Guild Wars 2

Okay, I’ll admit. When Scarlet first showed up, I was excited. Good female villains are rare. They tend towards either Bond Girls or The Baroness from G.I. Joe or the Wicked Witch of the West. I wanted a smart, vicious, scary, unpredictable woman to scare the pants off of us – without being a future ally/sexy secondary/evil old lady.

And she started out not too bad. She had some mystery about her, she taunted us enough to make us want to fight her rather than save her, it was clear she was totally insane, and therefore unpredictable. She was strong, scary, and kinda creepy. We hated her and wanted to kill her, while respecting her as a strong opponent. She was pretty good. She had a lot of promise.

But…

Then she became “too perfect.” Every bad thing that happened had her fingerprints in it. She has insanely strong allies with no real in-game backstory as to how she got them. I’m expecting to find out that she’s the reason that the wurms in Queensdale are attacking the farm. She’s no longer unpredictable, because we know she has something to do with every new plot tidbit.

Her only backstory drives in the point of how much better she is, and how unbeatable, with the barest explanation as to how.

She’s now a Villain Sue. And that makes her uninteresting. It makes her outright boring.

She’s simply throwing things at us now, with no way for us to see her overarching plot or any weakness. No matter what we do, she gloats that we’re walking into her trap – without having any sign as to what her trap might be!

Anet, I put this question to you. Not as a rant or a tantrum, but as an actual, worried request. Why should we care about a questline that tells us (many times over) that we can’t win it?

Yes, we’ll go for the achievements and the treasure (we’re gamers, we luv teh shiny), but one of the reasons I love this game is because even the much repeated events feel like I’m achieving something. If only for a day! I fight the Shatterer once a day, but I still feel accomplished. I beat up a dragon! Whoo! She-Hulk! Awesome! Yeah, I didn’t kill him, but I ganged up with 30 other people, he retreated for a few hours, and we won.

But with Scarlet…I don’t feel like I’m achieving anything. She gloats at the end of every storyline. Even if she’s lying, I’ve seen no sign of it yet. She claims that she’s winning, and…well, I don’t want to fight her anymore because as far as I know, I’m just playing into her hands.

If we’re told over and over that we’re losing…why play the game?

Don’t get me wrong – I love this game. I still play it, and I play it often. But I don’t want to play the living story anymore, because no matter what we do, we fail.

And that upsets me because the crazy sylvari had so much promise. Going into a Nightmare Chamber and hearing her whisper “Don’t look behind you…” sent honest chills up my spine. It was the first time an MMORPG scared me. It was AWESOME. I really respected her in that one moment where I was too scared to turn around.

Please, Anet. Have Scarlet be creepy. Have her be crazy. Have her be awesome. But, please, have her fail. Have her be too crazy to win. She needs to fail, or no one will care. Have her rant and rave and freak out. Do it in a controlled manner, even. From a girl gamer – you don’t have to coddle the girl villain. Let her fail.

Just let us know we’ve DONE SOMETHING. Even a little something. Just the slightest hiccup in her plan. Seriously, I’ll write it for you. I don’t care. Just something that lets us feel like we’ve won. As is, she’s too perfect, and I can’t stand the story anymore, because it’s now Scarlet’s perfect story and not ours.

Please. Let us win, just once.

(Tried to edit, ending up deleting, and…the post remains and I can restore my misclick? Awesome.)

With all the hate threads around, I can’t see ANet keeping her around much longer. One or two more LS chapters, and then she will outlive her usefulness. She’s already outlived her enjoyability.

It’s too late for Scarlet as a character. Her thread in the story needs to end. While she may have had potential at the start, she’s overplayed and has her hand in everything. I wouldn’t be surprised to see her retconned into the lore and story in other places. Wouldn’t surprise me if she was the reason the dragons are waking up in the first place at this point.
I’m tired of seeing her. Any new plot or event that happens in living story at this point, you can just shrug and say “oh, I guess Scarlet is here with some new alliance of friends”.
Next living story will be Scarlet’s new plot of uniting the Dredge and Skritt to form the Shiny Dirt Alliance. Ugh.

Guild Wars 2: Scarlet is a Scapegoat

I am afraid you’re wrong on your central premise, Scarlet isnt portrayed as someone who’s perfect at all. She thinks she’s perfect and acts like she’s the best but plenty of times both in game and out of game we’re told she’s far from perfect.

