Time acceleration and day/night.

[calle 100]

I've been thinking about this since the start of the DayZ mod and I feel like it is getting a bit too little of attention.

I read somewhere that the servers now got the ability to use time acceleration which is great, but I still don't see any accelerated servers.
Either it's because something I haven't read about or it is because people are getting too much of a choice.
Day and night cycle should not be something YOU choose but rather something that comes and goes - and you better survive it.
Now I don't know the best timeframe but I guess something like 1 ½ hour = 24h in game.
30 minutes of daylight, 30 minutes of night and 30 minutes of dusk and dawn. Maybe more.

This would make the players actually KEEP THE FLASHLIGHTS, cause right now people are tossing it at once.
Imagine spawning in right before night time, sun is setting and it's getting cold.
If you toss the flashlight you're done but it becomes a burden as soon as the sun comes up again.
Wet clothes at night = death before the sun comes up.
Night will bring opportunities to get stealthy, move unseen, but will still not be forever - no one will get bored of the darkness.
It's not realistic but it is authentic.
And as the team is adding hunting, this makes more sense.
Hunting = best at dusk and dawn.
As soon as the sun sets the predators start moving = people gets drawn to the cities.

I say: Remove the daytime only servers. This is ruining the whole experience for me. There's no real change in the nature, nothing to worry about.
This is also where your character could be getting "survived days & nights" and so on.

[virgiltracy 34]

There is only one test server running this right now.

[Caboose187 (DayZ) 3036]

It's only on the test server I believe, if night is even working as it doesn't even work on stable right now.

Edited April 14, 2014 by Caboose187

[xRann 126]

There will always be 24hr daytime servers. Once night time gets some polish and love some 24hr night servers will sprout up. More importantly, game time needs to be shifted to an odd hour clock. If game time is severed from real time to the odd hour rather than even you will almost never play at the same time every time. There was a reddit post about using a 19.5hr clock and you could alter those figures up or down and alter the rate of time from 1.25x to 4x if you wanted and still would not sync your real time sessions nearly as much with game time even with accelerated time.