Feedback and Questions Regarding the New Platform

[orejo]

Greetings new owners of online Dominion!  I am a player who has gone through two transitions of the game so far, and did purchase cards in the last version of the game for the sole purpose of unlocking the campaign mode as that is my preference for how to play the game.  Here is my feedback so far after a bit of play today with the new platform.

• All the text is blurry on cards on the left side (treasures and victory cards) and the cards in my hand. I have tried resizing the browser window, making it worse instead of better.  Is there a setting I am missing that can assist with this issue?
• I am not a fan of not being able to clearly see the cards I draw, instead having to read the running game text or try to spot the difference in my hard (which, as noted above, is super blurry). Would be nice if card draws displayed in the center of the play area zoomed in before landing into your hand.
• Is there a way to adjust the difficulty of the bot player? How do I set a table with multiple bots at once?
• It took me a few accidental card purchases to realize that a right click will display a larger size of the card.  How will this be handled with a touch screen UI, such as on a Kindle or iPad? On that note, when will the game be available on those platforms again?
• The way that the End Action and Autoplay Treasure buttons move between the box on the side of the screen and directly above your hand is frustrating in going back and forth to click for each phase of the turn. Is there a reasoning for positioning these buttons in different locations on the UI?
• The Autoplay Treasures button only plays the generic treasures, not specialty ones (Hoard for example). Would be nice if either all were played or a second button was present to Autoplay ALL Treasures.
• The announcement about the transition on the forums of the previous owners stated that we would receive either offline mode OR a year subscription, and that it would be our choice.  I see that we were simply given a subscription instead. Is choosing offline mode still an option, even if it means waiting until it is available?
• Is there an ETA for the campaign mode of the game? This is all I ever played previously and is all I would like to play moving forward, so it would be nice to know when I can expect it to be available.
• Is there a way to sign up for email newsletters so that we can be informed as features are added without having to check periodically?

I will reserve my overall opinion of the new platform as that is irrelevant and does not help anyone move forward to the fully functional game I know we all want to see.  I just want to be able to kick back with my kindle and play some challenging solo adventures during my lunch break at work again!

Edit to add: I just noticed that the final two expansions (Adventures and Empires) are not part of my subscription set, but they were purchased in the previous version. How do I get that corrected?

[ffejselur]

1. Orejo, I think you meant campaign mode, not adventure.

2. Maybe new features could be listed in a "What's New" thread that could be updated as new features are implemented? That would be great. Also this site screams to have a FAQ section so basic questions wouldn't have to be asked & answered a zillion times.

[orejo]

1. Orejo, I think you meant campaign mode, not adventure.

2. Maybe new features could be listed in a "What's New" thread that could be updated as new features are implemented? That would be great. Also this site screams to have a FAQ section so basic questions wouldn't have to be asked & answered a zillion times.

Thanks - I edited to say campaign instead of adventure.  I like the idea of a "What's New" thread, but only if there is a subscription tool to be notified when that thread is updated.

[Ranna156]

Edit to add: I just noticed that the final two expansions (Adventures and Empires) are not part of my subscription set, but they were purchased in the previous version. How do I get that corrected?

How did you get Empires? I never saw that it was available...

[Watno]

• All the text is blurry on cards on the left side (treasures and victory cards) and the cards in my hand. I have tried resizing the browser window, making it worse instead of better.  Is there a setting I am missing that can assist with this issue?

Can you post a screenshot?

• I am not a fan of not being able to clearly see the cards I draw, instead having to read the running game text or try to spot the difference in my hard (which, as noted above, is super blurry). Would be nice if card draws displayed in the center of the play area zoomed in before landing into your hand.

More animations will be implemented.

• Is there a way to adjust the difficulty of the bot player? How do I set a table with multiple bots at once?

You can set up a table with more bots by going to new table, then setting both min and max players to the desired total amount of players. If you click Ready after creating the table, the empty slots will be filled with bots.
Regarding bot difficulty, there is no way to change this yet, but there probably will be in the future.

• It took me a few accidental card purchases to realize that a right click will display a larger size of the card.  How will this be handled with a touch screen UI, such as on a Kindle or iPad? On that note, when will the game be available on those platforms again?

