Randomized Starting Cards -- Always Mostly Vanilla?

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SingularThey

I have a gold account. So far I've only played against bots.

This question is about how the application selects which cards to pick for your ten starting supply piles.

It seems that if I try to include non-Vanilla sets as ones that can be picked from, I end up, always, with eight or nine Vanilla cards, with only the other one or two being from non-Vanilla sets.

This has happened both when I had only Vanilla plus Intrigue activated, and when I had all sets activated.

Is this because I'm playing against bots? (Maybe they're not equipped to handle non-vanilla cards well?) Or is this how it always is, even with human players?

Mic Qsenoch

If you go to the "Familiar Cards" tab after logging in and choose "All Expansions" you should see cards from all the sets show up in games with the Bots.

If that doesn't work, I'm not sure what the issue might be.


AdamH

How many reports of stuff like this is it going to take before the devs realize that the default settings are completely inappropriate? And for every report we see here like this, how many other people just never play the game again and never bother saying anything? I should probably start harping on this again, since it's been long enough that the devs don't appear to want to do anything about it.

One of many default settings could be changed to make this experience better. It only takes one! Until then, the new-user experience, which is by far the most important and most neglected component of this software, is suffering drastically (not to mention all of the "experienced" people who play with new players that repeatedly suffer because of this). Fixing this one thing would have been more progress than the past month of updates we've seen, it's not even close, and this would take 10 minutes to do.

It could be fixed by any of the following:

- A splash screen upon first login that directs the user to the familiar cards page and explains that they'll have to change it in order to see any kingdoms with variety.
- Changing the default settings to make any purchased expansion "familiar" to a user, then making them change it if they want to mark cards as unfamiliar.
- Changing the default settings for creating tables or matching players to allow more than just two familiar cards (pointing out the checkbox for respecting familiar cards is NOT a fix here because it's also on by default, but also because Familiar cards is currently a workaround for other features that are not yet implemented.)

It's been months, you are losing money and customers because of this, and it's extremely easy to fix. I don't want this to fail, and fixing this will help you not fail. Please make this a higher priority.

LastFootnote

I strongly agree with Adam.

When "familiar cards" was first announced, I thought it was a really cool idea. Introduce cards slowly so that new players aren't constantly handed games with 10 new cards to read. I had assumed that cards would automatically become "familiar" after playing a game or two with them. It's mind-boggling that this is not the case.

The quickest "good" fix would be an "Automatically make cards familiar" option that makes any card familiar after a user has played a game with that card. This should be set to TRUE for everybody by default. Expecting players to know about the "familiar cards" tab and to manually update it themselves is ridiculous.

A better fix would be to always make cards familiar after a game with them (no option) and then create an actual card veto list, instead of players using the "familiar cards" tab as a sort of pseudo-veto as they do now.

The situation now is awful. You need to prioritize this.