Guild Wars 2

That’s a cohesive argument you’ve got there with very good points.

Smurfbuster.1529:

1: Mechanical flaws. I’m sure this is a broken record by now, and might’ve even been fixed by the time this post starts circulating around; but why is the communication device soulbound? Not everyone did the opening event on their main, specially since you can theoretically complete it at any level. So those that did that, not including me, are at a disadvantage until this is fixed.

I reckon you didn’t try at any point to talk to Vorrp with another character or you would have received a brand new sparkly communicator usable by that character.

Smurfbuster.1529:

3: Scarlet Briar and the systematic destruction of lore. First of all, I’ll start at the most obvious deviation from lore. Sylvari don’t have last names, there’s not a single sylvari in the entire LS/PS/open world that has a last name. Scarlet Briar is a sylvari with a last name. Why does she have a last name? I have no idea, but if Arena Net’s creative writing team is capable of overlooking a flaw as blatant as that, I have low hopes for them.

It’s obviously more of a title, pseudo, rather than her actual name.

Smurfbuster.1529:

Second, how is she so well-educated? Not only has she graduated from all three colleges, something even Snaff couldn’t do, but she’s been trained by several other races as well. If non-asura can get into colleges now, why haven’t we seen more examples in the game beforehand? The amount of time it would take to graduate from all three asura colleges, and then also be trained by four other races is far outside the timeframe that sylvari have walked Tyria.

I see this a lot. First of all, how do you know how long it takes to graduate from a college? All Asura join one and usually stay affiliated with that college for their lifetime, but where does it say how long it takes to graduate?
Secondly, who says an Asura can’t graduate from more college’s. They just don’t seem to bother.

I’ll give you the other points because they’re mostly up in the air at the moment. You seem to jump to conclusions quite quickly though. There have been a couple of tidbits on Scarlet that point to her being influenced strongly by some purpose. She’s not just evil for the sake of it, she appears to be trying to show us something. Aside from that she’s clearly in the loony bin.

I don’t have time to reply to all of this but I just wanted to raise one point:

Scarlet’s name. Do we know for a fact that Briar is her last name? Maybe she has a 2 word first name. It’s not exactly unheard of in real life, especially for women to have two first names, like Sarah Jane or Mary Beth. Sometimes hyphenated, sometimes not.

Alternatively sylvari can and do have titles or nicknames. Maybe Scarlet is her name and Briar is a reference to her lovely personality?

(That last one might be mainly to allow RPers and other lore-sensitive players to give sylvari a last name, but it came from Anet and should apply to NPCs too, even if they haven’t used it yet.)

Alternatively maybe she gave herself a last name to distinguish herself from other sylvari? I’m not sure if she’s part of the Nightmare Court but she’s definitely not your typical sylvari, I think she even makes sarcastic comments about the Pale Tree.

Alternatively 2.0 maybe she’s not from the Pale Tree at all but from another tree like the sylvari you meet in one of the personal story quests, and those ones do have last names?

Why do you think Scarlet should be like all the other sylvari and not have a last name? Heck, it could just be a nickname.

Scarlet isn’t like any other sylvari, it’s pretty obvious.

Real life isn’t logical. Life is replete with examples of things that aren’t logical. Some of the wealthiest people ever to have lived (and made their own fortune) didn’t finish college. The kittens invaded France and they surrendered in just 3 days. Britain, a small island, at one point pretty much ruled the entire world.

Stories that ‘make perfect sense’ and seem ‘the most likely’ are boring. Guild Wars 2 is written by people whom I’m assuming had some formal training and education on how to write compelling fiction. I’m going to further assume that the training and education they received at some point included the urging to not write ‘logical stories that make perfect sense.’

Very good points, but

4: Closing. In conclusion, Scarlet Briar isn’t the fantastic villain some people are making her out to be. She’s a stereotypical manic with unobtainable character points. She’s evil only for the sake of being evil and is Arena Net’s horrible attempt to try and explain things that already happened. Unfortunately she’s so terrible and horribly implemented that she makes more loose ends than tying them. I used to have hopes that this LS would actually be an interesting way to advance the plot of the world, but instead we’ve gotten generic villain with no backstory after generic villain with no backstory. Hopefully some of you will agree with at least some of my points made here today, thank you.

