New Feature Alert! Receive Notifications When Your Top Score Gets Beat

AMslimfordy
11 years ago
• 49 Comments

About a month ago, we announced the creation of our customized notification system. The first thing on the menu was to notify you when an update landed on your primary platform. We had a few snags even after launching the system (who doesn’t?!), but we think it’s all ironed out now and the feature is a neat one (you can opt in via your profile BTW). So of course, the only direction we’re willing to go is onward and upward.

The newest custom notification just went live late last night and we hope that it will be beneficial to both individual users and the community as a whole. The goal of this particular notification is to increase competition and fun across the leaderboards and challenge.

So what’s the feature you ask?

You can now receive a notification when your “Top Score” gets beaten on our leaderboards! This feature has been requested for a very long time, and we’re glad to announce that it’s now a reality. Notice how we emphasize, “Top Score”. You won’t be notified of every score that gets beat — that would just be too much. You only receive a notification if a score on a level you hold the #1 spot on — the “Top Score” — gets beat.

A few notes:

• By default, all users are opted-in to this notification. If you don’t want to be included, select “Notifications” from the drop-down menu that descends from your username in the top-right corner of the site, then change “Someone Beat Your Top Score” to “No”.
• The alert applies only to the top scorer on any given level. So if, say, @birdleader held the top score on Poached Eggs Level 1-1 and I ended up passing his score by 50 points, BirdLeader alone would get a the notification — not every person whose score I beat.
• The alert is sent via email and also on-site, just like private messages (PMs) and “@mentions”. The on-site notification will bring you to the specific level’s leaderboard so you can see what happened (and the notification should be cleared out by clicking it).
• Since the notification is sent via email make sure your email is correct. Also, the subject of the email is, “Heads up! Your Top Score has been beaten!”, so if you have some fancy filters or rules you might want to create one for that.

I assume people will ask: “I’m not even sure if I HAVE any Top Scores! Am I supposed to look through all these leaderboards looking?!” Well, we’re half-a-step ahead of you. We’re working on a way to display all of your Top Scores in one simple list. For some users, this may be depressing; for others, extensive. But it should be good for all.

So why is this such a good feature? For one, you get to keep an eye on your precious Top Scores without popping any blood vessels. But perhaps more importantly, it should cut down on the longevity of fraudulent scores on our leaderboards. We have plenty of guardians who keep an eye out for trolls, but they appear on very random levels sometimes and can be difficult to notice. Feel free to quietly flag if your Top Score gets beaten by some absolutely ridiculous, insanely unattainable score.

Lastly, as with any new system, bugs are expected. We are aware of some minor issues with how the on-site notification is working, but we plan to iron them out soon and they only apply to a small number of unlucky circumstances. But if YOU notice anything funky, please let us know. It’s hard for us to discover these issues since we aren’t elite flingers.

Now for the fun part. What do YOU all think?