Messages

1

General Discussion / Re: Donate and Possession

« on: 25 July 2017, 06:38:50 pm »

I think most of the discussion in this thread is pretty off-base, but I don't really see much point in getting into it. On the other hand, as someone who hosts tournaments I feel like I'm somewhat qualified to address this:

Possession creates enough unfortunate situations, now made more common because of Donate, that I view it as a card that should be banned in tournaments. The only other one is possibly Rebuild - since Donald has said himself he doesn't play with it. (In another category are the replaced cards from the base game and Intrigue.)

There's a list of cards I don't use for my tournaments for various reasons. Some of the reasons are due to IRL constraints that I don't really think people here care about, but some of the reasons have to do a little bit with competitive integrity. I ban the following cards due to a combination of them being unpopular and the idea that they can lead to unfortunate situations, especially in 3P games:

Swindler
Torturer
Ambassador
Possession
Urchin
Cultist
Rebuild
Page
Pirate Ship (3P tournaments only)
Cutpurse (3P tournament only)

Some of these cards I have nothing against, personally, but what I don't want to happen is for someone to leave my tournaments all salty because they lost to some guy who collided Urchins when they didn't, or on some "stupid <card> board where no skill was involved." I don't think that the results of my tournaments are any more "valid" because I don't use these cards, but Dominion's competitive scene is small enough that I think how people feel when they play tournaments is more important than any of that other stuff.

I also allow people to stack their decks at the start of the game, simply because I don't want people mad that they lost to some guy who got a 5/2 on a board where that's really good; I fully realize that this is a relatively small part of the overall variance in Dominion but man does this make people feel better.

I think both online and IRL tournaments would benefit from focusing a bit more on this type of thing for the time being, at least until competitive Dominion becomes big enough that I can quit my day job and just do that for a living. I'm counting down the days.

2

Support / Re: Players ARE CHEATING!

« on: 25 July 2017, 05:00:04 pm »

Here I meant with "analyze a turn" a post-game analysis of what happened. For a player that has never seen this, understanding how playing lot's of Worker's Village and Goons, and having a single Watchtower, can create big amount of vp tokens in a single turn, is probably illuminating about the power of Goons.

OK I understand what you mean now, it's very clear. So then you said this before:

I think that the log is not (and should not be) the way to analyze a turn. It would be much better if the ability to load the game could be expanded to allow a game to be seamlessly replayed, with the board state and both player's hands visible at all times, as well as the current actions/buys/coins, etc.

and well I just straight-up disagree with the bolded part. What you suggest is a cool feature and would be great, but it's not a reason that the game logs shouldn't also be able to stand on their own as a text-only way to analyze games after they are done. That would also be a really useful feature and I think both should exist.

Similarly, trust that the game takes correctly care of counting the available actions/buys, so when your blink is over and he has 3 coins, 2 actions and 3 buys, focus on that information instead of figuring out how he had to play his 3 Squires to get that. If you want to do that later, then that falls into the post-game analysis category.

So even if I trust the game and it's actually bug-free, focusing on just this information isn't enough, even during the game. With this example, it can be very helpful to know how many Squires my opponent is playing for Actions or for Buys because then I can accurately judge the terminal space of their deck or know how many gains they can threaten on their turns; this requires more knowledge than just the Actions/Buys/Coins counter, so I actually have to do that puzzling.

In a perfect world, every time anything happens at all in the game, it would appear in the game log. Actions, Buys, Coins, and cards drawn all have lines in the log when they are given out by cards (yes it's redundant for some cards like Woodcutter but it's extremely important for cards like Minion or Squire or actually almost all Dominion cards that don't give you exactly the same thing every time you play them) and it's all color-coded and indented as well to improve readability. And I still maintain that a line in the game log at the beginning of every Buy phase that displays remaining actions, buys, and coins would be really helpful both during and after games.

I feel like all of the information should be available to people, and if individuals decide that there's too much information, then there can be configurable options to automatically collapse certain types of information in the game log.

3

General Discussion / Re: Player buys province without enough money

« on: 25 July 2017, 12:43:01 pm »

I've seen this as well where the game log incorrectly displays treasures that were played on the last turn of the game. On your opponent's game log it probably showed up fine but for you it doesn't show everything.

Having the game log display all pieces of information available in an accurate way is extremely important, especially because the game log is currently being used as a crutch, since this information is not displayed in any other way.

4

Support / Re: Players ARE CHEATING!

« on: 24 July 2017, 03:41:27 pm »

@Adam: Our fundamental differences seem to be what the log should be good/useful for. To me it should be useful while playing

[...]

