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This really should be written and maintained by the developers every release. If not a developer, than someone close enough that updates to the documentation can be pushed out at the same time as releases.

Something AdamH wrote in forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=878.msg6311 I find very interesting, though I don't totally agree:

Having game logs that look great and are very useful (and shareable) is a really good way to bring in new people to the game.

That sounds really strange to me, because looking at game logs, even if they are looking nice, isn't IMO something that brings in new players.

I'm thinking about the opportunity to share game logs on the internet. I can link someone to a game log and they can look at it and say "wow, that game log looks great, how did you get it?" and then I'm all like "you can play Dominion online" and they're all like "wow that's so cool" and then I link them.

It's how I found out about Isotropic. Pretty much everyone IRL that I talk to about Dominion has never heard of an online client, and the more different ways people can be exposed to it, the larger the potential customer base.

Once the software is in a state that's worth advertising I'd say improving game logs is one of the higher priorities. Of course I have no delusions of that actually happening but what do I know?

What you say makes sense. In my experience I think it would be beneficial to be as specific as possible, especially given the track record of the devs and supposed test team. It seems they need all the help they can get in understanding what their customers actually want.

IRL I can't ask my friend "What card was it that you bought 2 turns ago?" without receiving a tirade.

Maybe this is just me, but if my opponent knows what card he bought 2 turns ago and he's not telling me on principle, I'm never playing with that guy again. It's not like I'm quizzing him on a history of the game all the time, I try to play board games IRL with people I like and people I like are friendly enough to do that, even when there's money store credit on the line.

Suggesting the game shouldn't be playable without the log, well I just don't get it, sorry.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, I thought that the people who wanted the game to be playable without the log were saying they don't want to have to go click on things in the game log in order to perform legal actions in the game -- that there should be buttons for that or whatever. If someone is suggesting something different then I feel like they need to be pretty specific about what they want, since there would be ambiguity with whatever they want and this.


I think jsh makes a lot of good points about the differences between IRL Dominion and online Dominion. I would think the goal would be to make an online implementation that is as close as possible to the tabletop experience, but I also think there are reasonable deviations that need to be made because of the different medium. There have been long threads about resigning and point counters and that kind of stuff...

I think it's a very reasonable thing for the game log to fit in this space. IRL the game relies on people saying what they're doing and not being jerks about repeating themselves in case that's needed. If the rulebook demanded that I was silent while I played, then I would either house-rule that out immediately or just play a better game instead. There needs to be an interface online that makes it as easy and intuitive as possible to follow what's happening in the game and I think the game log should do that as much as possible without turning Dominion into a different game. There is some gray area here but I really don't think that "follow the tabletop game's rulebook to the letter" is the right answer on this front. I wouldn't play the online client if it did that and I don't think most other people would either.

The new version has these hearts on my friends list. I had no idea what they were. I also saw that some of the hearts were only half full. There was nothing anywhere on the client to indicate what these hearts meant. I eventually figured it out but this was really unclear. I suggest either improving the interface to something that will be much more obvious what is happening, or just putting an info box there to explain what's going on. Really, now that I think about it, the info box should just be there no matter what.

This also got me thinking; when someone new has befriended me (or followed me or whatever the word is), it would be nice to have a notification when I log in and/or an icon somewhere, telling me I should go and check this. I can then decide what I want to do about it -- befriend them, leave them as-is, block them, whatever.

It's useful to know how many coin tokens were spent. There are a few situations where it's a good idea to spend more coin tokens than what's needed to buy the stuff.

If I'm looking at a game log at any time other than while the game is being played, it would be really difficult to follow what's going on without any more confusion than what's necessary. I'm actually of the opinion that much more information should be shown in the game logs; particularly right before cards are bought, there should be a line saying how much money, buys, and remaining actions there were at that time. Bonus points for an additional line that displays other status quirks like cost reduction, duration attacks, etc.

Having game logs that look great and are very useful (and shareable) is a really good way to bring in new people to the game.

AdamH, look here: http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=1024.msg3511#msg3511 (at end of post)

Thanks for the link. Here's the direct quote

If things don't go well with Shuffle iT then I am not sure I am up for trying online Dominion again. Maybe I'm just that much of a sucker though; I can't predict the future.