There is no ETA for dedicated tablet versions yet, but there will be a different way to view cards there.

• The way that the End Action and Autoplay Treasure buttons move between the box on the side of the screen and directly above your hand is frustrating in going back and forth to click for each phase of the turn. Is there a reasoning for positioning these buttons in different locations on the UI?

The reason for these buttons being in different locations is to prevent you from accidenatlly clicking the wrong button because there is a different button in that location than you were expecting. (For example, you might believe you're about to click autoplay treasures, but then notice you had no treasures in hand and you just ended your turn).

• The Autoplay Treasures button only plays the generic treasures, not specialty ones (Hoard for example). Would be nice if either all were played or a second button was present to Autoplay ALL Treasures.

This is because you might not want to play these treasures in some situations, or because the order you play them in matters.

• The announcement about the transition on the forums of the previous owners stated that we would receive either offline mode OR a year subscription, and that it would be our choice.  I see that we were simply given a subscription instead. Is choosing offline mode still an option, even if it means waiting until it is available?

When the offline version is released, you will be able to get that for free even if you used the online subscription until then.

• Is there an ETA for the campaign mode of the game? This is all I ever played previously and is all I would like to play moving forward, so it would be nice to know when I can expect it to be available.

Sorry, there is no ETA yet.

• Is there a way to sign up for email newsletters so that we can be informed as features are added without having to check periodically?

Not yet at least, sorry.

Edit to add: I just noticed that the final two expansions (Adventures and Empires) are not part of my subscription set, but they were purchased in the previous version. How do I get that corrected?

MF switched to selling subscriptions that don't carry over to ´the new implementation at some point after their licence expiring was announced, is it possible you got one of these?
Also Empires was never available on their platform.[/list]

[markus]

• All the text is blurry on cards on the left side (treasures and victory cards) and the cards in my hand. I have tried resizing the browser window, making it worse instead of better.  Is there a setting I am missing that can assist with this issue?

Can you post a screenshot?

I can confirm this with Chrome Version 55.0.2883.87 under Windows 10. It's especially bad, if the window is not full screen.

[quori1]

I have plain and simple feedback: everything about this game's development is complete crap. I can clearly see this was handled by developers with no sense of design experience put into the UI and flow of the game. I also feel this was a narrow and obtuse development process that considered only desktop windows users using Chrome or IE as the browser window.

MakingFun did not have the iOS/Android apps available right away either, but the game did function in Safari and Chrome on a mobile device (Phone or Tablet) quite well. Your game is UNPLAYABLE on any such device. Given the proliferation of iPhones and iPads, the sensible thing would have been to have that version developed first.

Your benchmark is Hearthstone. end of story. That is the game you needed to model your release and UI after and while perhaps not match the excellence that Blizzard has shown over the years in game development, you should have at least matched what makingFun had been able to do.

The dominion app had become my go to game. I doubt I will ever play this again it such a horrible release.

[orejo]

Thanks for the responses everyone, and thanks Watno for the full breakdown of answers. 

You are all correct, Empires was not available before...I think it must have been that lower cost buy of Adventures at the end that I am remembering.  They had released Adventures after I did the "buy all" and I had just added it recently.

I have attached a screenshot that shows the blurriness. This is max screen on a widescreen 21 inch monitor, Chrome browser, Windows 10.

[Watno]

Regarding bluriness:
It appears that this is due to some bug in Chrome, which they claim to be working on (see here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=521364).
It seems to only occur with relatively small screen sizes.
Using a different browser (probably Firefox) should yield better results atm.

[DistantLands]

If I'm using a Mac in Chrome, how do I view the text on cards in the supply?

[Watno]

You can configure a Mac to do a right click, the standard way to do it is either a double tap or clicking while holding control i believe.

[Jacob Marley]

I have plain and simple feedback:

Plain and simple, yes.  Constructive?  Not so much.  If you don't like it, fine, no one should criticize you for your preferences.  If you want things to change, describe the problem and suggest solutions.  If you don't care whether things change or not, stop wasting everyone's time.

[twasa]

Your benchmark is Hearthstone. end of story.

I am not a Hearthstone player, but it appears that they also initially launched without support for iOS and Android. At least if the Wikipedia page is accurate.

