R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
I feel like that answer just poses more questions. Why pull away from Tyria but not Cantha or Elona? The Brotherhood of the Dragon never had ties to those places, and while Elona is near to the Crystal Desert, why would they consider it ok but not Tyria? And Cantha? The isolationist empire, which under Usoku’s iron-fisted rule expelled all who didn’t agree with the official policies? Why would dedicated pacifists with ties to a dragon on the other side of the world do their recruiting there?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The nobility doesn’t really seem to have titles anymore, at least not in the city, so it wouldn’t be something her family could be stripped of. In any event, the person had a “noble demeanor”, so simply growing up in that crowd would satisfy the condition.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Female human noble immediately brings to mind Kasmeer, though it could also possibly be a new character.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The Zephyrites are a group of humans, largely of Canthan and Elonian ethnicity, who live in a flying ‘city’ called the Zephyr Sanctum, in order to remain out of reach of the conflicts of the surface world. Most of their history is a complete unknown for us, save that they’re somehow linked to the dwarvern Brotherhood of the Dragon and shared that group’s respect for, and cooperation with, Glint. They roam the world, touching down from time to time to trade and promote peace, and last year they signed a trade agreement with Lion’s Arch and played an important role in filling the empty seat on the Captain’s Council.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
That dragon painting actually isn’t unique to the place. There’s one in CM, iirc, and maybe another somewhere in DR. I suspect it’s just another case of ANet using concept art as in-game decorations.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Kiel had the right to execute Gnashblade because he had been conscripted. At that point he was technically a member of the Lionguard. Dessa was ordered in for questioning because she was deemed a potential threat to L.A. In Twilight Arbor, they were acting as a military, not as a police, so the idea of jurisdiction was moot.
As for the Seraph, you may have noted that both the Lionguard and Heal-o-tron called them on it… and they backed down. That was jurisdiction at work, or at least who they may or may not arrest.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Is Canach still in his cell at Vigil Keep, or gone altogether?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Not in preparation for the Foefire, but the writing had been on the wall for anyone to read for 20 years. It was a given that they would die in the war, so it’s not too far out there to think they might have had their tomb prepared and waiting- it’s a bit of a pointless extravagance, but on the other hand, they must have thought that it was the only lasting thing they’d leave behind.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(mandatory disapproval of how the show added in unnecessary financial filler plots)
The asura are certainly the wealthiest, I don’t deny that, but their government is weak, and more importantly, completely uninterested in the rest of the world. The Arcane Council would like nothing better than for everyone outside the walls of Rata Sum to just up and die. The sylvari may be good with plants, but I can’t imagine them selling in bulk- that would require either businesses or government, and there’s no room for either in sylvari society.
To expand on my previous point, I don’t think Kryta is wealthy, not truly. They’re only the most prominent supporters because their little is better than everyone else’s nothing.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I wouldn’t say that either. Of course they’re more involved than the norn or the asura, who have no real sense of national unity. And the charr, besides not being the most generous of folk, also have so many problems in their own territory that the entirety of the centaur war must seem like a small skirmish to them. That leaves the sylvari, who I think are more active than the humans- but they have no nation, no taxes to build up a natural treasury, and so no resources to lend to things like rebuilding a city. That leaves the humans. They practically win by default.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I will admit that the ridiculous display of extravagance that was the Queen’s Pavilion was… odd… and I was badly disappointed that release not to see Riot Alice living up to her name. However, while the Living Story is showing humans to be too well off, to say that they’re on their last legs does the opposite. Yes, as a race they’ve lost a lot of ground across the continent, but that doesn’t mean much when the kingdoms were independent. the fall of Orr didn’t make Kryta’s position any worse, and the searing actually indirectly helped them. Cut to the modern day, and yes, most of their coastal settlements were abandoned, but otherwise they occupy more or less the same amount of territory. People often cite the centaur war, but that’s only as bad as it is on account of elements of the Krytan government deliberately crippling their own army. All in all, Kryta is going through hard times right now, but it is not meaningfully diminished from what it used to be, and actually may be better off than it was in GW1. The other things you cited at the start, the charr and the Elder Dragons, are a potential drain on resources but too distant to be a threat.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I might be mistaken, but I believe I remember Rytlock saying that the four AC sub-bosses were all still alive when the Flame Legion stormed the city.
