This suggestion is actually pretty simple, but opens up a rather large path that we could walk down.
Add an option where a player can select about what kind of ingame events he wants to receive an e-mail. For example, I want to be notified whenever I am finishing a construction or research, or whenever I get incoming. Additionally Pete could then offer pay-for-comfort functions where you could buy a stack of SMS credits so you could also get SMS notifications instead of e-mail notifications.
Add reminders for people which have not been active for 48 ticks and are not in vacation mode. And so on. Combine those notifications with helpful instructions, if needed. Etc, etc.
Admittedly this raises a philosophical question: Should players have to log into their account in order to know what is happening? Personally, I don't think so. Certainly, people which want to spend hours a day on this game will be not amused as this cuts away another aspect of those so-called "activity rewards". But then again, for the greater good, this would also remind John Doe, who signed up his planet and has to wait X hours before the next thing happens, to actually come back and do the next thing. And it would remind those of us which are busy at work about things that just finished, at least I tend to forget to pro-actively check my PA account when I am working, since at work you usually think about your task at hand instead about that game you are also playing.
So, I am looking forward to a nice discussion about this, so far I do not see any reasons for not implementing this. Preferably for next round, because it would be a perfect addition for Pete's advertisment plans to get more users. And it would also justify a small increase in credit prices because you get more comfort. Essentially since this does not even require a lot of coding. For pure e-mail notifications it is adding exactly one column to the user table (storing notification flags), on the ticker it is a simple additional check of:
Code:
fetch notification flags for this user
for each game event step
if player has notification flag for this event
send notification
And that preferences page is dead simple, really, with e-mail only notifications it would be a bunch of checkboxes with labels for the notifications available.
Admittedly, you might want to summarize events so that you get only one notification e-mail per tick.