Fifteen years ago...

[Aysun]

Alright, lore-question time SE!

"Fifteen years ago, in the Year 1557 of the Sixth Astral Era..." begins the most recent update on the grand companies page. But two years ago, when the game launched, it was fifteen years ago according to the NPCs in game. Two years have passed, shouldn't it be seventeen years ago now? What year is it now in game? C'mon now.. don't confuse all us RPers!

Crap. Too late.

[DeirdreTaea]

Noticed this too when I woke up this morning.

SE! Please don't make it any harder for us RPers to work with the sparse amount of Lore you already provide! Has no time passed at all since we've created our characters and immersed in the world? Do I have to adjust my characters age again and remove all of the events in the passed time since launch?

Please throw the RPers a bone, we get tired of adjusting the years and dates in our journals.

[Felis]

It should be more than just 2 years.
8 real hours = 1 ingame day, I think

[DeirdreTaea]

It should be more than just 2 years.
8 real hours = 1 ingame day, I think

As RPers we go off of real world time not in game time, otherwise a simple conversation ends up taking 3 in game hours. Regardless, though.

[Elexia]

That's honestly why MMORPGs despite it's genre is more about the gameplay and P&P RPGs are more for RPers.

[Deli]

you all think too hard...
remember we were somehow in a time loop, you can think of that, between patches, such as the red moon suddenly grew after patch...then it stopped.
then jump to next loop after patch...

[DeirdreTaea]

you all think too hard...
remember we were somehow in a time loop, you can think of that, between patches, such as the red moon suddenly grew after patch...then it stopped.
then jump to next loop after patch...

That's not something that is Lore effecting, that's something graphical that SE did the best they could on. You're missing the point of the OP.
We would like a solid grasp on the dates, so we can plan our own events (Like uh, characters DOB) around it.

[Aysun]

Could not disagree more with you, Elexia. But that's not the point of this thread, really.

We overlook game mechanics that are necessary for the MMORPG to be fun to play, such as a game day being about so short real-time. If we didn't, like Felis said, it would be a lot more than two years, and a conversation would take 3 days sometimes in game. That would just be silly. So, like Deirdre said, we use real-time for RPing. That would mean it's been two years since launch, which would mean seventeen years since the event in Mor Dhona.

We're just looking for some clarification, that's all!

[Arcell]

So you're taking it upon yourselves to push the in-game time forward? I mean nothing in the game actually suggests that two additional years have passed. There's nothing in the game to suggest that any definite amount of time has passed. Technically it is but the game doesn't treat it like any long stretch of time. From the time we arrive in Eorzea to the time we finish off the current story, no specific amount of passed time is stated and the flow of events is such that it could be an incredibly short period of time.

[Aysun]

So you're taking it upon yourselves to push the in-game time forward? I mean nothing in the game actually suggests that two additional years have passed. There's nothing in the game to suggest that any definite amount of time has passed. Technically it is but the game doesn't treat it like any long stretch of time. From the time we arrive in Eorzea to the time we finish off the current story, no specific amount of passed time is stated and the flow of events is such that it could be an incredibly short period of time.

If you've played the storyline at all over the past two years, you'd notice plenty of things that indicate time has passed. The most notable being the big glowing ball of death in the sky transitioning slowly from a small moon, to what it is now. The grand companies launched, and over time, recruited us and formed the Alliance once more. There have been posts on the lodestone over the last two years "ICly" from NPCs from the in-game papers, noting these changes as they have been happening.

Time has passed, it would be silly to think that all this has happened and it hasn't. Using real-world years just makes sense, considering things like the seasonal events coinciding with ours in the real-world (Starlight festival/Christmas, Heavensturn/New Year's, etc).

To me it just seems like SE wants it to be fifteen years since Mor Dhona to now (Dalamud falling). Thus launch would have been 13 years. I'll probably just update my dates as such. Would be nice to get a concrete "this is the current year" out of them, but I don't think it will happen.