Speculating spoilers

This post contains spoilers about living world season 4 episode 2.

First of all. Big kuddo’s for those who found the blurred asura city on the world map. Who recognized Lornai and who found the hints about the scarab plague. I bow deeply to you.

But it also means that I feel spoiled. Core elements of this episode where allready in the open and now we can connect the dots, it feels like I was fully spoiled. The only new elements where the further development of aTaime and the charr tribe.

I am not angry at you, but it raises a concern. Is Arenanet giving too many hints? Are we too defensive in pointing out the false theories? How can we have fun speculating without spoiling us cause we speculate too good?

ArenaNet tried the opposite of "not enough hints" and that resulted in the backlash of "wtf why is Lazarus actually Balthazar there was nothing pointing to it!"

In this case, I don't think the three things you pointed out were meant to be subtle. The gray cube was hardly hidden on the map, Lonai looked far too similar to her GW1 self, and Joko going after the Scarab Plague was practically slammed in our face during Daybreak. It would either have had to be those cases, or major red herrings like the end of the raid being a massive red herring about Lazarus actually returning.

@"Konig Des Todes.2086" said:ArenaNet tried the opposite of "not enough hints" and that resulted in the backlash of "kitten why is Lazarus actually Balthazar there was nothing pointing to it!"

In this case, I don't think the three things you pointed out were meant to be subtle. The gray cube was hardly hidden on the map, Lonai looked far too similar to her GW1 self, and Joko going after the Scarab Plague was practically slammed in our face during Daybreak. It would either have had to be those cases, or major red herrings like the end of the raid being a massive red herring about Lazarus actually returning.

I know, that’s why I think it is about a healthy balance. that is why I mentioned the wrong theories. It is a concept that can be best seen at Agatha Christie stories. A lot of possible hints are given, which leads to many more theories. It keeps the hype going and the discussion between stories, but when the story is presented it feels like a line up where the actual facts are presented and it makes sense. This technique uses prejudice. Using the murder case scenario, having a diva, will trigger the people disliking diva behavior to speculate towards the scenario that’s the diva did it.

But as I said in my OP, the knife goes many ways. You are extremely smart and one who pointed towards the real hints in the past cause you understand the storytelling and know the lore extremely well. But you are also someone who is in front row to point out where people are wrong. I am not saying that is bad, but it contributes to the collective deduction of the hints and in fact creates these spoilers.

So yes, arenanet went too far in the amount of hints. They could lay more false trails based on prejudice. But we could also be more cooperative when it comes to lorecrafting and theories, by not pointing them out as wrong before the showdown.But feel free to rub in how we where wrong after the hints are lore. Like now Lornai is out.

There is one thing I miss from season 1 the most: the speculating. I still remember how many theores we had when the thumpers showed up all around Tyria and we found Scarletts lab. Now, everything is too obvious or there are no hints at all and nothing to speculate about. That's ofc only my opinion.

I think an important thing to keep in mind is that ArenaNet is out to write a story that's enjoyable to all of their players, not just the Lore sub-forum. That means that any foreshadowing they want to be picked up on needs to be accessible to the average, probably casual, player, which in turn means that it'll be clear enough that those of us here will quickly pick up on it. Just the nature of the beast- writing it any other way makes it fun for us at the cost of shutting out most of the playerbase. I don't know if you remember, mercury, but there were several, very heated complaints after the Balthazar reveal that Balthazar was too obscure and minor a character to have been given such a prominent role in the story. ANet needs to keep those people in mind too when crafting the major points, like the Scarab Plague.

Lonai, on the other hand, was just a nice nod back to GW1 for the veterans, in the same vein as the Herald being Devona. Knowing her identity doesn't spoil anything, and so it doesn't really matter whether we figured it out last patch or this one.

