Well-meaning but harsh criticism of the new platform

[Polk5440]

All games are spreadsheets.

[Witherweaver]

I find a lot of this criticism really odd.  For me, Making Fun was 100% unplayable upon release (by which I mean, when they released their new version over Goko).  I could not finish a single game, and could rarely start games.

With Shuffle iT, I saw an email show up, during the Day on Dec. 31.  I signed over, immediately logged in, after looking for a couple of seconds started a game against a bot.  Had no issues playing other than interface things that are new and that I wasn't aware of (e.g., right-click for descriptions, where to find Native Village mat).  Games ran smoothly.. no lag, no boots, no freezes.  Found how to customize stuff easily.

I do see that development is not complete, so the criticism of releasing an unfinished product is valid.  But comparing me being able to simply sit down and play games the day before the release for Shuffle iT's implementation to me not being able to play at all for maybe weeks after Making Fun's implementation, this is excellent by comparison.

Maybe I just got lucky, I don't know. 

Edit: I should point out, this as all on a laptop, in a browser.  I haven't tried playing on a tablet in browser.  I never tried to play a mobile version of Making Fun's implementation... I honestly never even considered it since their original release on PC was risking overheating my laptop.  But I can understand how someone that primarily plays through a tablet would be annoyed at a browser-only PC release.

[Witherweaver]

Regarding aesthetics, well that's pretty opinion-based.  This interface is functional, and to me that makes it aesthetic.  There could be some minor modifications of the specifics of placements, shapes, colors, and the like, but I think the overall design looks nice.  Goko/Making Fun was more "cartoony" and it gave more of a feeling of actually playing cards, but I don't think either of those things are preferable.

[Witherweaver]

Update, played on my tablet, Galaxy Tab S.  It is much much laggier.  Playable but frustrating.  Though interface is not really a problem.. hold on card to read description.  (Note: text does not scale correctly here.)

[Panoptikus]

Wow, that really exploded...
After several games I really adjusted to the new interface - even on IOS.  However, I am not an casual player (and you will need those to make this work). As some have already said: the new implementation is designed by people with a great technical understanding of dominion functionality. The platform would have been a good heir to isotropic. But in order to become a good online card game, the interface needs to be transformed from a text based interface to an intuitive gaming interface.
It was a mistake IMO to release such an unpolished product, but I know that this kind of criticism is not helpful. A lot of good points to improve the implementation were already made in the answers to my opening post. I think we all agree that we want online dominion to improve so I hope the delevopers might take some points into consideration.
It agree BTW that what has been delivered here is way better than the early days of Goko - but that shouldn't be our benchmark, should it? it would be great to have a product in the next month that really surpasses MF (instead of doing some thing better and done things worse)