Guild Wars 2

This whole event would be interesting to study from a sociological or political analyst point of view.

We have two parties, which are painted to be polar opposite of each other.

Ellen Kiel

• Political color is blue
• Offers us new and different things we are not familiar with
• Protects and defends the weak
• Upholds the law
• Believes in sacrificing personal gain to help others

Evon Gnashblade

• Political color is red
• Traditional and offers to give us things we are familar with and already know
• Controls a large majority of the economy
• Opportunist with a keen eye on profit seen through the various events since launch
• Makes money off of us
• Promises to make you rich and give you things

Evon Gnashblade is purposefully written to be depicted as deceitful, manipulative, and greedy. Yet there is a fairly large vocal majority which seems to support Evon Gnashblade, even in the face of a lot of negative exposure.

People are willing to forgo all of that seemingly negative history in the promise to get “cool stuff” and “make money”. Evon makes it direct and personal in saying “I will save you money on the Black Lion Trading Company, and give you things you have always wanted!”

(yet we will still be spending money on the black lion trading company and he will still make money off of us, just it is now spun in such a way that we feel good for spending less!…..)

With the BLTC price reduction, those are items that people don’t use on a daily basis, but they are status items and fun!

Ellen Kiel is written to be a war hero, a champion of the people, and a generally good person. Yet she has a fairly weak campaign. She will reduces waypoint costs and give us something new that we haven’t seen before (Thaumanova Reactor).

From a moral standpoint, it would seem like Ellen Kiel should win, because we all like good things to happen right? Well, as mentioned earlier, Gnashblade seems to have a larger population talking about him than Kiel.

She offers us a better quality of life (cheaper waypoints, and a larger majority use waypoints everyday than people who spend money on the BLTC).

Gnashblade says he will give you things you want. Yet continues to extort money from you when he can. At the ease dropping of an opportunity of an open seat on the council, he rushes forward to claim the prize and is willing to lie cheat and steal to get there.

Kiel offers you things you are not familiar with and that is about it. She came out of nowhere, saved lions arch a few times, and now is being herded forward into competition for a seat on the pirates council. Not even her own idea.

I wonder how much this translates to politics in real life?

Vote Evon.

Anet is in total control of who wins and what the outcome will be. The “Election” is part of a story that can easily be guided to allow for a corrupt outcome that leads to further conflicts in the story. The possibility exists that the actual vote casting will have absolutely NO bearing on the actual outcome.

Those players that realize this see all this discussion, analysis and quibbling over what rewards are better as quite amusing. Just farm the Achievement points and see what Anet has up their sleeve (so far they have been quite successful at distracting the majority of players from the fact that their BLC key sales must be going thru the roof….quite a brilliant plan).

What other conspiracy theories do you have, Brother Grimm?

You seem to forget that this is a game, so it’s not like the guy will actually screw us over in any way.
And Ellen is extremely weak and bland as a character, whereas Evon is interesting and fun.
Ellen’s presence in the Living Story so far has just been bad writing piled on top of bad writing, and if she wins you can be sure to see even more of her (is that possible? She’s been freakin’ everywhere so far).
Evon could be depicted as a total raving tyrant actively out to ruin us all, but all that matters is that it makes for a fun and interesting experience in the game.
We already know what to expect from Ellen on that front, which would just be more robotic lines on always doing the perfect goodly thing at all times always, no matter how stupid it is within context. Like her Candidate Trial right now where she wants you to fight off a hoard of pirates just to return the unmarked stolen goods to whatever kitten claims to own it.
Within the real world, that would be like seeing a group of thugs in some alley rifling through a stolen purse full of cash, so you full-on murder the thugs, then walk around with the cash saying “Hey, who owns all this money? I want to return it!”
Stupid can’t begin to describe it.

I’m pretty familiar with Thaumanova Reactor and the Inquest.

CMF.5461:

I wonder how much this translates to politics in real life?

Brother Grimm.5176:

Anet is in total control of who wins and what the outcome will be. The “Election” is part of a story that can easily be guided to allow for a corrupt outcome that leads to further conflicts in the story. The possibility exists that the actual vote casting will have absolutely NO bearing on the actual outcome. Those players that realize this see all this discussion, analysis and quibbling over what rewards are better as quite amusing. Just farm the Achievement points and see what Anet has up their sleeve (so far they have been quite successful at distracting the majority of players from the fact that their BLC key sales must be going thru the roof….quite a brilliant plan).

Exactly. Everything is made up in advance. With all his exciting election pork (Abaddon fractal, Southsun Survival), Evon is destined to win. Kiel is for sure the more ethical, rightful candidate, but Arenanet made her too boring and too weak to be elected. Methinks Arenanet could have made the campaign much more interesting by creating two really competitive, equally strong (if different) candidates.

