WG date inconsistency

[Afghanicus]

I've mentioned this few times before but I think it needs a bit more attention because it's something very easy to fix but has been ignored for too long.

 

I believe there are different teams working on the UI that have different perception of the date formatting.

 

This leads to confusion, especially among newer players who don't know what number represents the day and which one the month.

 

Here's one example...

 

When checking the date for any 'temporary resource' you always have the month first and the day after that...

 

 

However, if you check the expiration date of any combat mission, you'll see that it's the day first and month after that...

 

 

 

I've intentionally selected the examples where you can clearly see what is the day and what is a month (no 27th and 14th month exist) but often both numbers (day and month) will be lower than 12 and that's where most of the confusion arises.

 

This is just one example but the inconsistency is all over the UI.

 

I don't think this is of any major importance but I'm bringing it up because I'm sure it's quite easy to fix but WG did nothing about it, despite many complains.

 

Can WG fix this and pay attention to the consistency of the UI (many other little bugs I've noticed that don't belong to this topic) ?

 

And before someone says "just open a ticket, not a forum thread"... first of all, this cannot be fixed via ticket because I've been told many times (in the replies to my tickets) that developers can be contact only through the forums and the guys monitoring the tickets have nothing to do with those issues. I also want to know if anyone else is bothered by this or I'm the only one with OCD around here...

 

Thanks.

[Cambera_1]

21 minutes ago, Palubarac said:

... 

Agree

@MrConway could you please have a word with the developers/marketing team about this.

It would be great to have some consistency here. 

[RenamedUser_92906789]

Ahhh date formatting.

 

EU uses dd.MM.yyyy mostly (in my country its d.M.yyyy), while the americans use MM/dd/yyyy.

 

It is not uncommon that date formats in applications tend to be "messed up", especially if its targeted for multiple regions.

 

Should be fixed for sure... but imho not that important ... and to come a bit to devs defense... theres just waaay to many date formats being used out there.

 

We have maaaaaany bugs that need to be addressed first.

[Afghanicus]

31 minutes ago, nambr9 said:

Ahhh date formatting.

 

EU uses dd.MM.yyyy mostly (in my country its d.M.yyyy), while the americans use MM/dd/yyyy.

 

It is not uncommon that date formats in applications tend to be "messed up", especially if its targeted for multiple regions.

 

Should be fixed for sure... but imho not that important ... and to come a bit to devs defense... theres just waaay to many date formats being used out there.

 

We have maaaaaany bugs that need to be addressed first.

I agree that this is not that important and not a priority. I already said that in the first post.

 

However, I'm pretty sure (I'm not a dev to say I'm 100% certain) that a fix to the date is much easier than any other bug that they could be struggling with for few updates until eventually fixed completely.

 

In which format the date will be isn't so important as to have ONE format, not mixed all over the UI.

 

But when it comes to choosing, since it's EU server, it should be dd.MM.yyyy, as it is in every European country, as far as I know.

 

This mess was either created by different people/teams working on the UI or just by partially porting/copying the code from the NA server.

 

Either way, it should be fixed and it should be fairly easy/quick to do it, IF they want.

[Verblonde]

Being a Brit (DD/MM/YYYY) who moved to North America (MM/DD/YYYY), I'm pretty used to being regularly confused by date formats.

 

I would suggest that the simplest way to avoid confusion, for a game that covers a large chunk of the globe and multiple date formats, would be to use a three letter abbreviation for the month - 8 Nov 2019 say. That's pretty hard to misunderstand...

[HystericalAccuracy]

It may seem somewhat unprofessional, but how about always writing-out the month´s name?

 

aka February 4th 2020 instead of

04.02.2020 which can April 2nd or the 4th of February

[Afghanicus]

16 minutes ago, Verblonde said:

Being a Brit (DD/MM/YYYY) who moved to North America (MM/DD/YYYY), I'm pretty used to being regularly confused by date formats.

