17 Dec, 2009, Tonitrus wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
I've been considering the issue of time in a mud setting for awhile. I played a ROM mud where ticks were referred to as "hours", which they were. Since the ticks were about 60 minutes, this converted nicely as a way of communicating time. A mud "hour" was about a real life minute. A mud day was around 30 minutes, if I recall, so that would have worked well as a way to specify time also. Ignoring the whois display of age, a mud year is about a real life month (I believe).

From the perspective of clarity, these time units correspond well to RL units and are fairly clear once people catch on, and serve as a nice way to span time quickly, which is handy for affects and things like injury or even prison time. Have a sprained ankle for "an hour" is a lot less believable than "2 days", even if the ultimate real life time span is the same.

On the other hand, combats that span a number of hours are pretty unbelievable. The day and night fluctuation can also be quite irritating to vampires, for example, and if you had to manually eat/drink, it'd require an excessive amount of food.

If you consider bleeding as a game mechanic, this speed is too fast to have interesting bleeding, since anyone bleeding any significant amount for an hour is probably dead, and expecting people to bandage injuries in <1 round is pretty awful.

Another problem would be scheduling, if people are going to use IC terms for time, a system for converting IRL time to mud time would need to exist.

Another, easy-to-communicate, option is to have real time, where 1 mud minute equals 1 real life minute. This has a number of advantages, like never having to bother with converting it, and never having newbies who don't realize whatever alternative system you have in place exists.

This has a number of problems, if you want even token-effort realism, since any interesting injury would extend for a duration that is pretty insufferable for a game. Spraining your ankle for a real life day would probably be doable, if annoying, but broken bones would take an unspeakably long time.

Day/night, which may be of interest to certain creature types, may also be problematic, as people might only be able to log on at non-ideal times.

Real time also doesn't span time very quickly, which seems non-ideal for creating history. Given the rates that guilds and orders and things of that nature go through leaders, it also seems pretty inappropriate to use real time.

I've heard of certain muds introducing their own units of measurement and whatnot, which could possibly also be used with time to avoid the confusion of having mud "minutes" being confused with IRL "minutes", but I tend to find such practices pretentious.

As the above may or may not have implied, I am curious as to the rates of time different muds utilize and their effects on:

1) Ease of communication with respect to RP
2) Their effects on realism/quasi-realism
3) Their effects on gameplay and game mechanics.
4) Their effects on immersion.
5) How much trouble it is to mentally convert between them and real time.
17 Dec, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
In my game, 1 real-life second = 4 mud seconds, and 336 mud days make a mud year. Thus you get to experience exactly 4 mud days per real-life day, and 1 mud season lasts exactly 3 real-life weeks.

The days get longer as you approach mid-summer, while the nights get longer as you approach mid-winter, and different mobs spawn during the day and night. Some mobs also spawn differently based on the season (eg, during autumn treants are described as having brown leaves, and are particularly vulnerable to fire, while during winter their branches are bare and they're almost invulnerable to cold attacks). Lakes and ponds also freeze over during winter, allowing you to walk on them.

As my mud world is so large, I did toy with the idea of defining day and night relative to your geographic location. But in the end I decided it wouldn't really add anything to the gameplay, and having different timezones could get really confusing for the players.
17 Dec, 2009, Runter wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
In my last MUD I used server time for the in-game time. I never too closely integrated the gameplay with it. Nothing artificial anyways. In our player owned shop code players often would choose to leave their shops only open for hours of the day they thought would be useful to their bottom line. So often (depending on the shop) they would be closed over night. Albeit, some types of player owned shops did tend to stay open.

So needless to say, an hour in my game was an hour. A minute was a minute. 10 seconds left on a buf was..surprise, 10 seconds. :p


I never really understood the pressing need to use "ticks." I think it's better just to have an actual determined value and if you want to hide it from the user or give it a little random fuzz then do that. The polling tick system seemed inadequate and annoying as a player.
17 Dec, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
For historical reference… Everquest used a cycle of 1 game day == 70 minutes of real time. Their reasoning was that they expected most of their players to sit down and play for 2 or 3 hours (at most!), and that would let them experience at least one full day and night cycle, and possibly two. The reason they chose 70 minutes instead of 60, is so that day and night tend to rotate around the clock over time.

