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datetimezoneschedulingtournament

Is there an "average" time zone per country?

I want to schedule an online multiplayer game tournament, one per unique country, with a convenient start time for as many registered players as possible.

A global start time based on UTC is inconvenient for a number of countries. For instance, 17:00 UTC might be fine for those in the US but not in Australia.

Thus, I'd like to let each country have its own start time, say 17:00, but based somehow on the country's local time. The issue is that many countries have multiple time zones.

Would you recommend I take the average of the time zones per country? For instance, in the US, the start time would be 17:00 for those in the middle of the country, and +/- 2 hours for those on each coast.

I could further try to bucket users by timezone and have separate tournaments per time zone instead of country but that adds more complication to the design and prolongs the tournament to multiple mini-tournaments. That is, if you win your tournament in timezone A for your country, you still need to defeat the winners of the timezones B, C, ... for your country to be declared the country/national winner.

I'm not concerned about users understanding all of this (of course). I'll just show them a notification when it's time to play. I'm focused more on picking a convenient time to keep engagement up.

Has anybody dealt with this issue previously? How did you "solve" it?

Thanks for your thoughts.

Solution

  • Is there an "average" time zone per country? No. Many countries have multiple time zones. Sometimes a given country's time zones are not even near each other, due to the time zone applying to an island or overseas territory.

    But could you create one for the purposes of your game? Yes. Of course, it won't necessarily reflect reality of the world. Some users would be behind the time in that zone, and some users would be ahead.

    You might consider just assigning a separate start/end time for different groups of tournaments. For example, you could say that the US tournament starts at 8AM Central Time. It wouldn't matter whether or not users in other US time zones had the same local time or not - they would just start earlier or later in their local time accordingly.