Guild Wars 2

Also, some of the defences here are silly. They remind me of the defences of endless WoW raid grinding. “It’s just a game feature!” and “What, you expect to get raid gear for free?”

And here was me thinking that GW2’s defining feature was that it wasn’t WoW.

Oh how wrong I was. And what a massive con that advertising campaign was.

This game is going to end up being seen as a cheap WoW clone due to all of the money sinks and grinding, all those cynical design choices mount up. And when people come around to realising that?

GW2 is going to go the same way that Warhammer Online did.

And ArenaNet/NCsoft has no one else to blame but themselves.

Welp. Teleport costs are one of the reasons I’m no longer playing this game, and quit it in under a month.

The fact of the matter is is that Guild Wars 2 is filled with cynical design choices like this that encourage you to grind/pay for gems or remain destitute. I don’t like being treated like a walking wallet. I’ll give money to a game that I respect, one that respects me, but I won’t give money to a game like GW2 (whereas I happily gave quite a bit to GW1).

The waypoint costs never should have been in the game from the first place, to be honest. And anyone with a sensible head on their shoulders knows why this is the case. If you’re truly trying to create a casual-friendly game, then getting people stuck in a feedback loop of destitution with waypoint costs isn’t conducive to a great casual game. If I only have X hours to play the game, I’ll be wanting to use waypoints a lot.

I’m sorry, but attaching costs to waypoints is just an incredibly dumb idea, from a design standpoint.

Now, in Champions Online, I can have a jetpack, which is awesome to fly around with, and I can zoom from one end of a zone to the other in short order, even with the lowest rank of the jetpack power (and there are three ranks, with the third being ridiculously fast). So I’m playing CO at the moment, and having more fun with it than I did with GW2.

The cynical design choices of GW2 just quickly put me off the game in short order. What it became after BWE2 was a thinly disguised Korean grinder. How they managed so much wreck and ruin in such a short time is beyond me. But I think it has to do with NCsoft being bought out, and having Korean grinder ‘advisors’ on the team.

And it’s hurting them. It’s hurting the game. It’s turned this into a game I don’t want to play.

Thanks for reminding me of why I’ve moved on to Champions Online for a bit, though, and helping me to reaffirm that that was the right decision.

You charr-hating jerks are absolutely insufferable, there’s no point even talking on these forums with the likes of you, here.

(Hell, my entire group has already moved on because we’re tired of the cynical nature of the game. And that the forums of my favourite race are constantly trolled by GW1 fetishists is just the icing on the cake. There’s little keeping me around any more, I’ll tell you that. And I’ve spoken to a lot of people who feel the same way.)

Oh look, another person who hates the charr and has come to troll these forums. How original!

The problem with your post, G, is that it’s ripe with intellectual dishonesty. What you’re not telling people is that that was from the perspective of the humans in GW1. And they were toiling under mad king Adelbern. Adelbern was such a madman that, when the Krytans came to offer them aid, he turned them away because he believed that the Krytans must secretly wish to destroy them all now that they’re weak.

Everything was a ridiculous conspiracy with that crazy nutjob. And this is why you can’t really trust human records from the era. The developers have said many times that what they’re enjoying doing with Guild Wars is playing with the perceptions of people, and a proper lore-master actually looks at all the perspectives and finds the truth somewhere in the middle.

You’re just presenting the one-sided view that the humans of old Ascalon had. Just to backup a bizarre charr hate fetish.

Well, good job, I guess. You’re not making any of us look good, here. Least of all yourself.

Everquest II fixed this. And EQ II has far, far, far less money coming in right now than GW2 does. If you look at any animal guy with a tail right now, they’ve fixed all the armours (all of them) to have these cool fashioned tail holes or tail flaps. It looks awesome.

But… ArenaNet has been so cynical with their design. I’ve been playing Champions Online lately instead of GW2, because I expected better of them. I might even pick up Everquest II again…

(And last month I spent almost $200 on CO gathering together some costume options for me and some friends. That money could have been spent on GW2, but I refuse to spend money on a game that’s so cynical to the only race I want to play.)

I’ve ended up finding certain elements of GW2 disappointing (like the cynical nature of it), but the charr are the one thing that keep me coming back. Two words: Inimitable writing. The other races range from middling to awful in the writing department, so really I don’t understand how the charr were spared from that fate.

I can only surmise that the person responsible for writing Tybalt was the same person responsible for writing the charr. Either that, or the writers simply enjoy writing the charr more. I don’t know, with the humans I get the vibe of them being bored, with the asura I get this vibe of them being Grubb’s (a writer) goofy, incredibly slapstick, and immature insertion into the game (like a race of him), with the norn… I don’t know, they talk big but ultimately they seem shallow, and the sylvari? Too… pretentious isn’t the word for it, because that would be faint praise. Too pseudo-intellectual for my tastes.

But the charr? They’re down to earth, they have fantastic writing, they’re strong, and independent. They’re actually atheist (which some people hate and try to rationalise that hate with the most ridiculous arguments I’ve heard this side of politics), and they have no crutches. They’re funny. I don’t know, they just feel like a bunch of bros, and you can’t help but love all of them. They by far and wide have most of the best moments in the game.

Maybe when I’ve exhausted the charr and Order of Whispers stuff I’ll just stop playing GW2. I don’t know. But they’re what’s keeping me here. I love them, they’re wonderful, and they’re exceptional. I’m just sad that they were let down by timid designers who didn’t have the nads to drive their technological advancements up to 11, as the concept art suggested. And that the modellers got lazy with their armour. That’s a real let down.

But the writing?

Man. The writing.

I want that guy (and I believe it is a guy, Scott specifically?) to be given his own game to write.

I still have to say though that Champions Online remains my favourite game for where a developer actually has the nads to make what they want to make. They chose to make that game cheesy and corny, and to rev up the humour and ridiculousness of it all. And it wasn’t a popular choice, but they stuck with it and I respect that.

