After a weekly Realm reset and some hotfixes, North American players in World of Warcraft had a big question… Where’s the sun? Logging back in, these players found their realms to be a little darker (or lighter) than they expected.
In the meantime, quite a bit of panic ensued. After all, in-game times, which are fully linked to real-life 24-hour time cycles, are linked to the literal brightness of the world and a few chests. What was going on? Was it a deeply elaborate teaser for the new expansion, Midnight, coming out? Was it something more sinister?
Amidst the panic, a few players did some pretty basic reconnaissance and shared their findings: the day/night cycle was more aligned to UTC timezones, and otherwise, the day/night cycle continued relatively as usual. It didn’t stop people from speculating in an official Blizzard forum post.
A dev finally came to share that it was, in fact, a bug pushed during the hotfixes that aligned the time zones to UTC instead of North America. They also shared that it would be fixed eventually (involving a reset of Realms, it seems). Aww.
The weird occurrence did bring the NA community for a while to speculate over lore and seasonal events, and learning that it was just a bug burst the bubble a bit, plus pushed a few players to ask for a faster time box to see everything.
But hey, it was a good bonding experience. Probably.
