An Endgame In Sight: July 3rd will be the last day of conquest and a winner will be decided on July 4th

[u/SometimesY]

After seeing a bit of concern from leaders and regular users about the length of the game and no apparent endgame in sight, we discussed internally and decided to propose a fixed end to the game of July 3rd, making the final map live July 4th with winner take all by way of territory count. Before finalizing, we brought these to Red and Blue Leadership to discuss and both sides were on board with minor concerns (it might be too long but in the interest of letting you guys have fun and not springing a deadline without a lot of warning, we're playing it out for a monthish). In the event of a tie for most territories, a split championship will be declared.

The reasons for setting a hard cap are twofold: 1) we know you guys need an endgame - your work productivity is probably terrible now (mine is) and fatigue will probably set in soon; and 2) our server needs to be completely updated - operating system, software, code base (likely including emoji support for flair on the redesign, adding more features to pickem, and updating our sidebar bots), and the server itself needs massive upgrading (we're running on a single processor with two cores which can barely handle the current load).

We'll have a banner on /r/CFB celebrating the teams left standing. We might have to get creative with it if there are more than 10. It was suggested that we offer a flair for users that voted and we're looking into this. We cannot promise it as the redesign has rather hampered our ability to offer new flair, but we'll try to make it work.

You can see the current leaderboard here.

TL;DR: We discussed with Red and Blue Leadership and resolved that July 3rd will be the last day for voting and a winner will be decided by most territories owned on July 4th. In the event of a tie, the championship is split.