I'm so tired of Zeal being the standard for Dragongarde. I joined in DG, very early on. All I know about Zeal and Sanctum, I have been told/have read. When I first started here, I heard a ton of stories about Zeal (mainly from my townies/allies) and I thought it sounded really cool. They talked about wars and stuff like that, and it sounded like something that was a lot of fun.
I wasn't really very active on the forums for a month or so after I started, and I didn't really have much communication with people outside of Konoha/Valor ingame. We didn't talk to anyone else in that area; they were all either inactive or brutal raiders. Well, once I started looking at the forums more, I started seeing different opinions on Zeal. All of them were written in a reverent tone, but the memories/opinions expressed were rather different from the people I had talked to. For a while, I saw a lot of complaints about how no one built showy towns like they did in Zeal, and opinions/memories that went with those also differed. Then, as of late, there are all these PvP clans/solo PvPers setting Zeal as the standard for DG PvP and other things. Again, all the things said are reverent, but they are so different from what else I've heard. Also, PvP seems to bring out the most differing opinions in the same threads about Zeal. It seems to me that it's the biggest area of disagreement.
By this point, I've basically realized that people only remember what they want to remember, even if it never happened. Memories are naturally exaggerated, be they good or bad. And it seems to me that the memories of Zeal have been exaggerated in so many directions by different people that it would take a real historian months to delve through all of these "memories" and pull out the truth.
I don't bet, but I'd almost be willing to bet that during Zeal, no one who joined then thought it was that special. It lasted for what... 6 months? That's a lot of time, and when you consider DG has also been around for 6 months now, memories change around a lot. I look back even just on the beginning of this map and think of it as being really great. I can remember a lot of fun stuff we did in town, and just enjoying it in general. However, if I reminisce enough, I remember that I didn't like the beginning of the map much at all. The raids were constant and horrible. I died all the time just going outside of town for 5 minute periods. It was very hard to level. At that time, I was enjoying it but I didn't think there was anything that special. I certainly wouldn't have pictured myself reminiscing joyfully on it 6 months in the future. However, I feel like I really miss it.
No matter how much photographic/videographic evidence you have, people's memories will always be drastically different depending on what group they were with. It's likely that the only thing that will come out the same from all of those memories is a sense of awe and wonder. Everything else will be completely different.
Stop using Zeal as the standard for Dragongarde. You will only start arguments, annoy people, and mask any fun you could be having here with glorified memories of the past that make it seem bland. Zeal is six months gone and it is not coming back. Remember it, tell stories about it, relish in memories, but don't keep trying to zombify it. Memories generally work like warped pieces glass; any angle that you look through them from will result in a different image.
Yeah, kingdom wars would be cool. It would be nice if people could visit towns without getting slaughtered (and from another perspective, charge into towns without hitting walls). Maybe roads with less regions would be cool. There is stuff that needs to be changed, and some of that stuff may be similar to what there was in Zeal. But this is Dragongarde, not Zeal.
You would do well to stop using that as a point of comparison even if you still want to. Almost every thread about "making it like it was in Zeal" is locked for very similar reasons to what I just described.
