When are the LW arenas frozen and the snapshot taken before closing - when they close, or at the end of the ten minutes you get to land your sortie? In other words, if you take a base or kill an ack or hangar after the arena close message during the remaining ten minutes, when the arena reopens the next day, will the field or ack or hangar be friendly/dead or will it revert to the way it was when the arena closing message ran?
Last night in LWBlue, a vbase was flashing with nothing on dar after the arena close message, and it occurred to me that some sneaky fellows might lurk just out of sight and swarm and take the base with 3-4 minutes left before being ejected, after everyone else has decamped to the Off Peak arena. No one seemed to know if this was possible. I would hope it isn't.
I would assume kills and deaths during the 10 minutes still count, though, right?
OTOH, does the 10 minutes count for purposes of ack, hangars, etc. popping? In other words, you drop a hangar, the arena closed message appears 5 seconds later, and you RTB. Will the hangar pop 5 minutes or 15 minutes after the arena reopens? And is a CV killed during the 10 minutes dead when the arena reopens?
I haven't thought of a good solution to propose yet, but this relates to a general problem with the arenas switching, which is that you get 5-10 minutes of dead time as players who find themselves in the tower don't bother to up knowing there isn't time to do anything and all the enemy will be RTBing anyway, and then another 5-10 minutes of dead time in the new arena as people filter in, get themselves oriented and organized, and get in the air. This dead time effectively resets any base takes in progress when the arena closed - after the attackers all RTB, and then re-up and travel to the base when the arena reopens, CAP will be lost and hangars, ack, and town buildings will either pop or be well on their way to popping.
It's probably no surprise to anyone that I dislike the new arena system due to these issues. It solves one problem for some European players and creates worse problems for 5 times as many US players. (I also REALLY hate that the caps don't go to 400/450 at midnight CST anymore, and wonder why this is necessary for the new system. It always seems to be the case, as it was before, that if you log on around midnight CST everyone is leaving Blue faster than Orange so you have 30 people and little action in LWB and a cap of 250/100 in LWO.)
