Character birthday calculations are wrong.

[Kronos.3695]

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/celebrating-guild-wars-2s-eighth-anniversary/

The line "The oldest characters were created on August 25, 2012, during the early access period prior to Guild Wars 2‘s launch. Those characters will begin receiving their Eighth Birthday Gift on August 25, 2020." is completely wrong, since most of the people I know received the gift today, the 23rd.

Why? Because on your calculation you're probably getting the age of the character in days instead of years, which is wrong because you're not considering the leap years in between.

If you're currently calculating the birthday date using the days (currently 2920), you're doing it wrong because you're missing 1 day from this year (2020) and 1 day from 2016.

[keenedge.9675]

leap-years.day math versus year math. I suspect they used days ... :shrug:common apprentice mistake.

EDIT: oops all said above - too quick to type

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

It happens each year; probably not worth the bother.

[Shrimpkin.4851]

From the Wiki: Birthday distribution ignores the extra day in leap years; characters will receive a gift every 365 days. This means a character's birthday will "drift" backwards by one day every four years.

[vandrefalk.6823]

So, you get your birthday present 1 day earlier for every 4 years the game's been out. No biggie really :D

[Kronos.3695]

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:It happens each year; probably not worth the bother.

@Dondarrion.2748 said:So, you get your birthday present 1 day earlier for every 4 years the game's been out. No biggie really :D

I'm sorry, but I don't get your point: I'm not saying that this is an important and vital feature for the life of the game, but it's still a bug.If during a software life cycle you ignore every little things, your code became a mess over the years :)

[vandrefalk.6823]

@Kronos.3695 said:I'm sorry, but I don't get your point: I'm not saying that this is an important and vital feature for the life of the game, but it's still a bug.If during a software life cycle you ignore every little things, your code became a mess over the years :)

With the current issues at hand with EU servers hardly performing at all, and lots of other bugs in the game, then this would - in my developer backlog - rank as trivial. Yes, they should fix it but there's more pressing matters. There was someone in the community (reddit i think?) who posted they were sad about this because they no longer receive their gw2 birthday present on their IRL birthday, and again, hardly a critical error. Someone even said that person could wait to login one day and still receive the present on their birthday ;)

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

I'm sure the Devs are aware. I meant, it's probably not worth the bother to change the announcement (though that would suffice); it's brought up every year on the forums and elsewhere.

[Cyninja.2954]

The developers are most certainly aware of this. Unfortunately "fixing" this issue would be far more work than simply leaving it as is.

• First off, it's an issue which benefits players, even if only in a tiny way.
• Second, changing this requires taking into account leap years, which makes it a more complex, even if only slightly, algorithm.
• Third, changing this mid system would immediately cause an issue with all characters which become ineligible for a gift, which they would receive X days later. Which means that these characters would either have to get skipped on the "new" birthday, or lose access to the gained birthday gift. This would apply to ALL characters across ALL birthdays which fall creation in-between the incorrect birthday versus the new one. So pretty much EVERY single character created on release/early access (and eventually all created on release day, after the next leap year skip). This is actually the biggest issue and related workload.

TL;DR:Not worth the hassle to correct/fix at this point in time. Even less considering players benefit from this 365 day approach. The deviation remains minimal.

[keenedge.9675]

I once heard a quote "Being a Professional is doing your best even when you don't feel like it"

SMH

[Ayrilana.1396]

I wouldn’t be shocked if fixing this would break things.

[Khisanth.2948]

@Dondarrion.2748 said:

@Kronos.3695 said:I'm sorry, but I don't get your point: I'm not saying that this is an important and vital feature for the life of the game, but it's still a bug.If during a software life cycle you ignore every little things, your code became a mess over the years :)

With the current issues at hand with EU servers hardly performing at all, and lots of other bugs in the game, then this would - in my developer backlog - rank as trivial. Yes, they should fix it but there's more pressing matters. There was someone in the community (reddit i think?) who posted they were sad about this because they no longer receive their gw2 birthday present on their IRL birthday, and again, hardly a critical error. Someone even said that person could wait to login one day and still receive the present on their birthday ;)

Meanwhile some other people now get it on their birthday instead...

[vandrefalk.6823]

@Khisanth.2948 said:

@Dondarrion.2748 said:

@Kronos.3695 said:I'm sorry, but I don't get your point: I'm not saying that this is an important and vital feature for the life of the game, but it's still a bug.If during a software life cycle you ignore every little things, your code became a mess over the years :)

With the current issues at hand with EU servers hardly performing at all, and lots of other bugs in the game, then this would - in my developer backlog - rank as trivial. Yes, they should fix it but there's more pressing matters. There was someone in the community (reddit i think?) who posted they were sad about this because they no longer receive their gw2 birthday present on their IRL birthday, and again, hardly a critical error. Someone even said that person could wait to login one day and still receive the present on their birthday ;)

Meanwhile some other people now get it on their birthday instead...

xD

@Ayrilana.1396 said:I wouldn’t be shocked if fixing this would break things.

Suddenly the EU servers work completely normal again...

[Astralporing.1957]

@"keenedge.9675" said:I once heard a quote "Being a Professional is doing your best even when you don't feel like it"I will add some other relevant quotes:"the best is the enemy of good", and"don't fix it if it's not broken"