What's up with the timers?

[HandEyeProtege]

I'm sure other people have noticed this, so I'm surprised I haven't seen it discussed before. The timers in the game seem pretty wonky. Specifically:

1) The timer for contests and auctions seems to run fast (ie. a contest that starts at 2:12:00 actually ends in about 2 hours.

2) A battle timer that starts at 20:00:00 actually takes about 22 hours.

3) Strangest of all, yesterday I noticed that a contest was still running with almost the full time on it even after several hours had passed. My working theory is that maybe the contest pauses if no one is online? (This is a very small game where most everyone is pretty inactive.)

4) The caravan game timer seems to be more or less accurate.

5) I haven't actually investigated the harvest timer.

Does anyone know why the timers are like this?

[robin74]

These things have been discussed many times, actually.

1) Yes, auction and contest timers are off by about 90%. The timer which says 2:12 will actually end in exactly 2 hours.
2, 3, 4 and 5) The game stops when nobody is online.

[HandEyeProtege]

Thanks. Not sure how I missed the earlier discussions on it. I'm curious, though, is there any conclusion about WHY the game works like that? It's annoying enough to have things like battle happen at times when you can't get online, but it's even worse if you can't even count on a timer being accurate.