Hi ToolDevs,
Context of this question. We are considering adding a borderline feature to a tool and — following the principle of not investing work into features that might not be tolerated — we would like your opinion before we build it. We want to be fully honest, so we present the arguments both for and against, including what we believe may be the game designer's intent.
Goal and value of the feature. OGame today is largely played on mobile — a player performs an action, then puts the phone away and goes about their day. The return of a fleet or expedition happens at a time that is fully determined and known to the player the moment they send it. The feature would have a single purpose: to help a player not miss their own, already-known time — purely as a matter of personal organization. It reveals no information the player doesn't already have, changes no game mechanic, involves no interaction with other players, and grants no intelligence or tactical advantage. It is convenience and accessibility, especially for those playing on a phone.
How it works (technically, without sugar-coating). The player marks a specific row, with a specific time, in the event list (or the feature recognizes the return of their own fleet), and the tool reads that already-known time and registers it as a delayed message in a public push-notification service (e.g. ntfy.sh). The service holds the message on its side and delivers it at the set time. Once it is set, the tool observes nothing — while the player is away it does not look at the game, does not react to live events, and never tracks hostile fleets or attacks. It is a one-shot, pre-set timer, not a monitor.
Line of defense (for). Functionally, this is an alarm clock for a time the player could just as well enter manually into their phone's clock app. It is derived solely from the player's own action and concerns only the player's own, already-known times. There is no background monitoring, no reacting to events, and no attack alerting of any kind. Mechanically it is closer to a "set alarm" than to a reactive ping (e.g. on Discord) that would watch the game and notify at the moment of an event. From the player's perspective it is purely a convenience that helps them keep to their own schedule — nothing more.
Argument against — and the likely intent of the game's creator (honestly). We are aware that the game's very design may assume that the player is supposed to remember their own flight times themselves — that the discipline of presence and memory is part of the gameplay, not an inconvenience to be removed by a tool. In that light, even a classic, manually-set phone alarm is a kind of circumvention of the creator's intent. And this feature goes one step further: it is the tool, not the player's memory, that reads a specific time from the game's interface and turns it into an automated notification delivered outside the game, while the player is away from it.
Moreover, we are fully aware that the "Forbidden features" post — whose substantive text was written by RiV- (ToolDevs Admin) — addresses this category fairly explicitly, naming notifications about fleet arrivals delivered as a push / via external webhooks while the player is away. So we are not pretending the rules are silent on this. We are only asking whether our "alarm clock" framing — derived solely from the player's own action and involving no monitoring whatsoever — changes that assessment at all, or not.
The question we are really asking. Does the act itself — marking a specific record, with a specific time, from the event list as "an alarm for that hour," which translates into registering that time as a delayed push notification — fall within your accepted fair-play strategy, or does it already cross it? Regardless of the fact that it is an alarm clock and concerns the player's own fleet. In other words: could such a feature receive your approval to be implemented, and if so, under what conditions or in what narrowed scope?
An honest closing. We realize this raises doubts, and we do not want to decide it ourselves or assume a favorable interpretation. If you consider the feature impermissible, we simply will not implement it as off-game notifications — we will limit ourselves to in-tab signaling within the active game tab only. Thank you in advance for your opinion.
