City can decide the criteria and how that's managed but its pointless announcing that as they cannot anounce times for each qualifying group due to it being up to uefa to decide when tickets are available.
People cannot just wait for information anymore, there's an ungodly number that insist on answers instantly and decide to clog up phone lines asking questions that aren't ready to be answered yet. It just creates a swarm of enquires to the ticket office/help desks asking when creating even more for them to deal with.
This is a uefa thing.