I think that the log is not (and should not be) the way to analyze a turn.

Do you not analyze turns while playing? If not, I'd recommend it, you will play much better. I'm being a little bit sarcastic, because I think you mean something else by "analyze a turn" and I don't quite know what you're getting at.

All of the information about what my opponent did during their turn (that I'm legally allowed to know) should be available to me in a manner that's easy for me to parse. I should be able to blink during my opponent's turn and not have to spend five minutes and figure out a puzzle about the kingdom in order to know what happened. If what you mean by "analyze a turn" is making the game take really long by studying the game log and doing precise calculations, then having extra information in the game log would actually help with this instead of hurt it; I spend less time wondering about what my opponent did, and I just get to think about the things related to Dominion gameplay.

Needless to say, this goes for my turns as well. If I click somewhere and it does something that I wasn't expecting, or if I'm confused about what is happening in the game, it should be clear to me what's going on. The client is pretty good about this except for the game log IMO.

5

Support / Re: Players ARE CHEATING!

« on: 21 July 2017, 09:07:27 pm »

I'm not even sure if IceHot looked at the log (as I previously wrote, it seems to me that he looked at the 'live action' and was baffled on how 3 coin could buy a Province).

The log serves multiple purposes. It's an aid in-game and it's a way to look at games after-the-fact for reference. The log should be clear and useful in both of these cases -- saying that it's OK for one of them does not make the log good enough; it needs to be OK for both of them.

I'm not sure what to do, but to be also frank: I don't think an entry in the log would have helped in this case.

An entry in the log would have helped me, and I struggle to see how putting a line in whenever someone spends coin tokens doesn't help someone. If it really doesn't help you at all, OK let's say I believe you. Ask ten people who use this software if they would rather have that line appear in the log than not and if two or more of them say the log would be better off without it, I will eat my hat.

I really really really think you have this one wrong. The game log needs to display all information. What mode did they pick for Squire? How many actions/buys/coins do they have at the start of when they buy cards? Even if the game log wasn't vital for actually playing the game and knowing what is going on (which it currently is, and shouldn't be), the game log should still have all of this information in it.

6

Feature Requests / Re: See all Kingdom Cards

« on: 21 July 2017, 09:00:30 pm »

Maybe it's not clear what I was saying -- I wasn't really ever disagreeing with anything anyone said here. My main concern is that if a button was implemented whose intent was to show all of the kingdom cards, that all of the kingdom cards and events/landmarks be displayed on a main page. Like, don't have split piles, Knights, etc. screw that up.

As for the other suggestions, I really don't have strong opinions. Just give the user the option to display whatever they want.

7

Support / Re: Players ARE CHEATING!

« on: 21 July 2017, 01:29:01 am »

Again, of course it would be nice if the game log said something like "Player X converts 5 coin tokens into coins" in such a situation. But I take issue with your statement (which you voiced before) that this is a mayor bug.

I'm just going to straight-up disagree here. It's a huge pain to inspect the log and try to figure out what's happening, and it would be pretty much impossible to do if you aren't familiar with the game and you don't know the kinds of things you're looking for.

Sure, the game is being played out correctly, but I thought the whole point of this software was to make playing the game pleasant. If users can't tell what's happening, what's the point of having this software at all?

There seems to be a disconnect here between whoever is in charge of prioritizing tasks and the people who are actually using the software, and it's going to be difficult for Shuffleit to succeed while that disconnect is there. It's the user who decides what's important, not you or me.

8

Feature Requests / Re: See all Kingdom Cards

« on: 21 July 2017, 01:20:27 am »

If we are talking about an extra screen, then it may not be the big help for a new player who stares down at 8 cards he's never seen before, plus Village and Smithy. Because most people cannot keep 8 new cards in their memory. I really remember my first games of IRL Dominion and that I initially had big problems to remember what all the cards do, even though they were in front of me to read.

There are plenty of uses for this screen; the biggest one for me is that it's really nice to have this screen up while I'm talking about kingdoms on stream. But also if someone wants to check the interactions between multiple cards in the kingdoms without clicking back and forth.

Debating the usefulness of this feature by saying all of the times it isn't useful doesn't seem to make much sense to me; not everyone will use it, but I can see a lot of people getting a big benefit out of it.

9

Interface Issues / Cards in play cover up game log

« on: 20 July 2017, 05:37:19 am »

With enough cards in play, the display from the play area can go far enough over that part of the game log is covered by cards in play. If there is no other fix, I think that the game log should always appear on top of cards from the play area, even if they go into the area where the game log should be.

