I don’t get why they came up with this either. What could possibly be the reason they want two irl years and an expansion be one year? Why?
I imagine it was just for the simplicity when they insisted on codifying everything in and leading up to the Chronicles. A year an expansion is just an easy default for lazy writers with no real interest in putting any real thought into what that would mean.
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Timelines are rarely updated and terribly vauge. The “one year per expansion” rule doesn’t even work and celebrations happen in real time. As such I just stick at an age that fits and update it with the timeline when appropriate. Vaugeries like being in one’s 30’s and so on are excusable and convenient.
If some want to have annual anniversaries and such in real time that’s on them. I do what I can with the timeline provided when it’s relevant. Tracking years might be less important if playing a stupidly long lived character but significant history in recent living memory means no one is really untouched.
Or, you know, play an undead who doesn’t age.
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It’s always struck me as really strange because they could have legit said “the expansion events lasted as long as the expansion did” and you’d have an easily understood timeline right there, with no extra faff required to codify and explain anything.
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this in more than 10 char
WoW is 15 years old
8 years have passed.
15 years of annual events have passed.
Chromie has alot to answer for.
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Looking back it’s actually kinda hilarious. You have these multi-thousand year gaps between events, then leading into the RTS games things are about a decade apart between each game. Which is fairly compact, but reasonable.
Then as soon as WoW begins suddenly every earthshattering event (Literally in some cases) happens back to back year to year? How is the population not just utterly decimated? How is every soldier not riddled with PTSD? How is society still functional even?! Imagine if we had every single major event in the planet’s history happen year to year. The societies on Azeroth would be in shambles.
I’m one of those people who’ll love and make use of the highest fantasy elements in lore, but even high fantasy needs some element of logic or belief to be enjoyable.
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I go by irl years. The official timeline is too stupid to even consider.
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these are truely the endtimes
I just go by real time, it hardly ever makes a big difference anyway. Blizzard’s system is stupid (as usual).
Its funny how a lot of people seem to agree that the official timeline is stupid and nobody really follows it.
Because it is stupid and incredibly lazy writing with no thought behind what it would mean to have every expansion lat a single year.
Even going by RL time is pushing things a bit but two to three years is far more reasonable than one.
No, I know. I do it myself.
Just funny how that’s the one thing quite a few people are like; “nope, I’d rather not follow that, thanks”
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A common enemy on the server.
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I’m as vague about it as possible and since I roleplay a Night Elf, the passing of a year or two isn’t particularly notable to him anyway.
Blizzard’s timeline feels contrived and is just not in line with how our characters would reasonably perceive time. It‘s preferable to ignore this esoteric piece of lore and go by rl years.
IRL years, personally I’ve never had a character in RP that was around 5 years ahead of the “actual timeline”. And I’d recommend anyone follow IRL years, having two winters and two summers a year just feels really odd.
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I just follow IRL time too.
I can’t really be bothered slowing or speeding it up IC, and most people here seem to do the same. If you’re doing casual RP and do RP in general most days, or even with any regularity (which you should if you’ve any plans of being an active part of any storylines or guilds), then IRL time is the best way to go.
It’d be confusing and would just add extra fuss thinking about how much time passed since you were last IC and crap like that.
Unless you’re in a closely DMed bubble storyline, it isn’t going to work.
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The in-game calendar DOES follow IRL years. So there have been two Brewfests since BFA launched, for example.
Considering this, I think it would be fair to celebrate birthdays based on the IRL calendar. Although how old you actually get is… weird.
And in fairness to Blizzard, it’s a difficult problem to solve: having a world-ending cataclysm every two years still seems like way too often; and if they went for the bare minimum 5-10 year gap, they’d have to do a massive timeskip every single expansion. Which would be difficult consider that the stories of the expansions now tend to be weaved together: everything from MoP to now has been a single chain of events, so there’s never a good breaking point where you can insert a SpongeBob “10 years later”. The only other option would be to make expansions themselves take 5-10 years, but that would be difficult to portray in-game… even if the Fourth War taking longer than a few months would make more sense.
Plus if it was 10 years every expansion, most of our characters would be in retirement homes by now.
As roleplayers there’s a reason we follow the lore because otherwise we’d never agree on anything. Thankfully though, I think going by IRL years instead of the canon 1 year per expansion is something we can definitely all actually agree on.
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