Character Creation Date of Birth Bug

I'm not sure how this hasn't been addressed its been a bug for the life of the game from what I can tell, I've noticed before it but never reported it, so shame on me.

Create a character, go to absolutely any month in the character creator's date of birth selection screen, when you hover on the last day of the month you'll find that the date verbally and the date numerically do not match. This is an issue with every single month, some months have it worse than others, for instance there are 32 days in the First Umbral Moon, yet when you hover over the last day you will see that the numerical date is marked as (2/29), you can see that the 7th and the 8th both points to (2/7), that the 15th and 16th both point to (2/14), the 23rd and 24th both point to (2/21), hence why the last day is marked numerically as (2/29) rather than the correct (2/32).

This same issue occurs in every month, this isn't a one off thing.

It's not a bug. Those are the earth dates that are relative to the eorzean date you're hovering over.

That's seems like an incredibly silly things to bother with, why not just set each month to have the corresponding number of days with leap years included? Or create months with a maximum number of 31 days? Heck, why even bother with 32? Sure it might argue its a power of 2, but its not like that would actually help with data storage, both could be fit into 5 bits, but even if that's the case, I'm almost certain its a bug because of how unregulated the structure is. Go to the First Astral Moon, the date change is between the 28th and 29th, now go to the Third Astral Moon, the date change is between the 29th and 30th even though both have 31 days. It's incredibly messy and arbitrary. Should they have wanted to provide players with a way to represent their birthday they could have simply let it match the dates and then no one would need to pick the 32 if they wanted to have their real birthday match their character's instead they have a system where the days meaninglessly diverge from their intended dates. For instance If my birthday was on (4/9) it would for some reason have to pick the 10th in game?

It seems like they should either not bother showing that information or fix the numerical divergence, since it just looks sloppy and poorly executed if you look into it.

It's because the Eorzean calendar is not a 1-1 perfect copy of the real-world Gregorian calendar, for one thing, an Eorzean year is actually longer than an Earth year - it's 384 days vs our 365.25 days on Earth. Although an Eorzean year is made of 12 months, each Eorzean month is also exactly 32 days long instead of our confusing system of 30 or 31 days with February being 28 or 29 depending on if it's a leap year or not). This makes the Eorzean calendar very neat and tidy, but also sadly makes it difficult to match up real world dates with the Eorzean year.

Thus you will normally be unable to have an exact match numerically in an Eorzean date for a real world date (such as your birthday), instead as Mhaeric mentioned the equivalent chronological real world Gregorian calendar date is shown in brackets underneath the Eorzean date selected so they can at least symbolically match.

So this is working as intended I'm afraid.

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Originally Posted by Faustabor

I'm almost certain its a bug because of how unregulated the structure is. Go to the First Astral Moon, the date change is between the 28th and 29th, now go to the Third Astral Moon, the date change is between the 29th and 30th even though both have 31 days. It's incredibly messy and arbitrary.

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Again, it's working as intended. This question came up way back in alpha (possibly beta) testing and it was definitively confirmed (by GM Camate I think?) that it was intended. I even vaguely recall filing a bug report myself during the first couple of days of testing.

The date you're choosing is the Eorzean date which is 1 out of 384 and it is displayed in Eorzean terms as Xth Sun of the Yth Astral/Umbral Moon of which there are 32 suns (days) in each of 12 moons (months). The parenthetical date that is displayed below that is converted Earth date that represents, which is 1 out of 365, and displayed as (earth month/earth day). This was done so that people have a general idea what date they're actually picking means in terms of Eorzean seasons, since the 5th Astral Moon isn't the most intuitive thing for us non-Eorzeans to wrap our heads around, or if they want to match a real life date such as their own birthday so that it actually falls at the right point relative to the passage of the year.

What they could do is add a clarification such as "Earth date: (month/date)" or something to forestall any confusion, since they do just kind of put it there without any explanation. I like seeing the conversion to earth days, though, for the above mentioned reasons.