Get rid of eorzea time and just use real time

[Alhanelem]

One of the primary reasons for both FFXI and FFXIV having game time is because the servers were all in a central location and people from a wide range of time zones around the world connected to the same servers, so game time helped make things consistent. But FFXIV is moving to regionally-located servers, so I think it would be a good idea to just have day/night match real life, with servers in each region being set to the time zone they're located in (most likely PST in the US, JST in Japan, GMT in europe).

This would also eliminate confusion between the two time systems e.g. "Is that over the next real life day / jp midnight? or is it just one game day?" and prevent the ingame date from going drastically out of line with the time the game as originally set in as the years go by (in FFXI, the game started in the 900s C.E. and the current date in game is 1166 C.E.).

I'm not really sure whether most people like this or not. What do you think?

The main idea here is simplifying the process of figuring out when to do things. It can be a little confusing having 2 time systems to think about, and the immersion breaking of NPCs having to specifically name "(Earth Time)" and "(Eorzea Time)."

The results are in, and this idea is obviously a failure. You can't say I didn't put my heart into it at least.

[Rex]

I'd be all for it, but if there's things that only happen at certain times of the day, some people may never be able to experience those events.

And XI started in the 900s? I could have sworn playing in like 886 C.E. ...

[Pwnagraphic]

It's a cool concept, but if you had to wait for a mob pop in a quest that only spawns during the night, that'd get old quick or vice versa. There's also other things that factor in that are game related to in-game time.

Some NPC's may only appear at night as well or during the day so it could be hard to complete something if you're going off of real time. And remember these servers may be region based, but we're not forced to play only on a server specific to our region so if you set your time to CST in US and you're playing with someone in England, it just wouldn't work out too well.

[Pseudopsia]

I don't think I'll like this. If they sync Eorzea time to real time I'll be playing during the night on weekdays. I'll have to change to keeper of the moon.

[Lady]

I like the day/night cycle. Helped me to keep track of time better when playing. If they have any NMs that only spawn during certain times of day (ie the giant buffalo thingy), this makes it easier for casuals to get a shot at it too. But thats just my opinion.

[Zezlar]

I don't think I would really like this idea either. There would be times when I see day or night far too much in one strecth by playing at a certain time of day.

[Alhanelem]

WoW's ingame time is set to a particular time zone's real time and this doesn't really present many issues in that game. Day/night doesn't affect a whole lot in the game other than how light or dark it is outside though.

I'm pretty sure in 1.0 XIV there was just one NM that spawned based on time of day? As long as they don't get carried away with stuff like this I don't think it will impact anything much.

I think what bugged me the most in XI was how often the game threw around both real and vana'diel time, it only made things more confusing. Does this event reset every game day or every real day?

And XI started in the 900s? I could have sworn playing in like 886 C.E. ...

Eh, I was ballparking it. It might have been, but it couldn't have been much earlier than that, because there were Rolanberries with years in their name (e.g. rolanberry 864)

[Shikimaru]

I don't want real time in that game... but it's not going to happen anyway.

[Xenor]

No thanks. Even single player games don't do this, take GTA for example. A game with a day/night cycle should not have a 24 hour game day length. Game systems can still reset based on real time however. Leve resets were locked to GMT midnight/midday before they changed the system to be more frequent, that kind of stuff can be localised.

[LlenCoram]

No thanks. Other than the fact that I like seeing the time change during the day while I play without having to stay up all day, there's also the fact that just because the servers are located by regions, doesn't mean we'll be locked to certain servers. It's not a very good idea.