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umm, because the game rules don't allow it? Why is the online client supporting this variant and not any of the other million variants that some people use?

I thought the message was worded well enough, just my two cents, and I realize I'm probably one of the more skeptical people around here.

I actually am impressed with the system message feature, it looks pretty good. I have a couple of questions/suggestions:

1. Is there any way for me to view my system messages in the client, after the first time they come up? I looked in all of the tabs and I couldn't find one. There was a button that said "mark as read" and another one that said "delete" which kind of implies I'd be able to look at them somewhere, but I couldn't find it.

If you can't look at old system messages, then I'd suggest combining these two buttons into one button that just says "done" or something similar. Also, it would be nice if there was a thread in the announcements subforum that just had a copypasta of those system messages and when they were pushed out. I feel like having this viewable will prevent some potential future issues, regardless of whether or not there's a way to view them in-client.

2. Is there any chance that there could be a system message that functions as a tutorial or FAQ for first-time logins? It could contain links to several things including:

- rules of the game
- how to start a game
- how to buy expansions and what subscriptions mean (perhaps with some words on how to recover what you have from an MF account if you had one)
- how to use familiar cards (and an explanation of the default settings for that feature which have caused a lot of confusion)

It should also link to an FAQ like the one on these forums (only hopefully kept up-to-date) and a list of known issues with the software (also kept up-to-date). If these aren't going to be kept up-to-date, then at least updating them once when the system message is pushed out (and putting a "last updated" date on it, which corresponds with the system message) would go a long way.

It's probably implementation-dependent, but maybe just pushing a message like this out to everyone will do the trick? I don't think it's a big deal for people who already have accounts to see this tutorial message.

3. Will there be a system message every time an update is released? If that's not planned, I'd recommend having one.


I'm actually really hopeful about this. Use of this feature will solve a TON of issues with the "new player experience" that Shuffleit has been really hurting on so far, and it can be online much sooner than a lot of the more complex issues facing the development team.

I disagree.

Do you have any justification for this?

I agree with you, I should also add that in games with Masquerade and more than two players, VP counter should always be disabled, no matter what, regardless of player preference. I remember mentioning that a long time ago and it was ignored, as it probably will also be ignored here.

I also have to say that I didn't understand your "accurately judge the terminal space of their deck" example, because I'm just not a good enough player to see the relevance.

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.

Besides Villa and that one Tournament prize, what is the action count at that moment good for?

Both of these things are answered by the same concept. "Terminal space" is one of many things I just made up, but then I saw a bunch of other people using the term and assumed it was clear exactly what it meant.

I defined "terminal space" as the number of terminal actions you can expect to play on your turn. If you're drawing your deck, you can usually calculate this pretty easily. It's useful because it's one of many metrics you can use to gauge the capabilitity of your opponent's deck.

Why is it a useful thing to know? The trivial example is that I play a Swindler and now I have the opportunity to give my opponent a village, a non-terminal, a terminal, a treasure, etc. and I want to know which one is least useful to them. If they are "over-terminaled" or "don't have enough terminal space" or "have too many terminals" then I want to give them a terminal. If they're being the "village idiot" then I'll just give them another village.

But knowing the exact capabilities of your opponent's deck is crucial to being able to properly play an endgame. If they have extra terminal space then I know they can add terminal payload to their deck and have higher capabilities that I now have to play around. If they don't have extra terminal space and villages are out, I know their deck is limited in its potential. It can even have insights into how well their deck is running, since some cards can be played for other benefits besides actions. It's hard for me to tell how many of their Squires are being played for Actions when that information could be very relevant (they played a Squire for buys they didn't use, but they could have played it for actions instead, so they have more terminal space than is showing -- this is why having lines in the game log when these types of choices are made is very important).

All of this is strategically useful, but probably the most common use case is that I just want a concise summary of my opponent's turn, and right now all of the information I need to get that summary isn't there if I didn't catch it on my opponent's turn.

If they played their whole hand, it may give you information, but if they kept a few cards in hand...?

You make a good point. Number of cards left in hand would be great to know as well.

[In-game Clarity (Card movement, sound effects, reducing log dependency)]

In-game Clarity (Card movement, sound effects, reducing log dependency), by far.

I hate having to look at the log to see what was trashed with Swindler, what someone trashes when they trash cards, what they reveal with Courtier, what cards I skip over when playing Golem and Hunting Party, etc. It's the only reason I haven't bought the expansions yet.

Just to be sure: You do have the option "Wait for card animations:" set to 'yes' in your client?

I mean, all this option does is make the animations for opponents playing their treasures take forever, since they always appear to be played one at a time.

What would be useful is to have some indication of actions/buys/coins available at the beginning of every buy phase on opponents' turns, and have every card gained on opponents' dance in front of the user. This would get you 90% of the way there. 9 of the reamining 10% could be achieved by having an indication of duration attacks in play for each opponent, which is visible without hovering over their names (which is something that you pretty much never do on your own turns).

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.

[and should not be]

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.