There’s a whole lot of bias in your “case study” but I’ll just pick one.

How is Evon extorting money from the players? I don’t like RNG and the pakitteno boxes but the reality is, that’s Crysten Cox not Evon and it’s not extortion, it’s a gamble.

In the real world I think most people would prefer the “good guy” candidate, but in the game, the way ArenaNet writes these white knight Mary Sue characters, it makes me want to barf (Salma from GW1 was just as bad, if not worse and the War in Kryta had the same cartoon villain portrayal of the White Mantle and the Peace Keepers in its writing to contrast with the good Queen Salma). I wanted to uninstall the game at the beginning of Kiel’s candidate trial listening to her Mary Sue dialogue.

Ellen helps the innocent? More like the NPC characters in the game that don’t have anything to do with us or our personal gain for voting for her. After all, do you play a game to satisfy fake characters or you and your friends? Evon makes you rich, making you and your friends happier, making you want to play the game more. We don’t know the exact details of the abaddon fractal, how it played out, so saying “offers to give us things we are familar with and already know” is only half true.

Even with Evon being this more sinister character, it makes things a lot more interesting. Ellen Kiel is just like any other supposed HERO that we have seen in this game, plain and boring.

Let’s see

Ellen Kiel vs. Evon Gnashblade

• “Offers us new and different things we are not familiar with” vs “Traditional and offers to give us things we are familar with and already know”
  It’s not like we don’t know anything about Thaumanova reactor (ve’ve been there, after all), nor do we know that much about Abaddon’s fall

• “Protects and defends the weak”
  … You forgot to say that those were the same weak she helped oppress earlier.

• “Controls a large majority of the economy”
  This isn’t exactly an opposite argument to any you have made for Kiel (unless you wanted to suggest she’s poor). On it’s own this argument is neither pro of against Evon’s candidacy

• “Upholds the law”
  More like “follow orders”. Blowing up the ship was hardly following law. Besides, as far as i know LA has no law, only Council edicts.

• “Believes in sacrificing personal gain to help others” vs. “Makes money off of us”
  It’s not only personal gain that Kiel is sacrificing. Have you seen the reaction of her crew in the Trials? Yes, that was their pay for getting themselves in danger that she was sacrificing. And as for Evon’s “making money off of us”, i haven’t bought any RNG boxes. Did you? And of the many boxes you could buy through his shop, only Black Lion ones can be blamed on him – the Dragon Boxes were offered by LA council (meaning, Magnus – the Norn behind Kiel)

• “Opportunist with a keen eye on profit seen through the various events since launch”
  As i said before, most of the RNG stuff was only sold in his shop, it was someone else’s (Hint: Anet ;P) idea.

• “Promises to make you rich and give you things”
  And that is definitely not a bad thing. As long as he won’t renege on his promises, of course.

CMF.5461:

Evon Gnashblade is purposefully written to be depicted as deceitful, manipulative, and greedy. Yet there is a fairly large vocal majority which seems to support Evon Gnashblade, even in the face of a lot of negative exposure.

Now, that first part is a serious argument – and a true one. The real problem with Evon vs Kiel hovewer is not that people are willing to forget he’s a manipulative kitten, but that Kiel in her “positive candidate” role has been seriously overdone, and in effect she’s at best irritating (besides being a cardboard cutout with no personality).
In effect, you have here a vote between a real person, and a prop that has been painted so bright that it hurts. And additionally, if you scratch that paint, you will find that the wood underneath is a bit rotten.

No wonder Evon has such a big support. Even if he is a greedy merchant that is out to swindle us out of our money.

Grimwolf and Dan, you make the best counter argument why it is ok to vote for a “bad guy” because it is more interesting for gameplay reasons.

As far as Kiel being boring and people hate white knights and Mary Sues, well I don’t mind them and I don’t know why there is such a thorn in so many people to automatically hate the sterotypical good guys.

It is just a game, and we are allowed to step out of our societal norms and play what if. Yet I do agree to a degree the Kiel is boring and predictable.

As far as the rest the counter arguments:

• Bias in case study
• It is not Evon extorting money out of the players
• Ellen doesn’t help the innocent
• Anet is in control and it doesn’t matter???!!……

Yes and no there is bias in my analysis. I did what I could to take everything at face value and take the examples of in game interactions. My wording probably could have been better though.

Gnashblade sneaks around in the stairwell, lies about Ellen being his assistant, interjects himself into competition for the council seat, claims the lost treasures from the Aetherblade wreck for his own causes, runs the black lion trading company which puts takes it’s cut from every transaction done, sends out little vote for evon bribes in world loot… I’m sure there are more but that is all I could think of at the moment.

