Evening event July 22, welcome to moronopia

Now it's well known that the people at Niantic lack the basic ability to read the clock, so the times given here might be an hour off since we have this thing with daylight saving time.

Coincidentally the US has been dabbling with it for almost a hundred years, and we have high hopes the San Fransisco people will be able to grasp the concept in time for the centennial next year.

There are three 30 minute challenge windows starting at 18:00, 19:00 and 22:00 hours CET. Adding one hour for daylight saving time that would be 19:00, 20:00 and 23:00 hours. However, it's unlikely they've announced events at CDT, but rather at CDT + 1, which means the 11:00, 12:00 and 14:00 hours given for the local event would actually occur at the same hours CDT + 1, which pretty much is what people in that park would expect.

Now, we're talking Niantic programmers. Programming time is harder than it seems for some people, and the Niantic people have failed horribly at it since the inception of the game.

So...

The challenge events could actually occur at CDT time, meaning that they'll kick in exactly one hour after when they're announced to start.


In any case, if the first local challenge event doesn't kick in at 11:00 CDT + 1 the news will spread like wild fire, and the rest of us are likely to know within a minute or two. So worst case we'll simply have to wait for another hour.


If, and it's a big if, the challenge events start at 19:00, 20:00 and 23:00 hours CET + 1 (which means when our clocks and phones actually say it's 7, 8 and 11 pm), the first two should go off without a hitch. For the third one the people at Niantic will see a huge drop as it's a bit too late for most of the player base in the European Union.


Then there's the mystery challenge. 1 am July 23 CET, which might very well be 2 am in reality for reasons given above. No matter what, this one is a problem. The mystery challenge event is one hour long, and during that time at night basically the entire playerbase from the EU is gone.


Add that the entire event is placed during screwed up hours for everyone from Australia to Tokyo and we can see how Niantic basically fucked 80% of their global playerbase over.

Sweet way to run an on-line game.