EDIT: “The Sorcerer-King Adelbern had four great champions when the Foefire struck.” Thank you, Jelle! So bizarre as it is to say, Vassar and Ralena where either buried after it, or had had their crypt prepared in advance (the more likely, in my opinion).
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
They have bombards, but I wouldn’t call them cannons per se. The Kournan ones are more like catapults, and the Vabbian ones are straight up magical. I don’t believe either uses gunpowder to propel their projectiles, though said projectiles are themselves explosive.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Well, actually it says that land-based historians and scholars theorize that they aren’t mystical. ANet may well have always planned on them being magical, and just included that passage was just to give another perspective and perhaps a religious reason for the krait to find the surfacers intolerable.
Or maybe they opted to retcon every other sentence in that article. It’s truly unfortunate that we cannot say for sure.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I don’t think it likely, because it wouldn’t fit with the theme of Fractals at all. The Fractals of the Mists are supposed to mirror things that have happened- in a sense, they are photographs, informative but ultimately flat glimpses at something that once was. The Realms of the Gods, on the other hand, are very real, and for humans at least hold deep personal significance. After all, they believe that they’ll be spending eternity in these places. There’s also the possibility of the Gods being present, arguably the most powerful beings in the universe. The idea of gods and afterlives being reduced to a fifteen minute snapshot more focused on some gimmick of gameplay than what’s going on is… distasteful. To do the Realms justice, they’d kind of need to be the opposite of what Fractals are.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Continent wise, the Crystal Desert is considered part of Tyria and the Desolation part of Elona (the distinction between the two seems to be a matter of how far the sulfurous haze spread). Nation wise, no humans have claimed either since the days of the Primeval Kings, excepting several failed Ascension-oriented colonies. Undead aren’t bothered much by sand and sun, though, so it is certainly possible that Joko considers the whole of that waste part of his domain.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I don’t think it’s a matter of military risk or territorial sovereignty or anything like that. I see the placement as more a matter of where the havens are needed. Why pay for the upkeep of a fortress in Ascalon when the charr patrol their own roads? The Lionguard only has to take up the slack in the gaps between regional powers.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I won’t say it’s unfounded, but the dredge only have enemies because they insist on making them. It’d be relatively simple for the dredge to accommodate the Priory- all they want are some relics the dredge have no use for- but instead they insist on destroying them, and kill or imprison Priory researchers who come sniffing around for them. Their presence scares of the animals the hunter-gatherer norn rely on, and whenever they decide they want a new piece of land they just take it, and whoever was there before better run fast. Magister Penelope has the right idea- there is no moral high ground here. The only way any of these groups are going to secure their interests is by going out and taking them, and it was the dredge leadership that set that rule.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Hm… doesn’t mention taxes directly, just that they need to restore the trade routes to provide the income to rebuild the city. Still, I’d imagine you’re right. Building, manning, and maintaining havens can’t be cheap, and I don’t see why they’d skip out on a chance for them to partially pay for themselves.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Hao Luen?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I think the havens are in LA’s interests, but only in an economic sense. Those fortresses are about the only things keeping the roads beyond each race’s heartland traversable- without them overland trade would be impossible. LA owes its (former) prosperity to commerce, and without a steady influx of travelers and merchants the city would wither. Keeping the roads open is entirely in their own interests.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I’m not sure how much of this is entirely true, but I’ve heard that that patch was supposed to be the first of several that focused on introducing new dynamic events on a broad scale across Tyria. On account of the playerbase barely noticing the change (which was itself on account of the fact that we hadn’t even had time to track down all the events that had been part of the game from launch) the plans were discontinued and considered to not get enough attention to be worth the effort put into them.
If that is what happened, I wouldn’t expect Modus Sceleris to be picked up on again.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Wish we could see the text in its original state. Ah well.