Evon does extort players for money, in an RP sense. Yes there is a person/team behind this making real financial decision to try to make real money off this video game. But they are personified and made acceptable in this world via the Black Lion Trading Company lore. As said above the tax for the trading post transactions, but also the holiday event and living story skins and lottery items, not to mention the original black lion trading company chest and keys. Evon is written to make money off the characters/players in an RP sense.

Ellen helps the innocent with every action. Fine, they are NPCs that are stranded on an island due to Consortium contracts, or being assaulted by Karka, or are assassinated by Aetherblade separatists. Do you want Ellen Kiel protecting the players? We are supposed to be the extraordinary and heroic figures that go on these adventures WITH NPCs like Kiel.

She has headed up the defense of lions arch, southsun, freed displaced people from tricky legal documents, and in the most resent act, saved lost treasure to try to give back to the people.

As far as, how is she supposed to know who gets what out of a giant pile of loot, well I don’t know and maybe it isn’t realistic, but it could be used to put back into the city indirectly instead of directly into the hands of random people who claim it is theirs. Maybe that is bad writing or maybe that is your own cynical view in a means to defend your decision to vote for Gnashblade.

I’m not even touching the Anet is going to do what they want conspiracy theory….

Remove all the lore and the banter and sum it down to this:

Gnashblade is written and intended to inspire our greed to vote for him

Kiel is written and intended to claim our votes due to our view of morality.

In an online world, many people are ready to scrap morality to act in the guise of anonymity, which has in itself created a very large population of trolls and hatefulness.

The thing is that we are real people on the other end of real social interactions. I do not use anonymity to give me leeway to do what I want. That is a copout excuse used to do things that you may really want to do and act as in the real world, but it is socially unacceptable.

Putting on a mask does not change who you are, but it hides you from possible consequences.

Going further into it you could study where it is now acceptable in this newest generations society to act like this online, which reinforces the same behaviors offline as well.

…That goes past “bias” into full-blown insults toward anyone supporting Evon. If you really want a viable analysis of all this, you shouldn’t be the one doing it.

Why would I want to vote for the good canidate? this isn’t real life. I want the game to be interesting and exciting, not good and boring.

Also the only thing that really matters is that Evon’s fractal is 100x better from what we know. If Anet wanted to make it an even fight there wouldn’t be 5 dev posts supporting Evon and 0 supporting Kiel. They would have revealed some juicy secret about the reactor that made us interested. They would of put the minigames and trail portals near each other instead of putting Evon’s in plain view close to the WP and hiding Kiel’s back in a corner. They wouldn’t have sent us 20+ “support reminders” with 2s a token and a giant VOTE FOR EVON slapped on them. And they wouldn’t have made a pirate election where one of the candidates isn’t a pirate and doesn’t like treasure…

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Why would I want to vote for the good canidate? this isn’t real life. I want the game to be interesting and exciting, not good and boring.

Also the only thing that really matters is that Evon’s fractal is 100x better from what we know. If Anet wanted to make it an even fight there wouldn’t be 5 dev posts supporting Evon and 0 supporting Kiel. They would have revealed some juicy secret about the reactor that made us interested. They would of put the minigames and trail portals near each other instead of putting Evon’s in plain view close to the WP and hiding Kiel’s back in a corner. They wouldn’t have sent us 20+ “support reminders” with 2s a token and a giant VOTE FOR EVON slapped on them. And they wouldn’t have made a pirate election where one of the candidates isn’t a pirate and doesn’t like treasure…

That’s not entirely true, a dev from the fractal team mentioned that he is really excited for what the reactor fractal will bring, based off of the brainstorming ideas they have already made and that he is a Kiel supporter because of it.

However…. I think the election is a bit one sided… i mean, now that Anet is constantly coming out with new RNG skins, the Black lion key discount price seems a lot more useful than WP cost reduction. Also, Anet knows that a huge majority of their players are previous GW1 players, who were big fans of the original game and would love having a Abbadon fractal.

One key difference: This does not translate into real life politics.

In real life, Democrips and Rebloodicans aren’t much better than each other. Both support wars abroad, both support the police/surveillance state, both are paranoid a terrorist is hiding underneath your balls, both support the drug war, patriot act, NDAA, the NSA spying, overseas spending, and the mommy/daddy-big brother state.

It’s not a stretch to say Evon Gnashblade is better than the fools of congress in real life!

But keep in mind this is just a game. In the world of video games like GTA, you steal cars and run over strippers. With an opportunity to cause trouble in Tyria, people will vote Evon Gnashblade.

Some people actually want to see a shady capitalist merchant influence a PIRATE council, and open up a fractal where we face off against a FORGOTTEN EVIL GOD!

In short, there’s no way to compare real life politics to GW2 politics.

