Dominion Online Unofficial FAQ

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Haddock

I strongly believe that this FAQ should be linked in (or copied/paraphrased to) the client.  It answers quite a lot of questions I had about the way the client works - and I cannot be the only one.

In particular, right-clicking to see what the cards are is crucial, and mentioned nowhere else that I can see.

Witherweaver

Quote from: Haddock on 10 January 2017, 04:24:33 PM
I strongly believe that this FAQ should be linked in (or copied/paraphrased to) the client.  It answers quite a lot of questions I had about the way the client works - and I cannot be the only one.

In particular, right-clicking to see what the cards are is crucial, and mentioned nowhere else that I can see.

They should have a cute littler helper guy, like Clippy, but instead of a paperclip have it the floating disembodied heads from Making Fun.

gkrieg

Man I need upvotes for posts in this thread.

wargames83

Does Wait for Expansions under the matching option do anything?

michaeljb

Quote from: wargames83 on 14 January 2017, 12:03:23 PM
Does Wait for Expansions under the matching option do anything?

Yes. I just tested this with an alt account that doesn't have any subscriptions; it'll get you a match with a table host that does have a subscription. My first game using that option was weirdly 10 Base cards plus 2 Landmarks--I'm guessing that had to do with what the host had marked as "familiar". The second game was a standard mix of cards from all the expansions.

I think it'd be worth adding to the FAQ something about this option. What's there now implies that a non-subscriber can only play with expansions if they join a table their friend specifically sets up, but you can actually be automatched with a random player that has the sets.

Tatterhood

This helps enormously. I discovered Dominion over Christmas break, so I was trying to figure out this new version starting January 1st while also trying to learn the basics of the game itself. I wish I had seen this sooner. I heartily second the idea that this info (and more) needs to be directly in the client. I get that attracting new users is not something you really want until things are more complete, but experienced players can't intuit everything about the interface either.

hamstercrack

I had a MakingFun account with several expansions purchased. I received a notice from MakingFun that I would receive a welcome email to the new version. However, I never received that email and cannot locate it in my Spam folder.

I sent a message to Stef last week, but haven't heard back.  What can I do to get my account moved over? 

Thank you.

AdamH

Now that this is being linked from the client, it would be nice to clean this up, maybe make it more "official." Some ideas:

1. Make this something more professional-looking than a forum post. One that ideally will be maintained by someone in an official capacity. Notably, there was an update today and this wasn't updated along with it (it's still a week old).

2. Table of Contents, FAQ section: section headers aren't that helpful and it's hard to know what's in here without reading a wall of text. Section headers should be complete sentences so that people can look over only those (ideally with links to more detail) and know exactly what's there.

3. Known issues: it would be great if people could come here and see a list of the things that are known to be problems. If there are workarounds for them, they should be detailed and extremely easy to access. If these features are planned for a future release, that should be easy to find out.

4. There needs to be something very visible to tell users how to get their questions answered if they don't see it here. Contact E-mails that don't require accounts separate from the one people already have to make to play on dominion.games, that they can communicate with would be a big plus.

I appreciate Chris's work in making this, but the software desperately needs something user-friendly to help first-time players understand what's happening. It's finally time to polish this thing and get it fully ready for the "big time"

Chris is me

At the very least in the meantime, I'll update this in the next two days - I have a flight on Wednesday which should give me plenty of time to flesh this out. Sorry about the slowness in doing that.

JW

Quote from: Chris is me on 25 April 2017, 02:27:46 AM
At the very least in the meantime, I'll update this in the next two days - I have a flight on Wednesday which should give me plenty of time to flesh this out. Sorry about the slowness in doing that.

You shouldn't apologize at all. We should be thanking you for all of the hard work you've put into this! You recognized a need for a FAQ and filled it. At a minimum ShuffleIT should be collaborating with you to make sure that as new releases come out, this FAQ stays updated even if you are busy. 

JKRich

Don't know if this is feasible or not but let me throw out this idea: is it possible to move the FAQ to a wiki page on w.ds and have the client link to it there? That way anyone can update it when a new release hits and all the burden wouldn't be on Chris.

AdamH

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.

JKRich

Could not agree with you more AdamH. My idea was solely motivated by what appears to be the real vs. the ideal. There should've been a help/FAQ/how it works section of the website on January 1, in no small part because
Quote from: AdamH on 21 March 2017, 02:48:38 AMthe software desperately needs something user-friendly to help first-time players understand what's happening.
But the developers appear to have a blind spot on this issue, which shows no signs of abating. So if there's going to be a user-developed FAQ I thought I'd share an idea that might help. Still, I totally agree with you.

AdamH

Having something that isn't kept up to date is arguably worse than nothing -- if there's nothing there, at least people can look at the long list of things left to do and assume that it's coming some day. With something that's out of date, the question can be asked: "if this isn't being kept up, how can I assume the software itself is being kept up?" -- also, there really needs to be something of higher quality than this (I posted in this thread earlier about this) so the fact that this exists begs the question of whether or not that will ever exist.

Despite the fact that this FAQ is labeled as unofficial, it's still being linked to from the software itself, so it is official in at least some capacity. I feel like this middle ground is the worst possible thing in terms of the current state of the documentation: either there needs to be just a placeholder that says more is coming soon, or maybe more people should be given the ability to update the FAQ so that it's less likely to lag behind.

I realize I have sort of a minority opinion on this, but my professional opinion is that software is only as good as its documentation; meaning that unless there is a good-looking, useful FAQ that's kept up-to-date with each release, the software really doesn't hold up to anything. And I also feel pretty strongly that non-technical people should have a huge hand in writing this documentation.