Playing with the Time

In any Animal Crossing game, what is known as 'time travel' but actually constitutes cheating in a sense, can be dangerous.  The game is built upon the concept of REAL time and part of the intrinsic philosophy, as with Harvest Moon, is to instill the virtue of patience in the Player.  You are supposed to wait and wait and wait, if necessary, for 'all good things come to good people in the end.'

Of course, most of us have not been trained sufficiently at a young enough age to be willing to wait forever for those items we desire and there are pressures within the game, such as the points given by the HRA, now the HHA,  as well as the sight of rare items during some of the Island Mini-Games that cause one to desire an earlier fulfillment of some dreams.

Thus, the strategy of time-travel.  In the old Animal Crossing games, one could travel freely through time without any negative results provided always that one went forward and never backward.  I am not certain, however, if this is entirely true in New Leaf as so much is based on wi-fi now and it is possible that Nintendo will cause bad things to happen even if one has gone forward if and when you connect to THEIR clock.

I have been guilty of forward time travel in New Leaf but I have not been able to connect to Nintendo because of the nature of the security on our router.