Whereas in Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet listened too much to the small-minded complaints of there being “HOMG, that much technology? In MY fantasy?!?” and that let the potential of the charr down a bit.

Still, the charr come close. I just wish they’d come closer, and the game itself.

But they keep me here. The charr are pretty great. I really would love to see what the charr could be unchained by timid designers, though.

A lot of it has to do with the cynical nature of the game and how punishing it is. It acts counter to their desire to make it social, and this is why I’m realising that GW2 is really broken, and it breaks its core promise.

I’ll explain.

If you die, you have to pay to return to a way point, and you have to pay for armour repairs. So if one person slips up and makes a mistake, this means that everyone involved might die. It might be a small mistake, a silly one, it doesn’t matter. The problem is is that the punishment for dying is so harsh that you don’t want anyone else around increasing the risk of you dying.

Therefore you don’t want people around in dynamic events, either, because they can scale them up, do something stupid, and cause people to die. This is the sentiment I’ve got from a lot of people. The thing is is that Champions Online’s open missions (similar to GW2’s dynamic events) are much, much more social. Why? The death mechanism isn’t punishing. You can make a stupid mistake and recover from it.

The problem is is that this game is so punishing in that regard that it leaves casual players destitute. It almost feels hateful, to be honest, and unless you have time to spend grinding, you’re going to be destitute. It feels horribly cynical – really horribly cynical. And that’s my main problem with the game right now.

You need to look at why people don’t want you around, and the main reason is because, yeah, they think you’re going to make them die.

The solution to this is to make death less hatefully punishing.

If one silly mistake doesn’t make a group die, then people will more easily work together. Let me make a point. This. Is. Not. WoW. It’s not supposed to be Teh Hardcorez or Teh Leet. It’s supposed to be open to people who want to play socially and casually, but right now the game is designed counter to that because of the death mechanism.

I mentioned this in the beta, too, because I knew it would cause problems. And it is. The fact of the matter is is that because a stupid mistake can get me and other people killed, and then I have to face such punishments due to that that I remain destitute, has killed my desire to play the game.

I’m already playing it less and playing Champions Online more again.

This makes me sad because I love the charr.

But the fact of the matter is is that as long as the punishment for dying is so hateful, you’re going to have people being antisocial. And this is all on ArenaNet. It was their choice to do that. Guild Wars 1 had the same problem.

I’ve been a long time passionate fan of Guild Wars 2, but more and more lately I’ve found I haven’t been playing the game. I’ve been spending more time with Torchlight II and Champions Online because… well… I just feel that the game is far too cynical.

Let me address some points.

Money Sinks

There’s money paid for crafting materials, for travelling, and for armour repair. What this means is that there’s so much money being spent that no one has any money left over for anything else, which brings me to my next point…

The Economy is Ruined

Barely anything sells for more than the vendor price on the auction house. This is because everyone is so consistently destitute. This destitution is punishing especially on casual players who don’t have time to grind (in the game that was never supposed to be about grinding).

Random Difficulty Spikes

The game is almost designed so that you’ll encounter random difficult spikes, extra mobs and things, even when not in an event. And you’ll get swarmed, and you’ll die because there’s no real way out. There’s no method of retreating or teleporting away. You can’t transfer instances or do anything.

This is crushingly depressing to a casual gamer, like myself, because it means that if I get a random difficulty spike, I have to teleport back somewhere and get my armour repaired, and there goes my money.

Just to stress: I don’t mind difficulty so much. I’m okay with dying. But the punishment for dying is absolutely nonsensical, it’s almost hateful. And some of those deaths can be because of random swarming, which is a bit of a jerk move. So if I die a couple of times because of that, I just end up closing the game. It kills my will to play;.

Those Useless Professions

The Engineer and the Thief, are they supposed to be able to do anything other than die? And no, no builds. Having incredibly specific builds in order to not die is not a solution to this problem. I’ve had to shelve some professions because they can do nothing but die.

Ridiculous Prices

So, you’re constantly destitute in gold, and you only get this slight trickle of gold and karma. You get to level 30 and you’d like to get a new armour set. But that armour set costs more than you could have in ten lifetimes. So your only option is to grind (in the game that’s not supposed to be about grinding).

The Money Trickle

I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears being its own point. You only get a tiny trickle of money. And it’s about 2% of what you’d actually need for the area you’re in, whether it’s normal money or karma. So you’re always finding yourself short for what you need.

Armour Design is Lazy

For the charr, and I believe the asura and sylvari. This is a game about getting cosmetic skins, because you want to look good. But most of the skins look terrible, even the ones you have to buy. I mean, the Heritage skins aren’t that great, and those require you to own Guild Wars 1! This is really cynical.

Is a tail flap on some armour pieces too much to ask for?

And if I don’t look good, how am I supposed to feel good? Most armour on races that aren’t norn or human doesn’t look too great.

In Conclusion

I think that this is going to turn a lot of casual players off the game, as it’s hard to feel like one is getting anywhere. The random difficulty, the unexpected deaths, constant destitution, the ridiculous prices on everything, it just all feels really, really cynical. It feels Blizzard levels of cynical where I can hear this constant voice saying…

…do you want to give us any money, yet…

And that’s not what I want from a game. In the original Guild Wars I bought lots of things, all of the cosmetic things, name/face changes, bank upgrades, and so on. I was happy to spend money on this stuff. This is because I felt I could enjoy the game.

But Guild Wars 2 is feeling so cynical that I’m having serious trouble enjoying it. It’s getting harder and harder to fire up the game.

ArenaNet…

I know this is designed to make people want to buy gems, but it doesn’t work that way. Good will makes people want to buy gems. This is why Champions Online has a dedicated base of people who buy lots of store things. You have to have a good game that people enjoy playing. But the cynical design of the game means that you’re making people not want to play. And if they don’t pay, what on the store will you be paying for?

