That's good to know, since with $dayjob, $consulting, and $family, I imagine the times that I'm able to muster enough brain cells to play this in which my time isn't already spoken for will be fleeting, but it looks awesome.
Actually, that's a sort of separate question than the GP. Are there penalties for going through it slowly and/or playing in bursts interspersed with downtime? Depending on the metrics you are looking at, that might be very hard to correctly account for.
Are there penalties for going through it slowly and/or playing in bursts interspersed with downtime?
No! That's part of the beauty of it -- the game is on 24 hours a day (well, after we get past the roaring pyroclasm I expect on the servers immediately post-launch), 365 days a year, and hundreds of simulated bots are waiting with bated breath on a hard drive somewhere on AWS for when 'kbenson (or anyone else) has 45 free minutes in the schedule.
All three of us are working parents who are familiar with the juggling that goes on. Believe me, we didn't make something you'd have to be an unemployed 22 year old to get through. (In addition to that being a poor decision from a product perspective that would be a really poor decision from a "identify as many of the best engineers in the world that we possibly can" perspective because our working hypothesis is that y'all are presumably pretty busy.)
Nope.