Time

[Jherlen]

Going to make this a short post since I'm fairly tired, but I think there's an interesting topic for discussion here about the rate time passes currently in the game.

Although I'm too new a player to have been there for it, I understand from reading GDB posts that at some point the passage of time was changed to standardize the time system, which also slowed time down to our current ~8.5 years Zalanthas = 1 year RL time scale. Before this, if I understand right, 1 yr RL was roughly equivalent to 16-18 years Zalanthas?

I'm curious if some staff/players could confirm or deny this, and also give any reasons the change was made if true. Personally, to me, the faster time scale would be more appealing, because it gives us as players more opportunity to live out the full lives of our characters and allow them to grow old. I know we're still talking about matters of RL months/years here but for the sake of allowing pcs to do things like die of old age, raise families, etc, having the clock tick a little faster seems to make sense.

So my questions...
- Did the passage of time in the game ever occur quicker than it does now?,

- If so, for what reasons was this changed?,

- If so, what impact, positive or negative, has there been on the game?, and

- What are player/staff opinions on the time scale and the rate it moves right now?

[Qetesh]

This should answer your question fully as to why.

http://www.zalanthas.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7448&highlight=synchronization

Basically it was for better time keeping of the game. I for one really like the change. Characters can still get the opportunity to grow old and have a great life, the cool part is that they will get to do -more- in that life.

Also considering the fac that average Zalanthan does not live past 40. It will make it all the more of a challenge to get there.

[Anonymous]

Tiernan made the change.  I personally liked the faster passage of time especially because your PC could get older and one month equaled a week.  I still forget that two weeks is about a month nowadays.  In addition cutting the passage of time essentially in half meant that isntead of a payday every week for a clan member you got a payday every other week.  Considering I have strong feelings about current clan membership having clanmembers making 150 sid a RL week instead of 300 seemed to undermine them.

As for reasons and things Tiernan would have the answers.

[Xygax]

The other part of the change, beyond just slowing down the time-scale, was to make time behave more predictably.  MUD time can now be calculated directly against real-world time.

-- X

[da mitey warrior]

Time wasn't changed from 17:1 to 8:1, it was standardized.  Time used to advance at 2 or maybe even 3 different rates.

In game time was about 1 hour per 12 min, but this would vary depending on how much of a load there was in game, so if there was 80 people online and a war going on somewhere time would go slower than if there was 10 people online.  Then there was your character's age, which was calculated using a completely different function, so you would sometimes age 2 or 3 days during an in-game day.  And the date when the game booted up was calculated based on a completely different function, which was screwed up, and sometimes set the time back before the time of the last boot up.  So when time was fixed it was all given 1 speed, which was 1 hour ZT = 10 min, or about 8.3 to 1.

I liked how the old system worked, having 2 speeds of time was nifty and I thought it was deliberate.  17:1 speed was a good pace to age your character, given the average lifespan on most PCs.  But 17:1 would have each day be only 35 min long, so having two speeds seemed like a good compromise.  

The new system much better in many ways, though, its more predicable and convienient.  You can actually use IC time to arrange meetings now (we'll leave at high sun tommorow!) which would have been impossible before (a crash could skip over the day by weeks or even reverse time back several days).

[Jherlen]

Thanks for the extra info. Certainly having time be standard and predictable is a good thing, I hadn't realized there were problems with it before. But now that the code has been fixed, it seems like all it would take to change the time scale is a change to the arithmetic behind it? (Forgive me if I'm wrong there.)

A one week = one month scale sounds more attractive to me than the current pace we have right now. Besides clannie pay rates as CRW mentioned, we'd also have large-scale, long-term plotlines moving faster. Things that would take years to complete would still take years, but be done in half the time. This is a little more encouraging to players who want to get big stuff done but realize that a five year in-game endeavour is going to take them half of an RL year to manage. I'm sure some people will respond to that with "Big things don't come easy", but if you look at the history file and see everything that happened in the past history of the game that was generated by players, and then realize that to do something equal yourself it would take twice as long RL for the same ZT time investment, it's a bit daunting.

While characters can certainly still grow old and have a long life, right now it would take 5 RL years of playing time on one character to see them live from 16 to 60. If you take the shorter average lifespan Qetesh offered and go from 16 to 40, it'd still be almost three years. But unless you're REALLY good, chances are your long lived character will probably be a noncombatant merchant/noble/aide/bard etc rather than some kind of house guard or hunter. Characters living in luxury like that most likely have a longer life expectancy anyway. To me, it just feels like most of us are playing only snapshots (or in most cases the final days/years) of our PCs lives, because even if you can reach an RL year of playtime with your PC, they've still only aged 8 and a half years from when you started them. That's a decent amount of time, but in the interest of playing out a PC's full life and growth from young to old, I think a quicker pace would be nicer.

