How long should one full day/night cycle be in EverQuest Next?

While I like the list, are we really advocating for Farmville here?

Fantastic map that really supports what I was saying earlier about light pollution. Im in the NE corner of New York, just below Montreal and above the blue splotch that is the Adirondack Park. You literally have to go deep into the Park to get any kind of true darkness. My partner lives just over the border in Quebec, Canada, and there is no true darkness there because of Montreal, which casts an ENORMOUS amount of light for hundreds of miles.

Most folks in the U.S. have never experienced real darkness outside; even the people in more remote locations still have some sort of artificial light pollution. Which is one reason why a real dark cycle in EQN would be so wonderful, so scary, so immersive. Im praying the devs get the hint...

Agreed.. Some Fear would be fun..

From what I am seeing, people seem to be mostly falling into either similar to EQ and EQ2 or the Slightly longer cycle group and I agree with this idea, especially the slightly longer category. While I don't normally have hours and hours to spend logged in each time I get to log in to play, I still want to feel like I am actually accomplishing something during my gameworld day rather than just seeing it rush through a lighting change or more advanced mechanic that may be incorporated with a day/night cycle. I would love to see the day/night cycle actually mean something in EQN, such as an area is more dangerous at night because the goblins might be more willing to come out and attack denizens of the world at night when they would be "resting/camping" or things like this. Maybe some creatures would only be able to be found in the open world during the day or night time and otherwise vanish. This would be especially true of some types of spirits, or underground creatures that would be more sensitive to light. If this is implemented, you need more time to take advantage of it and so I would recommend a day/night cycle roughly along these lines:
Day - between 2 and 3 hours
Night between 1.5 and 2.5 hours
Full cycle would be 4.5 hrs
Some of the time from day and night would be shaved off to account for the transition time.
The time for each stage could be made variable to include differences in the amount of daylight/nighttime based on seasons or potentially also include the region of the world you are in to add a more realistic feel to the world over time.
The reason I picked a total cycle time of 4.5 hrs is to help people who have a constant range of time that they play on a regular basis still be able to experience the different times of day and be able to partake in any special activities/events that are time of day sensitive.

I also agree with the individuals who would like to see Night really mean Night. Much shorter range of vision because there isn't enough light to see by. Torches, campfires, and other sources of light (magical and non-magical) would become important in setting up a camp and spotting a threat in time. Maybe have light sources have their own range of illumination and amount of illumination they provide. Just some ideas that I hope will help make EQN a very immersive experience for all of its players.

Fear is fun! And immersive. Getting your heart pumping just a little bit because you are running for a zone line.. wheee that was always a good time. Speaking of that, I wonder what they are going to do with monster pursuit? Since theres not going to be any zone lines to break off monster pursuit (I assume), what will they do? Will they tweak the pursuit time? Allow for additional monster to monster agro? Sounds like another good topic...

[quote="I'd also like the return of functional special eyesight for some races - however - I can hear the screams of "unfair!" from here, so I'll just pin that on my wish list for later.[/quote]

Well - we're way off topic here but as long as each race has something special about them then fair is not an issue. I want nights as dark as possible as well. I'd love to see functional infravision, ultravision, etc. as long as they are accurately represented. infravision would look more like red/white, ultra would look more like starlight (washed out). Then the longer day / night cycles will actually mean something to your choices and equipment crafted to include infra or ultra vision would have value.

lol

I would say 2 and a half hours would be ideal for a full day cycle. Any longer than that would most likely put "casuals" a bit off.
1 hour of darkness is enough and most likely majority of the player base would agree. 4-6 hour day cycles is too excessive for normal players which SOE will try to lure in. Heck, even when I can put up a 5 hour session I would dislike over 3 hour day cycle. It would get too annoying for me at least if I decide to hit 1 and a half our game session and be the whole time in the dark.
I really don't believe that the day cycles would be over 3 hours.

I'm getting there myself. These polls are seeming more and more like marketing rather than anything of substance. These night & day issues will be the determining factor (for me at least) since the votes and the forum posts have been such land slides in favor of a particular option.

edit: For the record, I prefer post #98 talking about time changing according to seasons. However if that's not possible and we need a static time, then somewhere around 2 to 2.5 hours seems like fine comfort zone to me.

I voted with the herd and asked for a slightly longer cycle. something on the order of 2 hours feels right to me. A lot depends on if there will be time of day dependent quests and such...