Some examples:

Vorpp mocks her and her ability as he’s breaking through her shield to the funhouse and as matter of fact managed to get around her protection.

Caite claims to know Scarlet and she wasnt impressed with her back from their time in the grove.

then you got the short story. She studied many disciplines but nearly each time she left before she learn all that the tutors had to teach her so she didnt event reach their lever much less became the best at the particular discipline
example:

When spring came, she announced her intentions to move on, having learned all she needed to know. Beigarth tried to dissuade her, eager to pass along the full slate of his smithing knowledge to such a unique and promising student, but she left him with a wave and a breezy smile.

Though backed 100% by Omadd, Ceara’s thesis was not well received by the colleges or the Arcane Council. “Unsupportable conjecture,” they called it. “Unsubstantiated claims that border on academic heresy, or at very least, criminality.”

“It worked,” Scarlet said. “I suppose I should thank you for that, though I bet I would have figured it out on my own eventually. Still, no reason to begrudge a genius his due, right?”

She isnt really the best in anything more like a fast learning jack of all trades who thinks shes the best in everything.

Also I think you’re letting her hate for her cloud a bit your judgement. You said she gloats about having us fall into her trap every update she’s in. Thats not true. She was in 3 of the arcs and only said that in one of them (this last one) In fact quite the contrary she admitted defeat in the jubilee and vowed revenge as well as in TA. Actually we beat her plans every single time. This time hopefully she came of her horse and didnt underestimate us and thus laid out a worthy trap. We’ll see.

There are several problems with LS and Scarlet in particular.

One is character evolution. Generally, in well written books the characters evolve as they overcome presented challenges. In the semi-static MMO world (especially with the current LS vs PS issue), our characters really can NOT evolve. This greatly reduces the available avenues for the storytelling.

Compounding this, is the issue of pacing. Take a good book. Summarize it into 4 page essay (content loss). Then read one paragraph of the summary to a person every 2 weeks. At this point, by the end of the second week the person already forgot what the previous paragraph was about, much less what the paragraph 2 months ago was. This creates a very disjoined presentation. Even if the original was interesting (even after being summarized), after such presentation it is disjoined and loses appeal.

Furthermore, currently LS needs to cater to people who did not do the previous parts (either due to joining late, taking a break, whatever). I think this is the issue of constant repetition of how great and evil Scarlet is. It allows the people who haven’t done the previous parts to see that she is great and evil. However for the person who has done each step it feels repeatetive, predictable and therefore boring.

Let’s be honest. After the first LS updates the rest was extremly repeatative. The main villian is the same, she always escapes and no actual plot development is visible. I am sure that dev team has a great story which will tie in most of loose ends at the end (or at least I am trying to be optimistic), but the current presentation of the story is lacking.

My personal preference would be one of the following. If the 2 week schedule is negotiable, reduce the rate of releases to 1 or maybe 1.5 months. This will allow to tell the story without constant repetition.

For the current story it would be:

Molten alliance for the entirety of the first release (sets the stage, some greater power behind alliance is hinted on)
Multiple attacks by Scarlet: Toxic Alliance, Aethereblades, Jubelee, whatever) as we fight her on all fronts. This is likely 2 releases, first of which would confirm existance of the ‘overmind’, second would actually reveal Scarlet.
Conclusion of the story arc (which we are yet to see)

Oh, and while at that, please do not have her present at the end of each story, make it understood that she was behind it, but dont have her be physically present and escape. It is really not needed, and ruins the storytelling.

A lot more can be written about it, but I am fairly certain most of this has already been disucssed at length.

Galen Grey.4709:

I am afraid you’re wrong on your central premise, Scarlet isnt portrayed as someone who’s perfect at all. She thinks she’s perfect and acts like she’s the best but plenty of times both in game and out of game we’re told she’s far from perfect.

Some examples:

Vorpp mocks her and her ability as he’s breaking through her shield to the funhouse and as matter of fact managed to get around her protection.

Caite claims to know Scarlet and she wasnt impressed with her back from their time in the grove.

then you got the short story. She studied many disciplines but nearly each time she left before she learn all that the tutors had to teach her so she didnt event reach their lever much less became the best at the particular discipline
example:

When spring came, she announced her intentions to move on, having learned all she needed to know. Beigarth tried to dissuade her, eager to pass along the full slate of his smithing knowledge to such a unique and promising student, but she left him with a wave and a breezy smile.