The WvW stuff isn’t very mind-blowing. I don’t believe it’s ever been directly stated like that before, but the idea that the servers are alternate realities was more or less the logical conclusion. I did chuckle to see that there’s some unexplained lore difference between player characters and NPCs.
The bit about the Infinity Ball, though, is interesting. There was a thread about that not too long ago, so I’m pleased to see an answer, even if I was wrong. Can’t win ’em all.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Really? Where is that event at? Don’t recall ever seeing it.
Though if it is in Orr then that would explain it. Never cared much for those events given how lackluster their lore-giving is.
Before mega server the event was usually stuck at the end, no-one could solo the abomination. So you rarely got to see it start.
I beg to differ :P
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Really? Where is that event at? Don’t recall ever seeing it.
Though if it is in Orr then that would explain it. Never cared much for those events given how lackluster their lore-giving is.
Specifically, the Spaecia Illogica Waypoint on the west slope of the volcano (although it’s contested when the event is active). The pre-event is in Murkvale just to the west.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Korea is a country that depends on foreign assistance, is separated from its neighbors by a river, and exists in the information age. That is in no way comparable to Cantha, which has cut ties with foreign powers, is separated by an ocean, and exists in an age where remote contact is via messenger raven.
Skipping the lecture on quoting the wiki, we have conflicting statements in-game about rather Cantha cut off contact entirely under Usoku or was cut off by Zhaitan. The most recent statement on the matter (SoS) suggests the later, but it’s by no means as clear-cut as you say.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Wait a minute! Were the Krait around during the last rise of the dragons?
We don’t know. There’s no evidence for it, but some theories are based off of the parallels drawn between krait obelisks and the seer bloodstone, or figure that the krait prophets, who are supposed to herald a flooding of the entire world, may have been agents of Bubbles. At the moment both are just ideas- there isn’t enough to build anything solid off of.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Don’t get too frustrated about the Nightmare Court- my money is still on it tying back to the Mordremoth connection that they can’t acknowledge (never mind that Colin already confirmed it). I’ve been thinking of it as more of a loose end that will lead us into Season 2- and given their insistence that they’ve learned a lot doing Season 1, and ANet’s good track record of responding to fan feedback, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt as to the overall quality of our upcoming story. For the time being, anyway.
As to the core cast… I’m torn there. I do agree with all that has been said, specifically the bit about core characters curtailing the potential of the Living World strategy. The only thing this approach has going for it is the implied spontaneity, the idea that anything, anywhere, at any time can change; but that wasn’t what we saw in Season 1. Either the world’s story was stuck within the confines of the characters’ stories, stinting all the work the devs had put into the vast majority of Tyria (Example: the way we returned to Lion’s Arch every other month but barely didn’t even touch Ascalon after Flame & Frost); or else the character’s were shoehorned into events unrelated to their stories, at the cost of believability (the ever more threadbare excuse of Rytlock’s absurd assignments). Frankly, for the sole reason of the core cast I think that Season 1 would have been much better served as an expansion release. All that said, though, we still haven’t gotten a return out of the extensive investment we’ve been forced to put into these characters. Scarlet may be dead, but none of the character arcs have come to a conclusion, Scarlet’s included. At this point, I feel we need to see those things through. ANet pushed through to the end of the story fans were skeptical of, they can’t just abandon the one most of us actually enjoyed.
From my perspective, the best thing they could do is this: keep Marjory and associates around for Season 2, and make their storylines the main focus of releases. Do them justice, instead of making them info dumps interspersed with multi-month dry spells. And at the end of Season 2, wrap things up. Give the storylines satisfactory conclusions and let the characters retire. As things stand, not only does their inclusion detriment the Living World, but there simply isn’t enough to them to stretch out for multiple seasons to come. They should end on the high note they’ve been building up to, but they need to end.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
but the Charr sacrificed thousands of humans to conjure the Searing
Where’d you hear that? I’ve never seen anything to suggest that someone was sacrificed for the Searing, let alone thousands of people.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
If we’re talking about summoned husks now, then I would agree… but only because that’s how the Elder Dragons do things, not because of the name.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
There’s nothing connecting the summoned husks and druid husks but that name. Druid husks are immobile treants. Summoned husks are bipedal creatures, large, but not near so large as the druid husks, with no recognizable face. The Nightmare Court are never seen to interact with the druid husks, and druid husks are never seen to be corrupted (by the Nightmare Court or any other entity). All you have is a name and one shared attribute (they’re both composed of wood). As well argue that the Nightmare Court are possessed by nightmares- same name, after all, and both are evil.
