doesnt when you join the mission tell you how long you have? btw I thought the missions were in real time and not game time. game time is faster.
midway
IIRC, the mission screen tells you the current time, the mission start time, and how long after the start that you can join.
Like many others, I'd see that the mission starts at 14:30 and current game time is 14:10 (so I have 20 minutes to wait). I'd rather not sit at that screen the whole time just to keep tabs on the game clock.
The game clock is set for a time multiplier of 1.0 (realtime). In custom arenas and the Special Events arenas, that can be set to any value. We've done that on rare occasion for an event that takes off in the afternoon and lands two hours later at night (to simulate a long, grueling 6+ hour mission). Messing with the time multiplier can really screw with people's heads, especially if they are coordinating strikes from multiple bases to hit a target at specific times, so a multiplier of 1.0 is the norm.
I've watched the game clock during FSO events that I run, and over prolonged periods of time it perhaps is a couple of seconds off, but generally is spot-on for the two-hour duration. I'd be shocked if the game time is so far off that over the course of an afternoon playing in the MA that it would be very far off from start to finish.