Goal Seek Explained: Find the Perfect Event Time for Any Global Alliance

Imagine being able to slide a single time slider and instantly see — across every member's timezone — who would be awake for an event at that moment. That's Goal Seek. It's the feature that turns ApoClock from a timezone display into a genuine scheduling engine.

The problem it solves

Once you can see every member's local time, the next challenge is obvious: when should we actually run this event?

With 12 members across 8 timezones, there's no single perfect time. But there's always a best time — the slot where the most members are in their active window. Finding that slot manually means trying time after time, checking each member's card, counting who's awake. With a large roster, that's 20 minutes of work every time you schedule anything.

Goal Seek does it in seconds.

How Goal Seek works

1. You open the Goal Seek panel

Hit the Goal Seek button in ApoClock. A time scrubber appears alongside your member grid.

2. Scrub through time

Drag the slider to simulate different event times. As you move it, every member's card updates in real time to show what their local time would be at that moment — and whether they'd be in their active working hours.

3. See the score

At every position on the slider, ApoClock scores the time slot: 8 of 12 members awake. You can see immediately which windows are optimal and which leave half your roster asleep.

4. Lock in the time

Found the sweet spot? Lock it. The APOC time is saved and ready to post.

What "awake" means

Goal Seek uses your configured working hours (set in Settings) as the definition of "available." A member is counted as awake if their simulated local time falls within that window. You can customise the window — if your alliance runs events 18:00–23:00 local, set that and Goal Seek will optimise around it.

Tip: Set your working hours to match when members actually play, not when they're simply awake. A tighter, more realistic window makes Goal Seek's score a far better predictor of who will really show up.

The APOC offset

ApoClock is built around game server time — called APOC time. Every event is defined in APOC time, and Goal Seek finds the APOC time slot that maximises member availability. The offset between APOC time and UTC is set once in Settings.

This means when you post an event at "APOC 20:00," every member's card automatically shows their local equivalent — no conversion needed:

APOC 20:00  →  UTC 12:00
  Sydney    22:00  (next day)
  London    13:00
  Manila    20:00
  Toronto   08:00
  Dubai     16:00

Posting the result to Discord

Once you've found the optimal time, you can post a rich embed to your Discord server directly from the Goal Seek panel. The embed shows:

The optimal APOC time and UTC equivalent
How many members are awake vs. sleeping
Each member's local time and availability status

How the Discord integration works →

Real-world example

An alliance with members in Sydney, London, Manila, Toronto, and Dubai runs a weekly war event. Their peak overlap window — identified by Goal Seek — is APOC 19:00, where 9 of 11 members are in active hours.

Approach	Time to find the slot	Members awake
Manual Discord discussion	~20 minutes / week	Guesswork
Goal Seek	~30 seconds	9 of 11

Before ApoClock, finding this took a 20-minute discussion in Discord every week. Now it takes 30 seconds.

Try it on your alliance

Goal Seek is included in the free ApoClock app. Add your members, open the Goal Seek panel, and find your optimal window.

Launch ApoClock → | Set up events and scheduling →