One of the complaints that World of Warcraft gets is that their clock is 1:1. The day/night cycle is synced to the wall clock, which means if you tend to always play around the same time every day, it's always day or always night.

By the same token, one of the old muds I used to play on (BatMUD) had a daily reboot (not sure why, it was an LP), and they scheduled it to run every 25 hours, so that it would be fair to every player's timezone.

All in all, most players don't care how accurate time is. They care how fast or slow things happen. If combat is complex and requires many decisions, having a constant stream of events may be overwhelming. On the other hand, the typical mud combat is simple enough, that fast paced means less watching TV and hitting up-arrow/return.

For travel/crafting/etc… find a pace that feels like you're making progress without making it trivial. Speedwalking is bad, but having to plod along a route for 45 minutes is also bad unless there's plenty of other things to do while you're traveling.

Once you have that all settled, then adjust your game clock so day/night/seasons happen however often you think they should happen.
17 Dec, 2009, Orrin wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
On our MUD one game hour is 4 minutes of real time so a day lasts for about an hour and a half. We have 30 day months with 12 months in the year, so it's fairly predictable for players. As Quix mentions, avoiding multiples of 24 so that your new day/month/year rotates around the clock for players is a good idea, particularly if you have in game events tied to time. We don't have any random variation in the passage of time, but it's something I have thought about adding.

We don't close shops at night or anything like that, but we do vary room descriptions and other room effects by time of day, as well as having mobs that do different things during day/night etc. We also have seasonal trade/craft activities; fields can only be planted with crops in the spring and harvested in the autumn, sheep can only be sheared in the summer, etc. (these aren't meant to be too accurate, just to give a variety of things to do throughout the year).
17 Dec, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
Orrin said:
As Quix mentions, avoiding multiples of 24 so that your new day/month/year rotates around the clock for players is a good idea, particularly if you have in game events tied to time.

Depends on the mud. Some of my players specifically log on at certain times to kill day or night mobs, and if mud time was out of sync with real time that would become very difficult for them to plan.

I also have a minigame called "Great War" which kicks off every 6 real-life hours, and I always receive complaints when the scheduled time changes due to daylight saving. Once again, there are players who specifically log on for the Great War (their first game each real-life day is applied to the weekly scoreboard so players can plan their games well in advance).
17 Dec, 2009, Barm wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
For my project, I went with a two-hour game day. I don't have months. Twelve game years = one real solar year so I get to ignore leap days. Game time is converted from Unix time() so it doesn't matter if you unplug the server.

I made a blog post with more detail here; http://bogboa.blogspot.com/2009/02/days-...

Coincidentally, I wrote about EQ vs. WoW time just like Quixadhal mentioned above. I have not put my tiny brain to the issue of scheduling events for specific real-world datestamps yet.
17 Dec, 2009, Orrin wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
Depends on the mud. Some of my players specifically log on at certain times to kill day or night mobs, and if mud time was out of sync with real time that would become very difficult for them to plan.

It depends on the frequency of the activity. Your 6 hour example is fine because it gives people of different timezones the chance to participate, but if you have a MUD event that only occurs once a real life week for example, then having that always happen at the same time each week could potentially exclude some players.
17 Dec, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
Orrin said:
It depends on the frequency of the activity. Your 6 hour example is fine because it gives people of different timezones the chance to participate, but if you have a MUD event that only occurs once a real life week for example, then having that always happen at the same time each week could potentially exclude some players.

You're always going to end up excluding some players, so if you've got an event that only runs once per week you're going to have to make some hard choices. Selecting the time of day when the playerbase is usually at its peak increases the likelyhood of maximum turnout, and running the event at the same time every week makes it easier for players to plan their attendance in advance (imagine if your favourite TV show was shown an hour later each week, or if your kung-fu/singing/dancing/etc class rotated around the clock!).

Rotating the events might be fairer on an individual basis, but overall I'd expect fewer players to take part. Personally I'd rather see events scheduled more frequently than once per week, but if you really to go that route it might be worth making it a 24-hour event (I actually ran a 24-hour event on the original GW mud, although I hadn't counted on 3 players forming a round-the-clock tag-team).
17 Dec, 2009, Orrin wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
Personally I'd rather see events scheduled more frequently than once per week, but if you really to go that route it might be worth making it a 24-hour event (I actually ran a 24-hour event on the original GW mud, although I hadn't counted on 3 players forming a round-the-clock tag-team).

