of said dragon, she wouldn’t have need for all this magi technology garbage. She would simply have all the power she needed from magic itself which is in reality far stronger than the magi-technolgy she is using now could ever be as the magic is the primal force giving power to the magi-technology.

Kalavier.1097:

Frotee.2634:

I just don’t get how you can allow a character like scarlet to make your whole gaming experience so miserable you want to leave? Most living story updates take what, 3-4 days to ‘complete’? With the rest of the world still there, even a little larger than it was at release?
If you did like the game without Scarlet, why not simply ignore her?

Because people can’t remove/view things without that. It’s like the ME3 endings, for some reason after playing them you have some which LITERALLY declare the ENTIRE mass effect canon to be null and stupid. Then you have reasonable people who like everything up to the ending and go “I dislike this part and that part. everything else is okay.”

I like how you said that only the only people who could be reasonable were the ones who held the same opinion as you John Smith.

But even we savages put just as much rational thought and logic into our conclusions as you did and I imagine perhaps more as we actually had to consider the entire corpus of the series in light of the constantly changing lore between all 3 games, between the constantly changing motivations and the constantly changing technology. ME1 and ME3 nullify each other where for every A statement in ME1 there is an equal and opposite contradicting statement in ME3.

For example, why was it so important for the Normandy to get to Eden Prime? Because the humans had exhausted the archives on Mars and it was hoped that the Prothean beacon on Eden Prime would advance the humans technology further than the now exhausted Martian archives had been able to. Now fast forward to ME 3 and the entire plot revolves around plans that were just discovered at the very last second in an archive that not only couldn’t have been exhausted but still contained oodles and oodles of undiscovered morsels like the one Liara found. I’m not going to mention how completely stupid the story of ME3 becomes when you ask yourself, if the Prothean data was so important, why didn’t they make a backup of it? Why were no copies made of the archive itself? It isn’t like the file was that large, they transferred the whole file over to the human mind within a few minutes of boarding the ship. And how likely is it that the plans for that weapon would have remained completely undiscovered for 20 years? Were the Protheans that bad at optimizing their databases?

We don’t need to talk about plot armor Kai Leng and his aura of Shephard incompetence -20, the magical teleportation beam or 3 colors of magical light that simply throws ME1’s concept of a technology grounded in some sense of realism completely out the window.

Was the story in ME3 presented well? Did it flow well? Did it have its emotional moments? Yes to all 3; however if you view it in light of the entire series then you must conclude that it was a complete betrayal of ME1. Not to mention that the overarching plot of ME3 was just stupid because every single part of the overarching plot of ME3 raises the same big questions as the Prothean data example, especially the last part.

Come to think about it, the plot of Mass Effect 3 gets rehashed in Iron Man 2 where the story is so ludicrous that the entire plot revolved around a 30 year old Easter Egg left behind by Tony’s dad who decades knew that his son would keep his old diarama, put it in an impossible to predict magic hologram that can display an impossible amount of detail in order to reveal an impossible to create element that Tony immediately synthesizes in order to wrap up all the lose ends of the plot.

You know that line in the beginning of Dr Horrible after he reads a letter from Johnny Snow?
“Okay. Dude. You are not my nemesis.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of9kHpCv1ts (2:50 if you’re not familiar!)

That’s how I feel about Scarlet. And have, since she appeared.
She’s so absurd and poorly written (aside from a few funny lines) that I can’t even take her seriously as a villain.

There’s probably some big buildup to an “awesome ultimate boss battle” with Scarlet. Not only do I not care, but I don’t want the battle. (And I really don’t want it to show up later in my fractals, as I will admittedly try very hard to skip whatever content has the Scarlet boss fight.)
Possibly the worst part of the impending boss battle with Scarlet: It should have been avoidable. We’ve seen her close up enough times now that we really could have just shanked the weed (particularly if you’re a thief!) and been done with it many times over. Her “boss fight” could have already looked like a theatrical assassination of Julius Caesar, and been much better for it.
I honestly think that it would be good for this game if Scarlet simply fell off a cliff somewhere, died, and was never heard from again. No boss battle with a hated (for all the wrong reasons) character. No continued dragging out of a disliked storyline.
Please, let us fight more Dragons and real threats to Tyria.

deepwinter.9015:

Listen closely; this is the important part:
We do not like Scarlet Briar!

Your not supposed to like the bad guy. As far as the comedic voice, text and behavior, I find Scarlet a charmingly enjoyable villain and very well written and portrayed.

coglin.1867:

deepwinter.9015:

Listen closely; this is the important part:
We do not like Scarlet Briar!

Your not supposed to like the bad guy. As far as the comedic voice, text and behavior, I find Scarlet a charmingly enjoyable villain and very well written and portrayed.

You just contradict yourself. We don’t dislike her because she’s the bad guy. We dislike her because we find her uncharmingly annoying villian that is very poorly written and portrayed. Of course, people set different standards bar, you are an example.

Scarlet has “fractured” lore. It is absolutely nonexistent.

God save us all. Anet, RETCON SCARLET. OR KILL HER. PLEASE.

coglin.1867:

Your not supposed to like the bad guy.

You are supposed to like them as characters, yes. You are supposed to enjoy combat with them.

If people want to see a villain get their comeuppance, then that villain is fulfilling their role (see: Annie Wilkes, Lord Bolton, HAL, Mrs. Coulter, The Joker, or even some of the other villains we’ve had in this series, like Kudu). If people don’t care, and simply want them out of the story so the story can go in a different direction/ tone altogether, then that character is not fulfilling their role.

Shadoekin.3928:

Wooden Potatoes goes on to say that he would be more worried if the writers decided to go back to old content. But old lore was already imagined by Anet and nothing new needs to be written, just small reveals here and there. Going back to the dragons and history taps on resources already in game, whereas the lack of history for Scarlet makes her random and arbitrary.

We do not need to face the other elder dragons directly or so soon, but we would definitely appreciate the Pact sending out scout parties and researchers to learn more about the other dragons.

This is definitely a problem with Scarlet. It makes the rest of the story leading up to her a big “what’s the point?” and breaks the lore with this steampunk-magic concoction that is so much more advanced than even what the Asura are making that it seems almost like it came from a different game.

This game had a lot of potential then came bi weekly updates, followed by Lollet now it’s just got mechanics buggy buggy mechanics.

So I hid in the dungeons of Tyria or found refuge in the Myst Wars, I then had to traverse Fractured time and space possibly stuck in other dimensions on a far away planet but even there this greedy weed stretched her roots reminding me every other week that something new that I couldn’t possibly care about was in the gem shop or that she had ushered in a new list of of to-dos that would keep me occupied because she heard that SOME of us were bored.

I do not like the bi weekly LW updates, I do not like Scarlet as she is the LS personified, empty shallow with little substance just a quick flicker for attention and then gone again. As far as content goes there is no dungeon team, there is no expansion team, only the LW teams. There isn’t an aspect of the game now save for SPVP that isn’t tainted by LW and Scarlet. As long as she is here we won’t have any new meaningful stories or places to explore because it’s far easier and profitable to rehash bi weekly than it is to wait a while for a chance to travel to far away lands like Elonia or Cantha.