As a proposed fix, I’d suggest making the game itself feel less cynical, and then just adding more and more cosmetic things to the store. Otherwise you’re going to end up like an iOS app, wondering why all the gold has dried up, and where the gold rush went.

Yeah, but they’re still not in the game as much as they should have been. You’d think with all the neat stuff the artists were coming up with would be shown throughout the game. But until Orr, you don’t see most things. Because apparently the Pact are magically pulling things out of thin air.

It just feels weak. If these things are there, then they should have used them earlier on in the game. I mean, they were the ones who went on about the whole game feeling like endgame, so why hold these back for the latter regions?

It feels cheap. But “It feels cheap.” is a feeling I’ve been getting from GW2 of late. :|

One thing I’ve always admired about SOE is their dedication to quality, it’s more important to them than most MMO developers, despite the flack they get. You wouldn’t see that in a Turbine, Blizzard, or Cryptic game. But SOE does it.

They’re passionate about their stuff in ways that I’d hoped ArenaNet would be.

Come on, ArenaNet, pick up the slack. If a decade old MMORPG can do this right, then why can’t you? There’s no excuse, it’s just cheap and lazy. And cheap and lazy is something that I really don’t want to associate with ArenaNet. But cheap and lazy is something that many parts of GW2 smacks of.

Is that what they set out thinking their end result would be?

It’s never too late to clean up and make things better. EQ II is showing the way in that regard.

Yeah, this really isn’t the kind of lack of quality I’ve come to expect from them. Their prior games (the Guild Wars campaigns and expansion) just exuded quality, so this is very disappointing.

I created a petition to this end on the forums, here. Take a look and see whether it’s something you want to sign:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/races/charr/Charr-Armour-Pass-Petition

I’m not sure what good it’ll do, but since a lot of us seem to feel strongly about this, it might be enough of a poke to get ArenaNet to look into it.

This is essentially about the poor execution of charr armour: The tail clipping; the horn clipping; the scaling/rigging of armour pieces for charr women; and so on.

http://www.change.org/petitions/arenanet-address-the-poor-state-of-charr-armour-sets

Feel free to read that, and only sign it if you agree with it. I just feel that for a reasonable amount of work, it would generate a lot of good will.

Please note!: You don’t have to provide your details, like your address and so on. If you want to leave those blank and remain anonymous, you can. Those are provided as optional fields.

This may be all for nothing, but I figured it might be worth a shot.

I can’t disagree. Not any more. It does look fairly bad. As I’ve said elsewhere, I think marketing had a hand in this. The charr aren’t a very popular race, so they just didn’t put much effort into it. As such, I’ve had to warn beast race fans away from GW2 because I can’t recommend it.

If only they’d spend some time fixing it.

In the concept art, the armour was amazing. Have you seen the concept armours? They looked fantastic. But the armour in game, all of it, does indeed look terrible. The only one I found palatable was the Heritage armour. And I had to put a lot of work into getting that, and now I use it exclusively, as I mentioned in another thread.

It just saddens me, because I wanted them to be better than this. Sometimes though, ArenaNet is just feeling like Blizzard 2.0. They’re generating quite a bit of ill will at the moment, and that’s not something they want to be doing at the launch of their game.

And would it really be so hard for their artists go go back and put in some tail flaps on the coats, and some horn flaps on the helmets? I’ve done 3D modelling, and I have a friend that has too. And we can both tell you that, no, it wouldn’t. This is just lazy. And it’s depressing.

The charr have so much potential. So much unspent potential. Where is the passionate ArenaNet of old that would never have stood for this kind of poor quality? I miss them.

Yup. They got lazy with the charr armour. Both for tail and horns. It is straight up lazy. All about the money and none of the passion I remember them having. Again, I don’t blame them for that, but things like this erode my will to play the game.

See, I always had this ideal that they’d be better than that. But they aren’t. Oh, their writers and artists are, but as I pointed out in another thread, their writers and artists aren’t the ones calling the shots as to where resources are allocated or what’s worked on and how much.

To be honest, this looks worse than WoW in some places and I was amazed by it. I ended up just working for the Heritage armour and using that exclusively just because all charr armour looks so bad.

I went from recommending this to beast loving people to warning them off of it because of how bad the armour looks. I can’t, in good conscience, recommend this game as much as I originally felt I could.

I wish they’d just spend some time and fix this…

But that’s not where the money is. :|

The camera does go a bit crazy in jumping puzzles. It’s like they were mostly made for smaller races and the design team just forgot that the charr and the norn exist. So the only real option is to create a smaller-than-normal charr or norn.

They either need to go back and fix these areas, or at the very least they need to implement a first-person camera that won’t be affected by this so much.

I think at some point marketing just took over and the charr became less of a priority.

If you look at the earlier days of GW2, you’ll see that the charr had a lot of priority, in the art and the writing. You had Daniel Dociu creating art for fantastic things that never ended up in the game, and the writers coming up with some pretty brilliant ideas. You have some of the NPCs talking about making the things that never got in (so that’s almost like the writers telling us that they haven’t forgotten), but…

It’s almost like they realised that the asura and humans would be the most popular races. So they shifted their focus to them. If you look at the early marketing, they were all over their love of the charr. But if you look at some of their later stuff, they go on about how great the asura and humans are, and it feels really forced.

One instance I can think of is the article where an animator talked about how great asura animations were, and it sounded like they that person was trying to convince him or herself more than they were the reader. Then Ree had to talk up the asura in one video and it felt really forced, you could almost hear it in her voice. The passion that was once there had gone. She sounded bored and disinterested.

So there was clearly a shift somewhere in the middle of development. And I think the charr just got shifted to a lower rung of priority simply because they wouldn’t be as popular as other races. And that’s a shame, because we all know (truly know) that the charr are the most unique and original race they have. The other races have clear fantasy analogues, but the charr don’t.

This is why they were so nuts about the charr, and originally they made a big deal about the charr being their race, it was their creation, and they were proud of it.

