Routinely contested waypoints in PvE

[Hesione.9412]

For example, Concordia Waypoint in Timberline Falls and Angvar's Trove Waypoint in Snowden Drifts, can these be made either uncontested or removed from the game. The purpose of a waypoint is to rapidly move around a map. Having a waypoint that is contested for well over 50% of the time defeats that purpose, so might as well not exist.

[Gajex.2386]

Way, way back in the day, those contested waypoints gave the world a feeling of being alive. The world and its enemies reacted to your attempt at establishing civilization.

Young people nowadays just can't be arsed anymore to do unrewarding, endlessly repeating events in a long abandoned content. No endurance, I tell ya!

...that or you get yelled at by some farm train for doing them if it's in Orr.

 

Okay, but on a more serious note: The Concordia Waypoint was destroyed during ...a certain thing and Angvar's Trove only activates for those who are doing the guild mission there.

 

Edited July 10, 2022 by Gajex.2386
Am too old for grammar.

[mythical.6315]

2 hours ago, Hesione.9412 said:

For example, Concordia Waypoint in Timberline Falls and Angvar's Trove Waypoint in Snowden Drifts, can these be made either uncontested or removed from the game. The purpose of a waypoint is to rapidly move around a map. Having a waypoint that is contested for well over 50% of the time defeats that purpose, so might as well not exist.

If they might as well not exist, why not just ignore them?

[Hesione.9412]

27 minutes ago, Gajex.2386 said:

Way, way back in the day, those contested waypoints gave the world a feeling of being alive. The world and its enemies reacted to your attempt at establishing civilization.

Young people nowadays just can't be arsed anymore to do unrewarding, endlessly repeating events in a long abandoned content. No endurance, I tell ya!

...that or you get yelled at by some farm train for doing them if it's in Orr.

 

Okay, but on a more serious note: The Concordia Waypoint was destroyed during ...a certain thing and Angvar's Trove only activates for those who are doing the guild mission there.

 

It's still contested when that guild mission is active.

[Dante.1508]

1 hour ago, Gajex.2386 said:

Way, way back in the day, those contested waypoints gave the world a feeling of being alive. The world and its enemies reacted to your attempt at establishing civilization.

Young people nowadays just can't be arsed anymore to do unrewarding, endlessly repeating events in a long abandoned content. No endurance, I tell ya!

...that or you get yelled at by some farm train for doing them if it's in Orr.

 

Okay, but on a more serious note: The Concordia Waypoint was destroyed during ...a certain thing and Angvar's Trove only activates for those who are doing the guild mission there.

 

No they didn't they gave the feeling of annoyance.

[Fueki.4753]

Another issue with contested waypoints is, you don't know whether they are contested or not, if you try to teleport to them from another map.

I've experienced being teleported to a different, uncontested waypoint way too often.

[Silent.6137]

There are several waypoints that are very badly placed due to constant events and mob activities close to them.

Prime example are the Brotherhood Waypoint and Speakers Waypoint in Dragon's End. These two are contested 95+% of the time, thus making them virtually unusable and useless. Just moving them a little would have solve the problems.

Edited July 10, 2022 by Silent.6137

[Rasimir.6239]

15 hours ago, Silent.6137 said:

Prime example are the Brotherhood Waypoint and Speakers Waypoint in Dragon's End. These two are contested 95+% of the time, thus making them virtually unusable and useless. Just moving them a little would have solve the problems.

I always assumed these two are contested because the outposts they belong to are destroyed and not used any more. They activate when the meta events reclaim the outposts. Would it be convenient if they were available outside the meta? Sure. But it wouldn't make any sense story-wise.

 

The core Tyria waypoints that are contested all of the time (like the Concordia one) all have lore reasons, too. Most of them (like the two in Timberline Falls) used to be just regular waypoints, but were destroyed during certain events of Living World season 1. You can still see their broken remains on the ground if you go to the place, and technically they still are map exploration points, but they don't work any more. That's "Living World" as it was advertised (and executed) long long ago 😉 .

[Fueki.4753]

49 minutes ago, Rasimir.6239 said:

I always assumed these two are contested because the outposts they belong to are destroyed and not used any more. They activate when the meta events reclaim the outposts. Would it be convenient if they were available outside the meta? Sure. But it wouldn't make any sense story-wise.