Sources: The official wiki, Woodenpotatoes, and Shade Warband’s guild chat and mumble.

is the most sad of this underwhelming update. And it has been announced as something great. O.o

Fluffy Ferocious.9807:

Real life isn’t logical. Life is replete with examples of things that aren’t logical. Some of the wealthiest people ever to have lived (and made their own fortune) didn’t finish college. The kittens invaded France and they surrendered in just 3 days. Britain, a small island, at one point pretty much ruled the entire world.

Stories that ‘make perfect sense’ and seem ‘the most likely’ are boring. Guild Wars 2 is written by people whom I’m assuming had some formal training and education on how to write compelling fiction. I’m going to further assume that the training and education they received at some point included the urging to not write ‘logical stories that make perfect sense.’

Haha – the term for the fascists who ruled Germany and made WW2 a thing got turned into kittens. Bad kitty!

Grileenor.1497:

Very good points, but

4: Closing. In conclusion, Scarlet Briar isn’t the fantastic villain some people are making her out to be. She’s a stereotypical manic with unobtainable character points. She’s evil only for the sake of being evil and is Arena Net’s horrible attempt to try and explain things that already happened. Unfortunately she’s so terrible and horribly implemented that she makes more loose ends than tying them. I used to have hopes that this LS would actually be an interesting way to advance the plot of the world, but instead we’ve gotten generic villain with no backstory after generic villain with no backstory. Hopefully some of you will agree with at least some of my points made here today, thank you.

Sources: The official wiki, Woodenpotatoes, and Shade Warband’s guild chat and mumble.

is the most sad of this underwhelming update. And it has been announced as something great. O.o

The only conclusion I get out of this is that sadly a good part of the community is jumping the gun and crying foul because not everything is served to them on a silver platter.

They promised to tie things together and they did. Unfortunately for some, that didn’t mean they explained everything to us. This is not the end of the story yet. Scarlet is in the middle of this, but is keeping plenty of secrets to herself for the time being.

…And I enjoy that. I enjoy getting little teases like her haven ‘seen’ the Eternal Alchemy. I enjoy speculating what this mass invasion could be in the light of her ‘teaching’ us things. And most of all, I have lots of patience for this story to unwind.

Perhaps Scarlet adopted a second name as a way of publicly divorcing herself from her Sylvari heritage.

Smurfbuster.1529:

Sources: The official wiki, Woodenpotatoes, and Shade Warband’s guild chat and mumble.

Woodenpotatoes makes up better stories when goes on one of his “rants”. The ideas he comes up with are soooo much better than what the Anet writers have worked on, and its their job.

I can’t wait to see what he thinks of scarlet and what her motives are.

I love how everyone here is caught up on the name thing when every single one of your other points is far more worthy of discussion. GW2 has taken a pretty serious nose dive in the storytelling department every since release, and Scarlet has done nothing to bring them back up. All of the speculation surrounding Scarlet BEFORE this latest patch was far more interesting than what she turned out to be. Was she from that alternative future? Were the aetherblades from that future? Was she somehow able to manipulate the Dredge/Flame Legion by showing them something from that alternative reality? Maybe she was doing all this to prevent some major event in the future? Do you see a pattern here? A lot of that speculation exists because you used a steampunk theme that was already being used by that alternative future storyline. You COULD have tied into that story too, but you “chose” not to. I put “chose” in quotes cause I’m not convinced you even realized that such a storyline even existed. All the Living Story content up til now has been such a sharp deviation from the existing plot of the game that I wonder if the team behind it was even part of GW2’s development. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole “idea” behind the aetherblades was simply “We need to sell more armors. What’s cool? Steampunk? Alright lets make a story about that.” There has been so much speculation by players as to the deeper meaning of these Living Story plotlines, but I think all of it vastly overestimated the dev’s storytelling capabilities. There’s no deeper meaning to any of this; it’s all a bunch of individual storylines tied loosely together by a perfectly generic villain. A villain so generic, with such an undefined past, that you could literally attach ANY backstory/motive you want to her and it would fit. So when this story ends, and Scarlet is somehow tied back to the Dragons or some bullkitten, everyone will praise ArenaNet for being so clever. NO! kitten NO! Scarlet was mentioned maybe twice during this year’s Living story, she has no discernible character besides “crazy”, she hasn’t been around enough for players to really become attached and start to question her motives. She’s just a one-off villain with a placeholder backstory, ready to be inserted into whatever kitten plotline in order to add a “big twist” to this whole series of events.

