For us usually “deprecated” means “it works but the use is discouraged”.
For hourly reward systems, the use of os.time() is likely more appropriate. tick() on Windows is time zone specific, which means that if the user plays the game from two different time zones in the single day you may see some strange results from this.
edit ah, and also it’s different between Windows and other systems, so if the same user plays the game on desktop and mobile the resulting times are going to differ. All of this is likely not too critical for your use case, but the point of deprecating this function is that it has incredibly strange behavior that nobody actually wants. Of course games using it will continue to work just as they do today.