Messages

1

General Discussion / Re: Trolls

« on: 19 June 2018, 05:39:05 PM »

Plus, IRL, there is NOTHING in tounnaments at least as much as I know that prevent people from talking during a tournament match. Only Magic the Gathering enforces strict rules on that and you can recevie a yellow card, but I believe that is unfair. My 2 cents.

I won't disagree with anything you said except for this. I've run eight IRL tournaments and I've been very successful. If you did any of the stuff you said in this thread, even the stuff I don't mind online, I would just kick you out of all of my tournaments. Maybe I'd warn you first, but maybe I wouldn't.

The tournament organizer has complete authority over what happens in their tournaments, and my tournaments have an atmosphere that I've worked hard to start and maintain. Everyone who has ever showed up at any of my tournaments has been super-friendly which is a lot of why they have been successful. My main objective (really my only objective) is for people to have fun so I will quickly end something that I think takes away from that.

But online is a different beast. The whole point is that you get automatched with people you don't know, so eventually everyone is going to run into someone they don't like. If I was in the right mood I might even enjoy what you have claimed to say here but you can't really expect everyone to like you.

You may not believe it, but there are actually people out there who don't even like me! Ridiculous, I know, but it's true.

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General Discussion / Re: Trolls

« on: 19 June 2018, 03:02:46 PM »

I know I'm taking a risk by feeding the troll here, but oh well.

Dominion was a tabletop game before it was anything online, and that has imposed a lot of restrictions on online Dominion that most other online games don't have. A lot of those restrictions are mechanics of the game that are much less elegant when implemented online (I have to stop my turn to wait for you to discard to my Militia before I can continue, even though I would never do that IRL because it almost never matters and in the .1% of the cases it does, then sure I'll just wait) and autoplay can help in some cases, but like most of the features that this client desperately needs, it's not finished. But even so, Dominion online will always be a bit clunky no matter what just because it was designed as a tabletop game and not an online game.

...but then there are other artificial restrictions, like the model that the base game should be free and anyone can play with expansions if they have the right opponents; or things as simple as DXV's influence on what kind of behavior is acceptable in chat. The voice of authority comes down and all of a sudden there's this idea that since DXV wants it a certain way, that's the way it has to be no matter what. I'm not going to pretend that I have the kind of pull that could challenge every single one of these things, but muting the chat? I disagree pretty hard there.

This is a game on the internet, if I want to play that game, I have to have a chat window open where my opponent can write whatever they want and that has to be on my monitor no matter what. I can't disable the chat, I can't mute my opponent. Mods can try and ban people for doing things they don't like, but that will never stop it from happening; and currently the only tool that users have to deal with it is to blacklist them at the end of the game and move on. Not only is this never going to completely solve the problem, but it allows grey areas like this where a user is supposed to either finish out a rated game and deal with what they feel is abuse in the chat, or resign and blacklist the person, report it, and hope that the moderators subjective opinion will be good enough to make it so their rating doesn't suffer. This situation is going to make it really hard for people to take the game seriously on a competitive level.

When you play IRL, you get to pick who you play with, so deciding not to play with certain people is a solution that works. That doesn't work online. The users need tools to deal with what they feel is abuse in the chat because the current system will never eliminate the case I described where the users are powerless to deal with the abuse. The current solution is not good enough, and if the amount of complaints and topics here about that isn't enough, just think of how many people are experiencing that on the client and don't even know this place exists. I imagine most of them just leave and don't come back.

For the record, the behaviors that our troll is saying he actually did, even including saying the F word, are something I don't think deserve a ban by themselves. Different people from different groups are going to play each other and just because peoples' sense of humor or gamesmanship is different doesn't seem like it deserves a ban in my book.

Yes, there are double standards here, but I don't think anybody cares. Mostly because there's nothing anyone can do about it. Sorry.

It seems like a pretty poor use of resources to devote more time and energy into manually blocking people when adding a feature to let the users decide what's OK for them or not will not only do a better job, but also probably amount to less work in dealing with actual trolls. Ignoring them is likely to get them to stop naturally rather than having a system that promotes giving them the attention they want.

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General Discussion / Re: Trolls

« on: 18 June 2018, 03:15:11 PM »

All righty then. I personally would have warned this person before banning them if all they said was the F-word, but it's not up to me.

