Hexes and 29th February...

Let's say, I have a Conjure Phantasm that does -5 Health Degen. for 10 seconds, with a 5 second recharge time. (I do know about Aftercast delay, BTW, but just ignore it for now).

OK...I cast Conjure Phantasm on a monster, and cast it again on the same monster exactly 5 seconds later. What happens?

a. They have 5 seconds of -5 Health Degen, then 5 seconds of -10 Health Degen, then 5 seconds of -5 Health Degen.

b. They have 20 seconds of -5 Health Degen.

c. They have 10 seconds of -5 Health Degen; the second cast has no effect.

And also, how often do Characters that are created on the 29th of February get birthday presents?

if i remeber correctly if you use the skill again it will just stay at -5 degen but the 10 sec will be restarted.

and i have no idea bout the b-day on the 29th

Oh, so the counter is reset rather than it adding to the time already there? Thanks!

And with the 29th Feb thing, I think I've found a bug!

D.None of the above.

It would go you cast the first and it is suppose to last for 10 seconds but you recast it at 5 seconds so the first one gets replace with the second (newer) one , so it would be a 5 seconds of 5 health degen and then 10 seconds of health degen.


Answer to second question : on the date they have existed for 365 1/4 days. A certain number for to call a bday is just so it can be a special day, since it is in fact your birthday ( and that alone) it isn't really your "get one year older day" that is when you have been alive for 365 1/4 days since you were born or last time you had gone thru that cycle.

Oh,, thanks about the health degen thing!

Also, about the bday thing, does it mean that my bday migh slip between days? e.g.

I create character on 2007 at 11pm, Jan 1st.
Birthday for character, 2008, 5am, Jan 2nd?

Oh,, thanks about the health degen thing!

Also, about the bday thing, does it mean that my bday migh slip between days? e.g.

I create character on 2007 at 11pm, Jan 1st.
Birthday for character, 2008, 5am, Jan 2nd?

If you were gonna go with exact numbers yes, but i doubt Anet does this, it would just be on the date your character becomes 365 or 366 days ,whichever they use to measure a year, most likely 365, otherwise lots of people will get their presents a day later and we wouldn't want that now would we?

Ooh no

I'm fussy about this because each of my characters are made on the 10th of a month, and my bday is on the 10th December... and i'm kinda picky about these things

First of all if you really reallly think about it......this question is null and void. No characters were created on Feb 29, 2004 and we won't have to worry about the Feb 29, 2008 characters for awhile yet!


Next without being able to peek at A-Net's code we really can only guess how they've handled the B-Day thing, but as a programmer myself here's how I would do it.

I'm guessing that your character does not actually get his present precisely on his B-day, but instead when you next login after your B-day.

For example let's say you created "Lord of Fiery Doom" on March 10th, 2006 and his birthday is rapidly approaching. However for some reason you won't be able to play GW at all next week and you don't logon again until March 23rd. I think Lord's account will lie inactive on a server somewhere alone and forgotten until you pay him a visit. When you "wake him up" on the 23rd, A-Net will run a quick checklist against his account and see that he's overdue for a present and quickly add it to his inventory.

Another theory for handling this is the nightly maintenance. A-Net could run a quick program each night at Midnight that looks for characters that were created exactly 1 year ago and add presents to those inventories automatically. This method could cause a problem with the Feb 29 characters

This brings up some more questions.
1. What happens if you are logged in when your B-Day comes around? For example. Your B-Day is still March 10th. On March 9th you log in and zone out to Old Ascalon. You stay AFK and your character remains in Old Ascalon until March 12th. Does a present magically appear in your inventory on the 10th? Does it appear when you zone back into town? Or does it instead appear only after logging out and back in?

2. What happens if your inventory is slam full on your B-Day? Does it make a difference if you are logged out at the time or in?

3. How do time zones affect your B-Day? Does your B-Day occur on a specific instant or just a certain day. For example if your character was created on March 10th 2006 at 6:33pm can you claim your present before 6:33pm on March 10th 2007?

I think that's enought to think about for now.

1st thing... good point. No problem as of yet.

2nd thing... from 1, i'm guessing that you have to be in an explorable area for you to get the prezzie. What is the case for normal characters, when do you receive the prezzies?

3rd things... number 2, i guess it'll appear in your inventory as soon as there is space in it.

4th... yep, definetly enought for now.

Presents appear in your inventory when they are due (anniversary +/-), if you have space free. If you reach your b'day but don't log out it won't appear. If you log in but have no free space it won't appear until the next time you log in with a free space. It is not all that complicated.

Ultimately it really doesn't matter. Just know that when your toon reaches 1 year you'll get a gift so if close leave at least 1 spot open in inventory. The 2nd year is yet to be seen.

If they use standard date function from whatever library their code uses it takes care of it. If they hand code - it who knows (though why they would hand code it is beyond me).

I'm too lazy to look it up and the last time I cared was about 10 years ago for a class in college - since then I rather assume that any date library I use takes it into account. If not then I will get a small bug fix in a few years.

There is a standard way to calculate it it - you can probably find it with google fairly easily. IF you want to *really* muddle the waters of *exactly* when it occurs you have to look at other nice fun things like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

"Unix time, or POSIX time, is a system for describing points in time: it is the number of seconds elapsed since midnight UTC of January 1, 1970, not counting leap seconds. It is widely used not only on Unix-like operating systems but in many other computing systems. It is not a true encoding of UTC time, but is sufficiently similar to a linear representation of the passage of time that it is frequently mistaken for one. The main complication is that UTC accounts for leap seconds, while Unix time does not."


Nod your head and back away from the person who wrote that