Oh. I thought that Eastern was GMT -5, but I guess it's 4.

Fair enough.
It was once possible to set timezones within the site, but now its all done on the users computer.

time zones are so confusing you know what i mean?

in some ways i think it would be better to have one time, but it just means different things different places.


so in the us 6am would be like the middle of the night, but its 12am in GMT, and in China I guess like 6pm would be the middle of the night, etc.

Sort of like how the month of July means summer for some people, but winter for others, depending on your hemisphere.

and then we should just do away with the whole DST thing forever, given that that wouldn't matter anymore.


because people wouldn't be saying "oh it's 8pm i have to go inside now!"

they would do it by the sun.

i dunno. wont ever happen

Would also make it hard to live if you travelled.
As it is, you change timezones, and things still happen at roughly the same times. If you had no timezones and moved from place to place, you'd have to change the times you did things.

i mean yeah.... it wouldn't be without it's strangeness, but you could go by the sun at least.

as it stands, there's too much math lol. and guesswork.

and its very arbitrary where the lines are drawn for the zones.

Not really.
The rough outlines are done by dividing the earth into 24, but then nations decide how to break themselves such that they stay in the same zone as the rest of their country or their neighbours.

I really do not understand why people find it hard.

For countries that you contact regularly you very quickly learn the difference. DST is the worst bit (especially the fact that the US changes to DST a week after Europe, but changes back at the same time). For everywhere else, there are a zillion resources on the net to check what time it is Almaty if you need to know.

I do recall one rather dim young lady who worked for me the the UK. One day I asked her to check something with our man in Jamaica, so she called him .... at 4am local time. Understandably he was not impressed. It turned out that she had no idea that there was such a thing as time zones, she thought it was the same time everywhere.

hahah well THAT is a bit ridiculous.

but all this business of trying to know what time zone you're in? not my cup of tea. i'd rather put in my current city and it tells me, you know?

Yeah, I mean all you need is an iPod and, bam, you can figure out timezones. For me youth it's pretty implement, cause on the sat coast of the us we are someone like EST -5, and Europe is either 0 or + 1 or 2. Then china and Asia are around +6, add or take a few. It's not hard at all once you get a little bit used to it.

Hehe, thanks to Britain former imperial might, its nice and simple here :P

rcnrcn927 - it is GMT -5. You have you DST setting cocked up.

I think a really interesting update would be making it so that only people in certain time zones can join games. In my World Cup Game (obviously it wouldn't be feasible to implement that in the World Cup) I was playing with a guy from Ireland so it made it damn near impossible to get a good dialogue going because of the time difference. Making games open to a small group of time zones would allow for more talking, which I think generally leads to a better game.

...but then you have insomniacs like me who visit the site between 11pm and 3am local time. Perhaps just a notification about which time-zone is preferred for players to join, so people could pick which fits their schedule best. Downside then is it's more clutter and some people just might not care.

Really the only way to guarantee playing at the same time as your opponents is to play live games. (or FtF, but that's beside the point)