Smurfbuster.1529

All Snipped

Smurf,
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I think you bring to the table very good points.

Unfortunately some players put countless hours into writing feedback, reporting bugs, and writing their griefs only to be picked apart and hounded to the ground.

All that aside, I can say the only part of the story that has stayed concurrent to me is Rox and Braham. I know where they came from, their backstory, and have been building relationship with your character. The Villains have been a wash over for me. I smirked as the Anvil Rock Zerg crushed Scarlet and she was laughing in the process saying “Die, Die, Die, ..”.

I have found no twist in the plot, not excited, and merely just another big farm. Which I see as one of the only positives.

I did see a post by an ArenaNet employee who stated to oversee this current LS and concurred with a poster that the LS has been written without large plot building to prevent a long, strewn out, boring story, versus fast paced action with classic villains.

Either way, this is becoming a trend of looking away from being passionate about Guild Wars for me, with the game going away from what my interests are.

Glad there is a portion of the fanbase that enjoy it though, cheers to them.

In conclusion I do want to say from my experience, comments, opinions that negatively describe the course of the game are generally shunned, but welcome.

Best of wishes mate.

VoiceOfUnreason.5976:

I love how everyone here is caught up on the name thing when every single one of your other points is far more worthy of discussion. GW2 has taken a pretty serious nose dive in the storytelling department every since release, and Scarlet has done nothing to bring them back up. All of the speculation surrounding Scarlet BEFORE this latest patch was far more interesting than what she turned out to be. Was she from that alternative future? Were the aetherblades from that future? Was she somehow able to manipulate the Dredge/Flame Legion by showing them something from that alternative reality? Maybe she was doing all this to prevent some major event in the future? Do you see a pattern here? A lot of that speculation exists because you used a steampunk theme that was already being used by that alternative future storyline. You COULD have tied into that story too, but you “chose” not to. I put “chose” in quotes cause I’m not convinced you even realized that such a storyline even existed. All the Living Story content up til now has been such a sharp deviation from the existing plot of the game that I wonder if the team behind it was even part of GW2’s development. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole “idea” behind the aetherblades was simply “We need to sell more armors. What’s cool? Steampunk? Alright lets make a story about that.” There has been so much speculation by players as to the deeper meaning of these Living Story plotlines, but I think all of it vastly overestimated the dev’s storytelling capabilities. There’s no deeper meaning to any of this; it’s all a bunch of individual storylines tied loosely together by a perfectly generic villain. A villain so generic, with such an undefined past, that you could literally attach ANY backstory/motive you want to her and it would fit. So when this story ends, and Scarlet is somehow tied back to the Dragons or some bullkitten, everyone will praise ArenaNet for being so clever. NO! kitten NO! Scarlet was mentioned maybe twice during this year’s Living story, she has no discernible character besides “crazy”, she hasn’t been around enough for players to really become attached and start to question her motives. She’s just a one-off villain with a placeholder backstory, ready to be inserted into whatever kitten plotline in order to add a “big twist” to this whole series of events.

Very good post! And so true as well.

Thobek.1730:

Smurfbuster.1529:

Sources: The official wiki, Woodenpotatoes, and Shade Warband’s guild chat and mumble.

Woodenpotatoes makes up better stories when goes on one of his “rants”. The ideas he comes up with are soooo much better than what the Anet writers have worked on, and its their job.

I can’t wait to see what he thinks of scarlet and what her motives are.

Those are speculations and rumors and theories.

It’s not as if he is writing an entirely new storyline.

Can we have some sort of petition against nonsense and lack of interest in LS?

boredinbc.2786:

Perhaps Scarlet adopted a second name as a way of publicly divorcing herself from her Sylvari heritage.

Or maybe she never had that Sylvari heritage in the first place. Remember, there are many Sylvari far to the northeast of the Grove that were not born of the Pale Tree…

Evans.6347:

…And I enjoy that. I enjoy getting little teases like her haven ‘seen’ the Eternal Alchemy. I enjoy speculating what this mass invasion could be in the light of her ‘teaching’ us things. And most of all, I have lots of patience for this story to unwind.