 

The core Tyria waypoints that are contested all of the time (like the Concordia one) all have lore reasons, too. Most of them (like the two in Timberline Falls) used to be just regular waypoints, but were destroyed during certain events of Living World season 1. You can still see their broken remains on the ground if you go to the place, and technically they still are map exploration points, but they don't work any more. That's "Living World" as it was advertised (and executed) long long ago 😉 .

Lore-wise Fort Concordia was destroyed by a Mordrem attack in season 2.

But I don't think it'd hurt the lore if any (or even better: all) of the contested points are permanently usable for the sake of gameplay.

And if Arenanet is unwilling to put in such a small bit of QoL, they ought to remove the involuntarily teleporting of players to other points when they come in from other maps, or at the very least add a warning that the waypoint may be contested.

But letting rotten issues like this fester is one of the things they do best.

Edited July 11, 2022 by Fueki.4753

[Galmac.4680]

I wonder why no asura has fixed or removed that broken waypoints.

[Danikat.8537]

29 minutes ago, Galmac.4680 said:

I wonder why no asura has fixed or removed that broken waypoints.

I've been thinking the same thing. They were destroyed as part of the story, but that storyline was about how important the waypoint network is to the asura and what they'd do to protect it, so it seems odd that they just abandoned the broken waypoints and never replaced them or even removed the rubble.

IMO the ideal set-up is that they're locked on the map and show as broken in the world when you're doing the Season 2 storyline but then repaired and available before and after. If that's not possible I think they should just be available to everyone, because they're not directly part of the story, you're never sent to look at them and none of the NPCs commments on them, so it wouldn't be a big loss if you didn't see them destroyed.

[Emberfoot.6847]

1 hour ago, Fueki.4753 said:

Lore-wise Fort Concordia was destroyed by a Mordrem attack in season 2.

But I don't think it'd hurt the lore if any (or even better: all) of the contested points are permanently usable for the sake of gameplay.

And if Arenanet is unwilling to put in such a small bit of QoL, they ought to remove the involuntarily teleporting of players to other points when they come in from other maps, or at the very least add a warning that the waypoint may be contested.

But letting rotten issues like this fester is one of the things they do best.

I don't get why they couldn't just make it a renamed PoI instead of a permanently unusable "waypoint".

[Endaris.1452]

I suppose a different icon for these would be nice.

I think the main issue here is that there are no different map instances for different timelines. Not sure if that is even realistic at all in the future but essentially the progress in the story should present itself in the map instance.

That would allow a scenario where you can access Concordia the way it is now for LS2 but at the same time there could be an instance where it is repaired, let's say once your character progressed its story to PoF or a certain part of LS3. That way the Living World would actually feel alive. Right now, kitten is kind of weird, getting to Fort Salma as a level 25 character and thinking "okay, what is this fort and why is none on this map talking about it". Or dealing with the jungle infestation in Brisban Wildlands way before you even killed Zhaitan.

 

It sure would seem nice for LA at least since it has 3 greatly differing versions and I only got to witness two of them personally...

[Fueki.4753]

25 minutes ago, Emberfoot.6847 said:

I don't get why they couldn't just make it a renamed PoI instead of a permanently unusable "waypoint".

Maybe they were afraid of somehow breaking map completion by removing the waypoint.

[Rasimir.6239]

4 hours ago, Endaris.1452 said:

essentially the progress in the story should present itself in the map instance.

ESO had a system like that when it first released. You would seamlessly move to different map instances depending on your progress in main and area quests. It was great for single players, since the world would totally change around you depending on the quests you experienced, but it was nothing short of awful if you tried to play the game in a party.

 

I vividly remember trying to quest with my husband back in the first year of ESO, and we would regularly end up in the same place but on different map instances and unable to join each other's map because of things we might've done on the character while the other wasn't around. It was a total mess, and ESO removed that tech within a year.

 

Different games have different ways to handle quest progression related world changes. LotRO freezes maps and instances in time, so they always stay the same. ESO uses phasing for certain NPC and environmental effects, similar to how GW2 has done it in more recent years, making things show up/disappear depending on individual quest progress, but this does lead to its share of awkward situations where one person talks to an npc the person right next to them can't hear nor see. Genshin Impact, being mostly a single player game with coop functionality, simply bans you from playing coop if you have specific quests active.

 

In the end it all comes down to the fact that different players live in different "realities" depending on what their characters have experienced in game, but still want to play together at some point or another. To allow this while keeping the process as organic as possible (I don't want to have to manually trigger a map instance change just because the friend I'm playing with hasn't played a certain story step on their character) the game world has to be set up in a "one size fits all" kind of way, which in our case includes broken waypoints.

