Long story short, I joined the Vigil, make no mistake. Even my journal states that I joined the Vigil and that Ghan has Vigil orders waiting for me in Lion’s Arch. Yet now my objective is to meet with a Whispers contact! How did my story get derailed like this?
Please, is there anything and Anet member can do to fix this? I haven’t progressed any further because my story is supposed to be with the Vigil, not Whispers.
What’s the quest name of your story? Even if you join one order, you sometimes have to meet with other orders. They all show up again eventually anyway.
I get what you’re saying, bluestocking, but no, this isn’t just me meeting up with another order. It’s treating me like a Whispers initiate entirely, as if I actually chose to be a permanent member of the Order of Whispers.
Here, check out these screen caps. They show how I clearly joined the Vigil, and that there would be a contact waiting in Lion’s Arch, only now I’ve got a Whispers agent contacting me. What gives? And can Anet do anything to correct the issue? Like I said, I haven’t progressed any further in case they can do something about this.
It wouldn’t be the end of the world if nothing can be done, but any help would be greatly appreciated!
Okay, so I just went to the Vigil Headquarters and spoke with the armorsmith. Oddly enough, I’m still considered Vigil because I can buy all the Vigil equipment.
Did you do a Personal Story instance with another player who started the instance? Did you accept the progress while in that instance with the other player? If so, the Personal Story will change your Story track so that you can continue to play with the other player and follow his/her storyline. At the next branch, if you do not accept another person’s storyline, you will be placed back onto your original storyline.
There is nothing that can be done to get you back on track until that next branch comes up.
Did you do a Personal Story instance with another player who started the instance? Did you accept the progress while in that instance with the other player? If so, the Personal Story will change your Story track so that you can continue to play with the other player and follow his/her storyline. At the next branch, if you do not accept another person’s storyline, you will be placed back onto your original storyline.
There is nothing that can be done to get you back on track until that next branch comes up.
Good luck.
You know, I did, actually. Truth be told, I suspected as much, but it still just seems so odd that the game would do that and totally flub part of your story.
Note that the dialog that comes up when you ACCEPT the progress is pretty detailed about the consequences of ACCEPTING (that doing so can ALTER your past choices in the personal story), but per human nature, players do not reads the message and just clicks the ACCEPT button. It’s happened to me before.
We go out in the world and take our chances
Fate is just the weight of circumstances
That’s the way that lady luck dances
Correct, it’s not a bug or an account issue. If you’re playing co-op, at the end of the story step, if the other player is the “owner” of the story instance, it will ask if you want to accept progress and any decisions made by the other player. This is to allow the players to keep playing together, even if they would normally go off on different branches. Note that it hasn’t changed your Order, it’s only changed the storyline you’re currently on.
Which means you just need to find someone who is still in the Vigil storyline to do the next story part with you as the leader of the instance and you should be able to switch back to the Vigil storyline.
If my Vigil character was still in the Vigil storyline, I would offer to help, but unfortunately, I’ve moved onto the Pact storyline.
Not quite… Since a player on the Vigil storyline won’t be on the same story step, so it won’t ask you to accept the progress. Also, if you’re the person who started the instance, it will always use your Order/choices for the next step. Things will return to normal next chapter, as long as you don’t complete the end of chapter story step with someone in another Order and accept their progress, since that will (once again) put you on their storyline.
Not quite… Since a player on the Vigil storyline won’t be on the same story step, so it won’t ask you to accept the progress. Also, if you’re the person who started the instance, it will always use your Order/choices for the next step. Things will return to normal next chapter, as long as you don’t complete the end of chapter story step with someone in another Order and accept their progress, since that will (once again) put you on their storyline.
So how did she end up on the Whisper’s storyline then if that doesn’t happen? Couldn’t she just do the same thing she did here to get back onto her story? Hop into the next story step with a Vigil player. Recreate the glitch in order to get the story back onto the Order she wants. So basically just the next couple of missions.
Or are you saying that if she just does the next few steps by herself, the game will correct itself? If so, then maybe a conditional mail needs to be sent out if the game notices the player’s mission does not correlate to their actual Order. “Hey, we noticed you’ve got a Whisper’s mission but you’re a Vigil. Don’t worry, you’re still Vigil. Just make sure you complete this set of missions by yourself as the game will automatically switch you back to the Vigil storyline at the end of this mission provided you don’t accept someone else’s progress.”