Though backed 100% by Omadd, Ceara’s thesis was not well received by the colleges or the Arcane Council. “Unsupportable conjecture,” they called it. “Unsubstantiated claims that border on academic heresy, or at very least, criminality.”

“It worked,” Scarlet said. “I suppose I should thank you for that, though I bet I would have figured it out on my own eventually. Still, no reason to begrudge a genius his due, right?”

She isnt really the best in anything more like a fast learning jack of all trades who thinks shes the best in everything.

The thing is, with all of your examples, she’s presented as someone who’s so incredible that she’s outpaced all the masters. She’s just such an amazing student to everyone and she uses them all to become perfect.

Perhaps we’ve read it differently, but for me, the problem is that she’s written to be so awesome and so beyond her time that no one else can catch up to or understand her.

Galen Grey.4709:

Also I think you’re letting her hate for her cloud a bit your judgement. You said she gloats about having us fall into her trap every update she’s in. Thats not true. She was in 3 of the arcs and only said that in one of them (this last one) In fact quite the contrary she admitted defeat in the jubilee and vowed revenge as well as in TA. Actually we beat her plans every single time. This time hopefully she came of her horse and didnt underestimate us and thus laid out a worthy trap. We’ll see.

Don’t get me wrong – I want to like her. I really do. I really like the way she’s in the Tower of Nightmares because she’s returned to her roots as being creepy and insane.

I really, really, really don’t want to hate her because I know Anet is capable of so much more. I just think they’ve made a mistake in introducing a GW1 villain in GW2 and they need to salvage it.

I mean, after fighting the zombie dragon of DOOM, we’re all kind of wondering why we don’t carpet-bomb Scarlet’s hideouts and be done with it.

The problem is that the same people who created Scarlet will create her successor. There’s no reason to believe they can do better. That’s the real problem with GW2.

Not elder dragons – was good after the personal story but wearing thin now
Voice acting – fine
Image – looks peculiar rather than threatening,
Dialog – humorous enough but inconsistent with her supposed persuasiveness
Backstory – utterly unbelievable
Realism – things we’re told she done seem impossible given how she’s shown in game
Storytelling – always tells us the plot, a sign of really bad writing
Nemesisness – she tells us the plot before vanishing while while we stand around idly
Technobabble – miraculous technology solves everything but then forgotten forever
Lack of Threat – we don’t know what happens if we just ignore Scarlet
Progression – players characters act as unnamed extras in Scarlet’s story
Cast – no supporting villains
Variety – there is no variety, it’s always Scarlet

A big problem with Scarlet is her backstory. It’s the sort if thing you’d find in a fan fic and is the primary reason people call her a Mary Sue. It reads like someone trying to justify, as quickly and lazily as possible, all her skills and abilities by making her a genius amongst geniuses.

That aside, I think she’s too Joker and not enough Kefka.

Kefka, for all his lunacy, was a mass murderer and legit threat to his world. Scarlet is too much like a recurring comic book villain. For all her scheming, she hasn’t shown any teeth. After all this time there still isn’t the sense that this is someone who’s a real, serious threat as opposed to a problem the heroes fight off every few months.

She has no Depth,she is no Shiro and she is tooo childish(pokemon like).There is no authenticity behind her and her actions.

Grebcol.5984:

She has no Depth,she is no Shiro and she is tooo childish(pokemon like).There is no authenticity behind her and her actions.

Please, pokemon as a game is actually surprisingly deep and complicated in its mechanics when you peel away the top layer. IVs, EVs, natures, breeding, hidden abilities, pokerus; a lot of these mechanics a normal player will never know about, little less see.

With Scarlet we’ve just been told she’s the best at everything and she knows everything. It would be nice if everything were defined though. What exactly does she know that’s important? Why is it important to us? These are basic questions that need to be answered in characterization. Why is this character important? Scarlet has been here for about half a year, and about the entire year if we count from flame and frost on. Yet we still don’t know much more than we knew then. You’d think by now we’d know a goal for her.

It’s not the fact that they tell us we can’t win. Villains in games always do, it’s the fact that we never really seem to bother her. In most games theres a point where you kitten the villain off that they just snap. Not scarlet though, she doesn’t show any emotion, either anger or joy. That makes her boring. In other games even if you have a robotic villain, they still show some type of emotion. We cant connect to scarlet at all, not because she’s perfect (though that doesn’t help), but because it’s like she’s not human (or sylvari in this case).