I think a time of seven days is just arbitrarily setting it to be one week, but that if a shorter deadline is required, 8-10 days is better. (Yes, I realize an eighth day doesn't seem like much of a difference; what does an extra 24 hours give? Well the answer is, in fact...quite a lot. I can comfortably play in a game with an 8-day deadline, but 7 days is not enough time for me to play well, least of all in a newbie game which demands a higher quality of play.)
As BulletNLynchproof mentioned, this is also not the site standard, not even remotely close to it. 14 days is the most common metric, but the second-most-common metric is 10 days, and thus an 8-10 day deadline is more in line with site norms than a 7-day deadline; almost no mods at all actually run one-week-deadline games. (They
While I know this change caters to newbies, my concern is that the tradeoff is too high; it will lead to a couple of nasty side-effects.
One, the quality of play in newbies is likely to drop--if not from newbies themselves, then from veteran players who need/are used to the extra time. Many ICs are going to find themselves suddenly having it be ten times harder to do their job. Even SEs who have been around long enough are going to struggle; with this change, their play is going to be notably lower than it should be given the game type. (In a newbie, we are meant to show off the best of mafiascum play, and the best of mafiascum play does not work well on a tight budget.)
That, not going into how some people who would otherwise gladly IC/SE, with this change, will instead of going in and performing poorly, opt to simply not IC/SE at all because they know the above would happen if they did. (Such as myself.) Leading to less ICs/SEs signing up.
Two, while initial newbie retention rate may be higher, this change I'd expect would simply shift when the newbies flake--instead of flaking when they are playing the newbie game, they flake once they try out a different game type and find out that literally the entirety of our site uses an entirely different format than the newbie games. If newbie games are meant to introduce newbies to site norms, that'd be the literal opposite of the intended goal.