In any case, it would be really nice to be able to squelch people in chat. It would make situations like this a lot easier for everyone involved, especially the people who it seems you're trying to help by having a seemingly-tougher-than-industry-standard ban policy.

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General Discussion / Re: Trolls

« on: 18 June 2018, 02:56:19 PM »

I re-read the terms of service and of course there is language in there to say that Shuffleit can ban anyone for anything without notice. Of course that's going to be in any terms of service ever.

"insulting your opponent" is not part of any valid strategy on this site. I don't care if you think there are other games where it is valid, here it is not.

Was this user warned about language before their account was banned? If not, I'd say that's a pretty severe oversight.

...Look, it's your software and you can do what you want with it. It just seems really lazy to me to not implement a feature people have asked for, but instead to just ban people for saying things in chat. Sure you don't want it to get too bad and I don't know what this person is saying, but it just looks really sketchy to me when someone is banned for what they said in chat when there's no way to squelch them, especially if that person wasn't warned.

So hopefully that isn't the case.

My personal opinion is that of course there are things that can be said in chat that are bad enough to deserve a ban, but none of the things this person used as examples are remotely close to that. So I would like to think that I shouldn't be watching what I say to such a level where I can't say that stuff, or else I will be banned without warning. That's the cause of my concern here.

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General Discussion / Re: Trolls

« on: 18 June 2018, 02:37:14 PM »

Wait I thought people were only getting banned for slowplaying. Is it true that people are getting banned as well for what they say in the chat?

If that's true, that's not acceptable. There's nothing in the terms of service about the chat, is there?

The option to squelch opponents in the chat has been requested here and is a standard feature in any online game. Banning people instead of implementing that feature seems really not cool to me.

6

Feature Requests / Re: Feature request: give "never discard after curses are gone" option for Torturer

« on: 07 June 2018, 03:16:02 AM »

I've played about 5000 games and this exception has happened for me in one game. Autoplay can always be changed in-game.

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Feature Requests / Re: "Previous Games" option

« on: 31 May 2018, 03:34:19 PM »

It would be nice if we had something for unrated games as well. I only play unrated games because I want to use the familiar cards feature, plus I often play specific kingdoms several times for the podcast. I don't have a way to search for these, and I'm not sure I have a way to even see a game log for these games, is that right?

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Interface Issues / Re: Debt should display with coins

« on: 23 May 2018, 06:40:06 PM »

Coins and Potions are something you generate over the course of a turn.  In the same way that Coin Tokens you generate (or have) won't be added to this total, Debt tokens shouldn't be displayed there either.  If I saw Debt tokens there I might think I had accumulated that debt this turn. 

States are displayed here and haven't caused confusion (the lack of states there caused all sorts of problems). It also doesn't matter whether or not you got a state or debt or whatever during your turn, I'm not seeing how this "confusion" would even be bad.

This argument suggests to me that coin tokens should probably be displayed here as well, actually.

EDIT: when I play IRL I put my debt tokens in the middle of my play area where they will annoy me, otherwise I don't notice them and they frequently get forgotten.

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Interface Issues / Debt should display with coins

« on: 22 May 2018, 02:38:00 PM »

After the 55th time that I forgot I had debt because it was in a tiny icon in the corner of my screen, I decided to post here about this.

Why doesn't the debt a player currently has display with the coins they have? Like, it can be other places too but it really should be there. My coins and my potions are there, so there should totally be an icon there to show me how much debt I have.

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Interface Issues / Re: Boons/Hexes draw/discard pile displays

« on: 15 May 2018, 03:31:15 PM »

If only a 6/9/66... is underlined, as in the appended picture, would that be OK? This is just test code, in the end I think I would not want the numbers in the supply piles and elsewhere be affected.

Yeah, I would actually prefer that to underlining everything.

I looked through the Nocturne rules, and they don't seem to say either way (I may have missed it). So to me it is not at all clear if one is or is not supposed to see those numbers/may be able to count those piles in an IRL game.

I looked as well before making my first post and I couldn't find anything. Perhaps it's worth it to ask for a ruling on this? My guess is that DXV would say no but that's just a guess.

