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

What was the result? Did they say what they are going with at this point?

Longer than most games! Games where they cycle every hour or two are too quick. Day night cycles become meaningless to the point that often I won't notice it's night or day in a great game like Planetside 2.

It's often the limitations that make virtual worlds richer, more immersive and believable.

I agree. The quest to never inconvenience players, or to attempt to placate them with a Disneyland patina of "Fairness" results in boring games.

But as a human I can't see in the dark!

It's an insurmountable challenge, the Devs must respond by making night shorter, and making underground brighter. They should also give you some Station Cash for having been inconvenienced by having to wait so long for day.

2 hours is their latest claim. Game is a still a ways off though so tack a subject to change on there.

While I agree inconveniences can richen a world and make gameplay deeper, at the same time, simply being inconvenient for the sake of being inconvenient or worse, selectively inconvenient, isn't doing the game any favors either. I'd rather shorter, darker nights than a 24 hour cycle where nights must be bright because the peeps that can only log in after sundown/before sunrise need to be able to play comfortably too.

Shorter cycles means nearly everyone gets to suffer the same BS and as a result no one gets left out of that experience. The only selectively inconvenient variables should be those born of player actions and habits: a player logging into the dead of the night can't control that there are fewer people online, and neither can SOE, so that's on the individual player, as apathetic as that sounds. SOE has control over day/night cycles, but not player quantities.

Yeah real time day/night is not a good solution in my opinion. A 2 hour very dark night when there is no moon is fine.

One thing I hate about GTA V is the fact I do not get to enjoy the lit up city at night more. If you are going to have fantastic lighting then PLEASE extend the night cycle.

While the hour-ish baseline is a good idea, I think it makes sense to have that time drawn out a bit longer, if only to add to the immersion and help you be aware of the fact that time has actually changed, rather than have it be a casual on/off switch. Maybe have daytime/nighttime sensitive to the seasons (longer nights in winter and longer days in summer)?

It is important to make sure that all sorts of players with different play times are able to experience all of the cycles. On the one hand making it real time would defeat that purpose, on the other hand making it too short would not be satisfying enough. The ideal day/night cycle would be something around 5 hours before every switch. So there can also be one hour of shift every day that those logging on at specific times may have a chance to experience different cycles after a few real days.

I was actually hoping for a time frame of 90 minutes to about 2 hours so this is good news to me I feel that a 2-ish hour timeframe gives everyone not only a good opportunity to see the gameworld at both day and night, but gives any time-of-day-based events enough time so they can be accomplished reasonably (like when the undead started coming out at night in Kithicor Forest).

I would think that day/night cycles only impact visibility. If they are adding bosses or creatures that only spawn during certain times of the day, that has a bigger impact on gameplay, and thus might justify shorter cycles. Most of the games I play, I usually can't tell since you only learn by exploration.

Day/Night cycles (IMHO) should have a vast array of changes, exactly as the real world does.

For example: The average American City Downtown (not rural town and not New York City) plays host to the (mostly) business crowd during the day. Once the sun goes down, the business-folk hit the clock and the entertainment district lights up and a completely different category of person inhabits downtown.

Somewhere along the lines, even they head home and it becomes a ghost town until the next morning when the process starts all over again.

I'd like to have what we have on Earth while the in-game to real world cycle ratio should be somewhere between 5.5 and 4.5, i.e. a full cycle being ~4h22min to 5h20min (IMHO).

So we'd see days longer than nights in summer and the opposite in winter. Awesome would be having greater differences between length of day and length of night and longer transitions between day and night the farther away you are from the equator. For that of course I'm assuming the in-game world is a spinning globe orbitting it's source of light. If not, ignore this paragraph and tell us please what instead is the case. (not being sarcastic)

Still not being sarcastic, why must the full cycle fit into an average game session?

Day night cycles should be very long. It should be long enough that the time of day actually feels like real time. There should be some different stuff to do at different times of day stuff that more accurately represents what the enemy would do if it was actually night time. Maybe the big wolf pack leader is wandering the plains in the day time but retreats back to its cave at night? There needs to be enough time to do tons of stuff without feeling like you're rushed! You need plenty of time to EXPLORE and discover stuff without feeling like if you don't make a B-line straight to your objective or the Day-Night cycle will shift before you finish. I would say make it 1/3rd the real world length! This would make sure its always changing and if you can only play the game at the same time every day this would give you opportunities to play at different times of day in the game. If you wake up and its day then at noon its night then back to day it would be reverse the next day. Wake up and its night then noon comes around and its day then its back to night.

I would hate to be stuck in the dark for a complete play session. Especially when you take into account that my poor little old human can't see that well... well, unless I adjust the brightness and contrast, but that's just plain not fair

Hm, instead you prefer being stuck in the dark half a session every session? This way you'd also pass on ever getting stuck in the light for a complete session.

I just think it would be a shame not to give either the day and the night the time to bloom. And I think this is the only thing that's affected by the choice of cysle length as long as there is a shift, so that players logging in at let's say 8pm every day see different in-game times of day, and there are still multiple cycles per RT-day. How long one plays in light or dark wouldn't be affected in the long run.

I can understand not wanting that. It's different fo me, but I understand. I used to work the graveyard shift so severely that in the winters, I woke up to darkness, and went to bed in darkness: never seeing the sun except on my days off from work. If that were the case, I'd sure hate to see no sun in my games either!

I've been playing and the night cycles seem really long and the day one very short. I would much prefer shorter night cycles and longer day cycles. Heck just make it an option and let the client side handle day night cycles taking the issues off the server side.

I'd prefer 2 EQ days to 1 real day. Or 3 at most.

If you mean each player should be able to choose his own cycle length, that wouldn't work, considering the depending changes in the game world. Unless you want to end up in situations like: Another group member gets surrounded by zombies and cries for your help, but you don't see any zombies.

I will never forgot my first sunset in World of Warcraft when I played on US server.... sunset at lake when it was almost night where I lived ( Lakeshire location?), it was what was bugging me for over a year and because of what I comme back to WoW next summer...and next was fishing etc... ppl love gathering and odd jobs. I like fishing and herb gathering especialy. If I can create explosives I am as good as set for journey.