Just out of curiosity, is there anyway we could find out how long we've actually been on the island?

It's just it comes up in conversation every once in a while and I was curious.

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"Optimist: Person who travels on nothing from nowhere to happiness." -Mark Twain.

Besides date checking your earliest logs and the guess-and-check of your player number, I don't know! I'd be interested to find out, myself, just to see if my own memories jive with reality.

Two ways: Specifically ask somebody with access to that sort of information, or check your ID number and compare with others who know. I guess you can also check the exact date if you joined a clan very soon in the game and never left that clan.

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There are two secrets to success. The second one is to never reveal all your secrets.

Search your email archive for the earliest mention of "Improbable Island".

Pester a mod? (Don't everyone do this at once or they will come after me!)

In the fine print at the bottom of every page, you can see the total amount of time you've spent waiting for the server to process your requests.

Not the total amount of time you've spent playing, mind - the few centiseconds that happen between your request reaching the server, and the response being sent. For some of you, it's more than a day. Remember at the end of Final Fantasy, where it said "You've been playing for forty hours"? Like that, but instead of spending forty hours playing, we don't actually know how long you've spent playing - all we can tell you is that you've spent forty hours opening and closing the drive tray.

Umm, did you mean from the date you created your (first?) Island character, or the number of hours that you have been logged on for since then? (which is what I think CMJ's reply is referring to.)

If it's the former, your forum user info says you registered on 7th December '09. (It's just over there in the User stuff next to your posts.) Was there a long delay between joining the Island and registering on the Enquirer page? Anyway, you can say 'at least since then', I guess.

D.

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The lunatics are taking over the asylum! Come with?

I know in my case there was a good few weeks between registering in the forums after registering in the game. That was because the forums are really quite overwhelming for a noob. Occasionally I will dig through them and find some gems, or to remind myself why certain things are the way they are.

As for how long I've spent playing... I'm not sure how to read this:

Do I look at the larger number? Is it in milliseconds or centiseconds? If centiseconds, then I've only "played" for 77.8 minutes in over a year.

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Something something unintelligible gibberish something.

To interpret this data!

Page gen: 0.02s (this is the amount of time it took to render this page) / 4 queries (0.001s) (the number of MySQL queries it took to do this page, and how long they took), cache 30 successful (0.002s) (the number and time of MySQL queries that we didn't have to do because their results change seldom enough that we can cache them) / 0 failed (the number of times we've tried to do a cached query but the cache was out of date or whatever so we ended up doing a normal MySQL query instead). Average for this account: 0.22s (your average page load time) - 102746.575 (total time, in seconds, you've spent loading pages) / 466855 (total number of pages you've loaded).

Hey Trowa, you're coming up on half a million pages. Also, a few centiseconds or milliseconds at a time, you've spent 28 hours of your life waiting for Improbable Island to load.

That's your 'page gen' time, in seconds. That means you've spent about twenty-eight and a half hours... not playing the game. No. Waiting for the Island to respond after you clicked a link.

And the Island has showed you over four hundred and sixty-six thousand pages while you were logged in and playing Trowa.

Don't worry, though. You're not even in the Top 100 List of Island Obsessives. In any contest about who's spent the most time staring blankly at a screen just waiting for the Island to come back with the next page... I'd win. 9 days 15 hours 5 minutes 7 seconds, and counting. That's only Season Two. It's true, I have no life.

I think mine is at 17.3 hours in about a years time. I only know I've been back.. from my hiatus.. (Rl stuff.. really did like the island... though I do remember it being really chaotic from the change from the pilot..) for about a year. I know this cause I came back about the time portal 2 was released mid April last year.

But ya to figure out when you joined.. only things like forum accounts or guessing or remembering a significant event will work exactly.

See, now, I was going to be all proud of not spending my whole life on this game and still getting as far as I have, and then you two went and ruined it with the revalation that "0.22s" is not really given in the correct units. It ought to be 0.22s/p, so show "seconds per page" of average page load time so the ratio next to it makes more sense!

And hey, Sessine! Only 1 day, 22 hours, 41 minutes, and 33 seconds left before you hit the big 1,000,000 seconds mark!

As for remembering when I joined, that would be when I came across someone's depiction of their new kittymorph character on DeviantART in late December of 2010. So, like Lydia said, for me it's about remembering a specific event. (I may even rediscover the link to that picture sometime, but I think the player has since left the game.)

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Something something unintelligible gibberish something.

I remember satisfying my own curiosity by poking through the Gallery Of Shame and basing my approximate Join Date by which images I remember being uploaded, and it turns out I've been playing since the last Quarter of '09. Damn. Wasn't that, like, right near the end of S1? Or something? I remember the Island died once and we were all stuck on a Forum for a week or so...

oh christ

OH THAT GRIM MOMENT OF REALISATION. When the blood drops from your face, and the icefingers curl around your sides, and the shivers shiver up your spine. When you look at your hands - twisted by your keyboard into withered, gnarled claws - and you shake them to the heavens, whispering, damn you, Caveman Joe. Damn you for sucking my very life away, through my atrophied eyeballs. And then the worst of it... that the information was right there all along, at the bottom of every page, black and white, if only you'd looked, if only you'd looked.

Mmm. Delicious.

You can be a very creepy man sometimes.

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"Optimist: Person who travels on nothing from nowhere to happiness." -Mark Twain.

Isn't that part of the appeal?

-Rose

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moooooooooo Visit and help me finish the monster list: goo.gl/rpBGe (Ya'll mostly know me as CLOG, fyi)

Yes, but I am positive that it has not, in fact, been pointed out in a while. And I, being one of those to suffer the inconvenience of atrophied eyeballs, felt the need to express my creeped-outness at that tidbit.

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"Optimist: Person who travels on nothing from nowhere to happiness." -Mark Twain.

I, for one, find it to be especially appealing.

Does that pagegen time include back when it would take half a fucking hour to load a page right after newday?