What's GW2's biggest lore mistake according to you?

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

8 hours ago, Azakael.3019 said:

Easy one for me.

The Mordrem commanders being named, but faceless.

They should have been characters we interacted with during the personal story, during LS1, during LS2. That would have made their existence as Mordrem commanders much more impactful. 

Imagine if they were Carys, Laranthir, and Malyck...

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

The Joon's Estate story step was a big mistake, but that is just poor character development.

Lore though? How easy Zhaitan was to kill in the end. That should have been so much harder than it was.

[draxynnic.3719]

Most of this discussion seems to be focused on narrative choices, but in terms of lore mistakes, there's one that stands out as the biggest wallbanger of them all. It's small, largely forgotten, and probably retconned now due to realising how stupid it was, but it showed such a colossal lack of understanding of proper world-building that I think it beats everything else:

"Hey, the asura discovered that the calendar that humans have been using for over a thousand years was five days shorter than it should be!" Because apparently nobody noticed as the seasons processed around the year and back to their starting positions every seventy-two years.

That anyone thought we'd buy that explanation was insulting on a deep level. There have been enough cataclysms that they could have said that one of them influenced Tyria's day length and/or annual cycle, but nope, they tried to go with 'nobody noticed that the calendar was five days short until an asura research krewe pointed it out'.

 

Honourable mention goes to:

Krait: Release lore established that they believed that they were invincible and held all other races, especially land-dwellers, in contempt.

Nightmare Court: An important event in the founding story is Cadeyrne wanting to wipe out a bunch of krait hatchlings to prevent them from becoming a threat, and being told that was against Ventari's tenets. Part of the point of the Nightmare Court was the belief that the sylvari should be more ruthless towards their enemies, especially universally hostile races like the krait.

Thanks to Scarlet, they formed an alliance!

There were people in the lore community that quit over that one.

[Eekasqueak.7850]

Feel like most stuff around scarlet was really poorly explained 

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

3 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Most of this discussion seems to be focused on narrative choices, but in terms of lore mistakes, there's one that stands out as the biggest wallbanger of them all. It's small, largely forgotten, and probably retconned now due to realising how stupid it was, but it showed such a colossal lack of understanding of proper world-building that I think it beats everything else:

"Hey, the asura discovered that the calendar that humans have been using for over a thousand years was five days shorter than it should be!" Because apparently nobody noticed as the seasons processed around the year and back to their starting positions every seventy-two years.

That anyone thought we'd buy that explanation was insulting on a deep level. There have been enough cataclysms that they could have said that one of them influenced Tyria's day length and/or annual cycle, but nope, they tried to go with 'nobody noticed that the calendar was five days short until an asura research krewe pointed it out'.

Heh. Oh yes, that remains in the top 5 of my list of weirdest, arguably dumbest, choices that ArenaNet has done over the years.

I like to believe that it got retconned out since ArenaNet never brought it up again beyond someone asking Angel McCoy for further clarification after she left the company. Since it's pretty much ignored, I don't consider it the worst, personally. But yeah that and the Toxic Alliance were big things that made a lot of the lore community folks of 2013 quit the game. A lot more quit over that than Balthazar or Aurene, so I guess it would be the worst choice... Or maybe those that stuck around just had lost hope for great worldbuilding that the worst options later didn't feel bad enough to leave over - 'stuck with it this long, might as well say with it'.

I know that bit was my opinion for until EoD came out, which I then only bought because I wanted to see a conclusion to the Elder Dragon plot, however much I was disappointed in it.

[Witch of Steam.5138]

Scarlet 

hands down and without a single doubt scarlet. 

You can't just " Magically" Unite all the most Xenophobic Groups on tyria With some slick words. 

It doesn't Happen. 

The Asura colleges Purposefully DO NOT LET NON-ASURA IN , and completely stopped after scarlett. 

Like. 

The fact she was ever taken seriously at all Is a Massive Kick to the groin of the Lore. 

