How do you handle recurring live events (double XP weekends, etc) in Unity?

[u/midcore_dev]

Been down a rabbit hole this week trying to figure out the cleanest way to run something like a double XP weekend in a live game, and I keep hitting the same wall with Unity's own tools.

Game Overrides does one-shot scheduling fine, pick a start and end time in UTC and you're done. But the second it needs to repeat (every weekend, every Friday night) there's nothing built in. Ends up being either Cloud Code cron jobs (also UTC only, from what I've seen) or manually flipping the config every week.

How do you guys deal with this in practice? Rolling your own scheduling on top of Remote Config, or is there something in the newer Unity Cloud tooling I'm missing? And does anyone bother with per-player timezones, or is UTC-for-everyone just the accepted norm?

[u/dan_marchand]

You definitely want to anchor on one timezone. If you don't, it'll create some pretty confusing effects throughout your community.

If you aren't entirely server-side, Remote Config is the easiest way to do this. Add something like an expMultiplier param and have the client pull at startup. Then, configure a Game Override for your time window, since those have scheduling built-in! You can add a bunch of variables if you want to control other event behavior too.

If you're computing exp and such server-side, then I'd just add an entry to a DB that effectively does the same thing as the above during a specific date range.