I think at some point down the road, that pride stepped aside and made way for money.

I don’t blame them. I don’t blame them at all. The game has to sell and be popular, I understand that. But sometimes it just makes me sad with how much of the short end of the stick the charr have. We were clearly the favourites of the artists and the writers, obviously, but the artists and the writers weren’t calling the shots as to where resources should be allocated.

I can’t help but wonder if this was one of the reasons why Kekai Kotaki left the studio. As he was one of the main charr artists. And of all the races, the charr ended up being the least true to the original concept art pieces.

Yeah. One thing ArenaNet said they’d do is sell us NPC clothing for roleplaying. That if you saw a merchant or a civilian in clothing, you’d be able to get and wear that clothing. I’m still waiting for them to actually come through on that, because I want to be able to look like the NPCs.

I realise that they have far, far more pressing concerns at the moment, but it wouldn’t be that hard to create a tailor NPC in each city and throw a few of the town clothes sets on them, would it?

One thing to keep in mind is that the charr slouched position makes them look half the size of what they actually are. You need to do /salute/ to actually get a good scale. The first time I used /salute was a real eye-opener for me.

When I did, I had go and find the tallest norn NPC I could in the Hoelbrak just to /salute next to them. And my shoulders came up a good way above theirs. Actually half way up their head. So when a charr is standing upright, they’re bigger than the tallest norn.

It’s their slouching that can really throw off estimations of their height.

Weindrasi.3805:

Fifth because I hated Gwen with a passion, and was willing to adore anybody she disliked.

Did anyone like Gwen?

She was just a really insulting character, she broke under pressure, she went crazy, she became a murderous maniac who tortures unarmed prisoners in cages and then accuses them of being evil (Pyre), and… well, she was just weak. Of mind and of will.

There are better examples out there in literature of strong, female characters. But to be honest, with the little I’d heard of Bathea and Kalla, I’d be much, much more willing to follow them into battle than I would someone like Gwen. And I like how Kalla was strong enough to stand up to the Iron Legion Imperator without being all crazy and insane about it.

So yeah, after listening to how crazy Gwen was for a little while, I was ready to love anything that she hated. Even Vekk, an asura (known for being cold), though she was an evil, disturbed maniac.

But then, she was just the female version of Adelbern, really. I mean, for all his faults, Rurik was actually okay. He had the interests of the common people at heart and he would have made an okay king. I wish Gwen had taken after Rurik rather than mad old Adelbern.

I wonder if ArenaNet ever regretted the writing of Gwen?

Oh, it’s intentional. The aesthetic of the male charr was obviously nicked straight from Beast, right down to the long, hyena-like body and short legs. There’s no doubt about that. But everything is inspired by something.

Let’s be honest, though… if you could be inspired by boring fantasy races like the Vah Shir, the Kerra, or the Khajiit, or you could be inspired by something like Beast, which would you choose? To be honest, I think their inspiration was well chosen, because at least the charr don’t look like most fantasy races.

Not to mention that Beast was absolutely awesome and a well-loved character in most of my social circles. This made the charr an easy sell (unlike most beast races)!

So… yeah. It’s obvious ‘strongly inspired’ by beast. But then the Khajiit ended up being ‘strongly inspired’ by the Vah Shir and so on. It’s just how things are. Few things are completely unique. But the charr are still very unique compared to most beast races. I can’t really think of one other race in a game that has a visual aesthetic as original as the charr. And I know a lot about that topic.

@Destroyer Bravo.5391

Check out my naming guide a bit back, it’s fairly comprehensive. Classic warband names actually had things reversed, they had the warband name before the claimed name. In other words, Iron could be the warband name, and perhaps gut could be the claimed name.

Why? Well, maybe you were the drinker of your group. Maybe you could drink even norns under the table and you could hold your liquor like no one else. Thus, for that claimed the name of ‘gut,’ as a charr who had a gut that couldn’t be eroded by anything. Irongut.

Charr naming conventions are more forgiving than most seem to think!

I’m not a fan of mounts due to the waypoint system. It would make it redundant and it would introduce the ‘mount arms race’ where everyone rushes to get the best mount. That’s just no fun.

However...

I have toyed with the idea of having charriot (yes) races, or having destruction derby style things. The problem with this, of course, is that GW2 uses server side collision detection, and as such… well, let’s just say that if you had to have that many objects colliding accurately on the servers, their servers would likely throw a fit.

And it’s a shame, it really is. The charr cars are an amazing concept. There’s just so much potential there, and I feel it’s been a bit wasted in that we can’t do anything with them. That’s the only thing that bugs me about the charr – when they were building up the lore to the game, they talked about helicopters, and tanks, and things, and… well, there are no helicopters (only a charr talking about them), and tanks/cars are just static objects.

It just feels that all their potential given to them by their artists was wasted by their game design team. And that makes me a little sad, sometimes. The charr are still by far one of the best beast races I’ve seen in any game, but they could be oh so, so, so much more. So much more.

And even minigames where those brilliant charr constructions aren’t just window dressing would do much to address that unspent potential.

Maybe one day?

“Short end of the stick.” is a phrase charr fans have become accustomed to, really.

I’m playing the game solely because I find the charr an interesting race, which no other game has. But ArenaNet’s attitude of disinterest is honestly leaving me disinterested. I feel like I’ve been conned a bit, really, with all the supposed attention to the charr and then… well, it just so amazingly lazy.

It’s depressing, too. You’d expect better from them, being an arthouse dev, but this… this is sub-WoW standards. I just expect better. Meh. Maybe Guild Wars 2 isn’t ‘that MMORPG’ after all, and one will come along that will actually bother to do a beast race right.

I’ll keep playing for now. But they’ve killed my enthusiasm so much that I can’t really find the will to put out any more money on the game.

I still think this topic is utterly ridiculous.

