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

I would to see both day and night during gameplay. But enjoy the sunrise, set, static sun and moonlight

Please make TORCHES and LIGHT SPELL essential/necessary for gameplay,strategy and immersion!

i would like to enjoy morning,day,dusk,night i say 2 hours each,also during night let the creatures be more aggressive or atleast the carnivores! make it a lil more spooky at night hahaha

Landmark's current day/night cycle seems about right.

Slightly longer day/night cycles would be preferred, so that you can enjoy the passing of time.

To my knowledge this would be new and would give you some new and cool things to work with to enhance the experience. Night time is a luxury in games and it would be a fresh of breathe air to have a nice long experience adventuring at night.

Wait, so every week is 84 days?! Every month is about a year? Does that seem right? Are we going to see all 4 seasons in a month? The casual gamer who plays once a week will see a different season each time? Haha.
It just seems like a highly excellerated time for players to be immersed in the world. For the NPCs too. "Wow, it's been a week and that patrol guard has barely covered that 5 mile road." So I guess it also doesn't seem realistic to the world.

Also the fundamental game flaw I see is... If you're going to make it significant for it to be day or night then that means some things can only be done at day or night. So if I'm trying to do something at night, I only have an hour at a time in which to do it? Then I'd have to wait an hour to do it again. Or maybe I could rush to try and do some sort of day activity in that time before it's night again. Back & forth tugged stressfully by the very short day.

Now if day and night were meaningless then the cycle length would be aesthetic only, but they're going to be meaningful, right? Are players going to be able to do meaningful things in under an hour? will NPCs? Are they going to have to do huge gameplay strategy swings every hour due to the daylight?

I guess I'm saying that having meaningful day/night times in the game while also having such a short day/night cycle would be highly challenging to get to work well.

I'd just prefer a longer cycle. Why do players need to see entire day/night cycles everytime they play? Is playing for 4 hours without seeing the moon or seeing the sun a bad thing, when the next time they play they'll be able to see it? When I first heard about this cycle thing I wanted something more like a 36 hour cycle, where when you playit's a certain time (morning, afternoon, evening, night, early morning)and you have time to be immersed and enjoy that time. Sunsets are nice time of day in real life and last long enough to enjoy it. In a 2 hour day a sunset would be like a minute long, if you even cared about it since there are like 12 a day.

Hope this helps. =)

I agree with longer day-night cycles, but a flat 2 hours is just a plain bad idea.

The idea of a longer day/night cycle is to be able to have people experience fully each type of environment and associated content. The problem with a 2-hours cycle is for the casual gamer.

Because with 2 hours is that's a factor of 24. So, for example, every day between 7h30pm and 8h30pm, it will be night. So if I'm a student always coming back home at a certain time, or a parent with young kids who only gets an hour to play every day, it will always be the same. Instead, why not go with a slightly longer or shorter timeframe to make it so there's a cycle and its not always "2am at night" whenever I login at 8pm, when the kids are in bed?

For example, 117 minutes per cycle would actually induce a 36 minutes shift on the daily night-day cycle every day, for a 13-day cycle (every 13 RL days, that RL day would have the same occurences of day-night cycles at the same hour in the RL day). Here are a few examples of this :



I don't really have time to put up something nice showing that calculation's graph, but its based on that "Daily RL Offset vs. Complete IG day cycle (mins)" is :

Code:

[# of RL day minutes/day] - FLOOR( [# of RL day minutes/day] / [IG day length(mins)] ) * [IG day length(mins)]

For example : 1440mins - FLOOR( 1440mins / 120mins ) * 120mins = 0 mins offset because there's exactly 12 such 2-hours cycle every day.

I believe a good compromise giving a good shift (by 33% of a day-night cycle every day), allowing every play schedule to experiment every part of days, with a very low period (repeats every 127 weeks!), so :

If this type of compromise is not a direction EQN wants to take, can someone from the dev team explain to us why and what benefits there is to go with a factor-friendly cycle of 120mins?

Thanks for reading

I would say 1 hour real time for the day/nightcycle reason being a lot of gamers who game nowadays only alot themselves 1-3 hours to game each day, being able to experience both the night and day cycle within 1 hour timefram I think is perfect for todays MMORPG gamer

Well, I believe the model I propose both resolves that and accomodates the "longer day/night to enjoy more fully the content argument". If you only have one hour a night, instead of experiencing a full cycle everytime you play, you'd experience a different part of the cycle every time you play. So one day may be half-and-half day/night, while the next its all day and then again all night.

Would that work for you?

I'm in for something like a complete cycle of 160-200 (220 tops) minutes, also if possible day-night being positively or negatively longer/shorter depending on the season would be more than awesome.

an hour is just too short for any real meaningful day/night related restrictions (some shops not working during certain hours of the night for example) on the other hand a night that lasts more than 2 hours, that would be a nightmare, quite literally.

as for seasons and years something like 8-16 seasons per real life year sounds alright; and year would have somewhere between 2400 and 3300 days (real life year and ingame days) . If the World of Ever Quest Next has its own 'time' wouldn't that be awesome ^.^?

I like the way Landmark is currently doing it. Both the day and night last a good amount of time, enough time to rush over to that "Only appears at day/night!" quest/mob before the day cycle changes. Also, at least have a brief period of Dusk and Dawn. Have those be the transitions for AI changes between day and night. Enemies that only come out at night will start to dwindle off and be more timid at Dawn until they eventually run behind a rock and despawn, or have those sleeping Orcs start waking up, giving enough time for that thieving rogue to get out of dodge before the Orcs catch him taking their jewels and such.

Please could you include a "None of the above" option in round table items so that the EQ team can be informed if they are asking the right questions.

For instance if you are getting a sizeable "none of the above" count that would tell you that there is something you are not seeing. At the moment some of your "permitted" responses are just too narrow or simply don't allow for participants to inform you that you are not representing them in the survey.

Broadly speaking, the setup you currently have will likely prove that you are "almost always" right in your suppositions.
For instance, what if there are those who "don't wan't day/night cycles"? Whilst its not so very important to have that as a specific tick box, (such lists might grow to long,) it is important to know if you are perhaps missing something. A "none of the above" option catches this possibility and informs you.

Thanks in advance for listening.
I'm so very excited about EQ next.

I feel like the third option is the best.
The longer the better imo, but of course not too long. I'm not making much sense lol okay, let me say it better. It should be reasonably long, like maybe 4 day/night cycles per one real life day? Something like that would be cool.

At times a short cycle is nice, other times it is really a pain in the patoot. You get a quest where you have to do something only at a certain time, turns out that time is ending in 1 minute. Now you have to wait . The EQ/EQ2 72 minutes has been the norm for me. Sometimes I wish it went faster, and other times I wish it went slower. Really depending on what zone I was in at time time. Some places just look way better in the night time.

I really enjoy those quests though, ones you had to do only in the darkness of night. It really set some quests apart and made them really fun to do. Who goes on any assassination attempts at noon on the most sunniest day of the year?

Then again playing a night blind race, you could really learn to hate certain zones during certain times of the day...hehe...


I really really really hate the idea of a real life cycle, never seeing some places in the light of day, or under the moons. I would not enjoy this at all... I suppose it is nice for those players who are in game, and notice the sun is setting, and it is getting really dark in game, so it is time for bed