City Actionable Notifications

[JCsk]

The objective of this idea is that a notification appears when there is an action that can be taken in our city . For example, if you have commissioned your workshops to produce supplies and while you are waiting for it to finish, you go to the world map to explore the map and complete encounters in the provinces, or even if in another tab of your browser you access another web page , or if you leave the application running on your smartphone in the background, you will receive a notification informing you that your workshops are stopped (ZzZ) and that there is an action that can be taken in your city.

The same will happen with the factories, with the barracks if it runs out of training orders, with the Lonja if they have accepted all your offers, with the Magic Academy if it finishes producing or creating your last orders, with any building that we are expanding and finish the process, with any construction in progress, ...

Idea to Propose:
Notifications when there is an action to be taken in our city, even if we have the game in another tab of our browser or running in the background on our smartphone.

Details and reasoning of the idea:
The game will notify you when there is something you can do in your city, even if you are in another tab or if you have it running in the background, this will allow you to know when our buildings are stopped even when we are exploring provinces, or collecting relics.

Also adding these notifications, if we are on another web page or doing anything else on our computer or smartphone, as long as we leave the game open in a tab of our browser and have the application running in the background on our mobile.

Notifications will be activated when an event occurs in your city, such as your workshops are not in the process of producing supplies or your homes have reached the maximum number of coins they can produce.

Benefits:
With these new notices you will prevent your buildings from standing still without producing, avoiding the need to be watching the game at all times in case there is something that has finished its process and you have to give orders again.

Disadvantages:
These notifications can be deactivated, from a new tab, called Notifications within the advanced configuration options, with which they do not present any disadvantage. Players can disable these notifications at any time by clicking hide when the notification appears or from the Notifications tab.

 

[CrazyWizard]

I love your idea but there are some issues with it.

If you are not active, the server "stores" your city and ignores it untill it's reactivated again.
This is to save data costs, while servers and data are cheap, they are not free.

If they have 8m elvenar accounts and at a single time 500.000 of those are active simultaniously. by "storing" the account they save themselves 93.75% of the required computing power. this obviously is no joke to laugh at.

This is very obvious for example when you buildings are in scaffolding, no changes are made to it untill you login again, a 5 min upgrade can take weeks if you do not login for that long, another obvious example are scout quests, they only complete either if you login or if you go to the world map. it does not continuously track these things to save both data and computing power.

If you go to another tab in the browser your game is "paused" since this option became aviable in chromium. again to save data and computing power. when you go back to your tab the client frantically and sometimes failes to catch up with the server.

That said all is not lost,
The app obviously has these options, but outside of market sale notifications it's not impossible to have these notifications being controlled by the app and not the server, once you set a factory to X, the app can start a background counter for a notification for example 3 hours later.
This way it does not need to bother the server but can keep count of various events.

I think it would be possible for a developer with the interest to create a plugin that does exactly that.
We have seen a plugin before (thats no longer aviable) that grabbed live server communications to make spire calculations (spire advisor).

Therefore it should be possible for an plugin, to grab information about the scout, state of factories, ect on login and on live play and start a background counter with a notification.
It could for example see that there is no scout running anymore on login and notify you your scout is down.

I do not think it would be to hard to create such a plugin, if someone wanted to make one for the community.

 

[SkyRider99]

But this is a game forum. Not a business proposal or a board meeting. Entertaining thoughts however. Keep in mind that the game devs and the forum moderators are only mildly interested in our discussions in this area, but they do like to read about feasible improvements.

 

[CrazyWizard]

But this is a game forum. Not a business proposal or a board meeting. Entertaining thoughts however. Keep in mind that the game devs and the forum moderators are only mildly interested in our discussions in this area, but they do like to read about feasible improvements.

This is the idea and suggestion part of the forum for the game elvenar,
It's the idea that you put up suggestions and that they are discussed by the community.

I really do not get your response.

 

[Sir Derf]

I could be wrong, but I read @SkyRider99 's response as directed at the OP, who wrote his suggestion in what appears as the more formal form of a business proposal, rather than for forum discussion.

 

[Paladestar]

I love your idea but there are some issues with it.

If you are not active, the server "stores" your city and ignores it untill it's reactivated again.
This is to save data costs, while servers and data are cheap, they are not free.

If they have 8m elvenar accounts and at a single time 500.000 of those are active simultaniously. by "storing" the account they save themselves 93.75% of the required computing power. this obviously is no joke to laugh at.

This is very obvious for example when you buildings are in scaffolding, no changes are made to it untill you login again, a 5 min upgrade can take weeks if you do not login for that long, another obvious example are scout quests, they only complete either if you login or if you go to the world map. it does not continuously track these things to save both data and computing power.

If you go to another tab in the browser your game is "paused" since this option became aviable in chromium. again to save data and computing power. when you go back to your tab the client frantically and sometimes failes to catch up with the server.

That said all is not lost,
The app obviously has these options, but outside of market sale notifications it's not impossible to have these notifications being controlled by the app and not the server, once you set a factory to X, the app can start a background counter for a notification for example 3 hours later.
This way it does not need to bother the server but can keep count of various events.

I think it would be possible for a developer with the interest to create a plugin that does exactly that.
We have seen a plugin before (thats no longer aviable) that grabbed live server communications to make spire calculations (spire advisor).

Therefore it should be possible for an plugin, to grab information about the scout, state of factories, ect on login and on live play and start a background counter with a notification.
It could for example see that there is no scout running anymore on login and notify you your scout is down.

I do not think it would be to hard to create such a plugin, if someone wanted to make one for the community.

It depends on what form the notifications take, like if it's an email or a text notification, that would have server-side overhead. They save these kind of notifications for important things like "oh, we see you've not played for a month, we've given you 500 diamonds for free, log in to claim them!"

