So, 1 week and 1 snarky forum post later, I am all in. Just upgraded to Gold.

[Felendis]

Been playing for about a week now, I still have some concerns, but the game runs really well and the implementation is pretty solid on a PC once you get used to the UI/UX. I have met a few nice, fun players the last few days, and I see myself continuing to play this for a while.

Looking forward to the improvements coming down the pipeline, to the playerbase growing, and hopefully to more people buying more sets so I can see a little more variety in my games ;)

Good job team, best of luck, you have my support!

[Martin plays Piano]

I really love these thank you posts, I did one last week as well – I am convinced, that it gives promotion to the developers and it will encourage them to keep on track while being overrun with various good suggestions and subjective demands, but also with some crushing and frustrating statements (- please remember, this is a gaming community, not a theater of war).

The possibility of finding new players (via the terrific 'Good Game'-Button) has given me some awesome Dominion matches last week, which I hadn't had in MF since ages.
To be honest, all this social stuff of getting together with other players in the lobby, maintaining your friend's list or pathfinding appropriate games still needs some technical improvements and even more some design attraction, but its pure existence makes using the Shuffle IT platform for Dominion freaks so much more valuable than the former ones.

Have fun
Martin (user name Rachmaninoff)

[allanfieldhouse]

I've also been having a ton of fun playing on the new system...I mean it IS Dominion after all.

I have issues with a lot of the current user interface and overall level of polish (and I'll keep posting my thoughts on these issues), but overall they have a great start on what will surely end up being the best online Dominion implementation yet.

[Felendis]

The possibility of finding new players (via the terrific 'Good Game'-Button) has given me some awesome Dominion matches last week, which I hadn't had in MF since ages.

Yeah, I really love the ability to find a 'Good' match. I find that using that matches me with other players with the new sets, people that are a little more social, and people that generally know how to play.

To be honest, all this social stuff of getting together with other players in the lobby, maintaining your friend's list or pathfinding appropriate games still needs some technical improvements and even more some design attraction, but its pure existence makes using the Shuffle IT platform for Dominion freaks so much more valuable than the former ones.

I was thinking about this stuff right now, because I feel that the social aspects of the game just arent there yet. There are small things that need to get fixed, like when you are writing something in the chat box and your turn comes up, the focus returns to the board and get cut off mid sentence.

But the bigger thing to me is lack of real-time community building, in the form of a lobby chat. Not only is it great to ask questions and talk strategy, but it would be great to have a way to easily recruit a few people for a multiplayer game.

[Martin plays Piano]

I am completely with you, that the current lobby set-up is only the start of a longer way to go to get a nice furnished meeting room for Dominion freaks to sit and to talk and to get appointed – could be like a little "Café International" with different sized tables and game settings, where people from all over the world are invited to find old and new virtual friends.

However, the outlook to get (soon ?) an enhancement for the "Good match" button also for 3-4 player games makes me confident that those pre-game features are getting more and more attention in the Shuffle IT priority list. As I said in one of my beta testing threads the importance of socializing features mustn't be underestimated  within a gaming community – especially for Dominion with a very different mixture of skills and preferences.

The old MF times to find appropriate players by yelling around in a global chat are gone – hopefully.

[Jacob Marley]

Personally I have never found the global chat feature to be that helpful, not just with MF but other online games as well.  I find its just people saying random things that generally don't make much sense.  For getting into games, the auto match buttons are fine.  In depth discussion is what the forums are for.

[JunkDealer]

I'd be curious to hear from people who feel that a global chat is worthwhile.  I too am in the boat of not really caring/finding personal value in it, but that doesn't mean that it isn't valuable to other people.  Clearly Felendis feels that there is value there.  I have to admit with MF if I had a question or wanted to see what was going on I first turned to the global chat and if I didn't see anything there that was helpful then would turn to the forums.  Consider it immediate feedback vs delayed feedback I guess.

[Felendis]

I'd be curious to hear from people who feel that a global chat is worthwhile.  I too am in the boat of not really caring/finding personal value in it, but that doesn't mean that it isn't valuable to other people.  Clearly Felendis feels that there is value there.  I have to admit with MF if I had a question or wanted to see what was going on I first turned to the global chat and if I didn't see anything there that was helpful then would turn to the forums.  Consider it immediate feedback vs delayed feedback I guess.