[quori1]

I have plain and simple feedback:

Plain and simple, yes.  Constructive?  Not so much.  If you don't like it, fine, no one should criticize you for your preferences.  If you want things to change, describe the problem and suggest solutions.  If you don't care whether things change or not, stop wasting everyone's time.

It is constructive....the entire thing is junk. wipe the code and start over.

[quori1]

Your benchmark is Hearthstone. end of story.

I am not a Hearthstone player, but it appears that they also initially launched without support for iOS and Android. At least if the Wikipedia page is accurate.

Actually it launches for desktop and iOS...it was delayed on Android.

And even the desktop version was in fact an app, not a browser based game. It was far more refined and polished even in the technical alpha than this is.

Again, my biggest critique...this is a UI designed clearly by developers NOT DESIGNERS. It is clunky and messy and is as far from anything a good UDX Designer would ever come up with.

[JunkDealer]

Sample size of 1 here but I do think the UI is not very UF

I'm constantly missing actions or reactions because they appear in the logs instead of the play area
I'm constantly having to look at the logs to have any idea what's going on in the game.  I should be able to follow a game without ever needing to refer to the logs
I'm frequently catching myself almost clicking the wrong treasure or vp card.  Perhaps have the money on one side and the vp on the other?  Not sure how to fix this one
I find it difficult to select the right cards from discard, trash etc...  the right click adds extra clicks and increases the chance I misclick.
The size of everything feels smaller than the MF interface which was criticized for poor use of space.  I'm not sure how there seems to be less free space with this version and yet everything feels smaller (to the point where I have a hard time seeing what I'm doing especially on a small screen)
The lack of feedback in terms of sounds and player actions has apparently reduced my skill level.  I frequently miss that the game is about to end and am surprised when it does
It's not clear why games end. It frequently takes me some time staring at the end screen to know who won and why the game ended

I know this is a different company and a different application of the same game, but I find it astounding that UI complaints that were levelled against Goko and MF have been repeated here.  I know it will get better, but as I've stated previously I think many of us were completely surprised that a new implementation of the game would take a step backwards in usability and functionality.

Please take the above comments and work with them to keep moving this forward.  I'm cautiously hopeful that by the end of 2017 this app will be better than the MF was at the end of 2016, but given how far behind the launch was from my, possibly unrealistic, expectations and the lack of any clear public forecasts or timelines I wouldn't be surprised if some of the lower priority items are still outstanding.

Good luck!

[Jacob Marley]

I do agree that having game play buttons in the log area is not ideal.  I'm slowly getting use to it, but would prefer a way to get the buttons in the play area.

[gkrieg]

I have plain and simple feedback: everything about this game's development is complete crap. I can clearly see this was handled by developers with no sense of design experience put into the UI and flow of the game. I also feel this was a narrow and obtuse development process that considered only desktop windows users using Chrome or IE as the browser window.

MakingFun did not have the iOS/Android apps available right away either, but the game did function in Safari and Chrome on a mobile device (Phone or Tablet) quite well. Your game is UNPLAYABLE on any such device. Given the proliferation of iPhones and iPads, the sensible thing would have been to have that version developed first.

Your benchmark is Hearthstone. end of story. That is the game you needed to model your release and UI after and while perhaps not match the excellence that Blizzard has shown over the years in game development, you should have at least matched what makingFun had been able to do.

The dominion app had become my go to game. I doubt I will ever play this again it such a horrible release.

It took MF much longer than you might realize to have working iOS/Android apps, and their web client was always very buggy.  I don't know how you were able to play on a tablet before the MF app was released.  When they launched, their browser version was available in alpha it was so bad.

[tracer]

Also looking at some images of the Hearthstone interface, god help me if Dominion ever looks like that - I would likely stop playing.

Interface opinions can go both ways. I much prefer the (simpler) styles in this version to MF, and I doubt I am alone.

[gkrieg]

Also looking at some images of the Hearthstone interface, god help me if Dominion ever looks like that - I would likely stop playing.

Interface opinions can go both ways. I much prefer the (simpler) styles in this version to MF, and I doubt I am alone.

I agree with you here.  I think it is much easier to follow the new client than the old one, and they are implementing new things much more rapidly.