Update 5.12: Notifications

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.12.0! This blog post describes what’s changed.

Idle Changes

– Activatable artifacts have been significantly buffed.
– Added achievement for winning the Commander/Bomb Card arena.
– Auto-sell advancement no longer considers techs it can’t see.
– Auto-smelt advancement is now smarter about spreading out recipes when you have lots of non-working smelters/crafters.
– Added a “About Warzone Classic” button to the help menu of the Idle apps which explains how to properly transfer your progress over to the main Warzone app in case you want to play more classic.
– Fixed market raid dialog so the labels don’t get wrapped as much.
– Fixed the free cache power performance.

Notification Overhaul

This updates adds a ton of new notification-related features, and cleans up the existing notification options.

First, a history lesson: Way back in 2008 when this game was invented, the only notification options that existed were e-mail notifications. At the time, e-mail was the de-facto standard for notifying someone that something had happened. Back then we had pretty good notification options, as you could enable or disable each type of e-mail notification and also set them to be delayed (say, tell me 15 minutes after my turn advances). Delaying was useful in case you took 10 turns rapidly back-and-forth with an opponent — you wouldn’t want to return to your e-mail inbox and find 10 emails were sent.

When iPhone and Android hit the scene, people demanded the option for push notifications. These were added as they made a lot sense. They could integrate with the app and had some nice features like grouping up turn-notifications for a single game and the app could have logic to ignore them if you already had the game open, which isn’t possible with e-mail. However, these were kind of bolted on — the only options given to the player were “all on” or “all off” as they weren’t individually controllable like e-mail notifications were.

The most common notifications, like “it’s your turn”, were identical between e-mail and push. However, there were also lots of inconsistencies. Some notifications weren’t available in push form, like the ladder-rank-changed notification. Some notifications were push-only, like the “you’re about to get booted” message. Some e-mail notifications couldn’t be turned off, like the “you won the coin leaderboard” notification. Overall, I’d say it was a big mess.

This update fixes all of these by streamlining the notification system. Now, for each type of notification that Warzone sends, you can configure if you want to get it by e-mail, push, both, or neither. You can also configure a delay to the e-mail if you want it.

This makes for a much more robust system that gives the players full control over how they want to be notified and what they want to be notified about. You can configure your notification options by going to the Settings menu and clicking Notifications.

In-app notifications

Sometimes you want to know something happened, but you don’t really want it sent to you by e-mail or pushed to your device.

In-app notifications gives you an option to let notifications to delivered to you in the Warzone app or on the Warzone.com website. They will appear by flashing the mail icon in the upper right corner.

A good example of this is the tournament-ended notification or the fog-game-ended notification. These are things you are likely interested in, as you want to see what happened behind the fog of a game you were in, but it’s not urgent as nobody is waiting for you and there’s no downside in looking at it later. So you can choose to have these delivered by in-app notifications instead of (or in addition to) e-mail/push.

You’ll find in-app notifications is a third option right alongside e-mail notifications and push notifications on the Settings -> Notifications page.

New Notifications

In addition to giving you more control over how and where notifications are sent, this update adds new things you can be notified of, if you want:

  • Added ability to be notified when a Clan War timeslot is starting. Open the Clan Wars page and click Notify Me and you can set notification options for each timeslot
  • Added ability to watch a forum thread, which sends you a notification when someone replies to it. Forum threads are automatically watched by their creators.
  • Added a notification option for when someone sets a new record on a community level you made.
  • Added a notification option for when someone takes a record from you on a community level.
  • Added a notification option on your Warzone account’s birthday, to celebrate the special event.
  • Added notification option for new Warzone blog posts. It defaults to in-app notification only.

Other Changes

– All: Increased limits for big maps. SVG size from 2mb to 2.5mb, maximum territories from 3200 to 3500, max dimensions from 3330×2400 to 3500×2500
– All: Added a “P” button next to clans on the clan war map that lets you see a list of players who participated in this season from that clan, along with how many wins and games they played.
– All: Fixed clan war territories without rewards coming up every time. They should only come up once.
– All: Fixed clan war games not being assigned to territories if the first two games were on the 2v2 template.
– All: Fixed a rare case where a clan could get territories with fewer wins than was required if they were given multiple territories at once.
– Unity: Fixed the “view” button in the chat room next to a clan redirecting you to the website instead of keeping you in-app.
– Unity: Fixed clan chat not removing the red number when the chat room was opened.
– Standalone/WebGL: Coin purchase sizes are now listed correctly in the store. Previously they showed the iOS/Android sizes which are slightly different than what Standalone and WebGL clients can purchase.
– Website: The browser’s url now gets set properly when browsing clan war pages.
– Website: Forum threads now set page descriptions.
– Website: Fixed double-encoding on LevelsByCreator page.