 

I would suggest that the simplest way to avoid confusion, for a game that covers a large chunk of the globe and multiple date formats, would be to use a three letter abbreviation for the month - 8 Nov 2019 say. That's pretty hard to misunderstand...

Well, I was talking about EU server but you're thinking even further - on all severs.

 

A simple date formatting like XX YYY ZZZZ (where XX is the day, YYY are the 3 letters of the month which is well established and ZZZZ the year) could be applied to any server without creating any confusion.

 

Whatever works for them but I could be selfish here and say that I only care about the EU server at the moment.

[Afghanicus]

Just now, VIadoCro said:

It may seem somewhat unprofessional, but how about always writing-out the month´s name?

 

aka February 4th 2020 instead of

04.02.2020 which can April 2nd or the 4th of February

In their defense and the defense of a clean UI, everything should be kept as short as possible.

 

That means only 3 letters for the month, not a full month's name. And the "-st", "-nd" and "-th" is always unnecessary in this case.

 

Then would bring "September 14th, 2019" to "Sep 14, 2019". That's 20 characters transformed into 12 characters which is almost half.

 

Everybody knows which 3 letters represent each month, it's something used often all around the world.

[HystericalAccuracy]

5 minutes ago, Palubarac said:

That means only 3 letters for the month, not a full month's name.

That would also be fine (in fact even better). I wrote the name out just to make it 100% "goof-proof"

[Skyllon]

2 hours ago, nambr9 said:

(...)

EU uses dd.MM.yyyy mostly (in my country its d.M.yyyy), while the americans use MM/dd/yyyy.

(...)

I vote for dd-mm-yyyy, but I'm worried Hungary might disagree...

In my country month can also be written in Roman numerals...

[Sehales]

 

1 hour ago, Palubarac said:

Well, I was talking about EU server but you're thinking even further - on all severs.

 

A simple date formatting like XX YYY ZZZZ (where XX is the day, YYY are the 3 letters of the month which is well established and ZZZZ the year) could be applied to any server without creating any confusion.

 

Whatever works for them but I could be selfish here and say that I only care about the EU server at the moment.

There are no different EN clients for different regions, so no matter which format we use, it will be "less correct" in one part of the world.

I am not sure why these are inconsistent though, but we can check what can be done. The date formatting is actually on the list of "things that would be nice to get changed", as it is missing the year in some places where it can be relevant.

[RenamedUser_92906789]

42 minutes ago, Skyllon said:

I vote for dd-mm-yyyy, but I'm worried Hungary might disagree...

In my country month can also be written in Roman numerals...

 

the whole date formatting is over complicated ... some countries (Croatia comes in mind) is still using old pagan month names. Always confuses me when I get emails from them :)

[Fat_Maniac]

3 hours ago, nambr9 said:

Ahhh date formatting.

 

EU uses dd.MM.yyyy mostly (in my country its d.M.yyyy), while the americans use MM/dd/yyyy.

 

It is not uncommon that date formats in applications tend to be "messed up", especially if its targeted for multiple regions.

 

Should be fixed for sure... but imho not that important ... and to come a bit to devs defense... theres just waaay to many date formats being used out there.

 

We have maaaaaany bugs that need to be addressed first.

Just use the ISO standard format YYYY-MM-DD

[Afghanicus]

1 hour ago, Sehales said:

 

There are no different EN clients for different regions, so no matter which format we use, it will be "less correct" in one part of the world.

I am not sure why these are inconsistent though, but we can check what can be done. The date formatting is actually on the list of "things that would be nice to get changed", as it is missing the year in some places where it can be relevant.

Doesn't matter which one will be "less correct" or "more correct", the issue is the inconsistency itself which we currently have within the game.

 

The inconsistencies are annoying enough as they are (Croatia with their months, US with their measuring system etc.) but we can't fix that, can we?

 

Glad that it's on some list for fixing, I just hope it won't be set by importance because then I'd understand it won't be fixed for another 4 years or so.

 

P.S. There are many other inconsistencies that trigger my OCD all over the UI but as I said - I won't be discussing them in this thread.

