Hours in Game

Does anyone know how the "Total Hours in game on current character" report you get for clicking an NPC with a name beginning with the letter 'M' are calculated?

The numbers I am getting don't make sense, as apparently I have 9,334 hours on just my 50's in approx. 2 years and 3 months of real time.

Jak

well it does only count in game and if your alt heavy then that gets spread around how many toons you have

my main has about 5000 hours but i honestly dont play him that much unless i need badges

among my other high play toons they are usually around 500-1000 hours played which makes sense

most of those 5000 hours that i put on my main were in the first 2-3 years i was playing the game since i was doing a lot of heavy badging then, once i started running out of badges to get then i started playing alts more

Maybe if you're in a task force it counts the hours when you're logged out? And I think AE missions count as task forces for that purpose.

I'm reasonably sure it's giving the hours a particular character has been logged into the game; that's what we've been told it was and it makes sense with the results I have.

My longest active is CMA with something like 4,000 hours and the 50's that I play frequently tend to average in the 300-600 range. Most of my characters have hit 50 in ~200 hours prior to the XP boost a few issues ago and they tend to make it in ~80-150 now. Obviously that's fairly normal leveling, not PL'ing.

I suspect the mechanic behind calculating the total hours on a character can be a bit buggy at times. Most of the time I check the total hours on a given toon it looks correct, but there have been times when I've gotten a result that's been way off (like hundred of hours on a lowbie I've hardly played at all).

If you really have 9,334 hours logged onto one character in just 2 years and 3 months of real time, that means you've spent an average of about 11-12 a day logged on to that one character over that span of time. Somehow I'm guessing that's not correct.

I think peterpeter may have the answer, with his Hours on TF when logged out counting comment. Our SG often does multi week TF's, one night at a time. So some of my toons have been in the Shadow Shard on a TF for as long as 4 weeks. And I have used AE a lot also, and don't always remember to quit an Arc when I log.

I have eleven 50's and a 49. Some were PL'ed, but most were played. I also have maybe 30 non-50 alts and perhaps 10 deletes (one was a 44) so, yeah, something wacky has to be happening. If I had actually played 8 hours a day for 2 years and 3 months the total would be (2920 + 2920 + 720 = ) 6,560 hours, and as much as I have played, my real time in game cannot be anywhere near that.

Thanks for a mystery soved peterpeter,

Jak

That's my understanding also.

While you're IN-game, those hours are counted normally.

If you're in a task-force related activity (tf, trial, ouros, AE), they count and continue
to count even if you log out (until you actually complete and clear that activity).

This makes some sense (sort of), because of the disconnect logic - ie. you can
get disconnected from the game (mapserver etc.) and still re-join the activity
when you log back in.

I believe it is this behaviour that also counts that time as "logged-in"
with NPC's.


Regards,
4

I just tested this:

Logged in a level 1 character that has never played. Went to AE, started a mission, went down and found Markus. He said I had been on patrol for 8 minutes.

Logged in another character, got an Ouro portal, went to Ouro, came back and found another M npc (15 hours for level 20 character), then went back to Ouro to start a TF there. Logged out.

Returned to the first character to find that Markus said I was on patrol for 18 minutes.

So time on a TF is included in the patrol time, which explains why I've got so many low level characters with thousands of hours on them.

You can also see this effect if you try for one of the time challenges on a TF. It counts not only the time you spend logged in, but all the real world time as well. So when JakHammer's SG does a TF over multiple playing sessions (I do that a lot too) they'll find it impossible to meet the challenge to complete the TF within a time limit. When the TF is over, it will show your total completion time. It will probably be in the hundreds of hours, even if you only spent four or five hours of in-game time on it.

There is also a (I believe known) bug where transferring toons between servers can result in incorrect (and usually massive amounts of extra) hours being accumulated. I had a character on Infinity with 300 hours and switched him to Virtue. A week later I checked and he had 4,000+ hours.

"Memories" - The Evangel Farewell Video

Reminds me of the sliders episode (women with facial hair!!) where they slide after seeing a murder, to a world (no women with facial hair!!) running about a minute behind but otherwise identical.