On screen timer

[Malithar]

This one baffles me. Surely, it couldn't be too hard to print a timer already being used by the game to the screen in that box?

It may not be that it's so hard, but just that it'd take effort to make the change. Currently the only times the timer will appear is during a quest CS (the follow up to the Thirst for Knowledge quest line), Wanted battles, and Sunshine Seekers. They might be able to manipulate it as they want within quests, but in the case of Wanted battles and Sunshine Seekers, both tag you with a status effect for participation. Very well could be that it's tied to this in order to appear. If so, events that don't tag you with a buff for participation (mostly everything except for VW and BCs) surely could have it added, but they'd have to change how it works, which they appear against doing.

[Alhanelem]

It's probably a similar matter to things like a cutscene skip feature, where the primary issue is just that there's a very large number of things to go back and alter a feature for. Which is understandable, but it's honestly something you could gradually work towards, similar to how they've been gradually adding markers for various things on the maps in game. They could just do it in waves, e.g. first the new versions of battlefields, then old AU content, then old Promathia content, then old zilart content, etc.

[Sfchakan]

You guys are over-thinking this.

It's literally printing a variable to the screen. No more difficult than anything else shown on-screen.

[Alhanelem]

You guys are over-thinking this.

It's literally printing a variable to the screen. No more difficult than anything else shown on-screen.

From what I've been able to discern, the timer for the event (well, the one you see on screen) is started by the interaction with the NPC, while the server keeps track on its own. I know this because the timer was occasionally slightly out of sync with the actual end of the time limit (e.g., talk to the npc right before the timer ran out and it didn't count). Different content seems to keep track of time in different ways, and in many cases the client doesn't know the time remaining, it simply gets log messages stating an amount of remaining time (e.g. dynamis). So yeah, putting a variable on screen is simple, the trouble is the client doesn't have that variable in much of the timed content in the game.

It's kind of a whatever thing though. As long as they make sure all future timed content shows the time remaining this way, I'll be pretty happy.