In fact, her claim to have “seen” the Eternal Alchemy tells me that WP may still be right about the whole alternate realities thing playing in to this. You wouldn’t see the whole Eternal Alchemy (I believe Vorpp does say she claimed to see the entirety) if you didn’t see the alternate dimensions.

And being a dimensional (and possibly time) traveler could explain how she became so well educated and no one heard of her before now. She did the three colleges in our dimension and the other racial training in other ones. After all, the other training was “rumors”, according to Vorpp, not known fact that has other people available to verify. He could have just been having sour grapes about her prodigiousness, but also perhaps he wasn’t.

Either way, I find Scarlet an intriguing mystery for the time being. I don’t expect to know all of why she’s doing what she’s doing, yet.

And to the OP’s point about the molten alliance and how a woman couldn’t have formed them. Scarlet might just have been able to show she’s that strong. She does say in the invasion text that the Aetherblades follow her “b/c they like living.” She’s strong armed the steam punk pirates in to following her, she can show enough strength to make the Molten Alliance believe she can give them amazing power if they do as she says.

Umm… How about her name being Briar (as in a shrub) and Scarlet being more for flair (i.e. “Scarlet Witch”).

She’s obviously a prima donna, why would she care about Sylvari convention.

It’s as if all of Divinity’s Reach forgot that there’s a human-centaur war going on.

The Human-Centaur war is over. You went to harathi highlands, killed Ulgoth, and smashed them back over the pass. Before you killed Zhaitan, natch.

Third, Scarlet not only helped spur on the Molten Alliance, but she also formed the Aetherblade. If you thought the lore fell out the window beforehand, this is where it jumps off a bridge. I’ll start with the MA. The flame legion sect of the MA would never, ever listen to what Scarlet is. She is a female, and not a charr. Now, she could have talked to a charr that would talk to the flame legion on her behalf, but even that’s unlikely. The charr only really listen to Gaheron’s dead corpse and their destroyer gods.

This is more of an unanswered question than anything. We really still don’t know anything about Scarlet, or her background and motives.

Net, you expect me to believe that Queen Jennah’s engineers were able to construct an army of completely gear-powered robots in a country where the only person who had an interest for robotics died in Caudecus’ Manor?

They’re obviously magical. They shoot pink lightning bolts.

Tl;dr: your lore criticisms are unfounded.

Also, the whole:

“GASP! Villain X was behind it all!”

Plotline is only effective if the villain was presented before-hand. You have to get to know the villain, have them be a major part of the story up to this point. That way when the reveal happens it’s an actual shock to the players (if done right). Scarlet’s reveal was basically “Oh no, the villain we met 1 cutscene ago turned out to be behind everything. What a twist…”

Alleluia.1320:

And to the OP’s point about the molten alliance and how a woman couldn’t have formed them. Scarlet might just have been able to show she’s that strong. She does say in the invasion text that the Aetherblades follow her “b/c they like living.” She’s strong armed the steam punk pirates in to following her, she can show enough strength to make the Molten Alliance believe she can give them amazing power if they do as she says.

If you knew anything about the Flame Legion, you’d know that “showing strength” is irrelevant in the face of her gender.

Antara.3189:

I did see a post by an ArenaNet employee who stated to oversee this current LS and concurred with a poster that the LS has been written without large plot building to prevent a long, strewn out, boring story, versus fast paced action with classic villains.

I’d really like to see the exact wording and context of this post, if I could. Source please?

The Human-Centaur war is over. You went to harathi highlands, killed Ulgoth, and smashed them back over the pass. Before you killed Zhaitan, natch.

I don’t wish to get into the mess that is this release both lore wise and mechanic wise, but I do want to reply to your comment. It really shows the ultimate failing of what arena net calls a “living story”. Let me ask you, how do you know the Human-Centaur war is over? What proof do you have about this? What area did you concur that drove out all the centaurs from human regions and brought them to their ultimate end? Or what raid boss/instanced boss did you defeat that proclaimed himself the leader of the centaur? None.

