[MUD-Dev] Time Theory

[Vincent Archer]

According to Mats Lidstrom:

> Since I'm a believer in keeping it simple this is the method I'd
> use. Just add or subtract your tz difference and you're set for
> your meeting. Then just run the day/night changes 4 times a day
> and call them quarters so you could actually just say "December
> 24:th, third quarter" to pinpoint an event.

Of course, it still has a problem. I'm a classic example: work by
day mostly 9 to 6, come back home, at start playing at 8, up till
midnight.

If the day is split into 4 perfectly synchronised "days", I never
ever get to experience dawn. When I log in, it's already morning
there.

This is immediately bad: there are things that I cannot witness or
do unless I am willing to compromise my Real Life schedule for
in-game actions.

Even Verant has, after nearly 3 years, altered a lot its clocking.
Norrath revolves around a periodic event: Patch Day. Patch Day
resets all clocks, and the big game, the boss mobs, spawn after that
using a large time period, with a random factor added for some of
them.  However, for many of the mobs, they're up immediately after a
server has been restarted, i.e., on patch day. And end of patch is
religiously always at the same time, plus or minus 1h.

Net Result? On my play server, Sleepers Tomb is the absolute
property of asian guilds. They have time juste after patch to slip
in, kill the main targets, and get the stuff. Europe can't compete
much, it's afternoon and most people are at work, US can't either.

Then come the dragons (Temple of Veeshan). Europeans start to gather
immediately as they log in the evening, while the asian are asleep
and while most of the US is at work, go in, kill the big
dragons. Net result: when the US start playing, they've got 2/3rd of
the dragons already down. If not more.

And so on. The big targets are staggered in multiples of 24h
respawns, plus or minus a couple hours, which means, if you're
careful, you don't let "slip" the targets to a different time zone.

Keeping things in synch with real-time clock, especially one as
coarse as the day, is bad.

--
	Vincent Archer			Email:	archer at frmug.org

All men are mortal.  Socrates was mortal.  Therefore, all men are Socrates.
							(Woody Allen)
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