Cecil Task times not matching list

wadebear wrote:

Donna4612 wrote:
[I was on schedule for 4/23 and 4/24, then it went off the list. My 4/25 was the same as yours in all 4 of my towns (2-2-6-4 instead of 4-2-6-4).
Today (4/26) it was listed as a 4-1-2-1, but I started with a 1 hr task and the second task is 1 hr also.
All my towns follow the same schedule. All have different buildings. So I don't think it's the buildings you have. I think it's EA messing with us. :)

As far as I know my task times have never matched the list, but my towns always match each other - although my towns are not identical in content.

My 26th tasks were 4-2-2-1, so they don't match yours either.
On the 27th I got 4-1-4-4 instead of 2-1-4-4.
Today's are 2-1-4-2 instead of 4-4-2-2.

I pretty much give up. Whatever's causing some of us to have different times must be so esoteric that I'll never figure it out...

There is a pattern to your times for the last three days - for the first two days, the first and second are the first and second times of the previous date, and the third and fourth are the third and fourth times of your expected date. For the third day (the 28th), the first three lengths match the previous date, and the fourth matches the expected date.

I think it works something like this:

The task number (1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th) resets to 1st at midnight in your timezone. It advances to 2nd, 3rd, and 4th as you complete tasks during the next 24 hours, but always resets to 1st at midnight regardless of whether you completed all four tasks.

When the game looks up the task length it should give you, it uses what it thinks is the current date and the current task number (1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th). However, the game uses a specific timezone to determine the current date, which may not match your timezone. I think (but am not sure) that timezone is pacific standard time (not pacific daylight saving time, even though daylight saving has started). So, for example, if your time zone is eastern daylight saving time, the period between midnight EDT and 4 am EDT are considered to still be the previous date for the purposes of this lookup, so any task lengths determined during that period will use the previous date's entries.

If this explanation is correct, that would mean that for the past three days your games obtained the first two task lengths (first three on 04/28) during the period between your timezone's midnight and the lookup process's midnight (between 12am EDT to 4am EDT in the above example), and obtained the remaining task lengths after that. Does that fit with your observations?

This also means that it's possible to get a given date's entry for the same task number twice. For example, you could get the 04/28 1st length on 04/28 at 9 am EDT, then get the 04/28 1st length again (instead of the 04/29 1st length) if the lookup happens on 04/29 between 12 am EDT and 4 am EDT.