#424 Oceanic layers run on North American world time: OCE players see night for almost their entire play session

Status: Open · Area: Server & Account · Realms & Layers

Oceanic layers use North American game time, so players there see night for nearly their whole session.

Current behavior

Oceanic-hosted layers inherit the North American (Pacific) world clock and day/night skybox instead of running on Australian Eastern time. During the 21 October stress test (22 October AEDT) I was placed on Oceanic layers for the whole session, confirmed by sub-30 ms latency to the world server. The in-game clock and the lighting were still aligned to NA server time, exactly as they were for NA players on NA layers at the same moment. Because AEDT is 18 hours ahead of PDT, the whole OCE prime-time window lands in darkness: | Local time (AEDT) | Server time (PDT) | In-game | |---|---|---| | 12:00 (Sat/Sun afternoon) | 18:00 previous day | Dusk / night | | 19:00 (log on after work) | 01:00 | Full night | | 23:00 (log off) | 05:00 | Still night, pre-dawn | | 00:00 to 12:00 | 06:00 to 18:00 | Daylight, while OCE is asleep or at work | In practice an OCE player who plays evenings and weekend afternoons never sees daylight. Forever's headline dynamic lighting and weather work is effectively invisible to the region, and zones that are already dim (Tirisfal Glades, Duskwood, Darkshore, Felwood) are hard to read at night even with the new lighting. This is not a "you logged in at the wrong time" problem: there is no time an Australian with a normal schedule can log in and see day. This has a significant impact on player enjoyment for the whole region. The same complaint has been open on the Oceanic forum for retail since 2016 (Blizzard ANZ acknowledged it that year and nothing changed), and the WoW Forever thread on it is one of the most-liked threads in Forever General Discussion. Forever's realmless architecture, which already routes OCE players to dedicated Oceania data centers, is the first time this has been straightforward to fix.

Expected behavior

Layers hosted in the Oceania data centers should run on Australian Eastern time (AEST/AEDT) for the in-game clock and the day/night cycle, so that an OCE player logging in at 19:00 local sees early evening, not 01:00. This matches original Classic behaviour: the 2019 Classic Oceanic realms (Arugal, Remulos, Yojamba, Felstriker) were listed as Australian Eastern Time and ran their world clock on it. Forever is "realmless but not regionless", and Blizzard has said OCE players connect to dedicated Oceania data centers and are moved to NA servers only while grouped under a NA party leader. World time following the hosting data center is consistent with that model: a player who groups with a NA leader is already moving to NA infrastructure, so switching to NA time with it is expected and no worse than today. Acceptable alternatives if a per-region clock is not viable: 1. A shortened day/night cycle (for example 12 hours, or a cycle that does not divide evenly into 24 hours such as 20 or 26 hours) so every player sees every time of day across a week of sessions. 2. A client-side option or persistent buff to offset the skybox, in the spirit of the Jar of Sunwarmed Sand but without a 24-hour cooldown.

How to reproduce

1. From Australia or New Zealand, log in to the WoW Forever stress test or beta between 19:00 and 23:00 AEDT.
2. Confirm you are on an Oceanic layer: in-game latency is under 30 ms (NA layers show 150 ms or more from the east coast of Australia).
3. Hover the minimap clock. It reads approximately 01:00 to 05:00, and the world is in full night.
4. Ask a NA player on a NA layer for their clock and skybox at the same moment. They match yours exactly.
5. Repeat on a weekend at 14:00 AEDT. The clock reads about 20:00 and it is already dark.
6. Compare with the behaviour of Classic Oceanic realms (Arugal, Remulos, Yojamba), where the same local times showed daylight.