I'd love it if they would include a side story of an asura crew that sets out to repair all the broken waypoints Scarlett and Mordremoth have left in their wake. This won't "fix" the problem with events contesting waypoints, but it would at least get some of the permanently broken waypoints back into working order (and give us a bit more story in core Tyria 😉 ). while maintaining the integrity of the maps to work for everyone. Maybe they could even move on and fix up Fort Concordia and Fort Salma again.

[Lottie.5370]

The Guild Mission waypoints are always contested outside of the GM instance, but when you are inside the instance you can TP to them.

 

As you can see here.

[costepj.5120]

28 minutes ago, Seccedonien.1824 said:

In every area I loaded in well over half of the waypoints are contested

There are 486 waypoints in core Tyria alone. You reckon more than 300 are permanently contested?

[Funky.4861]

36 minutes ago, Seccedonien.1824 said:

I just quit the game after wanting to try and pick it up again after many, many years away. In every area I loaded in well over half of the waypoints are contested and no real player in sight... Guess I will delete the game again and see in 5 years if there is a reason to give the game a try again.

Every area? That's absolute tosh and you know it. If that's all it takes for you to abandon gw2, maybe you should not come back.

[Blude.6812]

10 hours ago, Funky.4861 said:

Every area? That's absolute tosh and you know it. If that's all it takes for you to abandon gw2, maybe you should not come back.

Regardless of who is more accurate about how many WPs are contested or not, I have always thought contested WPs of any kind were just a bad idea from day 1.

[draxynnic.3719]

On 7/11/2022 at 7:24 PM, Danikat.8537 said:

I've been thinking the same thing. They were destroyed as part of the story, but that storyline was about how important the waypoint network is to the asura and what they'd do to protect it, so it seems odd that they just abandoned the broken waypoints and never replaced them or even removed the rubble.

IMO the ideal set-up is that they're locked on the map and show as broken in the world when you're doing the Season 2 storyline but then repaired and available before and after. If that's not possible I think they should just be available to everyone, because they're not directly part of the story, you're never sent to look at them and none of the NPCs commments on them, so it wouldn't be a big loss if you didn't see them destroyed.

This. They've now been destroyed for longer than they were available. Rebuild them, and make them a story thing. Or just, you know, rebuild them. It was cute at the time, but people playing Season 2 nowadays probably aren't realising 'oh, hey, this is why that waypoint is broken' since they're able to blow through the season rather than doing it piece by piece and seeing map changes as they happen like we did. Heck, in Concordia's case, they could just rebuild that and make it so that Timberline is always in the launch state outside of the instance. Fort Salma is a bit more difficult since you return to it, but there might be ways around that too. 

[Fueki.4753]

7 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

This. They've now been destroyed for longer than they were available. Rebuild them, and make them a story thing. Or just, you know, rebuild them. It was cute at the time, but people playing Season 2 nowadays probably aren't realising 'oh, hey, this is why that waypoint is broken' since they're able to blow through the season rather than doing it piece by piece and seeing map changes as they happen like we did. Heck, in Concordia's case, they could just rebuild that and make it so that Timberline is always in the launch state outside of the instance. Fort Salma is a bit more difficult since you return to it, but there might be ways around that too. 

If they can send us to GW2's first Lion's Arch for some story missions, there's no reason they couldn't do similar for Fort Salma or any other temporarily destroyed place.

They probably just don't want to make changes to those places.

Edited October 20, 2022 by Fueki.4753

[Nazarick.9653]

Zintl Holy Grounds (Sparkfly Fen) is another one that's always contested...when will Anet accept that no-one does old events anymore? So whenever that one comes around in the pact supply rotation, I have to pick the one NE of it instead. (which is actually nearer than the one far west of it that you get booted to)

[kharmin.7683]

Are contested WP really an issue now with mounts?

[Fan Didly Tastic.7169]

46 minutes ago, kharmin.7683 said:

Are contested WP really an issue now with mounts?

Inclined to agree with this. Any time a WP won't get you somewhere is a moment to practice with your mounts. Mounts trivialize travel with good use. A well versed griffon or roller beetle driver can cross the average map in under a minute.

[costepj.5120]

I almost never use waypoints. There's a few events like awakened invasions or Ley-line anomaly where a few seconds can make the difference between success and failure; getting credit or not. The rest of the time I'd rather take the scenic route and see what other events, resource nodes etc I encounter along the way.