Guild Wars 2

I feel this is the new cop out behind every patch. Shes crazy so she does bad things is not interesting lore….. The Aetherblades, steam creatures, and molten alliance don’t really have an explanation at all. And this whole Tequalt thing looks like its gonna be a scarlet did it moment. Can we just…. finish this story arc up…. maybe look back at all the current lore teases in the game from Gw1 and expand on those in some compelling stories. With epic story missions… and maybe some new mechanics and stuff… not just hot air balloons or dragon holograms.
Just because they make the boss harder doesn’t mean they need a lore story behind it…… We can just pretend its been that way forever. And get back to fighting dragons or something….. unless scarlet killed them all or something.

Please Mad King please kill Scarlet and turn her into your minion. :P

What if Mad King is turned into Scarlet’s minion?

/dodges flame balls, lightning strikes and meteors

Inb4 this year it’s Scarlet who explodes from the Lion Statue, having “killed” the Mad King.

She brings with her trusted allies, the Aetherblades!

Because everyone loves the Aetherblades, right?

CHAMP BAGS FOR EVERYONE!!!!11!!ONEONE

OP, come, pull up a tent on this massive virtual field next to your fellow protesters, have some camp-fire brewed coffee, while we all watch WP youtube videos replacing the lack of GW2 storytelling.

What you’ve said is exactly what we’ve been shouting at Anet for months. I just hope a dev will look through a window and see all the virtual protester tents…
You can also check this thread.

ANet could of course remedy it all by having Scarlet seduce Trahearne so we could fight and kill him.

Sarathiel.6374:

I feel this is the new cop out behind every patch. Shes crazy so she does bad things is not interesting lore….. The Aetherblades, steam creatures, and molten alliance don’t really have an explanation at all.

There is an explanation for the existence of steam creatures in game (Asura Personal Story, Infinity-ball thing)… WHY/HOW Scarlet is able to summon them (or summon portals at all) I have no idea. Was this in some previous LW content?

Tom Gore.4035:

ANet could of course remedy it all by having Scarlet seduce Trahearne so we could fight and kill him.

I just imagined a Scarlet-Trahearne plant-baby! * is scarred for life *
Now that would be the most hated boss of all times. :p

What if the thing Scarlet saw was not the Eternal Alchemy, but actually Mad King Thorn (check the short story)? So what if she is ALREADY Mad King Thorn’s minion, and just doesn’t realize it herself?
If this is true, Scarlet will have a big role in the upcoming Halloween update(s), and her storyline is currently on hold, because it is still some time until Halloween.

Whether this is true or not is not important. What is important is that I am quite certain that the writing team have given Scarlet some method to her madness, and that her insanity actually makes sense if only we knew exactly what it was that she saw.

@hedix:
Even though sylvari have human reproductive organs, they cannot reproduce. The only way new sylvari are born is through the Pale Tree. So we will thankfully be spared the horrors of Scarlet-Trahearne offspring.

Tom Gore.4035:

ANet could of course remedy it all by having Scarlet seduce Trahearne so we could fight and kill him.

Killing both Scarlet and Trahearne at the same time? Shut up and take my money!

CHIPS.6018:

Please Mad King please kill Scarlet and turn her into your minion. :P

no minion. then we are stuck whit her for ever.

here is how i see it. scarlet went crazy because she is to smart. and she saw something that she could not understand and comprehend. she knows something we don’t that is how she forced the molten alliance to work together. she probably is using some greater knowledge to buy of inquest and the pirates.

The lady is a Lovecraftian style villain. Someone that has comprehended the true nature of reality, and in the process come unhinged from our more limited definition of same.

I get what you’re saying, digiowl, and I even agree that it does follow that formula…. but calling Scarlet “Lovecraftian” may have the unintended effect of disturbing Lovecraft’s corpse and drawing him to you to eat your sanity, bit by delicious bit.

Ice of Dragons.1637:

CHIPS.6018:

Please Mad King please kill Scarlet and turn her into your minion. :P

no minion. then we are stuck whit her for ever.

Honestly I’d much rather her become the Harley Quinn to Thorn’s Joker than continue as the annoying villian sue she is currently presented as.

She would’ve been bearable as a pure joker/quinn kinda character, but all the other traits she gave her put so far over the top it’s laughable.

I’d rather her not become another stupid Harley Quinn “crazy is so evil” stereotype like every other lame “juggalo”-esque crap thing out there. Keep clowns and crazy evil out of my stuff.

Motives are important and Scarlet has one but it is not a great one. She means to get us to fight the Dragons? We already are. Or the inquest? Same! Nightmare? Yea done! So after she can rule or influence? I do not see why she is needed at all or how my character would care what she is doing next. As far as I can tell she is nuts and there is no reason to it, so if the villain is evil but a crazy evil then how do we stop her?

