Guild Wars 2

Recently, Guild Wars 2 updated their in game time to UTC. Whereas this may not seem like much of a change for European and Chinese players, it is a bit of a change for the people on the opposite side of the world. For those of us who relied on server time to schedule events on calendars or otherwise, it’s become difficult and confusing for a good portion of players. Not only are things now scheduled usually a day ahead, but frequently there’s a +amount of odd hours.

Please note that I’m talking about scheduling events on community websites or otherwise.

A simple solution to this would be to split the “Sever Time,” up by server location.

Example: All European Servers would run on UTC. All American servers would run on PST. All Chinese Servers (assuming there’s more than one) would run on a time better suited for them. This would make scheduling for these separate communities easier on all those involved.

I can’t, honestly, say I’ve ever coded for a game. So I don’t know how easy or hard this would be but perhaps it could be a considered change for convenience in the future.

Thanks for reading!

The internal clock should go back to running on good ole ’Murrican time. UTC is so confusing.

If everyone (save those in Pacific Time) had to learn the Server Time that was different from their own before, it should not be too difficult to learn it again. Can’t the websites announce the events in UTC time, and all that need be done is to set the game display to UTC time?

I’m just confused what an arbitrary time display makes, if it is not your own time, anyway. It’s not like the time of anything in-game changed. Reset is still at midnight UTC time, just as always, World Bosses are still at the same time, etc.

It’s about local ease. North Americans would only have to work in a 1-4 hour time difference instead of having to schedule things for +8 (ish) hours which can take things into the next day. It’s about convenience more than anything else. Yes we could learn it, but we play on North American servers so shouldn’t our servers be set in some form of North American time zone?

I dislike comparing games on one game’s forums but an example would be World of Warcraft. WoW had North American and European servers. Those servers were set in time zones to their world clock. They went a step further and did individual time zones for servers but I’m not asking for that much depth (especially not with megaservers). Just a basic “server time” for those server’s continent location.

Still, everyone outside that 4-hour span had to use a foreign (to them) time display before. That would be 20 other time zones. Now NA must adjust. People can still use their local time and calculate, or everything can be announced in UTC, as the in-game clock will calculate it for you now.

Example: ‘Our Guild is holding x event at 14.30 UTC time, Friday. Set your in-game clock to Server time so you will know when to show up!’

Sure, it is odd for those in NA, but probably easier for those other 20 time zones outside NA. =)

The point still stands that they’re NA servers so they should display a NA server time. European servers would have a European server time, etc.

I think it’s honestly preference. It’s simply a suggestion. (:

I don’t know about you but my computer (Windows 7) has this nifty feature where I can set more than one clock so when I click on the clock in the system tray I get to see TWO CLOCKS next to each other, one with my time and one with a different time.

But I don’t really care because nothing changed except what is considered ‘server time’ and now it’s all standardized to one time which is great! Everything still happens at the same time as it used to as far as I’m concerned and if I need to track something’s time then I use one of the super duper handy dandy timing apps/sites that are prevalent on the internet.

Perhaps it would be nice if gw2 would show both times (local and UTC) on the mini-map.

Time zones are a mess but get even worse with DST. the daylight savings problems go away with utc which makes everything play nice! Otherwise time zones and each countrys use or not use of dst makes everything a huge mess

Lil Puppy.5216:

I don’t know about you but my computer (Windows 7) has this nifty feature where I can set more than one clock so when I click on the clock in the system tray I get to see TWO CLOCKS next to each other, one with my time and one with a different time.

But I don’t really care because nothing changed except what is considered ‘server time’ and now it’s all standardized to one time which is great! Everything still happens at the same time as it used to as far as I’m concerned and if I need to track something’s time then I use one of the super duper handy dandy timing apps/sites that are prevalent on the internet.

Perhaps it would be nice if gw2 would show both times (local and UTC) on the mini-map.

This is actually really nifty.

Well, the ingame time is 3 hours ahead of my time now, and by this change I can’t attend to guild events that had their times schedules fixed around 8pm (servertime) because – now – that’s too early for me to log.

Before, the ingame time was 3 hours after my clock, so I had plenty of time to be at home and log.