No, that's not quite what I meant. I just meant that JJ has a tendency to write all of his stories around mystery, and as a result they're usually never satisfying. I think they had a plan going into this, and the speculation just changed the rate at which they revealed things, or how they revealed things. Honestly, it was a good change. My only slight fear is that I just don't want them to build everything around speculation just because players did a lot of it.
Anywho, as for revealing Mordy from the start, it's not necessary. I don't need to know her grand scheme, just her immediate scheme. I think you could reveal that she wanted to build a drill or create a weapon early on, and set the stakes by killing a character, destroying a town, or some other kind of early impact. They had a good chance to do this during the Jubilee, but their greatest failure was not explaining why she showed up at the jubilee in the first place. She showed up, she created some chaos, but we thwarted her and nothing really happened. There was no fallout from her first attack, and that left no impact. She didn't steal anything, kill anyone, or announce any plans. Worse, we never even found out later why she attacked. It's the story equivalent of someone just running up to you one day, saying hello, and then running away. That's not really dramatic, it's just kind of annoying. Sure, there's a mystery there, "why did that dude just say hello?", but it's not super interesting. Now imagine if that dude had said hello, slapped you, and took your wallet. All of a sudden you've got a reason to track him down. All it would have taken would be for scarlet to escape with some kind of relic or something, and then for the post-investigation to reveal that she's hunting artifacts of huge power. Yes, this is the most basic example and it's certainly not the best example. But it lays out an outline. Plus, you could reveal her back story through extra-exploratory stuff. For those that care. This is actually the direction they started to go in near the end, so that's fine.
To their defense, Anet's already admitted their largest problem, and that's that none of the arcs felt connected. They'd build up a mystery in one arc only for it to be immediately ignored for another mystery. It really frustrated a lot of people, myself included. There was little incentive to pay attention to what was going on in an arc because there was an overall feeling that the next arc wouldn't answer much either. The one thing they haven't overtly mentioned is that foiling scarlet was always meaningless. We'd foil one plan just for her to pop up elsewhere. It felt like we were getting nowhere, and it was clear she was going to gain power anyway. But it wasn't like he plans were all that nefarious, there were no stakes. This is all she did:
- Terrorized the Jubilee for no reason then ran away
- Terrorized various zones in Tyria for no reason then ran away
- Built the Clockheart for no discernible reason, then ran away
- Built the Tower of Nightmares in order to spread spores (yay a reason!) then ran away (technically she didn't even show up to the last two)
- Built the Twisted Marionette to... test something? The drill?
- Invaded Lion's Arch in order to tap into the lay-line that would wake Mordremoth. (Objectively the most compelling chapter, we had stakes, answers, and finality)