 

(if you care about those, you can send me a PP as some of those include the 'Premium Shop' which I believe you care more than the rest) 

[TheComedian1983]

Před 5 hodinami Palubarac řekl/a:

 easy

 

Před 5 hodinami Palubarac řekl/a:

fix

 

Před 5 hodinami Palubarac řekl/a:

 WG

Spojler

That Ň czech letter in my avatar is about almost three years old bug (in game is showing just ˇ ).
One player even give WG very precise manual how to fix that problem. Twice. Nothing happened.

 

[Skyllon]

On 11/8/2019 at 6:25 PM, nambr9 said:

(...) some countries (Croatia comes in mind) is still using old pagan month names. (...)

Most of us do. That's the beauty of this part of the world.

[300ConfirmedKills]

On 11/8/2019 at 5:15 PM, Sehales said:

 

There are no different EN clients for different regions, so no matter which format we use, it will be "less correct" in one part of the world.

I am not sure why these are inconsistent though, but we can check what can be done. The date formatting is actually on the list of "things that would be nice to get changed", as it is missing the year in some places where it can be relevant.

ISO 8601 is fully correct everywhere, completely internally consistent and entirely unambiguous. E.g.: 2019-11-09T22:36:46Z
There's no reason not to use it in the client, on the forum and the portal.

[Hanse77SWE]

16 minutes ago, 300ConfirmedKills said:

ISO 8601 is fully correct everywhere, completely internally consistent and entirely unambiguous. E.g.: 2019-11-09T22:36:46Z
There's no reason not to use it in the client, on the forum and the portal.

[RenamedUser_92906789]

10 hours ago, Skyllon said:

Most of us do. That's the beauty of this part of the world.

We have them too, but they are not being used outside school or wall calendars.

[Sehales]

On 11/10/2019 at 1:04 AM, 300ConfirmedKills said:

ISO 8601 is fully correct everywhere, completely internally consistent and entirely unambiguous. E.g.: 2019-11-09T22:36:46Z
There's no reason not to use it in the client, on the forum and the portal.

As an IT-guy, I agree. As someone who has worked with people getting completely confused seeing this format, I very much disagree and find it highly unlikely that it will ever be used.

[Zip__]

The expiration dates on the personal/combat missions can be very misleading as they usually expire the day before the date given. I’m sure many players have been caught out by that before.

[300ConfirmedKills]

16 hours ago, Sehales said:

As an IT-guy, I agree. As someone who has worked with people getting completely confused seeing this format, I very much disagree and find it highly unlikely that it will ever be used.

None of us are born knowing about ISO 8601.

[Sehales]

23 hours ago, Zip__ said:

The expiration dates on the personal/combat missions can be very misleading as they usually expire the day before the date given. I’m sure many players have been caught out by that before.

That is new to me. They always expire in the morning of the date given. Are you based outside of the European timezone by chance?

[Karasu_Browarszky]

The missions seem to expire at 6 am on the date that is given, but I don't think you can actually see the exact time in the client itself, you have to look for the news page on the web for the exact starting and ending times which is a bit bothersome and leads you to think you have several hours more time to finish them while, in fact, you don't.

 

As for the date format, why not use the three letter English abbreviations for months, like Dec 11 or 11 Dec, won't matter which way it is, it will always be understood the correct way.

[Afghanicus]

On 11/11/2019 at 11:31 AM, Zip__ said:

The expiration dates on the personal/combat missions can be very misleading as they usually expire the day before the date given. I’m sure many players have been caught out by that before.

I didn't want to being that up as I did talk about that issue on several occasions. 

 

Weird that @Sehales never heard of that.

 

I mean I'm used to it but I still find it misleading. If it says that expires on 14-11 (tomorrow) that means that TODAY (not tomorrow) is your last day to finish the mission.

 

In the world I live in, an expiration day always includes that day as the last day to use something or in this case.. complete something.

 

But according to WG that's not the case. If it says it expires on a specific day, it means it expires the day before and on the expiration day you cannot do anything as it's expired already.