But your main point is a question of whether we should be trying to figure this stuff out in advance, and that's one that doesn't have a right answer. I observed back on the old forum that there are essentially four kinds of conversation that fall under "Discuss the lore and story of Tyria". There are the folks who want to treat it like a puzzle and figure things out, which is what you're objecting to; there are the folks who want to get excited about all the wild possibilities, which is what you're advocating for; there are people who want to clear up confusion about what's already there by asking and answering questions; and there are those who want to vent their dissatisfaction with the way the story has gone. ANet hasn't declared any of those as the 'proper' way to go about things, and in the absence of that, of course everyone is going to gravitate towards the approach that best fits them.

I particularly have a non-popular preference among GW2 players: I like more straightforward campaigns like Zhaitan. Join your allies, form an army and kill the enemy.

@mercury ranique.2170 said:

@"Konig Des Todes.2086" said:ArenaNet tried the opposite of "not enough hints" and that resulted in the backlash of "kitten why is Lazarus actually Balthazar there was nothing pointing to it!"

In this case, I don't think the three things you pointed out were meant to be subtle. The gray cube was hardly hidden on the map, Lonai looked far too similar to her GW1 self, and Joko going after the Scarab Plague was practically slammed in our face during Daybreak. It would either have had to be those cases, or major red herrings like the end of the raid being a massive red herring about Lazarus actually returning.

I feel like this post highlights your issues more than the OP. The Inquest cube on the map? Clearly visible, and clearly an asuran structure. I did play devil's advocate that it might have been something else, but even I knew that it had to be a lab of some kind. I must have missed the part where people thought it was Lonai at the end of the previous chapter (and I never saw her in-game despite looking for her), but if the clues were there and people figured it out, that's not really spoiling stuff; that's solving the puzzle. However, there were no "hints" to the Scarab Plague. Zaiem beat us over the head with it when we explored Fahranur. Basic laws of storytelling say that you never bring something up without it being important later. This is also known as Chekov's Gun.

However, can you really call something as spoiled if it was revealed in a part of the playable content? The only way that is spoiling is if someone hasn't reached that stage of the story yet, in which case, why are you reading forum threads with spoiler warnings? What I consider spoiling is the datamining, and revealing files that have been added to the .dat file for preloading but aren't accessible by regular means. that_shaman is probably the best known GW2 datamining, and while I don't begrudge him for doing so, I generally try to avoid reading about that, especially if it turns out to be false (which, sadly, it rarely is).

You start complaining about correcting people, and pointing out when they are wrong. Why is this a bad thing? There are a lot of crackpot theories out there, and letting them linger and fester dilutes genuine speculation of what could happen. I personally dislike the intentional spreading of false information, and do my best to correct people about such things (in the nicest way possible, of course). The forums are here so that we fans can get together, speculate on these developments and speculate on the story to the point where we generally do correctly predict the outcome. Although, I do feel that there was an increased number of "it's Balthazar" threads just before Flashpoint, when there was almost no speculation about that during any of the previous 3 chapters. Maybe that's just a weird coincidence, or maybe it was just a theory that was so plausible that people bandwagoned on it.

Pretty sure there was a leak relatively early on that indicated that Balthazar at least played a major role in the next expansion. Once it was revealed that Lazarus possibly wasn't actually Lazarus, the people who'd seen and remembered that leak started connecting the dots.

@Aaron Ansari.1604 said:Lonai, on the other hand, was just a nice nod back to GW1 for the veterans, in the same vein as the Herald being Devona. Knowing her identity doesn't spoil anything, and so it doesn't really matter whether we figured it out last patch or this one.Actually the fact that you guys figured this out made the character a lot more accessible for those among us who (like me) like to read what you guys in this forum are talking about but don't have particularly deep knowledge of the GW lore and universe. I know I had never heard of Lonai prior to reading speculations about her in this forum, and it made me look her up and read her backstory. That way, when I did encounter her in the story, she was in fact more to me than just a random enemy. As such, I personally very much appreciate the minor spoilers contained in the speculations, as they help me flesh out the story with information not readily available in game.