To give an example from our MUD, we have crops that can only be harvested during the autumn months. This season lasts for about 5 days real time so everyone has a chance to harvest crops, however it's likely that the majority of the fields will be harvested at the start of the season. Because each of our months is about 45 hours, the precise time that autumn begins will vary from year to year. Harvest can have an impact on the competitive gameplay in the MUD (the raw materials can be used to craft items or supply your army for example) so in our case I think it's preferable to vary the time in order to be fair to everyone, particularly if we want to attract players from different timezones.

If you're talking about a scheduled event where the goal is maximum participation then you might decide to favour a particular timezone based on your players, and staff availability as well of course.
17 Dec, 2009, Skol wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
I've done a couple variations, one is a 6/1 the other is 4/1 (irl minutes to in-game hour).
The 4/1 is my current game, meaning each minute, 15 minutes in game passes, giving a 96 minutes/game day. On my spy mud I had the 1 minute = 10 minutes in game, gave a 144 minute/game day. That one I kind of liked from the aspect of rounds/turns etc, but other than that all I saw was a longer 'day/night' period.

Richard, love the idea of longer/shorter days! Also the freezing over is a great idea, love that. I completely considered different timezones as well, but then came to the same conclusion that it'd be less worth than bother.
18 Dec, 2009, shasarak wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
(imagine if your favourite TV show was shown an hour later each week, or if your kung-fu/singing/dancing/etc class rotated around the clock!).

Participants in kung fu, singing and dancing classes generally do not come from more than one continent to attend. Players on a MUD quite possibly do. It's not useful to compare an event that requires physical, real-life attendance with one that occurs only in cyberspace. The former is necessarily limited to the inhabitants of one time zone, the latter is not.
18 Dec, 2009, Tonitrus wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
For historical reference… Everquest used a cycle of 1 game day == 70 minutes of real time. Their reasoning was that they expected most of their players to sit down and play for 2 or 3 hours (at most!), and that would let them experience at least one full day and night cycle, and possibly two. The reason they chose 70 minutes instead of 60, is so that day and night tend to rotate around the clock over time.


While other useful information has been posted here that will require further thought, this spawned a separate question. If the Everquest people were right about the 2 or 3 hours and we assume that 2 to 3 hours represents a typical range of play, my cursory (and likely flawed) math leaves me with the following results for the variations mentioned thus far:

Diku/ROM time: 4 to 6 days of mudtime
4:1: 8 to 12 hours of mudtime
Everquest: <2 to <3 days of mudtime
1:1: 2 to 3 hours of mudtime
15:1: >1 to <2 days of mudtime (30 to 45 hours)
10:1: <1 to >1 days of mudtime (20 to 30 hours)
Barm's: 2 to 2.5 days of mudtime

If we assume 30 minutes as a typical login time, we get:

Diku/ROM time: 1 day of mudtime
4:1: 2 hours of mudtime
Everquest: half a day of mudtime
1:1: 30 minutes of mudtime
15:1: 7 hours of mudtime
10:1: 5 hours of mudtime
Barm's: half a day of mudtime

So, the question is: Which of these, if any, represents the ideal* amount of mud-time for a player to span at one sitting?

* for a given value of 'ideal'

P.S. Base 60 numbers confuse the hell out of me, so any of those numbers may or may not be hilariously wrong.
18 Dec, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
shasarak said:
Participants in kung fu, singing and dancing classes generally do not come from more than one continent to attend. Players on a MUD quite possibly do. It's not useful to compare an event that requires physical, real-life attendance with one that occurs only in cyberspace. The former is necessarily limited to the inhabitants of one time zone, the latter is not.

The distinction is pretty irrelevant to be honest, as the fact still remains that different times are more convenient for different people, whether its due to a clash with other hobbies, the desire for an early night, conflicts with working hours, or whatever else. My kung-fu class for example is at 6pm on Mondays, 8pm on Tuesdays and 7pm on Thursdays - but if all classes instead ran at the same time, but that time rotated weekly from 6pm through to 8pm, I know I'd find it much more difficult to plan my attendance.

