OK, I love how the guides and Devs can post in the News tab, which is really really cool.

How about one small addition? A time function for events that have yet to take place.

As in "This TGFT Mining Event will take place in 2 days, 3 hours, 4 minutes." And it counts down.

Or is this just a crutch for us time-management-challenged types?

No, I think we definitely need something like that.

I'd be interested in seeing times of things be in our respective timezones.

And how about dating events, and letting us filter by dates. That way I don't need to look at bounty results from 3 months ago with no idea how relevant they are.

It would also be awesome to have things to be sorted. A little folder for "Bounties" "Trade" etc.

i'd be perfectly happy with a date on the news item itself. and maybe items that are older than 30 days could automatically dissapear

As long as they use the now-standard date notation convention (*cough* the date notation method that I first created and started implanting into others' minds *cough*) I have no problem with it.

I would very much NOT want to see "2005" or "2006" as year values. No sir.

At least add some kind of timestamps... GMT would do, as anyone can use /time command to check it.

It would be interesting if the event time was listed with the year 4433, and even better if the /time command could be hacked to show it as year 4433 as well.

Perhaps a better way of organizing the news as well, so that you can quickly sort through.

With buttons for bounties, trade events, etc..

as long as you stick a time converter onto the game (change it in prefs) so you can see you're time :)

This is even better. Step 1: Build a time machine. Step 2: Get a computer from the year 4433. Step 3: Use it as server. For one, you'll save lots of space with just one computer from the future, plus, the time will be correct.

Could be even simpler: "Event to take place in 4 days 3 hours and 32 minutes"

Regardless of your time zone, this simply requires the server's local time DIV 24 for days and then MOD the rest for hours and minutes.

Keep actual time a minutes on server.

This might sound simplistic but the hassle of dealing with calendaring across time zones is not worth the VO devs' attention.

Trust me: this is precisely my job.

mgl_mouser: That's pretty much what I was thinking. Although we can also use a unified "game time" coordinated some thousands of years offset from UTC. But we'd still want to show relative times (and not rely on the end user's clock, as the /time command does now).

/me points to his original post. (WHAT does no one READ? GAH)

Then again, you still have to be careful about frickin DSTs.

But if that's the only one, then it gets easier because you'd only have to deal with 1 DST (the server's local time). Not like scheduling a meeting across the pond where time zones and DST offsets don't match. You'd hate that. I guarantee it.

EDIT: DST is Daylight Saving Time.

Soooo, like I said earlier, would it be impossible to have the game format the times for your timezone? If you set it in the prefs, it ought to be doable. Nevermind making events easier to figure out (arrr...GMT is getting on my nerves).