As noted in a previous podcast episode, players in Australia can share a server with players in North America. Because of this, time zones become an issue for the Oceanic player. Do they always see the game at night during prime time, or do they get to see the game in the daytime? Lead Software Designer Ana Resendez breaks down how this works.
"If you have friends in NA, you can still play and group up with us. But what happens is that when you group up with someone, the server needs to choose one of our worlds for you to be placed into. We actually have Australia servers, and we could have Australian time zones in those, but what happens when you get an invite from Josh and all of a sudden you go from night to day in a couple of seconds?"
Aggrend also chimed in to directly ask the community how they would feel about this type of system being implemented.
"How would you feel about that, Australian players? Is that a thing you'd be okay with? Would you be okay with your day and night suddenly changing whenever you change groups depending on where the group leader is located? We can make a decision and say 'yeah we're going to do that', but that might be too jarring for people, so getting feedback on that would be helpful."
So that begs the question: what would Oceanic players prefer? Let your voice be heard, and let the developers know what day and night systems you'd like to see in WoW: Forever.
