There are a lot of things in the game that I feel have become under utilized for the amount of work silver has put into it. recent topics give a feeling that higher retention rate of new players and reduction of inactive inactive bots are whats on the mind of the community. So here is my contribution of ideas.

tunnels: changing default vote to yes for tunnel challenges. this would allow players isolated from the rest of the players to go on the offense more often, instead of restricting them to just building up towers on their own. this would allow factions to mount attacks on towers of inactive players while players still have the option to decline the challenge if enough players change their vote.

notifications: notifications in this game are a bit poor. no notifications for chat rooms at all makes it easy to forget they exist. it would be nice if there was the ability to get notified of activity in chat rooms and in the wire such as push notifications. this would have to be limited to player messages as zone captures would then make the once per day zone updates for the api a bit useless.

Wire: part of the tutorial for the game should be the wire. the game should force people send a wire message to a nearby active teammate so they can be brought into the chat rooms. this could even be incentivized with a small cube reward upon receiving a reply to help new players get involved and to help existing players find new teammates in their area.

these are all changes that I think would be relatively simple to introduce but would have large impact on retaining new players and giving isolated players something to do other than mindlessly stack towers to impossible to break levels.

Push notifications used to be a part of the game, but it demands too many resources. Back in the day, we had Command Center, a Windows 8 app, that gave up to the minute information on zone activities, but, again, it demands too much resources. Many players have created different resources available to everyone that are very helpful, but reply on a once daily data dump that is readily available. The in game chat is useful for new players, but was a very late addition. Prior to that GroupMe became the preferred method of communication and even Silver still uses it. The chats have mostly become a place for GM invites. Player to player messaging will always be a thing, mostly for cross faction communication.

Today I released email notifications for forum topics. You can now follow a forum topic, or get an email when a new topic is posted.

Now that Windows Phone is gone, there are some better options for unified push notifications. It is a non-trivial thing, but I feel like I want to put more time into notifications again. Maybe I'll invest a week and see if I can get something working.

The hard part about notifications isn't sending a message, the hard part is wrapping everything around it. I won't be issuing notifications for zone attacks. That was a mistake the first time around. The only zone notifications I might do would be tunnels. I think notifications would probably be for mentions in the chat room, atlantis, forum activity, high exchange rates, missile monday, wire messages, bases full, scope full, etc

I will not implement notifications without a very complete way for users to select which ones they want, quite time(s) and a snooze features. The danger with notification is players turn them off for a while, and never turn them back on. I won't do notifications without the ability to find tune what you get and when. That will take alot of work, but I think is important.

The chat and wire could use some work. But I think that is lower priority.

I feel like tunnels are going to get some love in the next few months, but not sure on what will be done there yet. That seems like low hanging fruit for some improvements.

A nice notification would be when the Bot tank, or the Energy tank, are full.

This would avoid to have to set third party reminders.