21 thoughts on “Update 5.12: Notifications”

  1. – Unity: Fixed clan chat not removing the red number when the chat room was opened.
    YES Thank you that annoyed me alot

  2. Map size increase? Awesome sauce. This goes well with the create games 4 territories per player default setting. I think doing this will give us bigger idle maps too so no doubt a double whammy. I also think that if people can purchase clan names, this idea would generate some kind of worth. Just add a clan name change dialog to the global chat. Word gets around if it’s noteworthy. People are recommending adding additiional clan slots to the 40 max. So you could add 5 purchasable since the CW map is larger and 45 player games.

    I can see the background grand scheme behind the updates and have to say, these updates are pretty clever.

    1. Great changes, I have no idea what any of them related to, however, what about the changes that should have been made 10 years ago. Like if you surrender before turn 15 you cannot play Warzone for 14 days. How about if you teamates do not agree to a surrender you do not get to whatsoever or you get a 30 day ban. How about if you fail to make a turn anytime within 15 turns you are suspended from playing for 3 days. How about, just eliminating the surrender feature altogether and if you fail to make a turn you are suspended for 3 days. In real life you don’t get to surrender your soldiers if you are losing, so why encourage players to violate a real-live scenario? Sure, few would agree with me, but why do the majority get to have the game their way when it does not reflect reality? Why do the bad, out of reality players get the game their way, while good thinking players come in, see the nonsense of the game surrender ability, and NEVER EVER COME BACK. Why are the bad thinkers view more important than the reality players views? Anyway, great game, too bad the weak people are set above the strong people, stopping them perfectly from ever becoming an active player.

      1. Almost every war ends in some sort of surrender or peace treaty right? It’s almost always the better option in war to surrender than to let all of your people die if you are losing.
        Also warzone is very, very far from a war simulator so i disagree with an appeal to realism. If we want to adhere to realism then all the cards, turns, troops appearing as you capture land, ability to see how many opponents you will fight before a battle starts, mathematical battles, and more, would be thrown out too.

      2. What’s your problem with people surrendering before turn 15?
        I understand your problem in team games but i don’t see any point to waste lifetime on a game that is mathematically impossible to win.
        Also in terms of realism i would rate this game pretty close to chess. You can always rely on all information you got and even though there’s some randomness in warzone it’s always predictable.
        The only thing you do not know is what move your opponent will make but even that is predictable.

  3. “Added ability to watch a forum thread, which sends you a notification when someone replies to it. Forum threads are automatically watched by their creators.”

    YES! No longer have to rely on seeing the notification in GC.

  4. Surrenders happen all the time. In world war do you think the Germans or the Japanese really invaded these people killed every fighting soldier? No, they are unconditional surrenders. War is a game and it’s a strategy game. A surrender is acknowledgement that you lost and ends the game sooner rather than playing until elimination.

  5. Another ask for the Forum thread update notification . . .

    1) Add a “View Forum Thread” button to the notification list, so instead of having to open the notification itself and then click View, just enable players to open the forum thread from the list and save some clicks

    2) [rehash of prev point] Only send 1 notification per thread; instead of sending 1 notification per additional post on a forum thread, just update the existing notification to say “3 updates” (etc)

    1. 3) Add an option to show all of a player’s own watched threads. In case you want to reread or proactively go and respond without having to go search for it or wait for a reply to get a notification for it.

  6. Hey can you please bring back the more comprehensive stats that the old warlight used to have? Things like k/d ratio? I loved being able to look at them back then and think it would be great to have them back

  7. Why can I not choose „in-app notification“ for „you turn“. That doesn’t make sense, really. I mean why should I get an email or a push notification, when I am in the app already playing more than one RT match at a time, but no in-app notification.
    There has been a pop-up notification for another match being advanced, which was way more handy.

    1. The app already notifies you of when it’s your turn on the multi-player tab. It would be redundant to notify you in two places.

      1. This is no notification, it is a status. Also i have to click refresh permanently to get a STATUS update.
        At the moment it is clicking around like crazy, when playing you play more then one game at a time.
        If you get a pop-up it is very handy, why? You can lean back if you have finished your turn. Maybe the game you are in advances faster. If not, you can relax and wait for the pop-up message.
        If both games are fast, you can evaluate, which turn you should do first (in some matches you have a lot of time for your match, in some you don’t. Also depending on the match phase). Either way you have a chance to plan your turns when you get a pop-up, especially with short timer settings.
        Now you make people getting booted.
        Don’t get wrong, not saying your new notifications system is bad, it’s not. But it’s missing something, which made sense, and made life easy before the change.

        1. Nothing has been removed.

          Are you referring to the pop-up that said “Game xx has advanced, do you want to switch to it?”?

          If so, that’s tied to push notifications. Make sure the “It’s your turn” push notification box is checked. If you unchecked it, you’ll also be turning off those messages.

          1. Yup, this is what I mean. Tick marks are set both for enable push notifications in general as well as for its you turn.
            But, no notification here.

  8. That would be a heavy handed policy and would be a game killer. Serial surrenders are annoying but do not need Global enforcement, If I run in to a truley annoying player, I just ban /block/un friend them. WarLight is most definitely NOT a Sim

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