[Sajuuk Khar.1509]

5 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Most of this discussion seems to be focused on narrative choices, but in terms of lore mistakes, there's one that stands out as the biggest wallbanger of them all. It's small, largely forgotten, and probably retconned now due to realising how stupid it was, but it showed such a colossal lack of understanding of proper world-building that I think it beats everything else:

"Hey, the asura discovered that the calendar that humans have been using for over a thousand years was five days shorter than it should be!" Because apparently nobody noticed as the seasons processed around the year and back to their starting positions every seventy-two years.

That anyone thought we'd buy that explanation was insulting on a deep level. There have been enough cataclysms that they could have said that one of them influenced Tyria's day length and/or annual cycle, but nope, they tried to go with 'nobody noticed that the calendar was five days short until an asura research krewe pointed it out'.

I'm going to have to stop you right here because this literally happened in real life.

Cultures as far back as early Egypt, to other societies spanning from China to Rome, at one point used lunar calendars. The issue with this is that lunar calendars had around 29 days in a month, and only 354 days in a year, which, over the course of years, led to the calendars becoming increasingly off from the seasons and such, due to the 11 day absence from the modern one. This meant that every 9 years or so everything would be off by 3 months, and it would take about 36 years for everything to realign. These cultures tried various methods like adding extra months every few years to try to keep it aligned with various levels of success.

Rome's calendar was so off that, by the time Julius Caesar took power, that there was a 3 month difference, despite various attempts to tweak it by adding days and months to the year. In fact, in an attempt to correct this error, Caesar introduced a 445 day long "year of confusion" to try to realign the calendar, while also adopting elements of the Egyptian calendar(which was a 365 day one by that point), and introducing leap year days, to try to correct it.

And even THAT didn't actually solve the issue, so from the time Caesar introduced it, and the 16th century, the calendar was again off by about 10 days. Which is why some places celebrate Christmas in January. It wasn't until 1582 that the modern Gregorian calendar came into existence. It too used time warp tactics by cutting off 10 days from October that year, and changing the leap year rules, to try to fix everything again.

That's why ancient people didn't tend to use the calendar for things. They planted crops based on when stars were at certain points in the sky and whatever, because calendars weren't accurate, and everyone knew it.

It took an incredibly long time for humans to be an accurate calendar that didn't keep getting more and more off key every year because humans didn't understand concepts like leap years, or that lunar cycles do not match up with earth years.

And even our modern calendar isn't actually accurate. Though the inaccuracy is so small it will take like 3,000+ years for it to show itself.

Edited August 19, 2022 by Sajuuk Khar.1509

[draxynnic.3719]

10 hours ago, Sajuuk Khar.1509 said:

I'm going to have to stop you right here because this literally happened in real life.

Cultures as far back as early Egypt, to other societies spanning from China to Rome, at one point used lunar calendars. The issue with this is that lunar calendars had around 29 days in a month, and only 354 days in a year, which, over the course of years, led to the calendars becoming increasingly off from the seasons and such, due to the 11 day absence from the modern one. This meant that every 9 years or so everything would be off by 3 months, and it would take about 36 years for everything to realign. These cultures tried various methods like adding extra months every few years to try to keep it aligned with various levels of success.

Rome's calendar was so off that, by the time Julius Caesar took power, that there was a 3 month difference, despite various attempts to tweak it by adding days and months to the year. In fact, in an attempt to correct this error, Caesar introduced a 445 day long "year of confusion" to try to realign the calendar, while also adopting elements of the Egyptian calendar(which was a 365 day one by that point), and introducing leap year days, to try to correct it.

And even THAT didn't actually solve the issue, so from the time Caesar introduced it, and the 16th century, the calendar was again off by about 10 days. Which is why some places celebrate Christmas in January. It wasn't until 1582 that the modern Gregorian calendar came into existence. It too used time warp tactics by cutting off 10 days from October that year, and changing the leap year rules, to try to fix everything again.

That's why ancient people didn't tend to use the calendar for things. They planted crops based on when stars were at certain points in the sky and whatever, because calendars weren't accurate, and everyone knew it.

It took an incredibly long time for humans to be an accurate calendar that didn't keep getting more and more off key every year because humans didn't understand concepts like leap years, or that lunar cycles do not match up with earth years.

And even our modern calendar isn't actually accurate. Though the inaccuracy is so small it will take like 3,000+ years for it to show itself.

