By: |
 Northstar.3798
Member of Vengeance |
Posted On: 03/04/2013 at 11:54 AM
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I cannot see where I can change the time zone for -5 est or New York time... it's stuck on "Seattle/Server" time.
Thank you,
[VNG] Northstar
No Mercy.No Remorse
http://www.VengeanceClan.com
By: |
 Foghladha.2506
Site Admin of Gaiscioch na Rall
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Replied On: 03/04/2013 at 03:26 PM
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The site is built to run on Server time so that when we schedule event's it's server time. This way you can have the ingame clock on Server time and everyone knows when that is. I have the clocks at the top of the screen for people to reference.
Benjamin Foghladha
Community Manager, SanctumofRall.com
Founder and Activities Director, The Gaiscioch Family [GSCH]
Server time may be well and good, but I dare say most of us live in local time and schedule our lives in that realm. Server time is great when all we care about is projecting whether we do something in 2 or 5 hours from now and use server time on the client because scheduling game activities is all that matters to us, but it's a royal pain in the axe grinder when I'm looking at the number 9 three days from now and wondering if that's mid-afternoon, suppertime, or 3am to me.
Heck, even if the times were in UTC we'd at least have a common single conversion that we're accustomed to doing regularly with the relevant math carried in the definition of our own local timezone. But using server time means we need to know two timezones one of which is not familiar to most of us. And those cities at the top of the page are no help when we're not in those timezones...it would be far more helpful if it just told us what offset Seattle time was. That's the piece of math that's missing from most people's active recall.
I made a point of configuring my client to use local time because it's far more important to me that I be alert to my "real life" scheduling, and it comes as a bit of a surprise when systems avoid the tiny effort required to respect that. Just because the math is easy doesn't mean we should be having to do it all the time. And with the double conversion, it's just complicated enough that people will make mistakes and miss events anyway.
It's especially a shame because my likelihood of using a system is highly dependent on its convenience and ease of use. :/ Getting registered on this site in order to voice such complaints in the first place is just complicated enough with getting the access code that I strongly suspect the needs of the general server audience are steeply under-represented. I'm likely not the only person who's known about this site for months and chosen not to use it because of such inconveniences. (I'm only here now because I want to play a stronger role in WvW despite being in a WvW-casual guild, and listening in on the weekly server meetings doesn't cut it.) I still won't be using the most useful content/features on this site until they're more usable.
If the site maintainer is dead set against it, I'd still like to hear from anyone else who'd really like a more typical alternative. With sufficient interest, I'll publish a userscript that fixes the times client-side. But I'd like to suggest a more flexible alternative: you could at least wrap all timestamps in span tags and generate a kittenle attribute containing local time so we at least have access to it in tooltips, or another attribute containing a full timestamp string so client-side fixes can work more efficiently and reliably.
I suppose I should note, lest I sound like I'm raging on poor Foghladha, that what's really retarded is that the servers themselves aren't using UTC in the first place.
After all, everyone loves applying a meaningless offset to their clock times that also changes up to 4 times a year and as many as two of them with no one around you knowing or caring about the change.
And ANet wouldn't be the first big-kittenle developer to have a live system fall flat on its face because they used local time instead of UTC and failed to account for DST changes affecting stored data and/or live execution. /facepalm
