Periodic XP assignment

There are some misconceptions about when XP is awarded, sometimes related to getting an XP at logon.

This is due to the way XP is calculated without requiring a “global event” such as the old thursday midnight GMT “weekly reset” and allows instances to have different period sizes for awards - a week, a day, a few hours, 4.328 hours. Whatever they like (this can even be configured per group, per character, and doesn't have to be the same for all people in the sim… in fact as you read how this works you'll realise everyone has their own cycle that starts and ends at times relevant to that specific character).

Periodically, and at disconnection, the XP over the last “period” is counted, and if its less than the max, then it considers them for awards.

Lets take a very simple example, a sim that resets the XP award every 20 hours (a day - using less than an exact day is a good idea, otherwise awards can only get later in the day) and gives 1 point of XP for an hour on the sim.

A new character visits the sim at 6pm, and stays there for 4 hours. At 7pm they should receive a real-time award for the hour spent on the sim.

At *3 PM* the next day, this is 20 hours after the last XP award, so at this time the XP awarded in the last “20 hours” is zero, yet the ammount of time spent on sim in this period is 3 hours - the 3 hours spent on sim after the first point was awarded. As such this player will receive credit for the time spent on the sim the previous day because it's still “within the window” and wasn't already “credited for”.

It's like, if there was a “midnight reset”, that the character visited the sim from 11pm until 3am - the first hour until midnight gave a point, and then there was a reset, and midnight till 3am would be part of the next cycle and award XP also. The biggest difference is you don't need to be playing at “strange hours” to have your time counted as part of two different periods - in essence the 2nd period starts from the moment you're awarded a point and includes up until the next period ; that is, in the above example the user who gets their “real time” award at 7pm can then think of their next 3 hours as counting towards their next visit XP, rather than being discarded.

Overall this can encourage a more flexible and rewarding experience rather than needing to synchronise with some global cooldown (and the original system used to reset at Thursday, midnight GMT, merely because this is the weekly anniversary of the UNIX time epoch, this never really made a lot of sense as a reset point).

Essentially as long as you meet the visit duration requirement within the award period you will get an XP point, and this might apply from previous time you have spent on the sim.