For all I know, the centaur war is still going on. In this “living” world centaurs are still raiding, pillaging, and attacking in places they NO longer should be, NPC’s still talk about the attacks, events still trigger OF the attacks. How can one possibly understand where to be at in the lore of this game at any given time? It’s beyond the scope of this game to be able to convincingly point out that what you do, or any of us do, has any effect on the world. Don’t get me wrong.. I’m not guild wars bashing, but as far as I understand it (and i’m barely hanging by a thread at this point) Zhatain has been slain for two years and all events happening now are well after his death. The amount of lore miscommunication, and the inability to bring the story to the players is disappointing.

That’s all I wish to say.

I got to say I agree with the OP on this. The living story, as gameplay, is generally quite fun and entertaining. However, none of it makes any sense.

I mean, what exactly are the Dragons doing at the moment? Just watching us fight each other constantly? LA and Divinity’s Reach have both been attacked now. Surely these godlike dragons would have thought “I should attack at the same time whilst they are weak, and completely crush everything”.

To me, the LS story events just seem to be farm after incohesive cutscene after farm. With no continuity at all.

I have enjoyed them all none the less, however a point comes when I’d like my characters storyline to progress – not just killing villain after villain.

VoiceOfUnreason.5976:

Alleluia.1320:

And to the OP’s point about the molten alliance and how a woman couldn’t have formed them. Scarlet might just have been able to show she’s that strong. She does say in the invasion text that the Aetherblades follow her “b/c they like living.” She’s strong armed the steam punk pirates in to following her, she can show enough strength to make the Molten Alliance believe she can give them amazing power if they do as she says.

If you knew anything about the Flame Legion, you’d know that “showing strength” is irrelevant in the face of her gender.

We don’t know how she managed the alliance, yet. Maybe whatever she showed/offered them was good enough. Maybe she offered them a way to bring back their gods/get them new gods. Maybe she mind controlled them. We don’t know. It remains an unanswered question.

And, as it wasn’t the point her this release, that’s fine, imo. This part of the story is about the (current) villain’s big debut as she causes terror and demonstrates there even was a concrete connection btwn the molten alliance and the aetherblades. Before now, we assumed, but it wasn’t confirmed. Now its confirmed. We know there is a mastermind behind both sets of events and that mastermind is set on causing trouble in Tyria.

We don’t know a lot of other things yet, like the motivation or the specifics of how she’s done it, but we’ll see that eventually, I’m sure. Its not like we stop her in this update and the story is over with this update. It says in the release notes that the invasions are going to continue even after Clockwork Chaos ends, just at a lessened pace.

i agree with much the OP said. i feel like AreaNet’s new marketing slogan should be ‘GW2: come for the dragons, stay for the steampunk’. in other words, i am totally lost and confused by the living story. the sci-fi/techno route this game is taking doesn’t interest me at all – i was promised dragons and fantasy! but, confusion in storytelling isn’t always a bad thing. heck, i’ve been confused reading George R. R Martin from day one and that’s the reason i LIKE reading his books. i want my confusion RE: living story to compel me to play. so, for now i am still engaged and interested in seeing where this living story will go, but it does seem like the lore has seriously jumped the shark.

if nothing else, can we please stop saying ‘later tater’ and ‘die die die’? so. freaking. cheesy.

I loved psychopaths, always my favorite characters. However her i do not like she’s just too obvious.

Hehe i will capture you queen!

Woops i failed, okay umm i make your toys evil hahaha!

Only way i think people could like her is because she’s voiced by tara strong, while she is an amazing voice actor she also voices a purple horse on the most overatted show ever.

I agree with the OP and others on pretty much everything.

I believe the big problem is that Anet is trying to keep the story simple and easy to digest for the masses. What Anet fails to realize is that the majority of the masses probably don’t even pay attention to the story. They log on, rush the cutscene instance, and start in on that achievement checklist or zerg farming.

The people that do follow lore, however, expect better quality and depth. One only has to look at these threads, or watch a woodenpotatoes video to see this.

Gergolot.4217:

I got to say I agree with the OP on this. The living story, as gameplay, is generally quite fun and entertaining. However, none of it makes any sense.

I mean, what exactly are the Dragons doing at the moment? Just watching us fight each other constantly? LA and Divinity’s Reach have both been attacked now. Surely these godlike dragons would have thought “I should attack at the same time whilst they are weak, and completely crush everything”.