Oh, and druid “husk” is a misnomer. They aren’t discarded- events in the area show that they still contain the druids’ power and spirits. That part of your argument misses the mark too.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Could it be possible that the uncategorized fractal is not above ground? When you fall you get teleported in the same way as when you are hit the electic beam created on the stairs on the way to Tom. So for all we know it could just be a structure in a cave that was made to look like a floating fortress/lab/etc, with on the ground generators for those teleports.
I doubt it. If it was subterranean you’d expect it to be carved out of the surrounding rock, but instead it’s stone blocks fitted together, with balconies that only make sense if they opened onto empty space. The argument might be made that it was built in a very very large cavern, but by that point it starts to seem dubious, especially considering the city cube in the distance.
And besides, Volcanic, Underground Facility, and Aquatic Ruins all plainly show that Fractals are full capable of showing subterranean places as being subterranean.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
They keep the aesthetic, but of the existing council, only Peter the Lost and Anne Reid seem to have been pirates. Farth Scarclaw seems to have gotten his spot by killing pirates, Magnus and Kiel are practically cops, Tokk and Shud seem to just be slightly shady business men, and Hao Luen and Theo Ashford seem to just be riding on their family birthrights.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
There is a fairly popular idea that there might be a Celestial Elder Dragon somewhere about Cantha, but I’ll let the proponents of that theory do it justice if they choose.
I would like a darkness dragon, but I’m not sure how much of a niche there is for it. All of the other dragons each have their own ‘dark’ aspect blended in with their given elements, so a dark dragon would be somewhat redundant. And besides, any such minions would need something to distinguish them from nightmares, which could be difficult.
Personally, while we’re just throwing out possibilities, I would most want a storm/lightning dragon. Kralkatorrik touches on such things, but mostly as an afterthought, and what aspect of nature lends itself better to an awe inspiring force of destruction than lightning?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Sorry for the necro, but I didn’t want to make a new hybrid thread when there was an old one gathering dust, and this was the first one I found.
So, for those who don’t keep tabs on such things, a German podcast called TowerTalk does semi-frequent lore interviews with the devs. They’ve recently posted a two-part recap of the Living World Season 1 with Scott McGough, Angel McCoy, and Bobby Stein. Most of it was just going over things we already know. (Although it is fascinating how different it was from the developer perspective, compared to the disjointed impression we had.) Very notable, however is that in the second part (about the 10 minute mark)they explain just what the hybrid was.
In Angel’s words “[Scarlet] has created this hybrid of krait and nightmare that, that is really nightmarish, if you’ll pardon my using the same word again. Um, so, she’s telling everyone that this is, this is the prophet. The krait believe her. She’s basically incubated a normal krait inside the, a pod on the, on the plant, and as it has become infused with the toxins from this plant, uh, in, in great quantity, it has evolved, and it comes out, and, um, you fight it.”
A couple other interesting things from that section: Scarlet found the plant, so it wasn’t, as some (myself included) theorized, provided by the nightmare court. She also said that if the pollen had been allowed to spread, it would have meant “nightmare everywhere.” Again, nightmare as a singular term, not the plural “nightmares” that might have been used to describe the hallucinations. The same term that was used to describe the make-up of the hybrid. More on that later.
On the last new note, she says the toxic krait were “infected by the plant, and changed by it”. She touches on what she’s already said here, that these changes mean the other krait won’t take them back and so they have nowhere else to turn but Scarlet… but also that “there’s also a certain amount of mental control that Scarlet has over them.”