You think you've proven me wrong, but you've actually just proved my point: People noticed that the calendars were wrong, and made adjustments until they worked. Roman calendars were refined a lot from their original introduction until the Julian calendar which worked well enough that it took centuries for there to be a noticeable drift. The Julian calendar was only off, compared to the Gregorian calendar, by 0.0075 days, but that was enough to make for a noticeable difference over a millennium and a half.

The various historical calendar revisions just prove that people are going to notice inaccuracies of the year length of much less than five days over the course of 1300+ years. As shown by history, thirteen centuries is enough to notice an inaccuracy of less than one percent of a day, let alone five whole days.

We had this discussion back when the announcement was made, it was exactly these historical examples that I used to demonstrate how stupid it was!

Edited August 20, 2022 by draxynnic.3719

[The Greyhawk.9107]

1 hour ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

You think you've proven me wrong, but you've actually just proved my point: People noticed that the calendars were wrong, and made adjustments until they worked. Roman calendars were refined a lot from their original introduction until the Julian calendar which worked well enough that it took centuries for there to be a noticeable drift. The Julian calendar was only off, compared to the Gregorian calendar, by 0.0075 days, but that was enough to make for a noticeable difference over a millennium and a half.

The various historical calendar revisions just prove that people are going to notice inaccuracies of the year length of much less than five days over the course of 1300+ years. As shown by history, thirteen centuries is enough to notice an inaccuracy of less than one percent of a day, let alone five whole days.

We had this discussion back when the announcement was made, it was exactly these historical examples that I used to demonstrate how stupid it was!

Plus, at least the way I see it, the GW1 time period alone should be roughly analogous to when the Gregorian calendar was implemented and the existence of magic may give Thyrian humans a significant edge over the IRL ones even if we're off by a couple of centuries in the comparison.

Regarding the severe incongruity of the Toxic Alliance: did some people actually quit the game over that? Looking back it seems I wasn't active during that specific time period on the original forum so its something I missed, and yeah the Krait and even a faction of the Court working together has always been a severe break in the previously established lore but to quit over it seems a bit extreme.

Edited August 20, 2022 by The Greyhawk.9107

[draxynnic.3719]

57 minutes ago, The Greyhawk.9107 said:

Plus, at least the way I see it, the GW1 time period alone should be roughly analogous to when the Gregorian calendar was implemented and the existence of magic may give Thyrian humans a significant edge over the IRL ones even if we're off by a couple of centuries in the comparison.

Regarding the severe incongruity of the Toxic Alliance: did some people actually quit the game over that? Looking back it seems I wasn't active during that specific time period on the original forum so its something I missed, and yeah the Krait and even a faction of the Court working together has always been a severe break in the previously established lore but to quit over it seems a bit extreme.

I can think of at least one by name. Quit the lore community, continued playing for a few months afterwards but stopped logging in altogether within a year or so. There were a few others that also disappeared around that time.

We have complaints about the story now, but the Scarlet era, especially around the middle of the season, was terrible. It was a bit of a "straw that broke the camel's back" scenario, except it was more of a few kilos of proverbial bricks than just one straw.

Edited August 20, 2022 by draxynnic.3719

[The Greyhawk.9107]

29 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

I can think of at least one by name. Quit the lore community, continued playing for a few months afterwards but stopped logging in altogether within a year or so. There were a few others that also disappeared around that time.

We have complaints about the story now, but the Scarlet era, especially around the middle of the season, was terrible. It was a bit of a "straw that broke the camel's back" scenario, except it was more of a few kilos of proverbial bricks than just one straw.

It was the "Visual Nerf" that almost immediately followed HoT's release that almost did it for me.

[Sajuuk Khar.1509]

4 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

You think you've proven me wrong, but you've actually just proved my point: People noticed that the calendars were wrong, and made adjustments until they worked. Roman calendars were refined a lot from their original introduction until the Julian calendar which worked well enough that it took centuries for there to be a noticeable drift. The Julian calendar was only off, compared to the Gregorian calendar, by 0.0075 days, but that was enough to make for a noticeable difference over a millennium and a half.

