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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
