I would agree that the cut off should be friday night, for the obvious reason of having proper time to play and nominate games.
I'm getting confused now. When people are saying "Friday cut-off", do you mean the beginning or end of Friday? For clarification, my preference is for game released ON Friday to count, but not games released on Saturday.
For the record I do not recall changing the eligibility timeframe and would consider that inapproriate for me to do so. Does that nullify Maximus and The Quest - Celtic Doom this week or is this change to be in place next week?
Were they released on friday or saturday? Same question goes for the Gangstar Vegas game... Edit: Checked them and all were released on the 7th. All belong to this weeks thread.
Well it didn't say anything about Saturday until the thread you started a couple weeks ago. And yes it has never been clearly stated but the rules have always been firm. It's always been policed by echoseven and members who have regularly followed the GOTW threads over the years, like myself.
I also reviewed previous GOTW threads and found no clear indication of nomination cutoff in the original posts from early 2012. I maintain I made no changes to rules and respectfully recall things differently but that's a moot point. Either way a cutoff is more firmly in place now. Thanks to Royce and TheFrost for coordinating.
I'm nominating Bridgy Jones since it's the only one I've been able to sink some time into I think a friday cut-off for the GOTW poll is a bit short. Plus, it gives games that release on a Friday a disadvantage. Either cut-off on Saturday night with games that release on Saturday being eligible for next week's poll, or cut-off on Sunday. Just my 2 cents. EDIT: That's if we're talking about the nomination period. ^
Just so people don't think I'm making crap up, here's some evidence of the existing rule of a Friday cutoff (the whole purpose of which is fairness to weekend releases). (Click the links for context if necessary): That's just from searching Echoseven's posts. There are many other instances where a statement of the rule as posted by another member can be found, but Echoseven was the easiest to search (other than myself, but me backing myself up might not convince many people ).
To be clear I did not mean to imply that you were making stuff up. We have established whatever cutoff has been an un-noted rule clarified only by mid-thread questions, even those quotes from EchoSeven suggest it's a incessantly repeated question. The important thing is that we have a solidified rule that is included in the first post. I'd like to think we are all cool here without compulsion to contradict one another and that everyone is simply committed to smooth GOTW polling.
I think over the year and a bit the GotW has been running, both variations have been used. Friday and Saturday cut-offs. My most recent comment was about Rebirth of Fortune 2 being released on Saturday 11th of May. The problem with releases on Saturdays is that the weekends here are generally slow. If a game is released on Saturday, there is no way it will make it to that week's poll. So to keep things fair, Friday is the last day that games can be nominated. If a game is released on a Saturday or Sunday, it will be eligible for next week. It's *should* be in the rules and I'll edit it in to be sure.
Friday is always a Friday. A game released at 12:01 in New Zealand on the 9th of July will be released at 12:01 on the 9th of July in the US. There's just a difference of X hours between the two.
Occasionally a game has a simultaneous release everywhere but that's rare and I don't remember the issue ever coming up. Also, games released at or after 11:00pm Friday have traditionally been considered "Saturday" releases that Apple begins to trickle out an hour early. So unless you want to make it midnight, you might want to clarify that too.
Well yes, if someone like Rovio release a game worldwide at midday on Wednesday, it will be reported everywhere as a Wednesday release. So then it will have to be the US release time. From my experience, midnight has always been the time releases start so midnight it will be, I guess.
Actually Apple releases games an hour before their release date usually. For instance, all the big Thursday releases actually came out Wednesday night at 11:00pm, yet their release date will show as the 6th (Thurs), not the 5th (Wed). The problem with using midnight is that a game could come out, have a thread posted and not gain traction until later in the week, but would not be eligible for the following poll, while a game that released simultaneously at 11:00 Friday but had no thread created until later would be eligible because there would be no evidence of a pre-midnight release. So 11:00pm cutoff is more fair and makes more sense given Apple's release timing.
Games come out at 11 eastern, 10 central, 9 mountain, 8 pacific afaik. They are definitely 11:00pm eastern and I always thought it was a matter of as soon as any time zone within a country hits midnight (or actually an hour before), the game was released for that entire country. So eastern would be the benchmark and the time is 11. When do the big releases show up in Houston?