The various historical calendar revisions just prove that people are going to notice inaccuracies of the year length of much less than five days over the course of 1300+ years. As shown by history, thirteen centuries is enough to notice an inaccuracy of less than one percent of a day, let alone five whole days.

We had this discussion back when the announcement was made, it was exactly these historical examples that I used to demonstrate how stupid it was!

Ignoring that people spent literally hundreds, thousands, of years, with the same basic calendar system with half assed attempts to "adjust" that didn't work, and led to them being constantly off until a working one was discovered MUCH MUCH later. You can't just ignore the first several thousands of years of human history, and just cherry pick the timeframe from right before the introduction of a more modern clanedar, to the current day.

And these historical examples prove how real it is. If we can go so long with broken calendars, and utter failures of attempts to correct them, why would Tyrians not as well?

Edited August 20, 2022 by Sajuuk Khar.1509

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

2 hours ago, The Greyhawk.9107 said:

Regarding the severe incongruity of the Toxic Alliance: did some people actually quit the game over that? Looking back it seems I wasn't active during that specific time period on the original forum so its something I missed, and yeah the Krait and even a faction of the Court working together has always been a severe break in the previously established lore but to quit over it seems a bit extreme.

Oh yeah, there were three notable "exoduses" from the lore communities - Tower of Nightmares, Point of No Return, and Path of Fire. Had a guild for lore enthusiasts that pretty much died with Point of No Return and the sylvari reveal BS, and the few who remained besides me pretty much left around Path of Fire. Been using it as a personal guild bank since.

Those that remain are those who either weren't dedicated to the lore enough when they got to those points in the story, or just have a very high tolerance to bad writing / narrative consistency to overlook the worst bits and enjoy the best parts.

[The Greyhawk.9107]

18 minutes ago, Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

Oh yeah, there were three notable "exoduses" from the lore communities - Tower of Nightmares, Point of No Return, and Path of Fire. Had a guild for lore enthusiasts that pretty much died with Point of No Return and the sylvari reveal BS, and the few who remained besides me pretty much left around Path of Fire. Been using it as a personal guild bank since.

Those that remain are those who either weren't dedicated to the lore enough when they got to those points in the story, or just have a very high tolerance to bad writing / narrative consistency to overlook the worst bits and enjoy the best parts.

Point Of No Return could do it, I think.  Still have to compartmentalize that bit of kittenery.

[draxynnic.3719]

55 minutes ago, Sajuuk Khar.1509 said:

Ignoring that people spent literally hundreds, thousands, of years, with the same basic calendar system with half assed attempts to "adjust" that didn't work, and led to them being constantly off until a working one was discovered MUCH MUCH later. You can't just ignore the first several thousands of years of human history, and just cherry pick the timeframe from right before the introduction of a more modern clanedar, to the current day.

And these historical examples prove how real it is. If we can go so long with broken calendars, and utter failures of attempts to correct them, why would Tyrians not as well?

Actually, it's the Roman/Greek example that's cherrypicking, and that's due to setting new record-keeping systems up after the Bronze Age Collapse. Most calendars from civilisations that had had stable record-keeping for more than a few centuries either settled on 365 days, or had a calendar system that accepted that some years would need to have more than twelve months. The pre-Julian Roman calendar was of the 'leap month' type, and therefore while there was a bit of "season wandering", it was corrected for by the leap month so they never got too far out. The Julian reform was an improvement that kept the seasons in place (with an error of less than a day per century) and removed the need for extra months, but it's not like the Romans just didn't notice the calendar was inaccurate before. Generally speaking, the calendars that are just wrong without any sort of correction (or the acceptance that months aren't going to line up with seasons in the first place) only come up with cultures that have only (re)discovered writing and therefore record-keeping within a few generations, and then the calendars are refined to something functional reasonably quickly.

Judge the effectiveness of the corrections used with pre-Julian calendars all you like, you can't claim that people just didn't notice when they were off by several days. With the Mouvelian calendar in use for at least thirteen centuries (and probably longer), I could believe that they might miss leap days, but not five entire days every year. Particularly since it's explicitly a season-based calendar and not a calendar that uses lunar cycles at all, so it's not going to run into the issues that arise from the solar cycle not being an integer number of lunar cycles (the Canthan calendar uses months, but the months are used to subdivide the seasons and are out of synchronisation with the lunar cycle). Given that the calendar is based on seasons and not on lunar months, I'm pretty sure people would notice something wrong if the Season of the Phoenix was becoming the cold season. 

