I’m wondering if there has been any news from Blues or Blizzard in general about addressing the day / night cycle on Oceanic realms? Constantly experiencing the world at night time starts to be a real drag.
WoW is full of vibrant and well detailed environments, but I feel like I’m permanently walking around with sunglasses on. I hope this is on a list somewhere as something to address. I appreciate it’s probably not high priority (especially at the moment), but it definitely would be a good quality of life improvement for us Aussies.
At first I made the assumption that there must be a technical / time-zone / maintenance reason for why it hasn’t been addressed - but then I found this item (https://www.wowhead.com/item=170379/sunwarmed-sand) and now I’m not so sure.
If all it takes is a consumable to switch the environment (world time) to a local setting, why not make it a toy instead? That way we can switch the toggle ourselves and Blizz doesn’t have to do anything on the back-end.
I would post this more specifically in the oceanic general discussion forum, but the last response from a blue there was in November last year (and that was to do with price increases on the subscription).
Hoping this post might prompt some discussion / interest from a friendly Blue.
Cheers and G’Day.
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Doubtful unless they want to put the day / night cycles into the sharding mechanics. Sadly ever since CRZ became a thing we have to put up with it.
It is also why we have to work off the Northern Hemispheres seasons for battle pets. As some of them only spawn during certain seasons. Such as the Qiraji Guardling only spawns in Summer (which is our Winter for OCE).
Interesting. I’m wondering if there are any practical impacts between two players on one shard experiencing night and day simultaneously? Apart from maybe some impacts to RP, I can’t think of any of the top of my head.
You know what, I hadn’t even noticed there was a day/night cycle
It must be pretty minor? Or I’m just oblivious 
It’s unlikely going to be something they’d do for the intents of how we phase with the US.
They could make a toy that makes a visual difference but it’s probably not going to affect things like tavern lights that would go on at US night and would be weird.
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Certain battle pets only spawn during the “day” or “night”.
e.g. The restless shadeling only spawns in the “early morning”.
Mmm, so it quickly becomes complex because they’ve tied world events, NPCs and I’m assuming certain elites, world bosses and potentially quests to world time. Allowing the player to manipulate the world time would open up those elements to potential abuse?
So if day / night transition with sharding needed a solution - could we not just have the world time adjust automatically if you shard with a player on a realm in a different time zone? This is already a rare occurrence for me as I rarely end up being in a shard with US players with 80+ ping.
I haven’t noticed so much in Shadowlands- do we even have day and night in the new zones?
Edit: I should mention that outside of shadowlands it is a real and very annoying problem. I fully support making a toy to change the time of day, or correcting sunrise and sunset times for OCE servers.
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No, just make the time of day in the game engine sync to local time. I mean, there’s a toy that does it already and nothing got broken.
I mean, in an ideal world - if it were that easy, surely they would have already addressed this? There’s got to be some complexity around the implementation that’s making it difficult.
I think Denona is right when they say that there are certain in-game mechanics that do depend on the world time rotation - so it makes sense that Blizzard wouldn’t want to put that power in players hands.
For a brief period where Blizzard merged the OCE and US servers into the same battlegroup in classic it broke day and night also, it was only when things reverted back to being exclusively Oceanic that local time was reflected in game correctly.
So I’m guessing because of the nature of retail OCE servers being in the same CRZ grouping as US realms it’s the same issue, seems like they can’t be bothered putting the effort in to fix it properly, which is a shame.
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I figured Australians would appreciate a break from the sun
They’re probably aware of it and just prioritized it low. To any CM or dev that may be reading, it has a really negative impact on the visuals of the zones to be constantly playing in darkness. Stormheim and Highmountain back in Legion are practically different zones during the day versus the night - very colorful in the day, very drab and dark at night. If it could be prioritized a little higher, your Australian playerbase would really appreciate it.
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It worked fine until they “fixed” the problems with the fishing contest (as if anyone cares about that any more) caused by the imposition of CRZ.
Originally that meant Oceanic realms were blocked from grouping with anyone else. So you’d have Ordos groups with half the raid saying “I can’t see anyone”. Before they made that change, time-of-day seamlessly changed (exactly like it does using the toy) when you joined a NA group. But if you were just playing with Australians, or solo, time of day made sense.
Blizzard never offered even a basic explanation about why it had to change.
None of those mechanics are power-based, though - and they were in play before this change.
The LEAST they could do would be to make the Sunwarmed Sand toy a 24-hour effect that persists through death. Complexity solved.
It’s been literally YEARS now. Way, way, way before any pandemic excuses could be used, too 
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Don’t get me wrong. I’m in favor of finding a solution to this super long term problem; but given how long it has been, I’m just trying to understand why a solution hasn’t already emerged.
I suppose it really is just possible that Blizzard haven’t got it on the Kanban board at all. Which would make me a sad panda. 