Everything in the game and the lore contradicts the OP. The OP says there are no schools, and yet there are fahrars (the charr take on schools), the OP says that the charr are taught only war, and yet there are fishermen and farmers, the OP says that there are no charr artists, and yet art around the Black Citadel is plentiful.

The OP makes claims about charr conquest which don’t exist in any lore piece I’ve ever read. The OP says that there are no charr scholars, and yet there’s the Durmand Scriptorium right there in the Black Citadel. The OP says that there are no charr thinking of technologies outside of warfare, yet there are charr working on just that (helicopters for transportation, electricity for clean power, and so on).

The OP says a lot of things, all of which he’s invented and have absolutely no relevance to the game or the lore. This thread is just trolling. I will insist upon that. I don’t think it’s right that forum moderators sit on their hands and allow this. It’s annoying for charr fans because it’s a spread of misinformation to potential roleplayers.

Basically, everything in the OP is utter nonsense. All of it.

Oh, and to add salt to the wound. According to this guy, the charr farmers and cattle hrders outside the Black Citadel can’t exist, either. Nor can the charr fishermen. Because they were never in a school that taught them these things. Nor are these war-based vocations.

Because the charr don’t have schools, let alone schools where non war-based vocations are taught. Right?

Hopefully you can all see why you should listen to this guy as much as you should listen to one of those crazies you meet on a street corner, yelling about the end of the world. Both have done about the same amount of research.

Their hunched nature is just part of their unique, visual appearance. And it has a lot to do with how their torso is borrowed from a hyena’s.

It depends.

You have to understand that nothing is more important to a charr than their duty to their warband and their legion. The ties they have to their warband are similar to familial ties, and as such, they wouldn’t be able to drag the rest of their warband down like that. So for a charr soldier, a life debt would be unlikely.

However, for a gladium? That’s another matter entirely. If someone saved someone who was already a gladium, or saved someone from falling to the same fate as their warband, then they might feel that they owe this person. They may take a leave of absence in order to pay off this debt and find their way again, to find their worth so that they might one day be ready to join a warband again.

Adding to the above, if a charr legionnaire saves a charr from suffering such a fate, they can file paperwork for a transfer to their warband. This can be considered a ‘life debt’ of a sort due to the bonds of the warband. Joining a warband isn’t a small thing, it’s like joining a family, these are people you’ll spend the rest of your life around. So in that sense a charr might indeed have a life debt, though in this case they wouldn’t think of it as a debt being repaid.

Hopefully that’ll help.

@Llethander.3972

I’m sure that that had the potential to be an incredibly clever joke. Sadly, it falls apart in that you can’t use racial elites in PvP. Sorry about that. :P

Levetty.1279:

Hey let me tell you about this guy called Draco, he wears leather pants.

I’m sure that that’s some incredibly clever pop-culture reference, but sadly I don’t get it.

@DrakeWurrum.6049

Except it wouldn’t be a “human” problem, it would be a “charr ally” problem. All you need to have is a sound mind.

Which seems more sound to you?

Option A: “Well, we’re on the brink of peace. Not having extra people to fight is nice, when we already have enough to fight. Plus, if we save them now, we have more troops to aim against the dragons. And if we do aid them, they’ll trust us, and potentially owe us. This could lead to a more greatly unified front against the dragons. Plus, they’re allies, and we stand by our allies.”

Option B: “Eh. We’ll let the centaurs have at it. They’ll kill the humans or they won’t. Of course, it the centaurs don’t kill the humans, then that’s our ceasefire done with. And their politicians will assuredly get the support they need for the separatists, thus creating a unified human front against us. This will leave us at war with Ebonhawke again. But eh, we can handle it! What did those humans ever do for us, anyway?”

I admit that they might have to stop and think about it for a second, but only a second, because any Imperator in his right mind would obviously choose option A. I file this under sometimes, I just wonder what the heck people are thinking. So of course they’d come to the aid of the humans.

The charr are sensible and pragmatic, they’ve proven this time and time again. They forge alliances where they can. They make peace where they can. They fight mostly because the people they’re fighting with tend to be unreasonable.

Again, they could have bombed Ebonhawke into oblivion, thus creating a unified human front against them. They chose not to.

The reason why the charr haven’t conquered the world is because whilst they could do it, it would cost them more in lives than they’re willing to spend. And military casualties aren’t something the charr are fond of – you want to assure victory, and everyone dying isn’t a victory for anyone. Living to see another day is a victory.

This is what I’ve been trying to explain in this thread – the charr aren’t about conquest, they’re survivors. They’ve become militaristic because of the myriad and powerful forces that are trying to control or kill them. If they hadn’t become militaristic, they would have assuredly and undoubtedly gone extinct a long, long, long time ago.

I’ll definitely agree about the personal storyline stuff.

It started out brilliantly. I loved the charr legions, and whomever was writing for them clearly had the lion’s share of writing talent. I can’t speak for the other races (and I hear some of them are particularly terribad), but the charr beginning is exemplary and really fun. Plus it provides you with a sound idea of what it means to be a charr.

Theeen you head into the Orders, and the game forgets who your character is. This is annoying, but it was at least made tolerable by Tybalt Leftpaw, who also has some pretty great writing.

But then you have the Pact.

Oh gods, the Pact.

That’s an example of some of the outright worst writing I’ve seen in any game, ever. Ever. Ever. Instead of using Destiny’s Edge or something, and personalising the storyline based upon the respective racial hero of Destiny’s Edge, they pull this Trahearne character out of their butts. A character that non-sylvari hadn’t even heard of up to that point. And a total Mary Sue to boot. The biggest, worst kind of Mary Sue possible.

“Call me Tray-tray, I’m going to save the world! Priiince Ruurriiiik!”

I want to murder him in his sleep. I despise Trahearne with a passion. Maybe it’s fine for the tra-la-la-vari but for everyone else? No. Just… no. No on every conceivable level. After discovering just how bad the end is, I just have little desire to play the game past a certain point, as I have nothing to look forward to.

