Messages

For me, the single most important upgrade is a 100% functional mobile client.  Doesn't matter if it's a web based solution or an app for Android and iPhone.  It just needs to WORK.  Just remove the terms "right-click" and "click and drag" from your vocabulary, and a feasible touchscreen client magically appears.

Secondly, I'd like a timer variant (I wrote a whole other post on the topic, so I won't restate anything here).

Split pile ID would be nice, too.

As for Offline Mode, that should be almost the last thing on your mind right now. Your user community is large enough to sustain itself by making only the changes above, except perhaps adding more languages.

Do not neglect the CASUAL GAMERS.  MakingFun succeeded with this product because they made "FUN".

Your product is trying to make "CHAMPIONS".

There are not a sufficient number of consumers in the world who WANT to be CHAMPIONS at Dominion.  You cannot sustain a business model based on the expectation that all of your customers want a Tournament Grade experience upon every login.

Think joy. Think relaxation. The casual gamers will be your bread and butter, and the champions out there will continue to play and pay even after you do implement more mass-market philosophies in your development.

In game name:. Linc

Fair point about the Curse cards and 3-pile game endings.

How about a Curse TOKEN that cannot be trashed?  -1 VP token after each expired interval.

:o :o :o

Server fall down, go boom!

"Server connection was closed or could not be established"

Not a great way to run a December when the vast majority of your client base is about to expire their 1-year free subscription and have to make a decision about whether or not to pull out their wallet.

It's not inspiring me.....

[casual gamers]

The ShuffleIt developers are Dominion enthusiasts, and it really comes out in the design choices made for the game.  Everything is geared towards people like themselves:  Serious hard-core Dominion gamers who strive to decimate their opponents in every confrontation.

The problem is... you have completely FORGOTTEN about the most important group in your would-be customer base:  casual gamers

Everything about the structure of this system favors tournament-style play where winning and losing matter, a lot.  There's no consideration given to times when folks just want to log in, play 3 hands in 20 to 25 minutes, and then walk away.

Solution:  Make "unrated" games played as Speed Dominion (similar to Speed Chess).

Speed Dominion would be exactly like regular Dominion, except that any time it is "your turn" a timer will be rolling on-screen, displaying the number of seconds which you have been in control of the board and other players are simply staring at the screen waiting for you to take action.  Every 100 or 120 seconds, that counter resets to 0... and you gain a Curse card.

Alternately, you could just measure the Player A time and Player B time.  Once one player has accumulated 2x the amount of play time as the other, the games ends and the player who used 1/3 of the time wins and the player who used 2/3 of the time loses.  This would require a caveat that no game would ever time-out until at least 5 minutes of total play had occurred (game total, not per-player).

Just like Speed Chess is a totally different kind of game from Tournament Chess, Speed Dominion is not Dominion.  Speed games should be limited to unrated games where statistics are not recorded, or a 3rd class of game should be created where only the results of Speed games are computed in the overall score.  Leave the tournament play as-is.

Of course, the "serious" Dominion players on the system would just change their matching preferences to refuse Speed games.  That's fine; let them have their 3-minutes-per-turn hands where they calculate all the mathematical possibilities and go through the painstaking process to draw all 35 cards of their deck into play every single hand.

That's fine, but I don't want to sit at my screen staring at someone else playing their hand for 80% of the experience.

Give us this way to avoid dealing with slow-rollers, whether they are rookies or hacksters just trying to mess with us, or 53.00+ ranked players who want to slow down and do everything PERFECTLY.

I, personally, don't want to play with either of those classes of opponent, and this is a way to make sure I don't have to.