Zone wouldn't load, after restart it repeatedly caused full game crash

Bug Report ID: #1601685695

Ran into an issue where a zone would not load, it just kept showing the loading gears. I attempted to teleport to town, it told me that I could not teleport while the game was paused, but the game was not paused.

To troubleshoot I tried logging out and back in, tried switching to another gateway, I tried logging into an old character that's now in Standard, which worked, but after switching back to my current league character the problem persisted.

I exited the game completely, cleared the shader cache, verified game files in Steam, started the game up again, but when attempting to log into my seasonal character the game would now just crash. This happened multiple times.

Ultimately, I was able to resolve this by using the button on the character selection screen that let's you spawn into town/hideout. Everything worked fine after that.