1 Earth Hour = 1 New Britannia Day.

Alt-Tab will automatically cycle through anything in range of being attacked.

There's very little skill in the combat system. I'm not sure why more people aren't concerned by this. It must be a lack of pvp focused people that follow this game.

 

Have you thought that maybe this is also due to story reasons? What do you do if a quest can only be done during a certain time of day? You would have to wait for hours in realtime! There is no way to advance time.

In offline mode some means to advance time could be implemented - sleeping in beds, making camp... - but this will not work in the online modes.

Those who are playing because of the story could be frustrated rather quick if they have to wait for hours to advance in the story of the game.

 

No, I had not thought of that. That's a very good point, Lord_Darkmoon.

Given a situation where it's challenging to complete a quest in 15 to 30 minutes (before sundown) I can see why they did it this way. It may be something they have to consider. The impact to multiplayer and pvp is big though (if 1 day = 1 hour).

 

Not just story reasons; also, NPC schedules in general. Some people are going to get really upset when its harder to visit merchants, skill trainers, bankers, etc. at night.

Btw, I'm going to make a post on camping soon; though I don't think it would be used to advance time, I think it would make night time (and traveling) more interesting, so it would be less of a burden on players.

 

Just making sure this is part of the conversation. For every person that will be upset about not being able to casual grind this game to death, there will be someone else (like me) that will be trying to have a more challenging experience.

Here I am trying to sneak around town during the middle of the day because night time was so incredibly short it just wasn't an option (in R15).



Now think about how powerful you make Sun Magic in comparison to Moon magic if one has an advantage over the other? This was actually a shortened video, I was standing around MUCH longer than that looking for someone to attack.

 

Yes you would have to wait for hours but you would also have more time to complete the quest.

Especially with the time it takes to get to places.

 

Yes, you're right; I've been thinking about how it penalizes moon magic. Although honestly, I would like them to see if they could figure out how to get moon magic to work effectively in dark shadows during the day. So, even in broad daylight, the darker the shadow I'm standing in, the more effective a stealth spell would be.

Conversely, its possible dark shadows could disrupt sun magic's effectiveness.

 

I think the devs did say that Moon Magic might be stronger under ground, for what its worth.

 

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/release-18-instructions.27377/

Release 18 Instructions
Discussion in 'Community Announcements' started by DarkStarr

Moon and Sun magic bonuses: now tied to the actual sun and moon instead of to the day night cycle. This means it is possible to have both sets of bonuses at the same time. Moon magic will no longer give bonuses underground.

 

Okay, then that includes all hours when the moon appears in the sky?

But, still, I think its important that stealth, even if we're just talking about non-Moon magic stealth, works better in the shadows.

 

Would you please also consider the casual gamers. I don't have the time and the nerves to plan my playtime around the day-night cycle of a game. If we really have 2 hours day and 2 hours night, the casual gamers are in trouble. What if you only have one hour of playtime each day and it always falls in the night. This gamer would quit. I have to agree that time flies by in SotA, I needed one ingame week to complete the hat quest. But when I look back it is immersion for me, that you need that long to travel over the world. Sure in towns it would be great to slow down the time because it feels kind of odd to need one day to walk from one end to the other of PaxLair. Or crafting takes days to complete. But yeah it takes that long. And think of the other things linked to the fast time. How long would it need to get the moongate to a new location if you make a day 4hours long? At the moment we can hope it chanced once a day his location. If you make an ingame day longer it would need one month that the moongate gets back to his first goal. Would you like that?

I totally understand your points, that it complecated to plan an attack and sneak to someone in 15min playtime and I have to admit, that I wished for much longer days when I try to build my mazes. Building at night is a pain in the a**. But looking at the other negative points regarding a longer day I'm happy and enlight my torch.

 

I was going to post on this; People seem to be forgetting that Shroud will have players spread across multiple time zones in the real world, my afternoon gaming session will always be at a different time to your afternoon session. Thus if we were to have night last 4 hours (say), it's highly likely some people would only ever see Night/Day in the time they had to play in real life. You can't get around that by adding different time zones to New Britannia either, as it would just mean you had to play in certain areas as well as at certain times to experience different light conditions; the two calenders would still sync up. A fixed, but relatively fast game clock is the only practical solution to allowing all players to at least see the skies shift...