However, notifications when the game is open in the background are easy to achieve, without impacting the server and the server-side implementation is actually already done for this. You already get a sound when a building finishes completion, this could be done for other things like when a production run finishes. The game is already pretty efficiently designed in this regard, for nearly all buildings when you first load your city each building has a bit of data associated with it, something that is essentially "next state change" which is the number of seconds until the current state is due to change (like a building upgrade completing, a production completing). The game client already uses these values to update the UI - The game isn't constantly polling the server to check when your bread production is done, it just relies on the fact that when you loaded the game it was told this workshop will finish production in 900 seconds, so 900 seconds later it stops the building animation and adds the collection icon. When you click to collect, only then does the client talk to the server to try to perform the collection action and when you start your next production the server responds to the client with a new value for "next state change", so the game client goes back to waiting for this time to come to update the UI again for this building.

Sometimes the game client gets a bit ahead of the server, like when your KP bar changes to show that you now have 1 KP to spend, if you try to spend it ASAP after the bar shows it there you often get an error message saying that you don't have any KP to spend. Try again a few seconds later when the server has registered the KP as being there and it'll work when you try again.

So this is something that Inno could absolutely do and they'd only need to change the client-side code, since the server already provides the data that is needed to drive this.

 

[CrazyWizard]

It depends on what form the notifications take, like if it's an email or a text notification, that would have server-side overhead. They save these kind of notifications for important things like "oh, we see you've not played for a month, we've given you 500 diamonds for free, log in to claim them!"

However, notifications when the game is open in the background are easy to achieve, without impacting the server and the server-side implementation is actually already done for this. You already get a sound when a building finishes completion, this could be done for other things like when a production run finishes. The game is already pretty efficiently designed in this regard, for nearly all buildings when you first load your city each building has a bit of data associated with it, something that is essentially "next state change" which is the number of seconds until the current state is due to change (like a building upgrade completing, a production completing). The game client already uses these values to update the UI - The game isn't constantly polling the server to check when your bread production is done, it just relies on the fact that when you loaded the game it was told this workshop will finish production in 900 seconds, so 900 seconds later it stops the building animation and adds the collection icon. When you click to collect, only then does the client talk to the server to try to perform the collection action and when you start your next production the server responds to the client with a new value for "next state change", so the game client goes back to waiting for this time to come to update the UI again for this building.

Sometimes the game client gets a bit ahead of the server, like when your KP bar changes to show that you now have 1 KP to spend, if you try to spend it ASAP after the bar shows it there you often get an error message saying that you don't have any KP to spend. Try again a few seconds later when the server has registered the KP as being there and it'll work when you try again.

So this is something that Inno could absolutely do and they'd only need to change the client-side code, since the server already provides the data that is needed to drive this.

You forget that the actively on purpose pause the tab if you are not active on it.
You presume it isn't, there must be a good reason why they paused the tab when that option became possible.

Without a client running code, it cannot in any way shape or form perform tasks.

 

[Paladestar]

You forget that the actively on purpose pause the tab if you are not active on it.
You presume it isn't, there must be a good reason why they paused the tab when that option became possible.

Without a client running code, it cannot in any way shape or form perform tasks.

That's a moot point though. They've chosen to do this (btw, it's your web browser, you can tell it not to allow this...), so if they choose to implement this suggestion, which will require them to change the client-side code anyway, they can rollback on this one at the same time.

 

[Cheryn]

The objective of this idea is that a notification appears when there is an action that can be taken in our city . For example, if you have commissioned your workshops to produce supplies and while you are waiting for it to finish, you go to the world map to explore the map and complete encounters in the provinces, or even if in another tab of your browser you access another web page , or if you leave the application running on your smartphone in the background, you will receive a notification informing you that your workshops are stopped (ZzZ) and that there is an action that can be taken in your city.

The same will happen with the factories, with the barracks if it runs out of training orders, with the Lonja if they have accepted all your offers, with the Magic Academy if it finishes producing or creating your last orders, with any building that we are expanding and finish the process, with any construction in progress, ...

Idea to Propose:
Notifications when there is an action to be taken in our city, even if we have the game in another tab of our browser or running in the background on our smartphone.

Details and reasoning of the idea:
The game will notify you when there is something you can do in your city, even if you are in another tab or if you have it running in the background, this will allow you to know when our buildings are stopped even when we are exploring provinces, or collecting relics.

Also adding these notifications, if we are on another web page or doing anything else on our computer or smartphone, as long as we leave the game open in a tab of our browser and have the application running in the background on our mobile.

Notifications will be activated when an event occurs in your city, such as your workshops are not in the process of producing supplies or your homes have reached the maximum number of coins they can produce.

Benefits:
With these new notices you will prevent your buildings from standing still without producing, avoiding the need to be watching the game at all times in case there is something that has finished its process and you have to give orders again.

Disadvantages:
These notifications can be deactivated, from a new tab, called Notifications within the advanced configuration options, with which they do not present any disadvantage. Players can disable these notifications at any time by clicking hide when the notification appears or from the Notifications tab.

I have been thinking about this idea. What if the game notified your cell phone with a notification that there was an actionable event in your city, or on the world map. I have trouble keeping track of things I'm waiting on when they all seem to have different time limits on them. I don't know how difficult this would be to implement, however. I know I get notified from my pharmacy when I have a prescription ready, when there is a new post to one of my community apps that I follow or even when I have new mail (not junk mail). That might be an easier remedy, but I really don't know.

 

[Solanix]

@Cheryn there are push notifications on the App, you just have to make sure that your device settings allow push notifications from Elvenar.