-Bongo

LoL never played farmville tbh. The crops growing better/being more abundant in summer was something someone else proposed. I was merely making a list of all the day/night cycle things that I could think of that would be interesting avenues to explore. Some of those also being weather/seasonal related, as those are extensions of day/night.

The closer they can make it to a living world with distinct day/night cycles and attendant weather/seasonal patterns (albeit in a time compressed format) the better, imo

Agreed to a point.. sometimes its just better, the other way around.. not excusing them, just saying sometimes its just not going to be that way, you can either Deal or leave. I want 0 fast travel, I am okay with Crossbows and Guns ( guns as long as they are more like Steam powered vorpral cog launchers) Really its SOE's game, however they are just using the polls to see if they are Really on the wrong side.. basically its to tell them when they are WAY off... then they will change to my understanding.

uhu the only reason I didn't vote for "much longer cycle" is because I believe it still should be easy to experience both settings for casual players too..while I think that the length of each should change properly according to the season
And I'd love to have scary nights too

I don't really care for how long they last as long as the nights and days exist, that a transition is felt overtime, that I can do something during both time period and that I'm not stuck in a constant night or day everyday when I log into the game.

Really, I can't say what the best duration would be.

Screw the Casuals!!!!!!!!!!!! lol jk jk... would be nice to see that Server that is for Hard core players.

Now I'll make a drastic proposal, but before saying that is absurd bear with me for a bit. I will explain it using a kind of scientific method.
The daytime in game and with that I mean the day/night full cycle should be of 36 real time hours so one day in the game is one day and an half in real time.
I'll make assumption/hypothesis so if they are not met, the whole reasoning collapses.

• The world is a dynamic one with the emergent AI
• There aren't normal questes but Rallying Calls
• Event will change during night and day
• Players usually have a somehow scheduled life so during the week they tend to play at the same hour in each day of the week
• In game there is not the changing of the day light length based on seasons (half of daytime is day, half of daytime is night)

With the 36h time cycle in game the time in game will reset to starting position every three days in real time.

I'll use G for game time and R for real time.
Now on day one when in G there will be the sunset, in R it will be 0:00, (just for reference) the night will end 18 hours after (36/2), in R at 6:00 pm we will see the sunrise in G.
Let say that a player will connect first time in day one at sunrise G, 6:00 pm in R, and will do that in all working days.
In day one at 6:00 pm he/she will see sunrise, day two the night, day three day, and from day four it start again. That way a player that work/study will be able to experience in 3 day, playing at the same hour, the day, the night and the changing from night to day. If the player connect when it is already night or day he/she will experience: if connect before the sunrise on day one, night-night(or sunset if connect at 12:00)-day - if connect after sunrise on day one, day-night-day. If connect at 6:00 am, night-day-sunrise.

Well a daytime that long have also drawback of course. I'm just expressing a divergent idea.
However if you cut the full daytime to 18h or 9h you will have the same "effect" but more often.

hmm Server with different time schedules wouldn't bother me at all I suppose

I think if there is NPC activity too,shops closing at night,...it could require to plan ahead..surely it might be an 'inconvenience' but not sure if it would be good/bad thing..a full bag can be annoying if nothing can be done about it but I also think everything has gotten too convenient and easy in games lately

What I would like to see rather than giving the game a day and night cycle would be to have a system like Age of Conan uses in Tortage. Day and Night don't alternate there, but are simply two different versions of the same region that you can choose according to your preferences.

So let's say you use a bed to switch from daytime to nighttime, and you exist in the same world in both of them, but daytime is comparably safe, a good time to train, harvest and explore, while night time is pretty dangerous, the monsters are more numerous, PvP rules might be more relaxed etc.

The environment in a city could also be drastically different from daytime to night time. While during the day the guards are well aware of any wrongdoing, at night only a few of them patrol the streets. Shops that sell items during the day might be closed at night, and become targets for thieves and other nefarious characters.

The thing is, if you run the whole thing as a cycle where people have no real choice about whether their character is going to go adventuring during the daytime or the night time since they are restricted by what time they have available to play you can't really make the changes all that huge. If you give people full control about whether they want to play during the day or the night though you can utterly flip the rules on their head.

You could have abilities that work only during day or night, you could have missions that require you to be out and about at certain times of the day etc. The thing that makes the day/night shift work really well in single player RPGs has always been the ability to skip from one to the other as needed. The same thing could work in an MMO.

Gotta love the longer cycles - around 3 hours would suit me fine.