... However I wouldn't be opposed to certain community influences upon the light in the sky that were localised; Let's say some sort of "Bring Forth The Night" spell that, if enough players are involved in trying to cast it, can make the zone dark as night for a certain amount of time. Limit it to Shardfall Zones, or Sieges, or unique crafting zones, or boss monster trigger places it has a reason to be lorewise and complements gameplay rather than just annoys people... Let's say there's a resource that can only be added to crafting under conditions of night; why not allow a crafting guild to organise to cast "Bring Forth The Night" over the zone the special Night Forge is sited, at a time they all agree too beforehand, either by via the forums or in game organisation?

 

That seems a bit extreme. Tonight you may only have 1 hour of play when it's dark. But tomorrow you might have 1 hour of play when it's light. That seems more than reasonable to me. Being a casual gamer shouldn't mean that every situation you encounter in the game has to be served to you ala cart. "Would you like your day time experience now, M'Lady? Or are you ready for Night Time to begin?"

At some point you have to be flexible enough to understand that you can't have day and night exactly when you want it - otherwise it doesn't serve much of a purpose and they should take it out of the game completely.

 

If you have odd hours, like 3 hours (in the OP) then you don't have this problem because even if you (in your time zone) play at the same time of day, everytime, eventually you're going to see day or night because the real world is moving at 24 hours a day and New Britannia is running at 3 hours day. So the cycle will cause your experience to change organically. Yes, you might have three days in a row where all you see if night, if you're only playing for 1 hour at a time. But then you might see 3 days in a row where all you see is day.

The same "problem" could be had right now if you only play 30 minutes at a time. That's not a reasonable argument for someone to say "think of the casual gamers that only play 20 minutes at a time!" See what I'm saying? We have to draw the line somewhere regardless if we have any type of day and night cycle. So my suggestion is to make it a bit more meaningful - 3 hours.

 

And this sentence doesn't count for you? You should also be flexible enough to get along with only 15min of really dark night for your purpose.

At the moment you have only to wait 1h to have the next chance. With your system it would take much longer and events would be more crowded around the day cycles because you can't really do anything at night.

 

Firstly, mathematical cycles only diverge if they aren't cleanly divisible into each other; in this case 3 divides into 24 perfectly, thus you won't have differing days at any fixed time on the calender. To prove it, here are where the Shroud days will fall per 24 hours... you can see that they will always be at the same hour of day if you use 3 hours.

00:00 - 03:00
03:00 - 06:00
06:00 - 09:00
09:00 - 12:00
12:00 - 15:00
15:00 - 18:00
18:00 - 21:00
21:00 - 00:00

The first round number that doesn't divide into 24 is 5.

Secondly, if someone is lucky enough to have contracted hours of employment, of course they'll be playing at the same time every day. However as people are increasingly moved to Zero Hours where they boss can call them in at any time they like, they're unlikely to be able to choose when they play at all. Neither one gives any leeway to let life be set by a computer game. In your example of 3 hours, assuming that's the entire day cycle and it starts at midnight, they may be lucky to see night at all even if they devote an entire evening to gaming... let's say they get home at 6pm (assuming a standard, although increasingly rare 9 to 5 job), they have to change, cook, do all the outstanding domestic tasks... The first midnight they'll realistically catch is at 9pm, and then they will probably have long since gone to bed ready for the early start next morning before they get to see the next at 12pm.

Sure, that may not be the lifestyle that you, or I are living, but shorter in game days are just the only practical choice for a wider audience.

 

1 hour per day doesn't bother so much though I'd prefer a 2 hour day. What really gets under my skin is the 2 weeks per year! That's way to fast for any kind of RP. 5 years from now would be over 130 years in game.. where none of the NPCs age a day?

 

While everyone is discussing about 1 earth hr = 1 britannia day in, what about 1 earth year = 26 years. Do our characters age? How long do they live for? Do they get better/worse as they age (stats)? While, we're at it, what is our birthday and age? Will we procreate so we can have junior take over the business?

Btw, 1 hr = 1 day is a bit too fast. I'd go with 2 or 4 hrs = 1 day; also it would make the math easy (which would also make us live longer)

 

really? Because alt tab seems to just switch between different Windows in my os

 

I agree that it should be longer!