Guild Wars 2

Please note: That this could most definitely be just an oversight, but it is always more interesting to speculate regardless. Please keep all sarcastic, joking, or resentful responses away from this thread. You have the rest of the forums for that.

Throughout my adventures, I noticed that one particular Chief is named the same as the grounds that the hylek occupies. Chiefs are leaders of a tribe that hold authority, but how do the names of the grounds come to be?

This is the only tribe I know of in the game that has a chieftain with the same name as the tribe. So why not the others? The other tribes do not have this similarity. This has me believe that all hylek tribes were, at one point, named after someone. Most of the chieftains we know of have similar names to their corresponding tribes.

This would mean that as hylek tribes gain a new chief, they would keep the name of the original chieftain. So the Eztlitl tribe is a newly formed tribe who banded together behind Chieft Eztlitl.

Seems like a logical conclusion. The tribe there recently moved to that location it seems.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Cotl

might not be a name could simply be “The Chief Eztlitl” somewhat lazy character writing but it’s not a major character in any case so it hardy matters.

I understand that it might be an oversight, but I specifically asked to discuss the notion that it isn’t. Please read the bold text.

Actually, I think the new interview from Massively just proved Plagiarised right. To quote Scott McGough:

They occupy a place until they fill it up population-wise, and then when there’s no more room they fall into conflict with one another until a sub-group splits off to find new ground. It’s your basic migration/evolution, taking new territory, spreading out to take new ground.

So this is how the hylek became so widespread in the 250 years – they overpopulate, they civil war, they schism and establish new grounds. So the Eztlitl tribe is likely a brand new schism. If schisms are common place, it makes sense to name the tribe after the first leader after said schism.

Which in turn makes me think there were originally just four hylek tribes (one per color) rather than the hundreds we see in GW2 – which fits with what we see in GW1, where there were five tribes (Hylek, Gokir, Ophil, Agari); the entire race of then-called frogmen took on the hylek name (who were green in GW1), but we see nothing of the Gokir (red), Ophil (yellow), or Agari (blue) in GW1. Thus given the NPC line and Scott’s mention, I would argue that the four tribes saw in GW1 (which were in much greater number than any tribe in GW2 by what we can see) likely schismed several times over creating the modern GW2 tribes – Eztlitl is likely just a brand new tribe, not even a generation old.