I’ve made a small new webapp that sends you a notification at the beginning of Meltdown Alert events in PlanetSide 2! Get notified when it’s the perfect time to join the battlefield on Auraxis!
PlanetSide 2 (PS2) is a free-to-play/pay-to-customize massively multiplayer online first-person shooter game. In PS2, three factions fight for dominance over the four continents on the planet Auraxis. Each continental round concludes after a faction controls enough territory to trigger a Meltdown Alert event.
During Meltdown Alert events; players receive a 25 % experience boost, and a sum of certification and ISO-4 implant points. The victorious faction also gets a bonus status effect from controlling the continent. Each event lasts up to 90 minutes. It’s a good time to join the fight on Auraxis, in other words!
To help players get into the game at the most opportune time, I’ve created a small webapp. The webapp, simply called PlanetSide 2 Alert Notification, does what it says on the tin. It sends notifications to your PC or phone, so you get a heads-up at the beginning of a new Meltdown Alert event. You’ll only get notifications for your game server you play on.
Note that you must keep the webpage open in your web browser to receive notifications! I might set up push notifications in the future. I can improve the service in the future if there’s enough interest.
Frankly, I was surprised that none of the existing Meltdown Alert tracking services didn’t already offer notifications. You can get alert tweets from Fisu’s tracker on Twitter, but you’ll see alerts from every server. PS2Alerts has nice historical stats and data from all servers. There’s also an extension for Chrome, but it hasn’t worked in years.
I hope you’ll find this useful, and maybe help keep players coming back to the game. It should at the very least be useful for ISO-4 farmers! You can only earn this in-game currency by participating in Meltdown Events, and from some rare daily missions.
The webpage talks directly with the developer’s servers without first going through my servers. The benefit (to me) is that I don’t have to operate and pay for any server infrastructure. The main drawback is that I can’t do push notifications (JavaScript Service Workers can’t fetch data from foreign origins.)
The webapp pulls data from the game servers every four minutes. On average, you’ll get notified two minutes into an event. This is well within the time-requirement to get the full reward pay-out for participating in the event.
Alert notifications can optionally play the games iconic/annoying “Wah! Wah! Wah-wah, Wah!” alert sound. Your web browser might block websites from playing sound, so you need to check your browser’s audio permissions.
I’m obviously hoping that this tool only will get used by New Conglomerate players on the European/Cobalt server. 😉 (It often feels like there’s a lot more Vanu Sovereignty and Terran Republic players online!) I’ll see you on Auraxis during the next Meltdown Alert!