Also, as it is right now, if you want your PC to start raising a family, you could have your vnpc children be born today... and two years from today, in July 2007, the kids would ICly be 17 and you could try and recruit someone to play them with you. Assuming your PC is still around by then. Yes, with a faster scale it would still be one RL year, but one year instead of two is a significant difference.

So anyway. That's the follow up I promised on why I'd like a quicker pace. All in all I think we'd see a benefit by allowing long term plots and things that require lots of IC time to happen faster. I'm sure there's things I haven't considered, though... so flame away.

[Fragmented]

I'd just like to say that I would also love to see time speeded up a bit, for all the reasons Jherlen mentioned.

[FiveDisgruntledMonkeysWit]

I would hate to see a quicker pace, solely because I'm the type of player to take frequent "breaks" from the game. When real life intervenes, and I can't log on for a month or so, I don't want to come back to a lot of "Amos! By Krath! I thought you were dead! We haven't seen you in seventeen years. My, you've aged terribly..."
As it is currently, Zalanthan time moves at a comfortable pace with the RL world. I feel that speeding up time in Zalanthas would cause things to happen faster, cause people to die faster. Currently it feels like I'm living almost every step of my character's life. A day for me is a week for him, and we can "catch up" during the scant two hours or so I have to play each night. If you speed that up, you risk causing an imbalance. Suddenly a day for me is weeks for my character. What if I can't play for a night? What if I can't play for a week? What if I lose power, and can't play for a month? Then the gap between me and my character grows. Instead of being a unique, almost-human entity I can understand, my character becomes like a frantic, wheeling insect, running about in the text-based microcosm of Zalanthas with me peering into the petri dish for a few hours each night.
I like the pace we have now. If anything, it should be slowed down even more.

[joyofdiscord]

I see the benefits of a faster time rate, but I also enjoy playing out the day/night rhythm.  With time moving twice as fast, the sun would be zooming across the sky and long conversations would stretch on twice as many days as they already do.  An IC day, IMO, would become practically meaningless as a unit of time.  That's just my little observation.

[amoeba]

So anyway. That's the follow up I promised on why I'd like a quicker pace. All in all I think we'd see a benefit by allowing long term plots and things that require lots of IC time to happen faster. I'm sure there's things I haven't considered, though... so flame away.

I'm not sure it would effect the pace of plots all that much. Plots tend to take some time for a number of different reasons.   Someone might need to get a few skills up to snuff before venturing into doing something dangerous, an assassin is not much of an assassin until thier skills get up to par for example.  It may take some time to build support for an idea, take planning, take getting enough information from your spies to make something happen.  Sometimes it may take getting just the right person in at the right time to make a plot move forward.  I suspect even a single death can kill or seriously delay a plot.  Very little in the way of plot development has anything to do with the rate of passage of time.

[Angela Christine]

Many more exciting time topics, from 2004:

http://www.zalanthas.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7451

http://www.zalanthas.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7460

http://www.zalanthas.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7466

Hey, look, it's a poll!
http://www.zalanthas.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7506

http://www.zalanthas.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=8029


Personally, I'd prefer it if there were 12 IC years per RL year (which would make each IC year last one RL month).  But that may be because the first MUD I played used that time scale, rather than a totally impartial preference.


Angela Christine

[Tiernan]

I'm going to split my response into two posts because I have two very important points to make and I want the distinction to be clear.  These are the passage of time and the perception of time.  I would like to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, and not some kind of twisted fruit salad.

The passage of time:

The passage of time in Zalanthas has always been that 1 Zalanthan Time (ZT) hour was roughly 10 RL minutes.  This was not radically altered when the Zalanthan clock was synchronized to the real-life clock.  The imprecision was simply removed.

Before synchronization, one would say:

A Zalanthan hour is approximately 10 RL minutes.

After synchronization, one says:

A Zalanthan hour is exactly 10 RL minutes.

Did the passage of time in the game ever occur quicker than it does now?

I contend that these apples are the same.   The passage of time did not slow down.  It continues at the same pace it always has.

[Tiernan]

Now that we all understand that the passage of time did not radically change, I can discuss the perception of time.

The perception of time:

The easiest way to try and demonstrate why everyone originally perceived time as moving faster than it really was passing might be by asking you to only use the odd-numbered months in your RL calendar.  You would transition from January to March to May to July to September to November and then back to January.  Skipping all the even months sure would feel like the year went by twice as fast, but in reality, it's still only 6 months.  This was the problem that was corrected when the Zalanthan clock was synchronized with the real-life clock.  The Saturday downtime had the errorneous affect of "skipping a month" so that everyone was thinking it was March when, in fact, it was really February.  That the codebase continually operated with this logically-flawed algorithm for as long as it did only perpetuated the false perception that Zalanthan time moved at a faster rate than it actually passed.

