First of all this is not a Scarlet-hate-thread and I would like to encourage everyone who wants to rage on her to go elsewhere or just keep their trap shut, I am tired of it. And Arenanet already admitted mistakes and vowed betterment.
Arenanet stated that their intention of the Living World updates were supposed to be like a cartoon show.
You have your Big Bad Of The Season (Scarlet) sending the Minion Of The Week. I am amused by that concept, it’s just like in good old Power Rangers or Sailor Moon.
And the conclusions of the implementations (Molten Facility, Aetherblade Retreat, Tower of Nightmares) were novel and interesting places and had proper boss fight mechanics. At least to my not-too-critical boss fight taste.
However, Arenanet did two mistakes by putting Scarlet into Thaumanova:
1. That kind of TV show now and then puts in a special episode (trip to the beach, flashback to the past, romance side story etc.) to prevent the pattern of “The Big Bad Attempts It Anew” from becoming boring.
Seeing the same face every week gets repetitive after a while, so you need at least some variety.
This was the perfect chance. Please do not botch such a chance again. I did honestly not expect Scarlet to be here and I was genuinely surprised. But not in a positive way, because the reason I did not expect her was that it is detrimental design-wise.
As said, I never minded her being behind everything, but this was just one time too often, you should have put her on a holiday until January and let players enjoy the season of goodies.
2. The Big Bad Of The Season is never responsible or involved in backstory.
You do not take a passing enemy and make him a stock character/lore foundation. The backstory/main characters (and I will count big places like Thaumanova as a character of sorts in the game world) get their revelations in the above-mentioned one-off-episodes or in a separate story arch that serves no other purpose and is cut towards that kind of revelation.
In the case of GW2/Scarlet, the mistake is even graver:
a) Let’s face it, a lot of people hate Scarlet.
b) Let’s face it, you’re going to kill her off.
c) Let’s face it, players who start after killing her off will never get to experience her the way we did.
-> Future generations will see this huge part of a region (Thaumanova) with this weird stuff happening and all the explanation they will get is some random two lines of chatter from a weird sylvari they have no connection to.
Which is why you just don’t take a passing character that was not specifically created for lore-building purposes and put lore on its shoulders.
The other half will consist to a great part of players who look at this as a blemish in the lore.
As a solution I would propose not only to have some break-things-up releases in between like Bloody & Madness and what-Fractured-would-have-been-without-Scarlet but also to throw in a release about the greater lore (a tidbit on Dragons, permanent politics, or one of the permanent areas itself) now and then.
I hope this was constructive.