That’s where Angel leaves off, the end of the Word of Dev fact of this post. However, I feel like wading into the kiddie end of the speculation pool and resurrecting the theory that the toxins of the Tower were, or at the very least communicated, Mordremoth’s corruption. I don’t remember if it was debunked or just forgotten, but it’s certainly fallen by the wayside. It does have some problems, but nothing insurmountable, but there is a lot going for it. It would account for why the krait changed physically but the sylvari only got a glowy aura. It would explain why Angel talked about it turning things into nightmare, the Nightmare being popularly theorized to be tainted by Mordremoth. It, combined with the popular theory that Scarlet was acting as an agent of Mordremoth and by proxy the Nightmare, would explain how Scarlet kept the loyalty of the Toxic Alliance, the most dubious of the three, and also account for this new mention of mental control. The final piece of evidence, while dubious, is why I wanted to bring this up- apparently, a little while back, this image was posted on Naomi Baker’s site as “Naomi_Baker_Concept_Art_Illustration_Guild_Wars_2_ka_brisban.jpg”, and then quickly taken down. Full story here. The rampant overgrowth of thorny roots veined through with glowing purple energy? We’ve seen that before. The Tower of Nightmares might serve as a useful starting place for speculation on what we’ll encounter out west.
Anyway, maybe most of my “theories” will be more of “no kitten” to you guys, but I did feel the hybrid explanation deserved attention, since it was such a compelling mystery. Really wish ANet would have some sort okittennowledgement of these interviews instead of making us stumble upon them weeks after the fact, but it’s a pointless complaint. Enjoy my stumbling.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Well, kinda. We assume there’s six because that’s what the surviving records of the last rise say. There might be other dragons, because you are right, it seems suspect that they’re in such a relatively small area. Remember also, though, that at the end of the last rise all of the magic that the dragons feed on was contained in an artifact on Tyria, so the dragons may well have been closing in and concentrating themselves in this area when they fell into slumber.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Everything points in the direction that she isn’t. She repeatedly calls out the Consortium, Lion’s Arch, and her former krewemates who joined the Inquest as being bad people- a concept no Inquest would be able to grasp- she states that she and her eerily faceless krewe work alone to their own ends, and there’s this bit from the Thauma Fractal: " I knew the reactor was dangerous—doubly so with the Inquest involved—but I wasn’t ready to watch my friends die." “The Inquest”, not “us”. She specifically refers to them as something distinct from her.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I doubt it, simply on account of the fact that Rata Sum has always been the largest asuran surface settlement, since the days of GW1.
Something else to stew over- while the Fractal itself is certainly large, an additional full sized city cube can be seen of in the distance from where you start. So, theoretically anyway, we’re looking for two massive asuran structures in close proximity.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Dessa is not Inquest. She used to be on a krewe with asura that later worked on an Inquest krewe, but that doesn’t make her Inquest. It’d be like saying that Snaff was Inquest because his apprentice joined them at some point.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I think Kiel’s airship actually uses the red PvP/WvW model, as I don’t recall the Aetherblade emblem on its side (Which would make perfect sense too).
It’s there. You need to climb to get an angle to see it, but from the top of Stormbluff it’s clearly visible.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
History in Tyria pretty much starts when humans arrive. ‘History’ is just a word for the body of knowledge of the past, and the humans are the only ones that have concrete records of the past beyond the last few hundred years, with the exception of the odd relic the Priory digs up. Besides, as I remember the podcast, he goes on immediately to specify human civilization.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Actually, I vaguely recall the devs mentioning that the colossus fractal was from the start of human civilization on Tyria. One of the TowerTalk podcasts, I believe.
As for the idea that a Fractal could just be a jumbled mess of ideas- McGough said that each Fractal is a “discrete section of the past”- in other words, everything in a given Fractal is from a given timeframe, separate from the timeframes other Fractals tap into.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Gonna dig it up, but we did have a dev do us the honor of dropping in to say that the Uncategorized Fractal is most certainly not Rata Sum, which makes sense when you think about it. The interior floor plan looks eerily similar in layout, but the pan at the end makes it clear that the structure itself is in no way a cube. The same post also explicitly stated that all the Fractals we have so far are in the past, with the possible exception of Uncategorized, depending on how you read the statement.
