Guild Wars 2

Didn’t the servers used to be based off of PST? and not GMT?

It’s always been based off UTC but there’s an option to display your local time instead of UTC.

servers use UTC, not PST or GMT

How come switching between the 2 settings in the past never used to change the time then?

UTC doesn’t change for daylight savings is what gets people.

MoarChaos.8320:

UTC doesn’t change for daylight savings is what gets people.

I meant, in the past when I would change to server time it would stay the same time. For example server time would say 7pm, and I’d change the setting back to local time and it’d still say 7pm.

UTC doesn’t have daylight savings. It’s technically not a time zone. It’s a time standard.
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/aboututc.html

If you’re in a country that uses daylight savings (once a year the clocks move forward an hour and 6 months later they move back) then that’s what’s changing – not the game.

I’m in the UK and have my in-game clock set to server time. For 6 months of the year it’s pointless because we’re on GMT, which is the same as UTC. But for the other 6 months of the year I find it useful because I tend to forget we’re on BST and not GMT. (You’d think after 31 years I’d get the hang of it…you’d be wrong.)

To make things even more confusing when Anet announce times for things they tend to use PST, because that’s the time zone they’re in, and therefore players will often use it when giving times for things (e.g. patches tend to go up around 10am PST). And at other times players will use whatever their local time is and don’t tell you the time zone.