PLEASE provide an option to make game days last as long as real days.

[Iscah]

I don't think the day/night cycle within the game is going to affect your circadian rhythm directly.

Yes, the blue light of a daytime sky scene might have some percentage more of an effect than at night, but it's very different to being out in the real world. Your screen is still shining light at you regardless, and some of that light is blue. Factor in blue-tinted spells, menus, dungeons, and anything with a mixed colour that is partly blue - not to mention that all light, not just blue light, is bad for your circadian rhythm - and it's nowhere near as simple as "my body will understand it's night-time if it looks like night in the game!"

For that matter, night scenes in the game are going to be rendered with a blue-ish colour anyway. Not as bright as daytime, but it's still blue light coming from your screen. And in the 'daytime' you're just as likely to be seeing yellows and browns on the ground as looking up at the sky.

I'd be very interested if there's actually a study on whether portrayal of time-of-day within a game can affect your perception of the time-of-day outside of it, but I would be surprised to learn it's the case. Games have been portraying short day/night cycles for decades, and I've never heard of it being proposed as an issue.


If you're really concerned about it, perhaps you can adjust your own screen settings towards red light.

[Tempest222]

Yeah I’m not interested in all that/don’t want game daytime hours to match what I’m experiencing in real life. We don’t need to try to pretend this is for health reasons if we want some more options for day/night cycling. Just wanting it is enough to suggest it. If someone is actually concerned about their health in this regard, night in the game is still blue light, so this wouldn’t help anyway. You could easily just go and set your screen to night mode with the more reddish hue like you said. Plus I often play at night and would hate to be locked into perpetual darkness. What I would like is an option to just disable the visual appearance of the day/night cycle amd choose whether I want the lighting to be day, midday, or night. I generally prefer the way the game looks during daylight hours amd feel there is too much night time in game, so I would just choose day lighting all the time.

[TritochHuntr]

I know I've already said this, but I'll say it again... Most people in this thread don't seem to understand that I am asking for a config OPTION, i.e. something a user can CHOOSE at their own preference. Therefore it doesn't affect you, as long as you don't enable the option. Graphics are rendered locally so there is no difficulty in rendering a time of day on one person's system that differs from the time of day on another person's system. Square already does this with quest NPCs -- the player doing the quest can see certain quest NPCs, but other players don't see them. Having players see a different time of day is not really that big of a deal compared with letting people play with a day the length roughly of their choosing.

I also like Tempest222's suggestion above (choose whether you want morning, midday, evening, or night and lock in the appearance). While my original post in this thread focuses on health reasons, the character limit didn't allow me to express that I also want this option because the game is just way too dark overall. It feels like I always log in at night, and when daytime finally come, it's dark and rainy. I'm getting kind of sick of it, and almost want to go back to WoW for this reason alone.

[Lambdafish]

Day/night is tied to the server, and Eorzea time is important to many mechanics in the game, particularly gathering. This change doesn't benefit enough to justify it even being an option, because changing Eorzea time would change many aspects of the game

[Eloah]

What the heck is this? Our circadian rhythm has nothing to do with whether it's day or night out. The very fact that we have a slight degree of control in adjusting it, and that some people are wired to be awake more during darker hours indicates as much; think back to us being nomadic individuals. Plus the whole 8 hours thing is inaccurate, we are supposed to have natural broken sleep, like other animals, but out society dictates we should sleep at night.

[HyoMinPark]

While my original post in this thread focuses on health reasons, the character limit didn't allow me to express that I also want this option because the game is just way too dark overall.

You can edit your post after making it to add in text beyond the 3,000 character limit.

That being said, I don’t personally see the need for development time to be invested in coding in this option. I don’t believe that it has that big of an impact on your sleep cycles as you believe it does—your computer screen is the main culprit here; much like how you described phone screens screwing up the melatonin production in our brains and convincing us it’s not actually time for bed yet, a computer screen does the same thing.

If you’re simply concerned with how dark the game is, you can try out ReShade to adjust the coloration (assuming you are a PC player), or mess with your monitor’s own color settings.

Day/night is tied to the server, and Eorzea time is important to many mechanics in the game, particularly gathering. This change doesn't benefit enough to justify it even being an option, because changing Eorzea time would change many aspects of the game

Lambdafish also brings up a good point—if you’re asking for an option to toggle the game clock to matching your clock, that will mess with several other systems already in place, mainly DoL systems that rely on the game’s clock for timed gathering nodes, since they are based on Eorzean Time (which, as you know, is multitudes faster than real time), and Eorzean Time is a set configuration server-side. It could also affect the weather, as the weather changes on a set schedule (I believe it’s every 12 Eorzean hours? I could be wrong, but it does change in set intervals), which would affect Sightseeing Vistas and fishing (as awful as the weather-based fishes can be, this is something to consider).

How would you propose the developers fix these issues, if you’re asking to have the option to toggle a game’s day time to match your own?

[TritochHuntr]

Lambdafish also brings up a good point—if you’re asking for an option to toggle the game clock to matching your clock, that will mess with several other systems already in place, mainly DoL systems that rely on the game’s clock for timed gathering nodes, since they are based on Eorzean Time (which, as you know, is multitudes faster than real time), and Eorzean Time is a set configuration server-side. It could also affect the weather, as the weather changes on a set schedule (I believe it’s every 12 Eorzean hours? I could be wrong, but it does change in set intervals), which would affect Sightseeing Vistas and fishing (as awful as the weather-based fishes can be, this is something to consider).

How would you propose the developers fix these issues, if you’re asking to have the option to toggle a game’s day time to match your own?

Did you actually read my entire original post? I addressed all those issues in it, aside from weather.

I don't have any experience with DoL classes yet, so it seemed to me as if the weather was primarily cosmetic. I might not know all the solutions or problems that could arise, but I will say this:

If Square Enix will hire me, I will gladly implement this issue myself. That is how badly I want to have longer days/nights in game. (I am a programmer with over 12 years professional experience, btw, so I am accustomed to dealing with all the problems that come up when implementing a new feature, and coming up with solutions for them.)

I'd like to also add that it makes a lot of business sense (for Square Enix) to implement this option. You'll capture a lot more of the WoW crowd this way. I came from WoW (which has full length days and nights) and I almost gave up on FFXIV because it really bothered me how the days/nights were so short. I know I am not alone in this. 10 million WoW players means a lot of potential future FFXIV customers.

[Canadane]

I know I've already said this, but I'll say it again... Most people in this thread don't seem to understand that I am asking for a config OPTION, i.e. something a user can CHOOSE at their own preference. Therefore it doesn't affect you, as long as you don't enable the option.

Yeah but some people don't want developer time put into things that ....well, just one single user may want.
All for a client side option that breaks world lore, possibly messes with timers tied to it, and have developers not spend time on something that would please a much larger group of people.

[Elamys]

It being night time in the game absolutely does not affect your circadian rhythm. Open up a window, play with a blue light filter, take a break to step outside or even just look outside. This is an overly complicated solution to a non issue. While I'm generally all in favor of options, the implementation of this one is so complicated and with so little benefit as to not be worth developer time. Something being an option doesn't always mean it's worth considering.

Also, a number of things in the game are tied to the Eorzean day/night cycle - gathering points, fishing, hunts, and vistas all have time components to them.

[New_Game_Plus]

today on things I don't want the developers to waste their time on: this.