To try and depict this visually, I have to use the 'code' tag so that the text comes out pre-formatted and not skewed by fonts, etc.

Code Select Expand

The real passage of time:
|-JAN-|-FEB-|-MAR-|-APR-|-MAY-|-JUN-|-JUL-|-AUG-|-SEP-|-OCT-|-NOV-|-DEC-|

The perceived time elapsed:
|-JAN-|-MAR-|-MAY-|-JUL-|-SEP-|-NOV-|

The odd months are the ones you would've roleplayed had you been logged in between Saturday downtimes.  The even months are the ones which got skipped.  If you had important events you wanted to roleplay during those even months, you missed out.  This could've been something innocuous like your birthday, or perhaps a more monumental event like the end of the 20th Age, which would most likely have been a world-wide celebration for some, or the ominous end of the world for others.  That it was skipped because of a flaw in the codebase's timekeeping system...  that denies everyone the opportunity to roleplay on/about significant calendar dates.

By synchronizing the two clocks, this "skipping" behavior was rectified and the perception of time was adjusted correctly to the passage of time.

[Jherlen]

Thanks, Tiernan, for the extra info, and to AC for all the other links... all very helpful. I should have done more homework before I posted this topic.

Lots of what I'm about to say is just echoing what was already stated across the five links AC provided, but I wanted to just put down my case all in one place anyway.

So, from what Tiernan has posted, it seems like the change to how time was passing was more of a bug fix and a standardization than an intentional change in the pacing of time. Which is great - as someone else stated I'd much rather have a slow but reliable paced system over one where my pc's age is jumping around all over.

Likewise, as someone else said somewhere else, making a ZT hour exactly ten minutes long is immensely useful. A ten minute hour / ninety minute day seems to work really well as far as day to day pacing of the game goes. A five minute hour would feel silly.

ON THE OTHER HAND, an IC calendar is pretty arbitrary. We can keep the new, improved and stable time flow and gear it to whatever speed we want (I think?). I'm too lazy to paste quotes from other threads, but I believe it was AC who wrote that hour/day time and month/year time are really different beasts. A calendar change to allow years to pass quicker, in my opinion, seems like an idea at least worth considering. This would address joyofdiscord's remarks about daylong conversations taking twice as long and the sun flying across the sky. And, honestly, unless my PC is constantly missing out on holiday parties at the end of the months, I don't think things would change much in practicality if months shortened to 150 days instead of 231, or whatever. Docs would need to be changed, yes, and I agree with (I think it was Tlaloc who said) that changes to the game world and documentation shouldn't be done lightly. However, I'll stand by my thoughts that a faster year-to-year pace would speed up long term plot evolution in the game.

FDMW makes a good point that people who take extended breaks would be gone for longer ICly than normal with a faster pace, and I'll concede that might sometimes be hard to explain, but it's explainable, and most people seem willing to forgive not seeing a PC ICly because a player can't OOCly be online.

In response to amoeba's points... some plot development would speed up, others wouldn't. Any plot which is tied to a specific time frame would be accomplished quicker on a faster calendar. Obviously plots which need player development would move the same rate regardless of speed of IC time, but things such as "Building this super uber fortress of doom will take you ten years" will still take ten years, but those ten years won't be over a year of RL time for the player to wait. It sucks when any long term goals or plans a PC has are tempered by time requirements right now, because although it might be realistic for your project to take 5 IC years, that's a commitment of 6-7 months of RL time. You might die stupidly between then and now, or you may no longer be able to play for any number of unforeseeable reasons. To me, it just seems hard for PCs to create something or make a long term mark on the world of that nature when time runs that slow.

It's almost a matter of philosophy and what sort of events we'd like driving the game that determines what sort of pace to gear things at. If the intent is to allow players the opportunity to create big things and accomplish large goals or see master plans carried out over the course of several years IC time; or even on a lesser level, to allow players to play out the entire life and growth of a pc from young years to elder age, raising a family and making a history along the way, I think a faster yearly calendar would be more helpful. If, on the other hand, things are meant to be a little more static and the focus is more on the mundane, day-to-day lives of pcs where the players would act out five or six years of their character's lives on average, the rate we have now seems better suited. There are certainly good things either way. I'm just in support of a faster pace for the reasons I've mentioned.

One more note to add: I agree with AC, a one month RL = 1 year IG scale for a calendar sounds really nice, and easy to calculate passage of time from, without being too excessively fast. Really like that idea.