Events that update every eight hours: oddly unfair
The featured item thing going on right now apparently updates every eight hours. Previously MODOKs recharged entry every eight hours. Kabam seems to believe that updating something every eight hours is a reasonable thing to do. I think its weirdly unfair. The problem is that for most players in the game, something that updates every eight hours is no big deal. It is not hard to check on it once in an eight hour period. But there are a small subset of players that will consistently get disadvantaged by events like this due to their sleep schedule just happening to align with the eight hour cycle.
For me in the HST time zone, the eight hour schedule Kabam uses falls on twelve midnight, eight AM, and four PM. Its very close to my sleep schedule. People eight hours ahead of me and eight hours behind me will face a similar situation, as will people in other time zones who sleep on a different schedule.
No matter what schedule you pick for an event, there will always be someone somewhere that just coincidentally lands in an unfortunate time window. But cycling every eight hours on the same schedule every time seems to specifically disadvantage far more people than is necessary or reasonable. You could avoid almost everyone's sleep schedules by cycling longer windows than eight hours - cycling twice a day every twelve hours would miss everyone but the narcoleptics.
I *usually* wake up before eight or else stay awake past midnight so I'm unlikely to miss any of the featured items. But in the case of MODOK I missed quite a few because running MODOK itself took time and at one point I was sleeping a little more than eight hours (not important why).
I can understand if maintenance happens at a certain time every time and I can understand when scheduled events that take place over an entire day start at the same time, like AQ or the AW week. But events or sales like this last for less than a day and in my opinion cycle with the worst possible period: eight hours. Cycling every two hours means everyone misses some of them. Cycling every twelve hours means almost everyone sees all of them. Cycling every eight hours means about 80%-90% of all players see all of them without any difficulty and 10%-20% of all players miss one out of every three consistently, or come close to it. That seems like the worst of all possible things to do in the interests of being as fair as reasonably possible.
I'm not specifically worried about the featured item sale, I'm worried about the notion that Kabam thinks eight hour cycles are a good thing when making a game for humans that average something in the general vicinity of eight hours of sleep a day. If the cycle was two hours ahead or two hours behind what it is now I would practically never have a problem with it. But many others then would. You're always going to align with a slice of people. I'm not asking to shift the schedule, because that would just shift the problem to other people. I'm suggesting that it is the eight our interval itself that needs to be rethinked. And next time it might be something more valuable.
