UTC vs. PDT/EST etc.

Dear Niantic community managers and anyone who is in charge of announcements of events and timings.

I understand that named Time Zones are a thing in the US and that you are a US based company. I also am very pleased about the increased number of events and challenges for Ingress as well as mostly, announcements happen with the internationally recognised UTC.

However, unfortunately there is still the occasional event being announced in named US time zones, like this weekend's 1.975x AP (PDT). I have a screenshot, but I'm unable to add it here.

I understand that for a large part of your client base, that may not be a problem, and that they even prefer this over the more logical UTC approach, but in the end, this is an international game, played worldwide and if times would be given in UTC consistently, there would be no confusion, once people get used to simply adding or subtracting their time zone to/from the UTC value... With the bonus of being universally functional.

Thanks!

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Comments

  • JudyBJudyB ✭✭✭

    Since there is so much confusion over what PDT means for Europeans, perhaps Niantic could start including both PDT and UTC in announcements? There will still be people who get confused, but hopefully more people will understand?

  • MoogModularMoogModular ✭✭✭✭✭

    But it's a US based company.

    I thought they have doing ISO 8601 dates for some events? Also note this is where --MM-DD is used when the year is omitted.

  • Niantic is US-based company, true. But they already use kilometers in game 😄

    It will be nice if Niantic consistently use UTC for time. I don't know how to convert PDT to my local time (UTC +7).

  • On a related note, it should would have been nice for the US to adopt the metric system. Sigh.

  • We were having a discussion in our community about event timings after I made a mistake converting the Myriad hack challenge start to our local time.


    One suggestion that was made was to have a rolling "local time" based events, such as the Community Days for Pokemon Go and Wizards Unite,


    Is this in the pipeline for future Ingress events or bonuses?

  • If we use the (crowd sourced and totally unofficial) top 100 players list and assume that it is a fair representation of the geographic dispersion of the player base then it breaks down (very roughly) like this:


    Asia: 44% (this number could be higher at the expensive of the Rest of World. The list has no Top 100 players in India for instance, although India has a lot of players)

    Europe: 36%

    N. America: 10%

    Rest of the world: 10%


    So, yeah, UTC and DD/MM would be the preferred format for about 90% of the player base.


    Obviously, this is in no way scientific or definative but it is based on the only metric we have, so I'm going with it.


    For those of you who don't know about the list, you can see it here. http://l.aoeu.com/topingress. Many thanks to @daethnir for maintaining the list and I apologise for my rough abuse of their hard won stats.

  • ConvexWaveConvexWave ✭✭
    edited July 2019

    On a side note instead of mm/dd or dd/mm just write it out instead so less confusion on the dates front

  • SoylentGrienSoylentGrien ✭✭✭✭✭

    The simplest solution is simply use YYYY-MM-DD which is the ISO standard.

  • I would recommend Niantic add a UTC clock within the Ingress app itself, and have the option for players to enable/disable it. Also implement an enable/disable toggle to modify comm chat to reflect UTC adjusted time stamps. The clock would fit nicely in that small space to the left of the Agent Name panel and just above the condensed recent activities alert panel toward the top center of the user interface of the Ingress Prime app. In this way an agent can become acquainted with using and thinking in UTC time with respect to their local time as they are playing Ingress, which in time should allow players to more easily understand and communicate in the international standard among one another.

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