Zone

A map zone, or "spawn" as they are called internally by some ArenaNet members, are a technical entity in the game world of Guild Wars.

They consist of a number of variables:

• A name, which is not always unique.
• A region to which they belong.
• A 'Terrain block' that is used as the underlying territory.
• A number that determines whether the instance is a staging or a combat area — staging areas are persistent, massively multiplayer, and can have multiple districts; combat areas are instanced and contain only the player characters that entered at creation of the instance.
• A set of objectives in some of them (see mission).
• A long list of entities that are to 'spawn' in them:
  • NPC creatures.
  • Map objects, interactive or not.
  • Portals, one way of movement to another zone.

Quests can further affect the entities that spawn.

Zoning and rezoning

Refers to moving into a new zone. Rezoning refers to leaving a zone and immediately reentering. This has the following effects:

• Health and energy are fully restored.
• Any dead party member or pets are resurrected.
• All bundles are removed.
• Any minions are destroyed.
• Both zones are recreated (which re-populates foes, redistributes bosses and chests, and resets any unfinished quests).

• All effects (hexes, conditions, etc.) are removed from all characters, with two exceptions:
  • Morale Boosts and Death Penalty are retained (when entering a new combat area).
  • A character in a Siege Devourer will remain with it (when traveling to another zone in the Charr Homelands).

There are several ways to zone:

• Using a portal, from another zone.
• Via map travel to a town or outpost.
• Through an NPC's dialogue option, which can be used to continue a quest, start a mission, or enter an otherwise restricted area.
• Waiting for a timer to expire, when starting a mission, completing certain missions, defeating a dungeon boss or boss-like foe, or ending a PvP match.
• By using the /resign special command, which, when used by all players in the party, allows the leader to return the party to the last visited outpost/town.

There are various types of zones

• Staging area - a place you can meet other random players, divided into districts
  • Town
    • Port
  • Outpost - including those for Cooperative Missions, Competitive Missions, Challenge Missions, etc.
    • Hidden
  • PvP location - staging area before entering the arena to fight
  • Guild Hall
• Instanced area - a place where your party gets a unique instance of the game:
  • Explorable area - a map instance where you can kill monsters, vanquish, or complete quests.
  • Mission area/instance - Some missions have an exclusive map, other missions share the same terrain with explorable areas.
  • Quest instance - while most quests simply take place in an explorable area with additional NPC/monster/objects spawned, some quests create a completely new instance sharing only the terrain of the explorable area (similar to missions).
  • Dungeon
  • Arena

"To Zone"

"To zone" means to travel through an area boundary or using the map to go to a new zone. Example: "Everybody ready to zone in?", "Just zone, all the dead players will come back to life." This has the same general meaning as the term rezone, with slightly different usage.