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In reality (and good fiction), situations are never so neat that you can get the best results just by being as ruthless as possible.
It’s funny how these morally grey organisations always find themselves in circumstances where torturing suspects or killing dodgy looking civilians turns out to be the right choice. Or at least, they succeed often enough that the audience can feel smug about how others just aren’t rational and ruthless enough to ~~put the mission first~~. An equally likely scenario would see the poison kill a crucial spy that nobody knew was there, the Batman wannabes hang the wrong asura, and Rata Sum would be furious at foreigners walking through their lands executing who they please. But then we couldn’t revel in how dark and edgy and kitten it is to kill civilians because of beep logic boop empathy is weakness.
I don’t see why the Pact should regard the Aetherblades as a problem at all. We don’t see them intervening in the Kryta/centaur war, so why would they be worried about a pirate port fighting off some other pirates? Or if they were concerned with absolutely everyone, I sure hope they’re not forgetting centaur civilians, any skritt settlement remotely near an asura lab, etc.
Plus, imagine if this stateless army did just start throwing its weight around – the status quo would be shattered. The Pact takes LA – oh but I think you’ll find that’s ancestral Krytan land and with the lionguard gone we want it back. Or they make Orr the seat of a new power – but it’s charr by right of conquest and you’re getting no more war machines until we get our share. And then other powers react to that, peace breaks down in a flurry of opportunism, and so on.
Pact as a Dark Knight
That’s just it – what is the Pact for? Saving civilians, all civilians? Fighting ‘evil’? As I said, we players know what evil is because it’s flagged hostile to us in gameplay. From an in universe perspective, how are they going to judge? It’s an organisation mean to kill dragons; what you’re proposing is a worldwide military that stamps out whatever it doesn’t agree with.
And what happens if less obviously good vs. evil problems crop up? Say the humans and charr go back to war – does the pact step in on one side? The problem isn’t whether the Pact’s involvement is legal – it’s how they decide who needs killing in the first place, and whether it’s their job to interfere at all. Identifying the designated bad guys won’t always be easy, and simple ruthlessness + firepower doesn’t automatically mean victory a la Game of Thrones.
Anet is probably worried about leaving other races out in the cold if they do an update about humans and Charr going at it, or Krytan politics or whatever. But this just leads to the multi-racial factions, orders/Pact and LA mostly, getting all the attention (I mean why is there Pact in CoF explorable go fight dragons you babies). So it’s not that the world is homogeneous, but that most of the story is.
I think it helps to view magical techniques as just another technology. Professions were merged into the Guardian because people simply discovered better, more powerful ways of using magic. You could become an old school ritualist, but why would you – you’d just be hopelessly outclassed unless some new advancement is made (expansion, cough).
As long as Livia/an immortal GW1 PC kept up with new advances, I don’t think they’d be any weaker – just ridiculously experienced and probably with some old tricks nobody is used to dealing with any more.
Why should the Pact support one group over another one? Why should they act as enforcers for a sovereign city-state?
It’s not just whether the Pact is able to save the city. It’s whether they should act as Team Trahearne World Police, performing glorified anti-piracy missions against the Aetherblades, supporting one Sylvari faction in what’s basically a civil war, or whatever. I mean sure it’s obvious to us as players that the bad guys are the ones with their names in red, but the Pact just sees a pile of semi-legitimate factions that they don’t really have much right to start interfering with.
And honestly, do we really want the Pact swooping in on every conflict just because if you count the airships in Orr they probably could? The races are really interesting, but already take a massive backseat to Lion’s Arch and the Pact. I probably enjoy the story more when Anet pulls away from ‘Lionguard/Pact vs. x’.