[HotDelirium.7984]

Rushing the last dragon Soo-Won out to usher in hurrying up and ending the dragon cycle plot line. She's interesting but doesn't really feel like the originator of Tyria, maybe of Elder Dragons but the entire world? What about all the races besides human? 

[HotDelirium.7984]

21 hours ago, Eekasqueak.7850 said:

Feel like most stuff around scarlet was really poorly explained 

I hear conflicting opinions about how Scarlet's mind was fractured and part of her was doing things to unknowingly serve Mord and the other to save Tyria for whatever reason.

[The Greyhawk.9107]

6 minutes ago, HotDelirium.7984 said:

Rushing the last dragon Soo-Won out to usher in hurrying up and ending the dragon cycle plot line. She's interesting but doesn't really feel like the originator of Tyria, maybe of Elder Dragons but the entire world? What about all the races besides human? 

I don't think Soo-Won was the originator of Tyria, not in the sense you seem to be implying.  Its my understanding that Tyria already existed but was nearly uninhabitable do to the Void Magic and Soo-Won, later with the help of the other elder dragons, kept the Void in check allowing Tyria to develop life on its own.

At least that's how its been explained to me.

[HotDelirium.7984]

7 minutes ago, The Greyhawk.9107 said:

I don't think Soo-Won was the originator of Tyria, not in the sense you seem to be implying.  Its my understanding that Tyria already existed but was nearly uninhabitable do to the Void Magic and Soo-Won, later with the help of the other elder dragons, kept the Void in check allowing Tyria to develop life on its own.

At least that's how its been explained to me.

From what gathered from the wiki and the dialogue it does make it seem like she created this world but its hard to tell if she actually created the planet itself. Maybe it's implied. Maybe a plot hole.

[draxynnic.3719]

10 minutes ago, HotDelirium.7984 said:

I hear conflicting opinions about how Scarlet's mind was fractured and part of her was doing things to unknowingly serve Mord and the other to save Tyria for whatever reason.

Less fractured and more that Mordremoth's modus operandi when controlling sylvari is to insert his thoughts into theirs until they can no longer distinguish his from their own.

I don't think Scarlet ever had heroic motivations. Instead, I think her motivation was that she wanted to get Mordremoth out of her head, so she was going to kill Mordremoth whoever she had to hurt to achieve that... and the "Tyria needs me" angle she had was because she thought she was doing the world a favour by doing so. The primary motivation was still "get the dragon out of my head" though.

The problem is that because she wasn't (always) able to distinguish between her thoughts and Mordremoth's, Mordremoth was able to steer her plans in directions that benefited him. I suspect that part of her planning was "I need to wake him up before I can kill him", which is... not entirely wrong, since we have no cases of a dragon being killed while hibernating and Braham's response when Jormag was sent into hibernation in Season 3 indicates that doing so is a even harder than killing an active dragon. However, it seems likely that Mordremoth has manipulated her plans in order to cause maximum damage to his enemies, empower him more than absolutely needed to wake him up, and make Scarlet a pariah from the perspective of the forces that would most likely be opposing him, possibly including setting things up to make it highly likely that Scarlet would die shortly after awakening him.

[HotDelirium.7984]

22 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Less fractured and more that Mordremoth's modus operandi when controlling sylvari is to insert his thoughts into theirs until they can no longer distinguish his from their own.

I don't think Scarlet ever had heroic motivations. Instead, I think her motivation was that she wanted to get Mordremoth out of her head, so she was going to kill Mordremoth whoever she had to hurt to achieve that... and the "Tyria needs me" angle she had was because she thought she was doing the world a favour by doing so. The primary motivation was still "get the dragon out of my head" though.