So to sum up: The starting storylines are great, the Orders are pretty good, and the Pact is … can I join the Elder Dragons instead?

Whomever was responsible for that travesty needs to be fired. Because I think that this might top Mass Effect 3 for the worst ending ever (and yes, I am talking about the director’s cut as well, which went all hand-holdy).

http://weirdfolio.tumblr.com/post/32207434268/i-hear-so-many-players-grumble-about-the-design-of

That’s really enlightening. Basically, the charr designed the city around being one of the most strategically difficult to raid. In fact, it’d be hell, due to the various factors involved. Every last variable was taken into account.

It’s definitely worth a read.

@DrakeWurrum.6049

No. With how much I know about the charr at this point, I’m really not.

That’s like saying that the Adamant Guard wouldn’t give a darn about a human who’s being hassled and taunted by a gladium in the Black Citadel. You might think that. But if you hang around the Black Citadel, you’d find that this scenario actually plays out, and what happens?

The gladium gets chewed out for it, big time.

Gladium: “What’s your problem? I was only having a little fun.”
Adamant Guard: “When your fun disrupts my city it becomes my problem!!”

Human: “I never thought a charr would come to the aid of a human.”
Adamant Guard: “That has nothing to do with it, in this city, we all obey the same laws.”

The fact of the matter is that the humans are now allies, and according to the way that the charr military mind works, if your allies are in danger, you protect them. It doesn’t matter what race they are, it doesn’t matter if you like them or not, you’ll still do it.

So no, I’m really not giving them too much credit at all. The charr pretty much operate the same on a micro or macro scale, and the precedent is there. It’s just how they work. It’s not even about giving them ‘credit,’ really. It’s just about understanding how they think and what they would do in that situation.

Can of whoopkitten.

That’s beautiful.

@Avan.1540

Fun things to add to that:

• Whilst their flying machines aren’t too widespread, they did prototype blimps and they’re using those. And anyone who’s familiar with charr aesthetics is going to recognise and appreciate the vast amounts ‘charr’ in those blimp aesthetics. Man, I love those blimps.

• Once the charr have prototyped something enough, it goes into mass production. So eventually that one guy working on helicopters is going to give the charr a vast armada of them.

• There’s a charr in the Imperator’s Core who has some very clever ideas of the widespread applications of electricity to replace other sources of power. (If you consider that they could likely use the plutonium-like properties of oozes to generate electricity, this could happen soon for them.)

• They’re already fiddling with very basic radiowave technology, and that’s likely powered (if crudely) by electricity. They’d need that to remotely detonate their mines.

So basically… they’re on the precipice of all sorts of forms of advancement.

The answer is simple. People on average don’t like it because it’s hard to believe about them unless you really get into their heads, but it’s true. It’s true of the Vigil as well. The answer is: empathy.

Think about it. Let it percolate.

The charr have been jerked around a lot. A lot. They had their homeland stolen, they also had genocide committed against them (by a race that was very genocide-happy at the time), they were enslaved by the mnions of a human god and forced to do his bidding, and eventually they worked past all of this to become strong enough to stand on their own. The charr society is built upon strength, and it’s also built upon understanding.

You don’t go through all of that without becoming sensitive to it.

See, that’s the twist. If you get into the charr psyche, you understand that despite their militaristic nature, they’re only so hard-nosed and militaristic in order to defend their own. They’re not truly a conquering race, but they counter-conquer a lot. This is why homeland security is really important to them, they need to be able to take down any threat that comes their way.

Let me paint you a picture.

The charr had been at war with humanity, but clearly, the charr see this as the fault of outside forces (like their gods), forces which no longer exist. They feel sympathy for the situation of the humans.

• The charr could have destroyed Ebonhawke easily. They could have rolled out a few tanks and just blew it to smithereens. Except, instead, there were already charr talking about a ceasefire and peace. Important charr like Smodur the Unflinching, Imperator of the Iron Legion. And peace couldn’t have happened if they’d blown up Ebonhawke.

• Even before the ceasefire, the charr were willing to let anyone of any race into the Black Citadel and onto charr lands. All they had to do was prove their worth to the charr somehow, then they’d be granted plebian status. Plebian status meant the right to work on charr land, and own a home on charr land, and the right to be treated with respect as a citizen and to be protected by the Adamant Guard.

So the charr treated the humans okay, despite all the humans had done to them, despite all that the human gods had done to them, because the progressive charr didn’t really believe that humans were their enemies, rather, they believed that bad leadership was their enemy. Bad leadership at the hands of the Flame Legion, Adelbern, and the human gods.

If you can prove you’re not a threat to the charr, they’ll leave you alone. If you can prove that you’re useful to the charr, they will go out of their way to defend you, they’d even use their military to keep you alive. They die for their allies. This is their way. It’s base sympathy. They understand that not everyone is strong, but they also have the same understanding as the sylvari, that everything has the right to be.

So the ethos is “Leave us alone, and we’ll leave you alone.”

Why haven’t the charr conquered the world? They don’t conquer, that’s why. They counter-conquer. They only attack if attacked. If you attack them, they will conquer you. But if you prove that you’re harmless, or if you prove your usefulness, then the charr will either leave you alone, or do everything in their power to ensure that you’re protected.

Because of the ceasefire, all charr are now beginning to see humans as useful. So what do you think would happen now if centaurs breached Divinity’s Reach and began killing humans left and right? Do you think the charr would sit back and let it happen? Hell no! They’d be right there, the legions would send as many contingents of soldiers as they could possibly spare, to fight (and even die) alongside their human allies.

Because that’s how the charr are. Ultimately, they just want their chance to be able to live and evolve, and if you don’t threaten that, they’ll protect your right to do the same.

This is the only logical reason to explain why the charr haven’t conquered everything. And it does indeed fit all the lore, and everything we’ve seen about charr attitudes in game. There’s a lot to back this up. Basically, the charr aren’t as warlike or as bestial as people think, they’re just as warlike and as bestial as they have to be to survive.