To me, the LS story events just seem to be farm after incohesive cutscene after farm. With no continuity at all.

I have enjoyed them all none the less, however a point comes when I’d like my characters storyline to progress – not just killing villain after villain.

Now that’s just silly… Well, in a way it can be seen as such. if we kill off the dragons too soon, the game loses it’s main antagonists. Unfortunately, by spreading them out so thinly, it makes the Elder dragons just seem like set pieces with just as much inertia.

The only possible way to salvage the Elder Dragon story would possibly be to turn the story into something like Pacific Rim and we find out the current Elder Dragons are just the beginning with more, even more intelligent, and specialized to fight us, Elder Dragons coming soon. Giant robots for PCs are also a plus.

In all seriousness, I hate to say this but Arenanet’s poor handling of the story with Guild Wars 2 is… just making me stop caring.

I only find myself playing this game for the combat system for the most part, but if I want a good story where my character matters even a bit, I play TOR. Yeah… Sorry, Arenanet, but this New Direction you’re taking things (not that the old one was much better, what happened to letting us punch out NPCs mid-speech with high enough brutality?) is just that bad.

To be specific, there’s the whole fact that the PC does not seem to matter much, even though things like a home instance should give a whole slew of potential for things that we can have to make it feel like we hold some effect on the world, the disjointedness of the storyarcs, (“Hi, Trahearn! Remember me? We met back when I was level fifteen or so, how come you don’t remember me? And why are you introducing me to Tegywn? We met already! You helped us get to orr, remember?!”), the lack of options for PCs to express their character’s voice, and the living story being so gated that one easily loses everything forever, even story context, and you have a very frustratingly bad story telling delivery.

Irikol.3495:

The Human-Centaur war is over. You went to harathi highlands, killed Ulgoth, and smashed them back over the pass. Before you killed Zhaitan, natch.

I don’t wish to get into the mess that is this release both lore wise and mechanic wise, but I do want to reply to your comment. It really shows the ultimate failing of what arena net calls a “living story”. Let me ask you, how do you know the Human-Centaur war is over? What proof do you have about this? What area did you concur that drove out all the centaurs from human regions and brought them to their ultimate end? Or what raid boss/instanced boss did you defeat that proclaimed himself the leader of the centaur? None.

For all I know, the centaur war is still going on. In this “living” world centaurs are still raiding, pillaging, and attacking in places they NO longer should be, NPC’s still talk about the attacks, events still trigger OF the attacks. How can one possibly understand where to be at in the lore of this game at any given time? It’s beyond the scope of this game to be able to convincingly point out that what you do, or any of us do, has any effect on the world. Don’t get me wrong.. I’m not guild wars bashing, but as far as I understand it (and i’m barely hanging by a thread at this point) Zhatain has been slain for two years and all events happening now are well after his death. The amount of lore miscommunication, and the inability to bring the story to the players is disappointing.

That’s all I wish to say.

I think that, despite this idea of a “Living World”, ArenaNet is afraid to make huge changes to their existing world (WoW’s Cataclysm-style). They don’t want to remove existing events or scenarios or simply haven’t found a gameplay solution to deal with that yet. The problem is that they’ve already advanced the storyline past the events of the main game, while everything is still referencing Zhaitan as the main threat in the Personal Story. Without removing some of the original content, they’re not able to properly advance the world to a new stage. And no, this isn’t an excuse for ArenaNet. What they’ve done is their own fault; they’ve basically written themselves into a corner. But I’m fairly certain this whole “Living Story” idea, at least in its current implementation, was NOT the original plan for expanding GW2. If it was, then the base story would have been written in a way that would allow the world to advance properly without these blatant holes in the storytelling.

One way that could have accomplished would have been to treat the Dragons like they were described originally, primordial forces of nature. Zhaitan would not have been killed in the story. The whole Arah instance would not have been related to the PS, and instead function like an explorable where you “defeat” Zhaitan, but he always rises again. Then the PS would have revolved around the founding of the Pact, and involved another villain. One with a more consistent presence, rather than the ever-present shadow that Zhaitan was. He could still be related to Zhaitan, perhaps a certain character from the PS that gets revived as a villain? It would be more impactful than having a bunch of villains that have no relevance to the player. And it frees up Zhaitan to be an ever-present threat to the world.