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Interface Issues / Re: Boons/Hexes draw/discard pile displays

« on: 15 May 2018, 01:26:18 PM »

Now, I can understand if somebody is confused what these 2 numbers mean. But once you know that it means the remaining/discarded boons/hexes, I'm frankly a bit at a loss to understand that seasoned players could not remember which is which. Especially as the important number (how many until a shuffle) is the first one.

I'm sorry I disappointed you with my lack of mental capacity, yet here we are, and I'm telling you that I have been told what it is and it's still confusing. I even offered some extremely simple fixes that would solve the problem.

It's not so much about missing the shuffle as it is about tracking the boon deck. I just saw Flame's Gift and I want to have an idea of how long it will be before there's even a chance that I'll see it again. 9/3, huh? Does that mean it could come up soon or I'm going to have to wait a while? Jeez, I don't remember, but I don't want to have to look that up.

For other decks/discards, the number is clearly put on the deck for how many cards are in it. I realize that 95% of the time the number is something other than 6 or 9 for my opponent's deck, but when it is I'm confused 100% of the time on whether that number is being displayed upside down like their deck is, or if it's being displayed right-side-up so I can read it easier. Yes I know that almost all of the time it's obvious but in that moment it's not, and all you have to do is underline all of the numbers to fix it!

I'm thinking about 55 different things in Dominion because it's a complex game and I want to play well AND get better while playing. That's why Dominion is fun. UI quirks where information isn't totally clear as it's being displayed really take away from that. I can tell you for certain that I'm not the only one who is being affected by this, so making excuses and saying that it must be me is not appreciated.

Basically, in a game where some information is still not easily seen, you are asking to remove information. And while it may not matter for hexes where the hex pile and hex discard pile will always add up to 12, the boon pile + boon discard pile can have any number from 0 to 12 cards, due to the 'stay out intil clean-up' boons, a Druid in the Kingdom or one or more boons set aside for next turn with Blessed Village.

I'm only suggesting to remove the information if it's not supposed to be displayed because of the game rules. It's just like the cards in my opponent's hand that I can randomly see -- this should never ever happen and this excuse of "other information is harder to see" doesn't hold water at all. I want to see everything I should see easily and I don't want to see things I shouldn't see, is that really so difficult to understand?

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Card Bugs / Re: Smugglers gain is mandatory

« on: 10 May 2018, 06:35:43 PM »

I agree this would be simpler, but the card says to do a thing and it's not doing what the card says. I thought this decision was made with Hamlet, where we sacrificed UI to do what the card actually said.

It's not a great situation that the card can't be changed, but taking shortcuts in the UI to cut out what's happening can be just as confusing as what's on the card. At least doing what's on the card is consistent.

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Card Bugs / Re: Smugglers gain is mandatory

« on: 10 May 2018, 04:00:39 PM »

In this case, it might not be a bug, but the interface is pretty misleading. Can you click on Will-o-Wisp to choose to try and gain it?

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Card Bugs / Smugglers gain is mandatory

« on: 10 May 2018, 01:42:34 PM »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoVkvrIUWrs&t=9m30s

In this video clip we see that the only card the opponent gained on his last turn was Gold. We play a Smugglers, so the only legal option here is to gain a Gold, but there's a button allowing us to not gain anything.

Once the Smugglers is played, if there's a legal option for something to gain, they have to choose it, they can't just choose nothing. The "Don't Gain" button should never appear here.

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Interface Issues / Boons/Hexes draw/discard pile displays

« on: 04 May 2018, 03:43:00 PM »

Right now the Boon pile (also the Hex pile) has a display like this:

Boons 8 / 4

Every single time I look at this I am confused as to which one is the draw pile and which one is the discard pile. Like, yes I know it's 8 in the draw pile but I had to go look that up on a video.

The rulebook doesn't clearly state whether or not you're allowed to look through or count the Boon discard pile anyways -- I would think that having a consistent interface throughout the software would be preferable here -- you usually see a counter for every deck telling you how many cards are in it, but nothing for a discard pile.

So I think it should read "Boons 8" instead. Or maybe if you reeeeeeally want to include that information, you could do "Boons 8 / (4)". But at that point you probably need to make the information available as to which boons are in the discard pile, which doesn't seem like the right direction to go.