As a normal person with a job during the day and the need for sleep during the night, I get to play around 3 hours each evening. The way it is now I never get to experience dawn, mid-day, or night in the game. Never! It’s always the same scene in-game, dusk, and it’s truly immersion breaking. I personally feel the full day/night cycle should take place within every 2-3 hours at most. Definitely not more than 3 hours. Something this simple yet so immersion breaking. I pray they change it. I can only imagine how many other people have only seen one part of the cycle as well.
I’d like to see something like day/night = 30 to 45 minutes, and dawn/dusk 30 to 45 minutes. But the current system is pure Groundhog Day and sucks IMO.
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I’m so sad I NEVER get to see the night. I got to see it the first weekend and I haven’t managed to do so again. 
And it’s so lovely, I wish I could see it more often.
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I completely feel your pain. I have no clue what these dev’s were thinking making it real-time. Such beautiful atmosphere changes they implemented in-game and I’m guessing the majority of the players never get to experience it.
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I’m on my phone atm and unable to find and concisely link a related thread. But there’s already an active thread about this titled OCE day/night or something.
The conversation has evolved into extra solutions like requesing for something like a 20-hour in game day, so that everyday rotates relative to it’s irl time a little bit.
Edit, found linky: WoW Forever adds dynamic lighting, but OCE is stuck in perpetual midnight. Fix the day/night cycle!
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If you’re playing the beta make sure to click on the bug reporter icon and give feedback in regards to this as well please.
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You do not need to reduce the time to borderline meaningless and completely demolish immersion to experience all hours of the day. It just has to be desync’d from the 24 hour clock. 22-23 hour day/night cycle or 25-26 hour day/night cycle will feel about as long as an actual day but will slowly cycle such that everyone in any timezone or with any odd schedule will experience all times of the day and various lighting differences, while retaining the feeling that it is an actual world with a regular time scale.
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IMO 20 hours is still to long, as each days play session would still essentially be the same time of day (in-game) for the entire session, for most gamers with normal jobs/sleep cycles. However it would be better than the current 24hour cycle.
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1 irl second = 1 in game minute, Bethesda style. Full day cycles last 24 min.
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Not true. Right now I only get to see dusk and by offsetting it an hour or two it would take 3 to 4 weeks to see anything other than that, depending on the offset. making a game have a 24 hour day/night cycle doesn’t retain the feeling that it’s an actual world, it makes it feel like “Groundhog Day”. Experiencing the entire day/night cycle is what gives a game the appearance of a real world., Something we just cannot do currently or with only a few hours offset. Only a person who lives in-game 24hrs/day would get that experience, or someone who has no job and doesn’t sleep that is able to play a significant amount at all times throughout each day. We experience all the cycles in the real world because we live in it, we can’t all live in-game.
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How is a 1:1 Day and Night Cycle immersion breaking? It IS Immersive, which is a key element of a sandbox environment. I’m not exactly sure why you want to play ‘Classic’ if you don’t want to play ‘Classic’.
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for someone who can only play a few hours in the evening the experience is currently “Groundhog Day”. That is truly immersion breaking, like i already stated in the post above —" Right now I only get to see dusk and by offsetting it an hour or two it would take 3 to 4 weeks to see anything other than that, depending on the offset. making a game have a 24 hour day/night cycle doesn’t retain the feeling that it’s an actual world, it makes it feel like “Groundhog Day”. Experiencing the entire day/night cycle is what gives a game the appearance of a real world., Something we just cannot do currently or with only a few hours offset. Only a person who lives in-game 24hrs/day would get that experience, or someone who has no job and doesn’t sleep that is able to play a significant amount at all times throughout each day. We experience all the cycles in the real world because we live in it, we can’t all live in-game."
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I think I’d like to see it maybe be 1 hour each. Maybe 2. But I do like the idea of it not being necessarily on the hours so it changes over time. I also think once shortened they should use it as an opportunity to have quests/events that occur only during the day or only during the night.
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For example. The way it is now let’s say YOU play 6 hours per day everyday. Let’s also say you always play between noon and 6pm. You will NEVER see dawn or night in the world of azeroth. You will always experience daytime (maybe the beginning of dusk) always. How is that not immersion breaking? The day/night night cycle as simple as it is, is a MAJOR factor in making a world feel alive. If you cannot see/understand this I don’t know what else to tell you.
I would venture to say the majority of players play, for the most part, during the same time frame each day and for around the same amount of time. The current system is 100% Groundhog Day for those players and it sucks. Yes there are exceptions…
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Maybe something like 15 hour days? Short enough and offsets 12/24 by 3 hours so days/nights will cycle through regularly. I agree it should be changed in some way.
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I say no. But I don’t say that in a jerky fashion I say I like the real time nature of it and while about two weekends a month I do play in the morning a bit…90% I only play at night (after work)…so I mostly see just night.
But I’m not selfish like so many other players are – I’d be good with a reasonable compromise but it can’t be the full day/night cycle within just 30 minutes real time – that’s way too fast…WAY WAY to fast.
Maybe make it take 3 hours or something but not 30 minutes.
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I absolutely understand the frustration. There are times of the day that I never get to see. But I wouldn’t call this an immersion issue.
You wouldn’t be surprised to find the same time of day when you went out at the same time.
I think the idea is that the world is immersive and changing not that the immersion matches our reality.
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+1 this seriously needs to be addressed/changed. i put hundreds of hours into the beta and never once seen Night or Dawn in-game. freakin sucks
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7 hour game days. So there’s 24 of them in a normal week, and since they would sync with real life once a week, you could effectively plan what in-game time would be whenever you play. It’s also long enough that a day feels substantial, and if you played for a whole in game day, you really feel like you’ve been playing a while. Also this way, if you play for one hour at the same time everyday, over the course of a week you would experience every portion of the in-game day.
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I’d actually keep it tied to real time. That’s how WoW has always worked, and it’s part of what makes the world feel connected to your own life. Logging in late at night and seeing Azeroth dark too just feels right.
A fast cycle would make it feel more like a game timer than a real world. Imagine the sun going down mid-quest every hour, it’d get distracting fast.
And you’ll still see other times of day, on weekends, days off, or whenever you play earlier or later than usual. That makes those moments feel kinda special instead of something that just cycles past every session.