Both players have to be on the same story step for it to even offer the option of accepting progress at the end. You’re not going to find another Vigil player on the OOW story step—and if you did, it would default to the next OOW story step in that storyline since that’s the default storyline once you’re on the OOW chain. I’m saying, completing out the current chapter will return the storyline to normal unless they derail it again by grouping up with a player from another Order and choosing to stay on the same storyline as them.
perhaps a new warning could be added to the dialogue option , to specifically state in big bold yellow world announcement letters. “IF YOU CLICK YES IT WILL DERAIL YOUR OWN PERSONAL STORY” and the big bold yellow world announcement letter warning show up again during the confirmation dialogue: “ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DERAIL YOUR OWN PERSONAL STORY”
while i appreciate the offer of credit for playing together with other people on story steps, this seems to be confusing enough for players that every week someone posts about how their personal story is derailed. i would personally prefer to NOT have the option to accept progress if it’s not the exact same storyline.
a compromise could be to reward “helpers” of PS instances with half XP credit, as though it were a dungeon or something.
Both players have to be on the same story step for it to even offer the option of accepting progress at the end. You’re not going to find another Vigil player on the OOW story step—and if you did, it would default to the next OOW story step in that storyline since that’s the default storyline once you’re on the OOW chain. I’m saying, completing out the current chapter will return the storyline to normal unless they derail it again by grouping up with a player from another Order and choosing to stay on the same storyline as them.
So how did she end up on the OOW story in the first place if the other player has to be on the same story step as you? Wouldn’t an OOW story step be different from a Vigil story step? So why did the pop up occur in the first place? If it’s a bug, why hasn’t it been fixed as I think this one has been around for a while? If it can’t be fixed, why isn’t there a warning about it? Why do people find out about the bug after it happens to them or read about it happening to someone on a forum?
If two people are both on Step, say 34 (one belonging to OoW and one belonging to Vigil) and the Vigil player joined the OoW player’s instance and accepted the step, the game would try to keep them together by merging their storylines so they could play the next step together, again.
That is how someone from the Vigil would end up in the OoW’s storyline. If a player could only play story steps from their own storylines, then you would not be able to play with another player and accept progress for the same numbered story step. It’s not a bug, it is a design implementation.
Perhaps, a warning may be included one day. On the other hand, it could be an incentive to choose that Order on an alternative character. =)
Both players did “Setting the Stage” together. (It’s a story step shared by all 3 Orders.) At the end of the step, it sets your next step based on your Order. When playing co-op, it uses the “instance owner’s” Order to keep the players together. (The “instance owner” is the player who started the story step and opened up the instance.) There is a warning that if you accept the story progress, your next story step will be “Name of Next Story Step” regardless of any choices that you made. Adding another warning would be impractical since the system only knows what the next step is (based on the instance owner’s choices) and can’t tell what it might have been based on every other player’s choices. The story steps branch at different places for different reasons, so it’s not a simple matter of “If player A is a different Order than player B pop up a warning.”
Maybe make the warning about change of story more prominent?
Inculpatus, that’s what I’m saying. Why can’t the OP just do Vigil chapter 35, or whatever the next equivalent chapter would be to do this, with a vigil character and ensure they swap back to their own storyline. I’m fully aware the next mission wouldne be enough, but two or three would.
As Jeffrey pointed out, “Adding another warning would be impractical since the system only knows what the next step is (based on the instance owner’s choices) and can’t tell what it might have been based on every other player’s choices. The story steps branch at different places for different reasons, so it’s not a simple matter of ‘If player A is a different Order than player B pop up a warning.’”
This is true.
Perhaps even more, as players we need to take responsibility to read the existing messages and really understand what we’re doing. Quite frankly, history shows that making it “louder” or brighter, or bigger probably won’t increase the chances that someone reads the message and makes the right choice. We all can fall prone to what I call “Quick Click Syndrome™” where you think “Yeah, yeah, accept” and then go “Whooops!”
In the end, Jeffrey supplied a way for the OP to get this right. In the bigger picture, I suggest that we need to read what we’re being told and not be so hasty. (And of course I say that without being judgmental, just wanting to make sure we’re looking at this from the right perspective.) There definitely are cases where increasing clarity in the game is a desirable thing, but in this case, it doesn’t seem that would address the real issue.