What this achieves is: making the Elder Dragons in general a constant threat that can never be truely killed, but can be repeatedly defeated in instances. It opens doors to have more relate-able villains in the personal story. And it lets the story of the world advance while keeping areas like Orr intact and in a constant state of battle. And later on down the line, like 5+ years into GW2’s lifetime, if ArenaNet wanted to truely change the world they can come up with a plotline where someone finally figures out a way to stop the Dragon’s ressurection. Then we can have a player-driven world changing event involving the true death of the dragons and a remaking of all the zones they were involved in. Which then opens up doors for a new threat.

But all of this is hindsight. In its current implementation there’s no real way to get rid of Zhaitan without scrapping a ton of content from the base game. And no way of introducing new dragons without creating a bunch of new zones (and then such an expansion would end up in the same boat as Orr). And any new villain they try to introduce will always appear irrelevant against the backdrop of these world-destroying dragons.

I agree with your post. I am starting to believe that some people will prop up whatever miserable story scraps thrown at us regardless of how poorly conceived. From the beginning I have heard that all these events will be knitted together into cohesive story. Is that what some of you really think this is. A story you care about, that you will remember long after GW2 has been removed from you hard drives?

Story point I wanted to see. Queen Genna announces that the pavilion was constructed for the purpose of testing Tyria’s greatest heroes. Why, because she wants to send a contingent from all the races to explore the ancient parts of Tyria, like say the Crystal desert, or Fire Isles. It would both unify the races for a common purpose and open new UNEXPECTED story lines.

I just want more!

Actually it’s easy to have alliance with dredge: make a stuff which can destroy dwarven thing. Show them that, and they will follow you.

The hardest one is alliance with flame legion (but if she can show them that she has a power (or weapon) to destroy other Charr legion, they will trust her and make a pact).

(I feel this Scarlet more and more like Mad King. Is she one of Mad King Sect ?)

The only complaint I have: random invasion system and 10 minutes limitation, if not you miss the event and need to wait 50 minutes (bad for a casual player). I prefer they make system:
1. rotation invasion system than random invasion system (yes there will be people who wait there, but not such a big deal). As there are 13 areas, can be make 2 – 4 sets of rotation which change every 1.5 days (full 2 rotation in 1 set).
2. if you miss 10 minutes limitation (and you are thrown to new overflow), same events are going on in that overflow (with the time left in all servers >>> although player cannot finish it, it is not a big deal, they still can participate in the event. Too easy for achievement ? Limit by how should player participate in the event, for example: player need to finish at least 2 events).

Alleluia.1320:

Antara.3189:

I did see a post by an ArenaNet employee who stated to oversee this current LS and concurred with a poster that the LS has been written without large plot building to prevent a long, strewn out, boring story, versus fast paced action with classic villains.

I’d really like to see the exact wording and context of this post, if I could. Source please?

See Below.

BobbyStein.2315:

Thalador.4218:

The problem is that Jeff and Ree are either very busy with building the overarching lore (and giving into the subpar ideas of the new writers) or are held back so the LS writing team can have their “fun.”

I can’t comment on what Ree and Jeff are working on, but I can say that I’m ultimately responsible for the quality of the Living World story. I don’t imagine we’ll please everyone with our new direction, but that’s true of any story. That stated, I encourage people to leave their feedback. Just please be respectful.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Mm, no, the problem might be that the LS writers are trying to have it be “fun and entertaining” as opposed to “stirring and exquisite writing”. Which is good, because people shooting for “stirring and exquisite writing” sometimes risk missing the mark and moving right on into “boring and pretentious” or too far into “just plain boring”. Like shooting for Inception and instead getting Minority Report.

This is true.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

. . . on a semi-related note? Who is voicing Scarlet Briar?

Tara Strong

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0152839/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

Evans.6347:

Smurfbuster.1529:

1: Mechanical flaws. I’m sure this is a broken record by now, and might’ve even been fixed by the time this post starts circulating around; but why is the communication device soulbound? Not everyone did the opening event on their main, specially since you can theoretically complete it at any level. So those that did that, not including me, are at a disadvantage until this is fixed.

I reckon you didn’t try at any point to talk to Vorrp with another character or you would have received a brand new sparkly communicator usable by that character.

