Design Flaw w/3-day Invasion Events: Clumping

Keep in mind that I'm having to do some guesswork here; it's not like any of us have seen the code. But here's what I think is happening, and then why it's such a pain in the neck:

When they turn on an invasion event, like the zombies over Halloween or the Rikti during invasion weeks or weekends, the first invasion happens in all eligible zones at once. Then what I think is happening is that at the end of each zone's event, the server picks a random number of minutes, 180 minutes plus or minus some fairly small number, and queues a zone invasion event for this zone in that many minutes.

If a zone event happens 8 times a day, and there are 7 days in a week, then by the end of an event week the spacing between invasions has widened to the original 3-hour interval plus or minus about two hours. That is to say, it's almost entirely random, and by the last day of the event there's a zone, on your side, getting hit almost constantly, maybe a 15-20 minute delay between the end of the invasion in the zone you're in and the next beginning of an invasion.

But over a 3-day weekend like the one we just had, Friday morning to Monday morning, there are only 23 invasions (average) per zone. So the total maximum deviation from the default starting time is less than an hour, and the average is less than half an hour.

I bring this up because even as late as late Sunday night, around the midnight scheduled (but not actual) end of the event, 5 out of 7 of the villain zones were still getting hit simultaneously. And the other two would kick off within seconds of when those five ended. So if you were trying to get the badges with multiple characters, and you logged in right after a wave of invasions, you had about two and a half hours to kill to wait for the first one. If you managed to get all 3 badges and the accolade in a single invasion event (likely, but not guaranteed, especially if you hit the lowest zones where most of your team can't kill things fast enough to spawn heavies), you could just barely switch characters fast enough to catch one more invasion event ... and then come back in another 2 and a half to three hours.

Please, please let me strongly suggest you increase the maximum "delta" on the random scheduling of zone events for these things.

I don't think it works that way. I think the 'clumping' is built-in and intentional. As I understand it, there is a random lull between invasions. When an invasion 'wave' starts - it hits multiple zones, with the exact timing and choice of zones being random. Then there is the lull, which appears to be at least 2 hours.

I THINK we were told this, once upon a time. I would assume the post got eaten years ago though, so I'm not going to bother searching. hmm.. ParagonWiki has detail about how Heavies are spawned, compliments of Dark Watcher, but nothing about overall timing.