Greetings, I don't understand the need to have a separation between sign-up time and play time, considering you can play during the sign-up time from as soon as the pod fill up, why not just separate the schedule in two part? Keeping the current 5 hours rotation, that would be a schedule of 4 hours league time interwoven with 1 hour break time. Let people sign in for a league at any time during the 4 hours that league is active. As they are now,what we actually have are 90 minutes time of league ( the entry duration) and 3 and an half our of break time, (the play duration plus overtime plus actual break). Why not allow people to join the league during the play duration? say for example they just got back from work during the play duration? I feel only 90 minutes for entry every 5 hours is rather limiting
I think it would make sense to allow people to join after the normal entry period with a warning stating how much time they'll have to play matches. Many people (myself included) don't intend to play all 4 matches in any given league, so the limited time is often irrelevant.
The reason it's done this way is to ensure that, if you sign up, you have a reasonable chance of getting to play all your games. Warnings about "you may not have enough time" and so on are probably not enough to ensure that people don't sign up for something and then miss out on expected play time. People often don't read warnings or may not understand exactly what they mean.
My beef with this : I sign up during sign up time a while before my lunch break, some time later on my actual lunch break I get down to it and try to play the games, but even if I had enough time to comfortably play all four games I actually end up playing only 1 or 2 matches , 3 when I'm lucky because there aren't many people queueing for the league anymore eventho there's still one hour left of play time, because almost everybody already did their 4 games as soon as their pod filled up . Also, suggestion n# 2 : allow people to play on league even is they didn't sign up for them. They won't be in any pod so they won't get an end of league reward, but if they prefer to gameplay of quick draw / death march / whatever league are on rotation at the time, they can enjoy playing that even if they missed out the registration for any reason
I think @Jon is more concerned about a new player not paying attention to the warning and wasting 50 gold on an entry fee rather than fairness, but at the very worst that can only happen once before they figure out how leagues work. Personally though, I think the convenience of being able to join a league whenever one is open greatly outweighs a few newbies losing 50 gold because they didn't read. Of course, I'm also not the one that would need to implement all of this.
I can see Jon's point, but I think closing entries 45 to 60 minutes before the end would give plenty of play time.