He or she may have done like me and talked to Vorrp a few times before he actually would give you the communicator. I think the point is, why not make the device account bound and re-gettable.

Pale Tree
Pale (adjective, light in colour), Tree (noun, type of plant)

Scarlet Briar
Scarlet (adjective, a colour), Briar (noun, type of plant)

Seems like she follows a similar naming scheme.

This is how I see it.
The Human-Centaur war I considered over, from doing the events concerning them. If you started out as a human, we took care of that before moving on to joining an order and then the Pact and then off to fight Zhaitan.
We killed a majority, if not all, of the Centaur leadership, so there you go. They will still be in the areas they need to be for the players who are going through them for the first time. By the OP logic, we shouldn’t see anymore risen around either.
Flame Legion just lost their leader, and we went back to COF in explore mode and beat them down again. They are scrambling and not organized. Someone as crazy as Scarlet could swoop in there and talk them into forming an alliance with a group that shares similar interests.

Shallow chase the zerg playable content coupled with a one dimensional mary-sue like crazy villain with lore busting steam punk goons is what you get when you expect new content every 2 weeks. Rushed ideas passed off as stories because some people get bored too easily is what’s happening here. Never mind the cleverly disguised incentives to spend money on keys or slightly better coffers/boxes to get your new monthly weapon skin allotment because that’s all been neatly packaged together in a “look this way!” attempt rather than focusing on fixing up the dungeons and finalizing each of the professions as the 1 year anniversary of the game creeps up on us.

And we call that Living Story. It’s filler, the more you give the more they want.

At least the account wallet was nice.

The personal story was bad, why expect anything different from the living story? I liked the story a lot in gw1 but i still don’t think gw2 has a story, it is all just a mishmash of events.

Personal story? Oh you mean the prologue to Trahearne’s story. Funny how he doesn’t seem to fit into the Living Story scene

MastaNeenja.1537:

Personal story? Oh you mean the prologue to Trahearne’s story. Funny how he doesn’t seem to fit into the Living Story scene

That is weird how he isn’t in the living story, he was the main player in my personal story so that lead me to believe that he was an important person in tyria…

To throw in my 10 cents:

The remaining Arenanet staff who continue to work on Guild Wars 2 are tasked with wringing as much profit from the game for the NCSoft overlords. To do that they need two things:

1) Add gem store content.
2) Maintain and improve gem store view counts and purchases.

To get gem store view counts, you need to remind players of new gem store content, as well as get them to log in and view the gem store. This is where the Living Story comes in, and serves the entirety of its purpose – getting players to log in! Personally, I don’t know what the average activity of a player is, but it can probably be broken down into people who log in on patch day and people who log in every day. Living Story content caters to both groups, and daily gated content (world bosses, daily dungeons, daily achievements) caters to the more frequent gamers. Achievements themselves enhance the addictive aspect of the game (to keep you logging in before the living story event is over!) and players acquire reward items from the living story story achievements. Notice how they’re all account-bound, un-tradeable and are rapidly filling the corners of your inventory? Hey, you better buy more bank space for only 400 gems, matey. Oh look! New items in the Black Lion chest! Better buy BL keys and hope you get a ticket. Hey look, another musical instrument keyed to a different note!

The living story is little more than a mechanic to get players to log in frequently and purchase gem store content. NCSoft don’t care about the lore or telling an interesting story, they’re a business. And we all quite willingly vote with our wallets. Don’t expect an expansion pack until player numbers start dropping off significantly, and even then its unlikely. I don’t doubt there are good developers at Arenanet who want to add meaningful content and lore to the game via the Living Story, but the project managers dictate who works on what, and adding well-explained lore takes money. Money which could be better spent on flashy new content like a new race of enemies that will hold the attention span of the playerbase’s majority for another two weeks.

5: Systems don’t tested
Maps always full. Event never start in overflows (even before 10 min gate). Maybe Anet you need change your bussines and open a cheescake factory.

What i want to know is how she got an army and fleet that rivals and exceed the pact. How is it that none of the 5 capitals bothered to send any help to stop the invasion but instead rely purely on volunteers.
Also, even if she is capable of learning from all 3 colleges, why would they even admit her much less in all 3?