(06-23-2014, 08:41 AM)K Wrote: Me personally, I go by the main story quest AND the real world time. So to me, when the game launched it was 1577, but in january it became 1578Same. Of course, there'll always be people who will disagree and say that it was 1577 when they joined (regardless of how many years from now they'll join the game), so rule of thumb is to be vague with anyone who's outside your group/community's timeline until you are sure they're running on the same calendar you are.
(Do we have an RPC-Community timeline? Was the possibility of one discussed a long while back? The idea worked out wonderfully in the big RP community I was in in the past)
Anyways. To go by the in-game clock isn't viable. By the in-game clock, one month of Real-World time equals out to be just under two In-Game years. That equals out to almost twenty years have currently passed since ARR launched, and sets us up for having holidays that lasted half a year or more. And whole years where there wasn't a single holiday. And a conversation can last days without needing to stop for at least a nap.
SE has some very strange ideas about time, and XI set up some weird precedents. While it makes sense that the clock moved faster there because of some mechanics (Undead only popping at nighttime, moon phases, guild/shop hours, the day element effects, certain weather effects, 'wait one Vana'diel day before progressing', versus the only thing I've encountered in XIV so far that relies on the time of day was the Halloween event), the XI devs maintain that a full Vana'diel year has NOT passed in XI. Yep, twelve Real-World years of content, over a dozen crisis', something near 300 Game-Clock years later, and apparently a Vana'diel year hasn't passed yet.
Maybe I'm being a bit early in this, but I would not be surprised if the same happened in XIV down the road.
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And before someone tries to argue RP-agrues that maybe these planets are just -that- small to be rotating this quickly... I'm not an expert, but I believe a planet that rotates this quickly wouldn't be able to keep an atmosphere or have enough gravity to keep anything stuck to the surface. It's just a game mechanic in XI that allows you to not have to wait days (or months) for conditions to be right for types of crafting, specific quests, monster pops, etc., and I suspect in XIV it's directly linked to why I can't talk to NPCs while mounted.