The problem is that because she wasn't (always) able to distinguish between her thoughts and Mordremoth's, Mordremoth was able to steer her plans in directions that benefited him. I suspect that part of her planning was "I need to wake him up before I can kill him", which is... not entirely wrong, since we have no cases of a dragon being killed while hibernating and Braham's response when Jormag was sent into hibernation in Season 3 indicates that doing so is a even harder than killing an active dragon. However, it seems likely that Mordremoth has manipulated her plans in order to cause maximum damage to his enemies, empower him more than absolutely needed to wake him up, and make Scarlet a pariah from the perspective of the forces that would most likely be opposing him, possibly including setting things up to make it highly likely that Scarlet would die shortly after awakening him.

Maybe the upcoming episodes 4 and 5 will flesh this out a bit more concisely. 

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

1 hour ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

With the Mouvelian calendar in use for at least thirteen centuries (and probably longer), I could believe that they might miss leap days, but not five entire days every year. Particularly since it's explicitly a season-based calendar and not a calendar that uses lunar cycles at all, so it's not going to run into the issues that arise from the solar cycle not being an integer number of lunar cycles (the Canthan calendar uses months, but the months are used to subdivide the seasons and are out of synchronisation with the lunar cycle). Given that the calendar is based on seasons and not on lunar months, I'm pretty sure people would notice something wrong if the Season of the Phoenix was becoming the cold season. 

Two minor corrections with this. It's unknown when the Mouvelian Calendar came into practical use. Despite this, the issue remains because do we know it's been several centuries before GW1 due to archeological sites, and even then merely the 250 year gap between GW1 and GW2 would have the season shift full coarse around the calendar thrice over. People will know what's up and alter the calendar accordingly the moment that the middle of summer has over a dozen days of snow, and that'll happen in just 30-some years if the calendar was off by five full days.

Second correction: Canthans do use a lunar calendar. Or more specifically, they created their calendar as a lunar-seasonal, but left it as pure seasonal. When the Canthan Calendar began, the months lined up with the lunar cycle, but over time it diverged - by GW1's time, the new moon was in the middle of the month instead of the beginning/end. This is all mentioned in the Factions manual and is on the wiki.

This bit actually furthers how silly the "discovered 5 days" bit was, because there's lore documentation showing that Canthans had seen their calendar being drifting off of what their initial placement as the centuries past, but never had the need to add on days. And given that the Canthan months all predate the empire's founding but two names (Kainengtah and Changhai), that means that they've been record keeping the calendar's alignment to the seasons for over 1590 years without change beyond two months' names.

So even if the Mouvelian calendar was established in, say, 700 AE (which is near the latest it could be), the seasonal lengths have been documented for over 1200 years prior to then, without denoted change, in Cantha.

 

And what's worse, is the claim that asura - who had surfaced for only ~200 years - would be able to figure out what humans had been studying for 1500 years is a bit silly, even if asura are supposedly geniuses.

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

47 minutes ago, HotDelirium.7984 said:

I hear conflicting opinions about how Scarlet's mind was fractured and part of her was doing things to unknowingly serve Mord and the other to save Tyria for whatever reason.

The whole notion of Scarlet having "heroic motivations" to save Tyria, back in 2013, pretty much solely came from this one item's description. Which the idea of it being truth never really lined up because Scarlet's canonically sociopathic and has a very warped point of view long before Mordremoth got into her head.

 

End of Dragons re-solidifies that fan theory as possibly canon with Mai Trin's statements of Scarlet's "big plans", but it also kind of comes off as more unreliable narrator and Mai Trin just fan girling Taimi-style, and to me came off as more of what drax said - just Scarlet planning to confront Mordremoth.

[Gibson.4036]

On 8/12/2022 at 6:24 PM, Malus.2184 said:

-_- Real Druids were Celtic priests who, amongst other things, handled the blood sacrifices.

What you see as "real Druids" are the D&D fantasy Druids.

And neo-pagan fantasy druids.

[Eekasqueak.7850]

3 hours ago, HotDelirium.7984 said:

I hear conflicting opinions about how Scarlet's mind was fractured and part of her was doing things to unknowingly serve Mord and the other to save Tyria for whatever reason.

Idk everything I hear about her just makes it feel like they had to stretch hard to make her this overarching mastermind without really caring how they got there?