Crossroads

Two factors are combining to make the Crossroads area of Act 2 an extremely frustrating one for me:

1. The area is huge. That means it takes ages to generate an instance, ages to traverse, and it runs horribly slowly. (Playing with Julus' WINE wrapper, which mostly works fine but exacerbates the performance issues of memory/CPU-intensive areas.)

2. Because it's 'the crossroads', you have to visit it at least three times on your way to different side areas. Unless you're really fast with the side areas or you remember to revisit the Crossroads sporadically, the instance gets deleted and you have to slog through the place all over again.


I don't mind big areas if they're one-offs and interesting. But the Crossroads is not very interesting as an area, in terms of monsters or landscape (looks much like the rest of the Act 2 outdoor areas in both respects), and it quickly gets tedious slogging through it again and again, especially once your character has outgrown the content and has little prospect of getting good items there.

For navigating Crossroads in probably the most straightforward area in the game because of the uninterrupted road.

Follow the road from the start - it leads directly to the waypoint. It can't be more than 30 seconds run. Since it's the road you will probably meet less than 20 mobs total. From the waypoint both Fellshrine and Broken bridge can be run to in less than 10 seconds.

Chamber of sins is a bit longer cos there is an unique boss on the way, probably 40 secs - 1 minute.

As someone with a crap machine I agree that crossroads takes forever to generate, I have lost 2 hardcore characters(one was lvl40) when teleporting there and when the load finishes I see my character lying dead and 2 white monkeys around him.

Hmm , odd, i dont find this area any larger than alot of others. Its on par. Additionally , IMO , its the easiest map in the game to traverse.

Just my opinion.

Cheers.

Crossroads is indeed one of the easiest maps in the entire game to learn. It's pretty much static.

This is basically a layout of the map:



You don't really have to visit it three times. Just travel to the way-point every single time and getting to any other area shouldn't take more than 30 seconds.

It's not particularly big though...or at least i don't find it to be, i don't even recall getting larger variations to that particular area it's always generally about the same size

You're right, with some organisation and knowledge of the layouts, you can rush the waypoints in the other areas and never see the Crossroads again. It's just that rushing waypoints feels gamey to me and I'd rather not be forced into a choice between doing that or replaying an area repeatedly. The way I see it, the instance timeout isn't really a deliberate game feature so much as a convenience for GGG so that their servers don't get overloaded. If the devs put in specific levels that have to be completed in a certain time, I'm all in favour, but it should be something that's justified in-character.

Maybe the Crossroad is not that large an area, but more generally I think areas with many paths leading off from them are a bit of a weakness of the instance timeout system.