Hey folks, just a heads up that we are not going to be able to send an email every time a turn is ready for each of your games anymore.
Instead, later today I’m going to code up a system that will email you with the status of all your games, just once a day, and only if you have not accessed the game in the last 24 hours as well.
Do I understand well that we won’t be able to rely on email notifications to avoid missing turns, i.e. will need to proactively check on the site to see if turns are ready?
Ruisselet brings up a good point:
If we are not going to see an email at all, if we have accessed the game within 24 hours, then we will never receive an email until after we’ve auto-conceded a match, right? (For any game with 24-hour turns or fewer).
yes, unfortunately you can’t wait for the email anymore know know that your turn is ready. I’m going to try to improve the load game screen, and we also have plans to have a list of your games available from within the game itself as well.
Sometime soon we might be able to add this function back, but it would be for premium players only and it would probably be “opt in” for each game.
Email is kind of a tricky area for us. It expensive to send (compared to hosting the game), and a lot of people really object to getting to much from us. We try and be useful, but without annoying people of get sent to the spam folder.
This kinda makes sense, but is still terrible for me, in turn-based games especially.
Would you consider either:
?
yeah, i was relying on the emails myself.
If you are in a 24 hour game, and you set yourself a calendar reminder every 24 hours, in theory you should never be AFKed.
I think that would work OK if the turns always went at the same time. Since I’m not always prepared to do my turn ASAP (like if I’m working or something) what I usually do is just leave the e-mail unread, and that’s a convenient way for me to see approximately when the turn was and to know when the turn is due, even if I don’t open the game.
I understand that sending the email is too expensive, but I wonder what else might work instead. You could make an RSS/atom/whatever feed available for each game and just not include player details or a leaderboard, though I don’t know how many of your users would use it – RSS basically died for me when google killed google reader.
RSS might be a solution. There are services that bridge RSS -> email.
Hrmm, I think there are methods for a browser to send notifications to the OS these days. I could get the game client to poll the server every 10 mins, then send a desktop notification somehow. I’ll have a read about it during the week.
That would be better (and still good) but it may be difficult as I split my play between home/work/iOS.
I don’t know what’s available at scale, but I’ve used things like pushbullet before to send me notifications when something happens on my work PC.
What about an alert via the phone app?
Yeah, something for us to look into it.
Also, related thought. A gentle reminder message/alert to a player if they’re the last one the game is waiting on could potentially speed turns up a lot
Mobile reminder would be excellent.
What was thinking we should do, is have an option that you can enable if you want it in the options - but it will be off by default.
That way we won’t send a bunch of unnecessary email to players that dont want it, but will send it to players who want it and choose to receive it. (which I think could be a small percentage of players. )
Seems great to me.
I mainly use the App so would love to see notifications.
Some of you may have noticed we have re-enables turn emails. We just felt that the game really needed them. I missed them more than I thought I would
This was noted with much pleasure by my fellow players!
I’d be curious to know about how many emails you send for your games and who you use to do it.