Needless to say I'd be really sad if that happened. I do play quite a lot of IRL Dominion but I really really want there to be a good online client.

Donald X once said something to the effect that "if this implementation doesn't work out, we will probably give up on online Dominion"

I don't remember this and I'm curious. Do you have a source?

Game 2849998

I was credited with 27 Triumphal Arch points because I had 9 Universities this game. I'm quite certain I had 10 Candlestick Makers, Peddlers, and Forums in this game (though I can't be sure because the game log isn't easily searchable for this kind of thing and deck contents aren't displayed yet). I should get 30 points for this, yes?

Perhaps the bug is that if my two most common Action cards are the same amount, the software looks for the next distinct number, even though I believe it should just take the two most common regardless of if they're the same?

I agree. The ding that's already used for chat notifications is just fine for this. I was pretty surprised when a different noise was being used.

This could be fixed by just having obvious animations showing where the three coppers go instead of having to look at the log. You don't have to make the player choose which of the three coppers to trash.

This is possible, but without seeing what those animations look like I'm hesitant to say this will solve the problem that exists with the user's experience. And in any case, I still think this should be configurable. Having a consistent interface is still very important for new users.

The default settings should reflect what a new player would enjoy the most -- what would make the interface the most clear and most user-friendly to someone who doesn't know what Dominion is and/or has never used the client before.

A new player plays a card, expects to make a decision, but doesn't see what they expect. They have to first figure out that a decision was made for them somehow, which I have no idea how they would do that other than reading the game log in detail and assuming that's what happened. But then also this isn't consistently applied.

A new player is going to be really confused when they play Lookout and don't get to trash a Copper, then discard a Copper, then topdeck a Copper. I've been playing with this client for months and it's still jarring to me when that happens.

It's very, very clear to me that the option to have trivial decisions made for you should be off by default and I'm willing to stand behind that position if I need to.

On the other hand, yeah it's a pretty low priority, unless it's something they can do very easily, in which case their ratio of (improvement in user experience)/(time invested) goes way up and maybe it's worth throwing into the next release.

I could argue that it's better to turn off these automatic decisions entirely until it can be configured, and I believe that is the case. But I'm not gonna bother because I know that's not going to happen.

I'm not sure if this is on the backlog; if not, I think it should be.

Many times during play, decisions are automatically made for the player. This occurs when there is only one choice for a decision (Lookout reveals three identical cards, I play Sacrifice with only Coppers in hand, etc.). As far as I know, there is no way to turn off this behavior.

This feature should be configurable. There are many reasons why someone would want to make each decision explicitly regardless of whether or not there's an actual decision to make. The most important one is that the interface would be more consistent -- for example, when I click on Salvager, the next card I click is always one that I want to trash, not one that I want to play, and I don't have to think about whether or not that decision is going to be made for me (are all of the cards in my hand the same?) before I even know what my next click does.

And of course if this is a configurable option, the default should be that no decisions are automatically made for the user.

Since version 1.2 it's also the first line in the gamelog.

It would be much more helpful if it was also the last line in the game log. Also if it was visible somewhere else on the end screen other than the game log.

Since bugs affect everyone equally, the effects cancel out.

Higher level players will be more likely to be aware of the bug

I must be missing something, it seems like these two things contradict each other. The whole point of doing anything would be because players can't be expected to know of all bugs in the current version of the software, so that they can be played around; but some players would. The ones that know about the bugs would get an unfair advantage and the ones that don't are going to have a bad time.

enforce a ban on the bugged cards for their own games (By removing it from their "familiar cards" and setting "max unfamiliar cards" to 0)

This is possible? I have been unable to do this in rated games.

...but my suggestion, which I will repeat again, would not be difficult to implement and is effectively the same thing:

There are other solutions besides resetting the leaderboard as well. Cards or combinations of cards with known bugs could be on the banned list, even if it's just for Pro games.

If people could do it individually, it would be nice (actually the more I think about it the less I like it, but that's another topic), but I think a global "banned cards list" for pro games would be more appropriate -- only for cards or combinations of cards with known issues.