iPhone notifications for seed restocks triggering the full 5 minutes late

[haughty sierra]

My boyfriend and I both have been getting notifications as a seed leaves the shop. I just got the Starweaver notification at 5PM and instantly opened the app, only for it to have been part of the previous restock that ran 4:55 - 5PM.

[haughty sierra]

Happened again. Notification for sunflower restock at 7, right after it left the shop.

[sterile oak]

The iPhone notifications haven't been consistent for me either. Your best bet is to turn on the pingspam notifications for what you want, in this server. Those are late as well sometimes. All instances of discord should be closed for it to send alerts to your phone. Even then, It's delayed. This isn't a proper fix for the issue, but this is a known issue.

[devout mesa]

its iphone what you expect?

[high palm]

i don't have this issue with any other app though. it's just MG

My experience with the iOS app notifications:

Firstly and most importantly: sometimes it doesn't notify at all. which is mildly infuriating.

Secondly: when it does notify, the seed notifications are (or were*) quite consistently 2 minutes after a seed came into the shop (so i have 3 minutes left to buy it). But sometimes, a notification will pop up even later, say 4 minutes after the seed appeared, and instead of "now" it says "2 minutes ago"; which would be the usual 2 minutes late.

Egg notifications are quite consistently 4 minutes after an egg appears, which is less of an issue because that leaves 11 minutes to buy it.

(* ) it isn't always like that. In fact since a few days, I feel like the notifs, especially for seeds, have become less consistent. Sometimes they come very quickly, at the same time as the magic shopkeeper in this server sends its restock message - so 30-50 seconds after restock. And sometimes a seed notif comes 4 or even 5 minutes after restock, and some of these late messages have the timestamp "now" instead of "x minutes ago"

tl;dr: the iOS app notifications for seeds and eggs are often late, sometimes too late, sometimes they don't come at all.

[trail ravine]

this is something i'm working on right now actually, and i'm hoping to have a fix for it next week.

some backstory:

the main reason for the delay is that the notification is personalized per-player, based on which specific notifications they have set up. for example if you have NOTIFY ON for starweaver, sunflower, and cactus, and two are in stock, you might get a notification like:

"Sunflower and 1 other seed is in stock!"

I did this because I thought it would be a better experience than getting one notification per seed/egg, but as the game has grown, it's become a much more difficult problem to get all these notifications sent in a timely fashion, as we have to create thousands of individually personalized variations

New system

To make the system faster and more reliable, I'm going to make several key changes:

1. notifications will no longer be grouped — you'll get one notification per seed. so if you have "NOTIFY ON" for 5 seeds, and all 5 are in stock, you'll get 5 notifications, one per seed.

2. when sending notifications, they will be sent out rarest-first, so if a Starweaver is in stock, we'll prioritize delivering all the "Starweaver in stock!" notifications before sending other seeds like Cactus

———

With this new system, I might also be able to make it so we can actually put the image of the specific seed in the notification itself, which would be really cool - but i'll need to do a bit of investigation to see how possible this is.

I really appreciate everyone's feedback and patience with the notification system - I really never expected the game to grow big enough that the current system would start crumbling under its own weight, but here we are (and it's a good problem to have!) So, sorry for the issues, but hopefully this comment explains some of the challenges involved and what i'm doing about it. thanks for reading and playing ❤️

[proud lily]

@trail ravine even for Android the seed announcement is late usually by a min or 2 sometimes more

[trail ravine]

that's a third party mod, i'm not sure how that's working

[high palm]

Thanks a lot for the explanation!

An image of the seed would be so awesome. On my Apple Watch it always shows up as a massive image with the text below it, and I have to scroll to read it 😅 im praying it’s possible to implement that ❤️❤️

[trail ravine]

hi! following up here: i'm happy to say the new notification system is live. thanks everyone for your patience and understanding

tl;dr I rebuilt the notification system to be faster, more reliable, and include unique icons for each seed/egg!

The key changes are:

1. Instead of "batching" your seed notifications (previously it'd say "Cactus and 3 other seeds are in stock..."), now it sends one notification per seed. So its more notifications, but doing it this way is both much more efficient algorithmically and also has another benefit: icons!
2. Each notification now includes the icon of the seed or egg! Makes it much easier to visually scan I think.
3. The server prioritizes sending out the rarest seeds first, so they are delivered faster. This should help ensure Celestial seeds are delivered as fast as possible

All in all, the new system should not only be faster and more reliable, but it's also quite a bit simpler, I was able to delete 500 lines of code lol.

however

while the new notifications should be faster and more reliable (and simpler, I managed to delete 500 lines of code lol), there are still a lot of moving parts and it's yet to be put to the real test (Celestial seeds). so it could still have issues - if you notice any issues with late delivery or missed notifications, please definitely let me know in #1405784970479271978 !

thank you for reading and happy gardening

@high palm @haughty sierra @sterile oak

[high palm]

YAY!! 🥰

[tiny linden]

how can i get nofi from the ios app?

[trail ravine]

go the Seed Shop or the Egg Shop and you can press the "notify" button on each seed or egg you want notifications for!

[high palm]

The big celestial test happened… and I’m afraid my app failed the test 😢 I was on my computer with discord+MG open and I grabbed it (thx ping spam). But I don’t remember getting a mobile notification and I just my notifications centre to see if I simply didn’t notice, but there’s nothing

[trail ravine]

hmm, this is likely something different we should probably investigate 1:1. i did confirm we sent all starweaver notifications within 60 seconds - the issue here is likely it wasn't received by your phone

[high palm]

Oh that’s interesting. Slightly worrying. lol

[trail ravine]

let me see what i can look into with your account specifically, i'll DM you

[trail ravine]

lmk if you didn’t get the DM, it seems some people have been having trouble seeing my DMs for some reason