It’s not about conquering. It’s about survival. And if you’re an ally of the charr, you get to survive too, they’ll make sure of it.

It’s very situational. But it’s also great flavour. See, that’s the thing of it, if you break out a charrzooka then you immediately become fairlykittenunique on the battlefield. There’s just nothing else like it and it’s immensely fun. Obviously, it isn’t overpowered, and it can’t be used in every possible situation, but in my opinion it’s worth having.

Really though, why is this so hard to understand?

The charr say: “Faith is weakness, as gods are false. If any powerful creature ever posed as a god and tried to control us, we’d destroy it for the insult.”

The charr do not say: “We believe in gods, we understand that there are powerful creatures who’re worthy of worship. We accept their existence.”

The former is atheism, the latter is not. The former is what the charr say, the latter is not. How… do people have issues understanding this? It boggles the mind.

Basically, they don’t see gods as being ‘gods,’ they decry that as a fallacy. Instead, they see gods as powerful persons or beings which use their power to try and convince a peoples of their godhood, so that they might control them, and claim worship and offerings. This is what happened to the charr. The charr realised that the very notion of gods was inherently fake.

From the Wikipedia article on Atheism: “Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.”

The charr reject the idea that gods, as others believe in them, can exist. They think that the very notion of an all powerful being to be worshipped is fallacious, they see trickery, and they seem just a powerful person or creature trying to control others. That is the same as atheism.

The Egyptian peoples believed that some of their Pharaohs were gods, they believed this completely. However, an atheist would tell you that the concept of a god is a fallacious thing, and that a Pharaoh was just a powerful person pretending to be a god in order to achieve power. If a person believes in a god, and another doesn’t, it doesn’t make the person who doesn’t believe in a god not an atheist.

The charr believe that the notion of a ‘god’ is a fallacious thing. That a ‘god’ is not a real thing, but a construction created by a powerful person who wishes to control a peoples.

Now let me again cite the definition of atheism: “Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.”

By the very definition of atheism, by denying that a ‘god’ can actually exist, the charr are atheists. Don’t mix up the Flame Legion (who are god-worshipping theists) with the rest of the charr (who’re almost Universally atheist).

TL;DR: So for the last time. No. From someone who’s read every last thing about the charr, who’s played through the three legions multiple times, who’s spent more time with them than is healthy, I can say – no. The charr unequivocally do not believe in gods. There is no doubt about this. They see the word ‘god’ as an irony, an oxymoron. Hence ‘false gods.’ If the charr believed in gods, they’d say they did. But once again, they see powerful creatures trying to trick lesser minds into being controlled, they don’t see gods. They don’t believe in gods. Therefore they are atheist.

@Taritu.6320

That’s true of the Iron Legion, too. It’s only really the Blood Legion that buys into “macho BS,” but that’s due to Blood having the most stringent militaristic structure. If you look at most modern military institutions, especially from recent history, you’ll find a hell of a lot of that “maco BS.”

But yes, Iron and Ash are both varying leagues of progressive (Iron being mostly so), and as such that aforementioned “macho BS” isn’t an aspect of their culture. They’re much more easygoing.

@Aseyhe.2948

Thank you for being so eloquent. It was driving me crazy trying to explain that to people. I can’t get over how many people think that ‘if one person believes powerful person is a god, then everyone in the world automatically becomes theistic’ is actually correct. It baffles me.

Even in our modern day world, if a powerful alien turned up claiming to be a ‘god,’ would all atheists stop being atheists if they didn’t acknowledge this creature as a ‘god?’ Of course they wouldn’t. Atheists would still be atheists. A powerful person claiming to be a god doesn’t stop atheists from being atheists.

Sometimes the things people believe makes my head spin. They really do. The lack of understanding and clear thinking, even just common sense… sometimes it’s like people don’t hear what they’re saying.

Essentially, for those that don’t understand: If one person believes that another person is a god, then that doesn’t stop someone else from functionally being an atheist. The charr, functionally, are atheists. To the letter of what an atheist is. They vocally decry the concept of ‘gods’ as falsehoods, this has been stated in the lore and the game about a billion times by this point, ad nauseum. If you look up atheism, that’s what the charr are, unless we’re being ridiculous.

@Mechos.5640

That doesn’t take away from my point, though. Every norn relies on a spirit and thus uses that as a crutch. How is that a misconception when the game itself says it? Show me a norn that doesn’t have ‘spiritual backup’ to sturdy their resolve and then you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

The fact of the matter is is that it’s like I’ve said, no matter what’s written elsewhere, what you experience in the game is paramount. And what I’ve experienced in the game tells me that the norn use the spirits as a crutch, that they wouldn’t be able to do what they do if all the spirits died out.

Even if the spirits are just allowing the norn to feel confident, it’s still a crutch.

What you’re not understanding here is that my point is is that the charr have no Universal crutch. They’re reliant on each other rather than some outside source to provide them with something, which is all I’m trying to get across to you. We could argue this back and forth, but so long as the norn feel they need the spirits (and they needed them to lead the norn South away from Jormag, as the norn couldn’t do that themselves), even if just for confidence, they still have a Universal crutch.

Again, my point was (just to reiterate), four of the races have the following crutches: The humans have the human gods (which they use to give them resolve), the sylvari has the pale tree (which they feel gives them a centre as a race), the asura rely on magic (as all their pseudoscience uses magic), the norn rely on the spirits (to give them the confidence and will to fight), but the charr? The charr rely upon the charr, they don’t have a Universal crutch.

Yup, a strategic retreat is a sound military tactic. And one you have to use sometimes if you want to save lives. You retreat, quickly regroup, and fight again.

Yeah, their power is static. This is actually an issue with every NPC in the game, though. NPCs don’t scale. Which means that most NPCs in zones are dead, rather than patrolling. And most NPCs in storylines die off quickly.

I brought it up in the suggestions subforum. It’s something they need to look at in general.

