Fix Server Time to be actual server time

[Felis]

I'd say it should be set to UTC but that's about it. And yes it should be same globaly. That way there is a common time for all. As it is I tend to be very sceptical of things in ST.

If SE decide to use 1 time zone for everyone as server time, then it will be JST

[Warlyx]

If SE decide to use 1 time zone for everyone as server time, then it will be JST

yup... FFXI times...what a pain in the rear.... u had to wait until Japan midnight for some resets.

atm server time in EU isnt that bad , reset times happens at 4pm or 5pm based around season (daylight saving)

[Wade]

I forgot I posted this and came back to posts. Glad to see others have experienced it too and understand the problem.

Overall yes, it's a minor annoyance, but it exists and has caused problems when scheduling events. Every so often in the FC or linkshell people will say "what is ST for you now? 7? right, then it's 8 my time"...it's just silly! The fact we can't rely on ST as a standard for all players is just annoying

... if everyone understood GMT then you could just schedule around that, but man it's even harder to get even other people in the same country as you to understand GMT doesn't change. ST would alleviate that - if it were reliable.

[Jpec07]

It seems kind of silly that they couldn't have the servers send their Unix timestamp every few packets so the client could confirm how it needs to modify local time to properly display server time. That's quite possibly one of the lowest-cost operations that they could do, and is really easy to code.

It appears that the clients are using the computer's timezone to modify the timestamp before rendering; if someone has their timezone set wrong, or they just have a weird datetime set in their system clock, it could throw the rendered time way off.

[Xavikon]

Interesting factoid about this complaint. It is also the reason why FFXIV gets 90002(I think that is the error, might be 90006) on some peoples systems more often than others. If using Windows internet time sync feature for your local time clock, if your local machine drifts very far from the internet time, and Windows synchronizes it, FFXIV will disconnect you due to the local PC clock change.

[DWolfwood]

I started playing on Ragnarok, and back then, the Server Time made sense to me because it was always GMT. I presumed this was because the server was technically based on EU time. However, when I switched to a NA Data Center, I was surprised to see that ST was still the same as GMT.

I'm really confused on it to be honest. I don't know what it's supposed to even mean.

Edit - I'm living in Texas (CT) for the record.

[Laraul]

I'm really confused on it to be honest. I don't know what it's supposed to even mean.

It's supposed to be the time the server is set too, which is always going to be UTC since the actual location of the server is meaningless. It's auto correcting the server time for DST though and it shouldn't. It should read the same regardless where you are.

[Lexia]

I have noticed this but does it really matter what the server time is?

[Wade]

I have noticed this but does it really matter what the server time is?

This thread has several reasons why it's beneficial to change. It all boils down to something really simple though: "we do X at Y ST", where X is raid, dungeon, roulettes, FC event, whatever. The point is if you say we do it at, let's say 17:00 ST then everyone can check their clocks and check the game ST and go "OK, that's 6pm for me" or "7pm for me" etc. Right now you simply can't do that, ST is not a constant and therefore is unreliable.


On the topic of server load and issues with queries. Someone mentioned an easy solution to this which I can clarify: append to unix timestamp of the server time to packets from the server. It doesn't have to be every packet and it doesn't really need to be the unix timestamp either. If it were a timestamp it'd be 4 bytes, but we don't really need that for this (it's easier and 100% reliable but this is informative so let's go with another option). Ideally we just need a day of the year and the hour of that day, day of year is 0-365 (1 to 366) and hour is 0-23. That's 14 bits, you'd probably have to round it up to 16 bits and use 2 bytes.

In that situation the client does not ask the server anything, the server merely (ap/pre)pends the servers timestamp (or day + hour) to the packet thus increasing the size by 2 or 4 bytes. Even if this was done at login only it would help, but it could be done once per minute or once per hour or once every x packets...the point is, even for SE and their server infrastructure this is not a big change. If you use the 2 byte approach you get a packet and if it has 2 bytes at the end and the first 2 bits are 10, 01, 11...any really, you know the remaining 14 bits are a day and hour from the servers time (UTC based). Chances are their packets are flagged with a type though so they could just bitshift to say "this is an X packet but it has a timestamp at the end"...so many options with very little overhead.

[Cherie]

Ah, that's a interesting find.

I wonder why they chose to do it that way now... I see some lag when I query the server for things sometimes....like for instance, summoning retainers. And I'm sure you notice how you can search by part of a word when looking for a crafting recipe but when searching the market board it's exact first word only.

Maybe they are scared of querying the server too much? I remember a review with one of the devs talking about how they accidentally broke the game once by allowing people to query what zone their friend was in too quickly... so they added delays for lots of operations so people couldn't knock the server offline.

Everyone querying the server time at once might cause problems? Maybe not... but I bet they'd err on the side of caution... 2.0 early access/launch was a bit messy with the server crashes. Not as problematic as other game launches though.