And that was really the point. Ignore physical-vs-cyberspace comparisons, that's not relevant in this case. I'm just asking you to imagine planning your time around events that occur at a different time each week, compared to events that occur at the same time every week. I don't know about you, but I find the latter far easier than the former (although I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm a fairly disorganised person).
18 Dec, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
I agree with KV that – if there is a strong association between time and events – it can be confusing to not easily know what time an event is at. Even if a MUD is international, it's likely to have a generally core group of players, and you probably want to make life easy for those players. There's not much point in inconveniencing a considerable portion of your playerbase to hold some kind of large event for a relatively small group of people.

If you had several timezones with even distribution, perhaps the time could be set to rotate in a predictable fashion; for example you could know based on whether it's the first, second, third, week etc. which "slot" it was in terms of event planning. That said, while this is predictable, it can certainly be confusing as well.
18 Dec, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
Do note that there isn't any real reason why you can't have regularly scheduled events (for the players) at the same wall-clock time every day, while also having periodic world events (based on the game environment) happen at the same in-game-clock time every in-game day.

Personally, I like to see variety and change in the game world. If I know it has day and night effects, I'm kindof bummed if my work schedule only allows me to ever see one of them. Of course, I also would like to do some world events, and if they're always scheduled at times I can't play, that sucks for me too. If they rotate around the clock, I won't be able to do them every day/week/etc, but I can do them some of the time, and hopefully there's more than one such event.
18 Dec, 2009, Barm wrote in the 17th comment:
Votes: 0
Tonitrus said:
So, the question is: Which of these, if any, represents the ideal* amount of mud-time for a player to span at one sitting?


Let me preface this by saying that I'm a long ways from a live game and readily accept that a two-hour game day may not fly. I know that I want day and night to convey a tangible feel to the player and have meaningful affects on gameplay. One of the appeals (to me) of a two-hour game-day is it makes a game-year roughly equal to a real-time month. So October could correspond to the game's "Year of the Restless Dead" with appropriate ghoulies.

OTOH, this may not be so valuable to the player who has to wait 56 minutes to restock his bandage supply. Of course, big city vendors might provide extended shopping hours.
27 Dec, 2009, triskaledia wrote in the 18th comment:
Votes: 0
I currently use the Xalaiaix Moon system. Within this system the different times of the day you can view the moon to see where it is. With this system sometime I'd like to make damage increased for the different classes during the different cycles of the moon. I'm sure a lot more can be done with it… But that's where I want to go with it. I've also played a mud where they had their time set up to real time. The problem I found with that mud is that when you go the vampire race you've pretty much set yourself to be a night time player because you take sun damage during the day. The damage wasn't so severe that it made game play impossible, but it made it quite difficult because the sun would pretty much be there for the 3-4 hours I was allowed game play.
Quixadhal said something about using fixed events based on the mud time, and the problem I've found with this is that not everyone can log these "set" hours. The best thing I've found for events is randomly thrown events, or once they're set, they're there for a set amount of time - preferably at least a day to allow all players to participate. When I actually had players, I would only run events if so many players were online. …Or if I got drunk and was just feeling generous…
Lots of things can be done around the mud time, it all depends on what you want to do with it and how you plan to use it.
–Silence Tyire of Reanimation.
04 Jan, 2010, elanthis wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
If they rotate around the clock, I won't be able to do them every day/week/etc, but I can do them some of the time, and hopefully there's more than one such event.


Rotating at 2x speed might help here. If you can play at 7pm - 9pm every night, then your play sessions would alternate between night and day in-game. Same if you can only play on certain days of the week; one week you'd see one pattern of day/night cycles and the next week you'd see a different pattern.

What I would recommend is that if you have events tied to game time, make sure the game clock syncs against the wall clock. Do not calculate game time based on ticks or what have you, because then the time will drift. With synchronized time, players can at least know when to expect various in-game dates and day cycles to occur, whether or not the game is running at 1:1 speed, 12:1 speed, or 1:4 speed.

Putting a calendar or schedule on the game's website is also a great idea, especially if you sync your in-game events to the calendar automatically.
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