Guild Wars 2

When I am on Ember Bay, the thermal vent arrows are rotating at a different rate than the map. This means that they NEVER point the way they shoot you, rendering them useless.

If you look there are two vents in a row. You get in one that’s pointing away from where you will go. You travel underground a short distance to the next vent that is pointing the way you will go. That second vent that’s pointing the direction you’ll go is the one you are shot out of.

Indeed. They aren’t even really arrows, but triangular shaped burrows; in one, out the other. You may have noticed that a shorter or longer time elapses between entering the burrow and exiting; that’s the time it takes to travel from one to the other. The arrows on the mini-map indicate the correct destination direction.

Think of them as one tube that has the middle buried underground. The two ends stick out at the vents. The end you are shot out of points towards your destination and the end you enter points away.

Enter here ^ —> exit ^ —> direction of travel.

ArenaNet probably forgot about the option to rotate the minimap. It should be an easy enough fix for them to either rotate the icons or simply “paint” the arrows on the map.

Checked a bunch and they all shoot you off in the direction that the arrow points on the map.

I’m guessing a lot of people, including some at Anet, forgot that there is an option to make the mini-map rotate. I completely forgot about it until I saw this topic. I never use it because my terrible sense of direction is even worse if the map keeps moving.

Have you submitted an in-game bug report? If not I strongly recommend you send one in so they have a record of the problem and can work out how to fix it, because without that they may never even know there’s a problem to be fixed.

It’s not that I can’t tell when I am there, it’s that I can’t tell ahead of time., so short of memorizing ever vent on the island, I cannot pre-plan a route.

Also my map has always rotated. I thought that was just how it always worked. I wasn’t aware there was an option for it to not rotate.

Most of the vents take you clockwise around the island, i.e. westward while in the south. The leylines take you primarily anti-clock, i.e. eastward while in the south.

Since I have bilateral dyslexia (I can’t easily tell left|right or top|down, especially for things that appear identical when flipped or rotated), I can’t rely on maps or landmarks all the time to help guide me. Instead, I try to figure out a route to get from A to B and remember that — then the map doesn’t matter, the icons aren’t important.

So for example, I remember that I can go from spawn to the dwarf heart (and skrilla + karka daily) via the leyline. Obviously, this is more of a headache for me than for most people, since I need to remember about 5-6 common routes and another half dozen uncommon ones just in EB. (I’ve just about learned my way around VB and I’m still working on TD.)

tl;dr there are ways you can tell ahead of time; you just have to figure something out that works for you.

That option is like the minimap equivalent of keyboard turning …

Khisanth.2948:

That option is like the minimap equivalent of keyboard turning …

Which option? Rotating or not rotating?

I cannot stand rotating, myself. I grew up using paper maps and have a solid relational sense of direction when it comes to left/right and n/s/e/w. But I need to know which way I’m facing to relate my position to other things on the map. so the map needs to hold still, darn it.

I don’t mind when a GPS is “first person view” for traveling but when viewing the route over all it had better be showing me north at the top of my screen ><