Personally I wish they would focus on other aspects and other lore characters. The possibility of another Sylvari tree or Jormags minions pose more of a threat and they should be working on a way for me to feel personally threatened by Jormag or the other dragons. Currently I see them as big forced to be beaten, but no personal threat to my world.

The best villains are the ones that have a side you can almost understand, but see as evil or grey

If you look at how ArenaNet portrays Scarlet after an interview with TowerTalk, she’s actually far more interesting than the game comes close to portaying – or the short story, which makes her a Villain Sue.

When it comes to Scarlet, the problem is Anet’s “pacing” – they say they have a story, which they want to tell “in the future” – issue is, we get next to no story now. We’re getting bare bones of a story with each update thus far, Tequatl and SAB moreso than any other update. An Orrian Chicken appears to have more meat on its bone than the most fleshed out stories of the so-called Living World.

Another issue is that the “Living World” is not a living world. And no, it’s not a “random story” like some have begun to say either. It’s a progressional story of Scarlet. It’s focusing 95% on Scarlet, her actions, and her actions’ repercussions (which 100% deals with Ellen Kiel for some reason). A living world would be affecting the whole world, bit by bit. Tequatl was the first chance at making it a living world, but they gave us just the marrows of the story’s bones. “But there’s more!” Bobby Stein claims… doesn’t matter, if we don’t get to see it.

TO ARENANET: If we don’t see the story, it doesn’t matter how much of it you guys have upcoming. You don’t satisfy us now, you’ll lose us. I truly truly hope you take all these complaint threads, the sheer amount of which having expanded greatly since August – and on the story at that, whereas before it was mainly on mechanics – to heart. Because things need to change.

You can tell us there’s a story behind Tequatl’s update. But it honestly doesn’t matter if we don’t see it. And if we, the players, go through months with next to no story additions, with most of the content being achievement grinding (face it, most of the LS achievements are grinding – do x y times, go do old content under z conditions; that’s grind).

DOW Mageski.2097:

Motives are important and Scarlet has one but it is not a great one. She means to get us to fight the Dragons? We already are. Or the inquest? Same! Nightmare? Yea done! So after she can rule or influence? I do not see why she is needed at all or how my character would care what she is doing next. As far as I can tell she is nuts and there is no reason to it, so if the villain is evil but a crazy evil then how do we stop her?

From my understanding, she’s basically trying to change how the universe functions. How the fate of the universe deems we should act.

Yeah, she’s that full of herself.

But she is unique in this, among GW villains, at least. She’s seen a hallucination and believed it to be how the universe functions, and the fate and purpose of the sylvari race. And now she’s working to change that, because she doesn’t like how it is. The issue to me is that her actions during Queen’s Jubilee… weren’t shown to us in game to be unrelated to her master plans. It took an interview for such to be known.

I think the whole Scarlet character was poorly written and she’s just annoying and she doesn’t seem to be a villain at all, just an annoyance. I hate her and I think the LS creators need to actually learn about some story structure.

Guhracie.3419:

I get what you’re saying, digiowl, and I even agree that it does follow that formula…. but calling Scarlet “Lovecraftian” may have the unintended effect of disturbing Lovecraft’s corpse and drawing him to you to eat your sanity, bit by delicious bit.

I suspect he would find it slim pickings.

ANet seems to have good story writers on staff, but for some reason they fail in turning those stories into game content.

digiowl.9620:

ANet seems to have good story writers on staff, but for some reason they fail in turning those stories into game content.

Probably the same reason it’s hard to turn a good book into an equally good movie. The material is there, but they’re limited by their tools when actually making the finished project.

Can WP just write lore……

Sarathiel.6374:

Can WP just write lore……

No. Just because he’s decent at finding lore and good at showing it, doesn’t mean he’d be any good at making the lore.

And given from the “creativity” of his characters’ names…

Erukk.1408:

Probably the same reason it’s hard to turn a good book into an equally good movie. The material is there, but they’re limited by their tools when actually making the finished project.

Turning a book into a movie is difficult because you have hours of story, and all has to be presented in about 100 minutes.
Turning a (lore-)book into game content does not have this problem. This is prooven by many games, and also by Anet: remember there was something called “personal story”?

Content in almost any MMORPG is heteogeneous: There are quests, events, raids, scenarios, etc. And in most games you will find a lot of lore in singleplayer content, and the big bang events can be experienced as some kind of group content.

The living story just feels as if we would just get the big bang events. That would be like WoW introducing only a new raid, but no new quests telling you about its background.

For me this is very sad, because GW2 has to offer a lot of interesting stories and lore. But it seems as if Anet tries to hide it at any cost.

Scarlet is kitten