Does the Community Use "Tamriel Standard Time"?

vivapadomay · August 2018

So the, erm, trouble in Cyrodiil began in 2E 982. and as far as I can tell, ESO launched with a lore-date of 983. Considering the day/night cycle of the game, someone who'd been playing since launch would now be early Second Seed, 2E 600. The AddOn "Clock" by Tyxz supports this idea as does my go-to lore site, uesp: http://esoclock.uesp.net/

My question is two-fold: Do veteran players use Tamriel Standard Time, and as such, have their characters aged 18 years since the start of the game? Should new players who care about roleplaying assume that it is now 600?

If the latter is the case, that would mean my young Breton would have grown up with the war. I would love to play the game this way, since having a "shared reality" is one of the things that attracted me to ESO. I'm quickly learning that it isn't the case (is anyone else here the Vestige?)

Kikke · August 2018

I think most ESO vets have some feelings that time has continued. When I started playing was before any DLCs, and by every DLC (if you do the questline) you get a sense of time progression. But dunno if anyone actually has a clue on what time era we are in xD

Ilsabet · August 2018

First off, I presume you mean 582 and 583 in your first line.

I don't know of any in-game clock or calendar that shows anything other than my local time, so I doubt that most players use that at all in their normal playing routine. I don't even really think about what time or day it is in Tamriel, aside from the one time I was trying to track down vampire spawns and had to go to external websites to figure out what time it was (which was pretty cumbersome).

I do think about the passage of time in terms of where my character is now compared to where she started, but I wouldn't use the day/night cycle as my metric but rather the amount of time it's supposed to have taken for the events she's participated in to unfold. Unfortunately I can only really guess at that amount of time, since I don't know if we have enough in-game sources to provide dates for things. I think I've read that there are texts in Orsinium that place those events at 2 years (or maybe 1 year) after the foiling of the Planemeld, but that's the only thing I've heard of having particular dates assigned to it.

Otherwise I just have a basic progression of the events that have happened in my character's journey, and I just have to kind of estimate how long it's been since she started. (And yes, she is the Vestige in her story.) She was 16 when she landed in the Wailing Prison, and I reckon she's probably about 18 or maybe 19 by the end of Summerset.

DirkRavenclaw · August 2018

I use Votans Minimap, there isnt the Date but the local Time ,

vivapadomay · August 2018

Ilsabet wrote: »

First off, I presume you mean 582 and 583 in your first line.

D'oh! Good catch. Got mixed up with my D&D world's timeline.

So what I'm gathering is that people aren't really paying attention to the lore-date... I suppose that's good and bad. Good, in that you can log off for six months mid-quest and pretend as if no time has passed. Bad, in that an opportunity for immersive collaborative storytelling is lost.

Drat. I was looking forward to publicly celebrating the canon holidays from the first two TES games, but I suppose this isn't the game for that...

Elsonso · August 2018

I pay no attention to the lore year. The day of the year always seems to align with the real world holidays that the Marketing Director wants to exploit.

Ilsabet · August 2018

As someone who does a whole lot of stuff in the game that may or may not really be part of my character's story, I think it's important for me to separate time-played (and on an even more meta level, real-world-time-passed) from the time that actually contributes to my character's "canon" adventures. I might spend a week fishing or shopping or derping in Cyrodiil instead of questing, but that doesn't mean Ilsabet is going to wake up one day wondering why it's been a week since the last time she helped somebody with their super-urgent problems. (Insert X-Files-esque lost-time shenanigans.)

Of course, I roleplay in the form of a journal entry thread that I can pretty much craft however I want based on the experiences my character has, so I can pick and choose which of her in-game activities factor into her ongoing story. I stay quite faithful to the way things happen when they happen, but I also "manipulate the data" (as one of my high school math teachers used to say) in terms of the timing of things when it helps the story flow more smoothly or sensibly. Doing my RPing essentially solo for my own benefit makes it easier to do stuff like that since I'm not worrying about collaborating with other people like what you seem to be talking about.

I think you could pretty easily commemorate holidays that come around, just by observing that "oh hey it's Squirrel Chasing Day" or whatever that just happens to come up in the midst of whatever's going on in your story at that point. I would probably do something like that for a holiday that my character found relevant for some personal reason, even if I couldn't even tell you what the date or even the year is on an ongoing basis. My understanding is that the "official" holidays pretty much match up with real-world calendar days, rather than being based on the sped-up daily cycle in-game. So that would probably make it easier to celebrate with other people when they know the day is coming up.

Elissn · August 2018

While I pay close attention to the time in the single player games I think it doesn't really work in ESO. Even though the game has changed over the years the ingame time does not seem to move on. Auridon still looks the same way now as it always did. Around 14 in-game years must have passed since I cleared Silsalien, Firsthold and other destroyed settelments but of course the rebuilding still hasn't really started. In order to get a feeling of passing time I either need a progressing story or visual changes. And since the storylines in ESO are so much shorter then in, let's say, Skyrim and it is way too much effort to include visual changes like rebuilt cities there comes the point where time seems to stand still no matter what an in-game clock might say.

Why not, I'll try to write down my lore explanation for this, hope it makes sense.

I think of my character being stuck in time thanks to Meridia. She tricked Elriyah into touching the light after the Plainmeld was stopped, causing her to be thrown back to the time she had just escaped the Wailing Prison and time doesn't continue to pass normally afterwards.
So no matter how many years Elriah ran across the continent before, as soon as she touched the light of Meridia she's back in 2E 582.
And no matter how many years Elriah runs across the continent afterwards, whenever she returns to Bleakrock Isle the Covenant ist still burning down the same wooden houses they already started burning down when Elriyah left years ago. This happens with all places she has been to. She can be away for a long time, deal with problems in different places, but when she returns she has to realise that no time has passed at all. Sometimes time moves does on a bit when new troubles occur (like the Daedric War) but once the problems are solved time seems to stop again.

I think Meridia is up to something and - probably just like a certain character I'm not naming to avoid spoilers- she wants to use Elriyah for this plan. But since being the Vestige allows Elriyah to reform near any wayshrine at will Meridia cannot simply trap her in her realm. She can however trap Elriyah in time and maybe pick her up once all preparations are made.

So far my thoughts on time in ESO.