10

Support / Re: Players ARE CHEATING!

« on: 20 July 2017, 05:32:30 am »

The real bug here is that this information isn't displayed in the game log, so the only indication that this is happening is the short time that the actions/buys/coins box values change.

The game log really needs to display all information relevant to the game -- the problem here goes beyond getting bug reports that aren't actually bugs: people who aren't familiar with the quirks of the software are going to think the software doesn't work because they aren't being given all of the information they need to properly play the game. This is a huge deal.

This same thing happened from Qvist's perspective in this game #5297643 on the last turn, no coin tokens were involved. I was told this is a known bug but I don't recall reading about it here, so here it is again.

11

Feature Requests / Re: See all Kingdom Cards

« on: 19 July 2017, 05:29:04 pm »

The initial post was from d.Thomas as a newbie - who made his first post here - so I can assume that he never heard before from the King's courtier plug-in - so I am sure it might help him a lot more rather than waiting for the perfect solution.

Sure, and I'm just making sure the devs don't look at the plugin and think that's the best way to go.

12

Feature Requests / Re: See all Kingdom Cards

« on: 19 July 2017, 02:40:43 pm »

I do use that extension, but it doesn't show events on that display page, and it still has the same issues with Knights/Castles/Ruins, etc. that I described.

13

Feature Requests / Re: See all Kingdom Cards

« on: 19 July 2017, 02:16:50 am »

So many people have tried this and failed to get it right. Please don't make the same mistakes they did.

All Kingdom cards, events, and landmarks need to be visible on one screen. In the case of split piles, Castles, Knights, etc. don't display all of those options on the one screen unless everything fits. It should be very clear what the 10/11 kingdom cards are from looking at this main screen. You can have other pages or windows or whatever but being able to see that stuff on the first screen is the most important thing. If you don't have that, there's no point to implementing this feature.

14

Card Bugs / Re: not getting Conspirator bonus (and difficulty 1x in playing treasure)

« on: 18 July 2017, 01:06:41 pm »

OTOH, when playing the Making Fun version of Dominion, I often wished that those scenarios where you have to choose an order for some set of cards, and those cards happen to be all the same, could be sped up. Like if you buy a Mandarin with 5 Copper, and you had to put each Copper back to the deck one after another. So it's not like (at least to me) the general idea to get rid of selections that boil down to just one option in a given case is not appreciated.

Yeah, that's a great reason why it should be an available option to have these decisions made for you. The user should be able to configure these things to happen if they want.

Another aspect is that the fast speed at which this happens automatically will alert a human opponent. So if I see me opponent play an Archive and the log immediately says that he looked at 3 cards, set 2 aside and took one in hand, I know that he got 3 identical cards. This is not information I'm supposed to have. This is similar to opponent thinking about playing a Reaction when I play an Attack. If the game in that situation does not immediately continue with my Attack, I know that opponent has a Reaction in hand, even if he finally decides not to play it.

Making the automatic execution of "only one choice possible" actions optional would of course be the best option.

And these are the reasons why that option should not be enabled by default. Users should have to explicitly enable it if they feel that they would rather give up this game-related information to have this type of interface.

In the meantime, maybe putting an alert in the 'central information area' (where your Action/Buy/Money accounts are) that some streamlining happened would be possible (like sometimes it directs you to the log for choices to make).

I think having an animation with that choice being made for you would be much better. The only animations that currently exist are ones that play each treasure individually when you press the play all treasures button; having animations would actually solve a LOT of problems with the software, most of them related to the fact that it's very difficult to tell what's happening on your opponent's turns. At the very least, any card that is gained on opponents' should dance in front of the player (just this one thing would make the software so much better).

Also, if the game log actually displayed all of the things that happened during the game, then the game log would be a nice workaround, but unfortunately it doesn't. Right now it's not possible to know the exact state of the game from the game log alone; many times you can piece it together from the game log and the actions/buys/money counter, but there are a lot of reasons why that's not good enough.

15

Card Bugs / Re: not getting Conspirator bonus (and difficulty 1x in playing treasure)

« on: 17 July 2017, 04:43:02 am »

My best guess would be:
Smugglers with only 1 target = forced gain = easy to miss.
You then click on the pile and buy it instead.

Seems like the real bug report here is that decisions where there is only one legal option should not be automatically made for the player because it's really confusing. It's very easy to require clicks for everything and then just add an option somewhere to make these decisions for the user, which is disabled by default.