Difficulties with ところ

To just immediately give you an idea of what my confusion is. I am currently playing a visual novel in which one of the characters says

“全員集まったところで雪合戦だ!” - “Now that everyone’s here, it’s time for a snowball fight!”

This brought back a lot of my confusion with ところ in general, whether its ところに vs ところで and this is just generally a good example of a sentence I can’t seem to figure out from the Bunpro grammar points.

In the ところで as a conjunction grammar point it says “When ところで appears after the past tense of a verb as たところで, it carries a different meaning, and will express that something isn’t the case, despite (A). This is an advanced grammar point that will be covered at another stage.” However this appears to be not the case whatsoever in the sentence I provided.

My best guess with the literal sentence break down is its saying “With the place of us all having gathered, It’s a snowball fight!” Meaning that with the A portion having taken place, it means B is in order.

Is it possible that this is just the normal conjunction of ところで meaning “and with that” and the portion written by bunpro about the たところで meaning something totally different as “despite” is misleading or oversimplified? I also notice all of their sentences feature ところで to start a sentence and not in the way this sentence is constructed.

The grammar point being used in your sentence is this:

It’s just that it’s using the て form of だ, in order to connect the two statements. However, when ところで is used at the start of a sentence, it means “By the way,…”.

I still haven’t gotten to the other ところで, link below, but I’m assuming the differences become obvious with context:

HTH!

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