@Shooopa.5632

P much, yeah. But he’s basically trying to convince himself that the charr are big, evil beasts. And he’s trying to find different ways to hate on them. He’s been doing that in other threads.

He’s not doing a very good job at undermining the charr. Not at all.

@ptitminou.6489

“They still base everything on honor,”

No, no they don’t. You’re failing to understand, and this failure is particularly and profoundly your own. You’ve shown this same failure in that other charr thread where I replied to you. You have a very, very narrow field of view, and thus your perspective and understanding are limited because of it.

If you play the charr personal storyline, you’ll find out that the word you’re looking for is loyalty, not honour. The charr believe in each other, in their warband, and in their legion. That’s not honour, that’s loyalty. Your notion that the charr all hold honour up as a standard is defeated by the charr idiom of ‘Victory at any cost!’

You’ll never understand the charr, that much is clear. You have a clear need to hate them and pigeon-hole them. That’s fine. But at this point you’ve become transparent in doing so, especially with your reply in that other thread. They’re not human, no. But they’re not mindless beasts, either.

Your mind needs to be less binary. You can have things which are both not human, and not completely feral. There are many layers of subtlety involved. Haven’t you ever read any good fiction which involves non-human races?

Yep. And I like that no one’s been able to come up with a crutch for them. Every other race has a Universal crutch. All that can be said about the charr is that one or two weak charr may use something as a crutch. So, ultimately, there’s no Universal crutch for the charr.

No gods, no spirits, no pale trees, no magic.

That’s pretty much where my love of them comes from, ultimately. They’re that one race without a Universal crutch.

@ptitminou.6489

Honor: That’s utter tripe because you’re using one rare, extreme example (and Almorra is a bit crazy) and super-imposing it on the entirety of the charr, and then running off on a mad tirade from there. You’re basically saying, essentially, that all humans are like Hitler. That’s what you’re saying. Did you stop and read what you were typing? One example does not a race make. The charr see honour as important, but ‘victory at any cost’ is obviously the counter to that. So it’s not a crutch. You basically just invented that because of one extreme example, and that extreme example was a gladium, even.

Personality: Every hard-nosed society will expect you to ‘earn your way.’ What you’ve just said there is that modern day RL society should pay you to sit on your rear, doing nothing. It doesn’t work that way. The ‘prove your worth,’ thing is just the charr take on ‘if you’re going to stick around, make yourself useful.’ They’re basically just expecting you not to be a mooching basement-dweller. And that’s too much for you?

Atheists: You’ll note that most charr don’t believe in maintaining customs. I’ve mentioned many times that it’s mostly a Blood Legion thing, because they’re traditionalists. But even then, charr society is changing all the time. You even have one NPC in the Black Citadel who says that he thinks that the charr are evolving too rapidly. Yep… they’re so static and tradition-loving. And being a traditionalist doesn’t make you religious. That’s as ridiculous a fallacy as saying that if you’ve ever held money, you’ve automatically become a ruthless tycoon. At this point I wonder if you’re straight up trolling.

Run Animation: Someone’s never heard of a ‘leisurely pace.’ We humans do power-walking. Wolves learned to move at a certain stride which allows them to cover large amounts of land without stopping to consume food in-between. They’re just conserving energy. It’s simply a charr take on power-walking.

Let me sum up your arguments…

1. Hitler exists. Therefore, because Hitler exists and is human, every human alive must be exactly the same as Hitler, in every possible way.

2. The charr should offer everyone a free lunch, money, and luxury accommodations without ever having to work. Because you’re lazy and you feel you deserve it.

3. If one can connect something very tenuously to something else, then they must obviously be the same thing! Therefore a deadly nightshade is as worthy of a food as a salad because both of these things are comestible.

4. Power-walking was never invented.

Why am I talking to you again?

@Mechos.5640

The norn rely on the spirits for their power. I’ve played enough of the norn personal storyline to know this. It comes up in every storyline. A norn derives their power from either bear, snow leopard, raven, or wolf. A charr derives their power from him or herself.

You’ll note that I never said that the spirits are gods, that’s a straw-man of your own creation, so I won’t argue with it. What I said is that the norns rely on the spirits for their strength, which they do. It’s extolled at numerous points through the personal storyline. And if a spirit turns them out, they tend to ‘go dragon’ (Jormag) just to keep their power.

In the case of the charr it’s partially because it’s an evolution of segentata. A style of armour that the ancient Romans used. And I don’t know whether you know it or not, but the modern charr take a lot of cues from ancient Rome. That goes some way to explain why a lot of their armour sets are either trenchcoats or have armoured kilts involved.

Eh, they could balance it if they wanted to.

And it would be completely awesome, and thus entirely worth it. I mean, you don’t see any other race player pining for their past characters like you do with charr players. I want Dinky, and Maverick, and Euryale, and Reeva, and so on to turn up when I use that skill.

It’s just so easy to miss them. They’re such outstanding characters. And I’d just have that ability for their one-liners.

No, I whipped it up just now. Hence ‘tell me that’s not how it would go.’ But that’s pretty much their attitude. The charr are very physical creatures, they don’t believe in anything other than that which they can perceive and manipulate with their own two paws. They’re completely pragmatic.

If you asked a charr to believe in some ethereal force that they couldn’t perceive, that wasn’t malleable, or that couldn’t be detected, they wouldn’t do it. If you presented them with a powerful person calling themselves a god, the charr would call flim-flammery. If that so-called ‘god’ tried to force them to worship it, they’d fight it with all their worth, for their freedom and just to prove their point.

That’s the charr for you. They’re the closest fantasy analogue of an atheist I’ve ever seen. A charr believes in a rock because it’s there in front of them, it’s not superior or inferior, it simply is. A charr doesn’t believe in a god because a god is supposedly this ethereal, superior force worthy of worship. The charr response to such invariably tends to be “Uh, no.”

See: Charr attitude towards magic.