Card selection when 1 player has purchased sets

[Tuuli]

The FAQ says

I usually play games with my friends. Do they need to buy subscriptions as well?
They do not need to buy subscriptions to play with you. If you create a table and they join your table, they will get to use all of the cards you have subscribed to during games at that table. So if you have a Gold subscription, your friends can play with you using all cards even if they are not subscribers.

I am probably doing something wrong, but whenever I play against my friend, the game only gives us cards from the basic set. I can list purchased cards to be included and then it works, but if I leave the card selection randomized, we end up only with basic cards. What am I missing?

[trazoM]

Probably your problem is the "familar-cards"-feature. See the unofficial FAQ for this (manual).

[yed]

http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=1100.0

[Tuuli]

Thanks!

[AdamH]

I've mentioned this elsewhere, but something should be done about this. The current user interface does nothing to alert the user that this is happening, you have to come here and scour the forums and/or wait for a reply from someone. If I know what Dominion is, I come here to play a game with expansions that I've bought, then I play a game that looks just like it should be full random with all the sets I bought and see only base cards, it looks just like I paid money for absolutely nothing.

There are several things that could be done about this:

- Once you buy expansions, make all of the cards in them familiar cards (this doesn't fix it but it helps)
- Make the default number of unfamiliar cards allowed higher than 2 so that there's an actual chance of seeing something that isn't from the base set every once in a while -- enough to not make people immediately think "wait, what's going on?"
- Make the default setting for table creation when they first create a table be to not respect familiar cards.
- Have something pop up and alert the user to the familiar cards feature the first time they log in with a new account, which explains to them "hey, if you don't change something you'll never see any different cards: here's what this does..."
- Make the option to respect familiar cards more visible than what it is, hidden under the "advanced options" menu when creating a table.

Right now, this feature that isn't related to actual gameplay is getting in the way of people setting up games the way they want to: this software is still new, meaning that it's making first impressions on a lot of people right now, and those first impressions are being soured by a feature that is getting in the way of what people want to do. Finding these forums and digging through an extremely long post for an answer that might still be dificult to find is not a good enough answer. Familiar cards is a great idea but it would have been even better if you had finished implementing all of the cards before pushing out this feature before it was ready.