Guild Wars 2

I logged in, saw that the Megadestroyer event was scheduled to be up, and that Maelstrom’s Waypoint was uncontested indicating the event was probably in progress.

I ported there, got transferred to a server where the waypoint was contested due to the event having failed. The volcano had erupted and was spewing lava everywhere. There was no way to escape fiery death – I couldn’t port out because I was taking lava damage.

Megaservers now mean that the waypoint status on your map will frequently be different from the waypoint status on the server you’ll arrive in. When that happens, I would prefer to be given the option to abort my teleport, rather than be dumped into an active volcano.

Actually that waypoint should have appeared contested for you if you weren’t on the same map.
With the changes regarding megaserver “all contestable waypoints will now appear contested when not in the same map” (see https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-megaserver-system-world-bosses-and-events/ below Regarding Cross-Map World State), what means it should have been contested when you first saw it and only appear with the proper status when you arrived in the map later.
That was the bug on your case, the waypoint should be contested when you were out of the map.

There are a number of inconsistencies, oddities, and frustrations with the current method of determining whether a waypoint is contested; it would be good for ANet to review the mechanics behind it.

1. As exemplified above, a waypoint is not always contested when it should be.
2. In other cases, waypoints are contested even when the event causing them to contest was part of past Living Story and not part of any event chains.
3. For some maps, there are only 2-3 WPs that are always available from outside the instance, meaning you have to pay for two waypoints and wait through two loading screens to get to where you want to go.

There are a number of ways to address each of the above, but my hope is that ANet will take a holistic approach and re-normalize the system based on using Mega Servers, rather than try to make the old set of WPs fit the new model.