Form ate my response back to you Astralporing, so I’ll try to make it shorter this time.

Upholding law and defending the weak that she oppressed earlier.

This makes a positive mark on her character as she was supposed to uphold the law, and the contracts were legally binding documents that she could not override. When she found the opportunity to casually ignore the bombs placed there by Canache earlier, she found a loophole that would allow the people to be freed. She was “lawful good” up to where she found a way to be slightly “lawful chaotic…maybe lawful neutral”.

I didn’t realize that some of the holiday/living story boxes were written as hosted by people other than Gnashblade, the original intent that he makes money off of the people via the BLTK and capitalizes on things where he can still holds though, minus the dragon chests.

The promise to give us things and make us rich are simply bribes which are thinly veiled. My issue is how willing a large majority is to accept said bribes.

For the record I did not have nearly as much issue with Treherne as the majority seems to have, and I don’t have as much issue the same way with Kiel. I think it somehow became popular to be on the “hate the white knights” bandwagon.

@Grimwolf
Yes it is insulting, but I was trying to point out how willing we are as a people to feed into greed. Maybe you didn’t realize how plain and simply these guys were written, or maybe you feel it is just a game and it is ok to have fun.

From an analytically perspective it is interesting to see the support for a “bad guy” party over a “good guy” party, when the end result is pretty much the same thing, with a couple of twists (new dungeon, save us a little of money for 4 weeks. Real money or game money).

Going back to, how does this translate to real world politics question.

How many people do you know vote for a party because it would directly benefit them?

I am in the military, and the consensus is that it is dumb to vote for a party that will not up military spending…i.e my own paycheck.

That statement irritates me and I would think we should vote for the person who will do the most good and help the most people, not just fill my own pocket.

@Kain Francois
very true that in the real world the two parties are pretty much the same, which explains why I have a hard time voting for any of them since they are all pretty corrupt.

I have some differing opinions, since I am in the military, and the spying and what not has saved many lives, but that really shouldn’t be discussed here, so I wont respond any further to stem further arguments and bad feelings.

Random fact, I hated and never got into GTA and Rockstar Games irriate me because they like to be the bad boys of gaming. Killing and wrecklessness for the sake of ratings is shallow and a turn off to me.

Yet I really enjoyed Red Dead Redemption and LA Noir, which is by the same company. That is because I felt the story and the time period were depicted wonderfully and it gave a proper setting for said violent acts.

I don’t believe in the “its just a game” argument for a majority of things. Just because it is a game, I still use my moral compass. I will step out side of bounds to play what if, but my serious save games or online characters I maintain my status quo.

Still, very good point on it being a Pirate council, Kiel makes a pretty poor pirate in the traditional sense.

Oh and to the rest of the post, I didn’t mean “I” was the one doing the case study. I meant that it would be interesting if someone else who was educated in political sciences and sociology were to study our microcosm of a society and make comparisons to the real world.

I wouldn’t look too much into it. This is a game with no real world consequences, and both offer similar things.

I explained the real world versus game world earlier. To some degree that is true, but the motivators behind decisions are interesting things to examine.

Kojiden.8405:

I wouldn’t look too much into it. This is a game with no real world consequences, and both offer similar things.

Actually, we’re deciding who will be the main character of upcoming story arcs.

It’s Boring cliche (Kiel) versus Eccentric anti-hero (Evon).

If anything, this is a popularity poll not much different than Character Wars on gamefaqs.

Brother Grimm.5176:

Anet is in total control of who wins and what the outcome will be. The “Election” is part of a story that can easily be guided to allow for a corrupt outcome that leads to further conflicts in the story. The possibility exists that the actual vote casting will have absolutely NO bearing on the actual outcome.

Those players that realize this see all this discussion, analysis and quibbling over what rewards are better as quite amusing. Just farm the Achievement points and see what Anet has up their sleeve (so far they have been quite successful at distracting the majority of players from the fact that their BLC key sales must be going thru the roof….quite a brilliant plan).

Actually, BLC key sales are down because players don’t want to buy them now in case they do go on sale in a few weeks.

And enough with the conspiracies already, not only are they blatantly false, but they’re also against the forum CoC. It would be nice if you wouldn’t talk down to the rest of the player-base too.

Regardless on who gets elected, my original intent was the choices behind who we want to back, in the face of the presented character material in game.

Not what ifs and self imposed ideas about how people think the characters are, but what we have been exposed to thus far.

Now if it is some big conspiracy and it doesn’t matter who we vote for, then oh well? I am not personally revolted by these actions, as we really don’t have any stake in the matter in the first place. The game and story evolve regardless and it is fun to interact to some degree.

GW1 players will say that ANet has done voting before with holiday events to push them out longer or to change the seasons, so this is not out of scope for them.