I think the value is just what you guessed. The value in a global chat is getting a response that is generally instant, though it lacks depth (and sometimes intelligence or the ability to spell). The forums are great for long, thought out discussions that can last for days or weeks.

I think the biggest value that the global chat would bring to a game like this is the instant help and feedback for a brand new player. People just getting in to Dominion or even just playing online for the first time are going to have some significant hurdles to overcome by trying to understand all that this platform offers, and if they dont really know how to articulate their issues right now, searching the forums for them will be difficult. They could try to cobble together a post that doesnt just create more follow up questions, after they go through the whole forum registration process. Thats assuming they care enough about the game to come back and see if they got an answer. The friction on that interaction is SUPER high, and most people just wont do it.The people here posting on the forums are not who global chat is for, but I would assume the percentage of the userbase of people who have no idea the forums exist is pretty high, and for this game to grow, that will always be high as new people come in.

[Martin plays Piano]

The main problem for the global chat is, that it can be (and it will be) misused from ,,poopers" and cadgers ("anyone with expansions here? – invite me!") but also from friendly people only wanting to say "hello, I am here". I am in doubt, that somebody is wishing back this kind of unspecific communication.
I would separate as following:

a) For newbies: why not using the existing Discord channel for that ? – of course there must be a more intuitive way to find it and to have a quicker log-in (perhaps you are logged in automatically when being logged in into Dominion). A nice button "need support?" on the welcome screen might help people for their first steps on this platform. Of course the Discord must be maintained from the Shuffle-IT guys, and I don't know how long it is planned to have someone sitting there day and night ...

b) For discussions and strategies: I think there is no need for another channel – we have this forum here (ok, it could be tidied up a bit in the meanwhile), and then there is the brilliant Dominion Strategy Wiki, which I really can recommend for card-specific explanations and much other interesting and well structured issues. Why not having a link to both on the welcome screen as well?

c) For finding games with someone (2 players): great stuff, as posted before, the "good match"-button is awesome, the other match buttons might be the same, but all of them are only the 2-player solution.

d) For finding game with someone (3-4 players): this is the missing issue – the separated match buttons for 3-4 players would be a feature, that really rocks the party. No necessity of yelling around "who wants to play with me?" – the system will find your partners silently.

e) For finding friends or specific players for a game: that's the lobby for – in combination with the friend's list it should be easy to find your preferred players, to have an overview, who is logged in, at what table they are sitting etc. – the tables tab today is a good start for that, but it's not state of the art at all. The lobby feature might give you so much room for development, that I leave it up to you, guys, to create something fascinating (info boards, statistic boards, tournaments, announcements - gosh, the lobby could really become your master council room.)

f) Global chat: no way, you don't need it.

g) Table chat: is absolutely essential and makes a game different from a bots game. Ok, there are several players saying nothing when you entering the table with a "Hello" – but the majority wants to speak, to discuss and to joke with the players. Perhaps one day this can be enhanced to a live-speak (via microphone) – ever thought about that ?.

Conclusion: a) b) c) g) are there – d) is vital – e) to be "upgreated" - f) we don't need.

[AdamH]

I think the way to go is to be able to chat with your friends in the game, and then have a table chat for each table. Having a friends list and being able to chat with them in-game is pretty standard among online games, and for sure there's value in having a table chat because the game can have more than two players. I think the table chat is implemented pretty well.

If chatting with friends is hard to do, a global chat would suffice until friend chat is finished if that's easier. Global chat isn't very useful though IMHO, so I wouldn't see much point in having one other than as a temporary thing until the real deal is implemented.

But it's really important to be able to chat with my friends in the game so I can ask them if they want to play. Right now I don't have a way to invite them to a table (I'm not saying I need one, because chatting would be better than just directly inviting them to a table) but the way it is right now, I log on and I want to play and obvs my first choice is to play with one of my friends. I can see who is online and I can kinda see what they're doing, but most of the time if I want to invite one of them to play all I can do is open a table and hope one of them sits down at it.

If I see my friends with a table that appears open, I will rarely sit down at it anymore because too often they aren't there or it's a ghost table. I also really like hosting tables because I can ensure the cards I don't like don't come up (I make them unfamiliar and set max unfamiliar cards to zero) so it would be cool for me to be able to invite people to my table.