EDIT:
We’re not ready to reveal the whole truth about the Uncategorized Fractal yet, but I can tell you that it does not represent a potential future for Rata Sum. All of the other fractals represent discrete sections of the past, recreated. We have the ancient past, more recent past, and mythic/lost to history past, but there are no futures in there.
The similarities between the two maps cited is more a function of asuran architecture having common elements rather than a story-related easter egg. In other words, the maps look similar because they were designed and built by like-minded builders with similar design aesthetics, not because they represent the same place at different points in history.
Hope this helps,
So all of the other Fractals are set in the past, but Uncategorized is set the Six know where. It definitely isn’t Rata Sum, but it is asuran. I’d argue that it’s set fairly close to the present (relatively speaking), as Dessa’s reaction would seem to indicate that she recognized something about it.
As for the harpies, in addition to the question you asked… who thought it was a good idea to teach the blighters magic?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
ANet did state that they want to more or less align out-of-game and in-game time, and Wintersday kind of forces them to, so eight months is a good ballpark figure.
Fair enough, but it nonetheless would have been a huge red flag that this operation is much bigger than they had though.
The marionette was destroyed… but when a known terrorist and enemy of your city has made off in an airship the size of your harbor, you… continue to ensure that your guard is down. Makes perfect sense.
We don’t have a figure for how long it took, at least that I’ve heard. There is something that sets a minimum value, but not a max. It could have been a week, yes, but it also could have been a month. But that’s neither here nor there. By the end of the first day most of the Council had proven how bad they were at their job.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
My bad, it was the first Southsun release that added them.
From Reconnaissance:
Doern Velazquez: Agent Riel, is the commodore aware of the situation?
Riel Darkwater: He is, sir. The city’s being evacuated in accordance with the Master of Whispers’ plan.
It wasn’t charging back in again. It happened eight months later, and just three months in the Lionguard discovered that airships were being manufactured on a massive scale. Knowing that, it is completely unreasonable that they did nothing when they were warned that Scarlet and just tested a superweapon and was heading to Lion’s Arch next. Regardless of the size of the actual attack, they should have set up defenses.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Are all the ideas going to be universally appealing? No. Am I willing to forgive all that for siege turtles in WvW? By Ogden’s Hammer, yes!
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I don’t know how much sway the Sanctum had on the Bazaar. Remember that the two are not inextricably linked- the Bazaar has no set location or schedule, and the Sanctum is only a sometime visitor to it.
EDIT: That said, I have had the thought that the disruptive black marketeers Belinda is chasing are not bandits, who have thus far shown no interest in selling goods on the sly or trying to economically destabilize DR, but instead the Bazaar of the Four Winds. If I’m right, we could see if and how they’ll tie into Season 2 sooner rather than later.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
@Kalavier They didn’t do much before the Battle of Lion’s Arch. The Order leaned on them to evacuate the city after Claw Island, but I believe that’s their only input to the personal story. They didn’t even exist in game until Dragon Bash.
So their track record, as we know it: one smart move, that wasn’t their own idea. One forgivable oversight, which killed one of their number and injured two more. One smart move, economically speaking. And one completely unforgivable failure to act, despite ample forewarning that a major attack was imminent from a member of the community who had proven trustworthy beforehand and one of their own members. No independent investigation, no balanced investment taking into consideration the risk versus the probability and costs… just earplugs. I’d say at least some of them deserve the boot, Kiel, Peter, and possibly Magnus excepted.
@Shiren The problem is exactly that they’re all traders. We learned from SoS that a rich trader can simply buy a ship to qualify, and we know for a fact that the asura were both businessmen with little ties to shipping and that two of the humans were simply old money. The captains of the Captain’s Council are already only accounting for about half of it, and the gambles of financial investments require a much different skill set than competently overseeing the well-being and security of a thriving port city.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Interesting… and also a hog for screentime and player attention. It would appeal to a small demographic, but probably not one large enough to be worth the amount of screentime it would require. And besides, the Pact is an in-universe symbol for ANet’s design philosophies. It would be exceedingly strange if they undermined what it stands for by pitting it against the local governments.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.