Optional Discard or Trash - Opt-in or Opt-out?

[kieranmillar]

Had a game with Sauna in it and me and my fellow player got involved in a discussion regarding the current interface and we wondered what other people might think.

Currently if a card has an optional discard or trash effect, it's currently inconsistent as to whether the interface asks you to opt-in (plaza) or opt-out (sauna, mercenary, mill). I can understand hamlet asking if you want to discard before discarding, as it offers options for what benefit you want from the discard, if you wish to do it at all.

I can't right now think of all of the optional trashers or discarders, perhaps it is only plaza that is currently inconsistent with all others, as with plaza you have to opt-in to the discard instead of opt-out.

Which do people prefer? Should the interface be the same for all of the cards? And if so, which way? Or should it change depending on the card to what feels most natural?

By the way, the game we played had both sauna and counterfeit, man that was confusing when you counterfeited a silver, as the sauna trash opt-out triggered twice in a row, very easy to accidentally trash counterfeit there if I didn't leave on the option to confirm every discard or trash.

[AdamH]

I've touched on this issue here and in some other places too. I think the guideline is to have the most common case be the most intuitive, so for Sauna I think I should have to opt-in to the trashing (most of the time when I play a Silver I just get $2 so Sauna-trashing is weird). For Counterfeit I should have to opt-out for the trashing (most of the time when I play a Counterfeit I'm trashing a card so declining that is weird). For Hamlet, it's a little closer but after a few thousand games I am inclined to say that opting in to discard abilities is the way to go.

Unfortunately, regardless of what is chosen, there's no way around the fact that you'll have to be stopped in the middle of Counterfeiting your Silver to say yes or no to trashing a card. Normally, if you decline to trash something because you played a Silver, just clicking on the next thing you want to do is the signal that you don't want to trash. Unfortunately, when you're playing a Silver twice, there's no need to wait for user input to play Silver the second time, so it needs to explicily ask you if you wanted to trash something to the first Silver before playing Silver the second time. That interface will always have to be awkward, but luckily it shouldn't come up all that often.

[allanfieldhouse]

I think the guideline is to have the most common case be the most intuitive.

I agree. The problem is that we're never all going to agree about what's most intuitive for every card. I can't even agree with myself about some cards! Early game, when I play a Sauna and a Silver, I obviously want to trash that Estate sitting in my hand. Later in the game, I have 0 cards left to trash, so it's really annoying when it prompts me if I want to trash.

I think we (well...the developers) are just going to have to pick a default choice for each card and then live with the annoyances introduced when you don't actually want that default.

Unfortunately, regardless of what is chosen, there's no way around the fact that you'll have to be stopped in the middle of Counterfeiting your Silver [after a Sauna] to say yes or no to trashing a card.

I think for the most part these defaults need to be chosen to make sense for that particular card. When you have multiple choices interacting between multiple cards, things are always going to be tricky. Unless there's a particularly bad interaction (like this http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=1453.0), it's okay for a complicated interaction to have a slightly more complicated interface.