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In

1. Get a game ID
2. Open a new table
3. Choose "Load old game"
4. Enter the id and Add a Bot
5. Click ready
6. You can enter earlier decision points and replay from anywhere if you like.

And note that if you aren't a paid subscriber then the only games you will be able to reload in this way are ones with only base set cards.

It's too bad the way this played out but the other company promised you something that they could never deliver on because they didn't have the license forever. That was wrong of them. The current company is only selling subscriptions for as long as they are guaranteed the license, so this won't happen again even if they lose the license.

Basically, it is an attack in all but name, that does not allow the defenses that cards with the attack type allow.

That Possession is effectively an attack but hits only one other player is a huge problem in games with 3+ players.  But this is a 2 player tournament.   

The problem for the tournament is what jsh articulated.

Personally, I am in favor of banning Possession for the tournament; it's a card few people like playing with that can literally lead to broken/stalemate games with debt (and it's not even convoluted to end up in the scenario!)

Also, it's not a big deal during game play that Possession does not have the Attack type: most boards won't have Lighthouse, Moat, or Champion to block attacks with, and of the other reactions only Diplomat seems particular effective at negating Possession (Squire would have needed to be re-worded, though).

Is there any protocol for what we should do if we get into a stalemate with possession/donate?

Agree to a draw?  For ranking purposes, one player resigns and then you start a new game which the other player immediately resigns.

You could do that and it will give you the most interesting games.

But the rating system would have to reflect that and take the starting player into account. My guess is that the advantage is 3-4 levels. If you don't account for that, it will mess up the ratings.
For example, if player A is a bit better than B and higher ranked, B will start and win the majority of games as the first player advantage overturns the skill gap. That is inconsistent with B being ranked below A and B will one day have the better rating. Then, A goes first and wins a lot, being the truely better player as well. This is also inconsistent with B being higher rated and B's rating falls again. So you'd end up with swingy ratings that don't converge to any difference reflecting the underlying skill gap.

As you say, the ranking system should incorporate who goes first if each player doesn't have an even chance to go first.

Rather than making the higher rated player always go last, another option is that a player's chance to go last equals the predicted probability that they'll win. This way higher ranking players still get to go first sometimes, but less often the higher rated they are.  That method could also be used if the players haven't played before, and if they have played, whoever won most recently goes last. This tends to produce more interesting games, but even a player who almost always plays lower ranked opponents will go first a decent amount.

One thing is more or less obscure bugs (of which there seems to be quite a few). Another thing is basic stuff like player tokens not being displayed and the after-game log having wrong information. I don't even feel like starting to list all the other equally important stuff, it's been done before, but I guess I should, but I actually don't have time right now. Anyway, it's very strange to me that people would rather have new cards than basic flaws fixed. You can always play with the new cards by actually buying the physical set and playing.

I think you're in a very small minority on this one.

Of the Dominion players who have played 500 or more games, people might care more about a new set. But for people who aren't that into Dominion, but could be, having another set isn't a big deal.  Having another set makes playing all cards games even more of a hurdle for new players than it already is, and Dominion games are plenty interesting these days without a new set.  Having a better interface would help people get into Dominion in the first place. 

I find it strange that ShuffleIT would prioritize having lots of volunteers help moderate a tournament (for the most serious players) over essential user information like an official FAQ.  The closest we have is an unofficial guide last updated in March.  http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=1100.msg3053#msg3053 There's no sign of a tutorial that teaches people to play Dominion on the horizon, and offline play seems even further away.  The priorities of the existing customer base that already loves competitive Dominion seem to be taken too seriously compared to the potential customers. I'm glad for me that Nocturne is first, and I don't need a FAQ, but it's been over seven months and I still won't recommend the site to people who are new to Dominion because it's not a good enough experience, and I don't want it to drive them away.

1.2 You also need an account with 20 rated games played (by September 15th).

How do I find out how many rated games I have under my account? I want to know what criteria will be used for the tournament. How will I know if some of my rated games get erased because I've inadvertently played them against a troll account whose games were redacted?

Under the "Leaderboard" page it shows a few rows with the inputs into your rating.  There's a row that says "Games" and shows a number of games. Presumably that is the number of games that count on your rating, and that's what will be used to determine eligibility.

I dont understand. The user, who is slowplaying, has to be banned for us to get our ratings back, right? So the onus is still on the player to report that particular slow user so that they get banned and we get our ratings back. Is this assumption correct?

You can just resign and black list the slowplayer. Stef monitors the players who are most frequently black-listed and this has enabled him to easily find and ban the slowplayer's accounts. Sending a private message to Stef (http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?action=profile;u=3) is also helpful, but probably not necessary.

The rating system has been updated so that games played by banned players do not contribute to the rankings:

http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=604.msg7582#msg7582

when a user gets banned, all rated results now will be retroactively removed. I.E. when you meet a notorious slowplayer, feel free to resign & blacklist

[Possession made it to cardboard, but not because it had some magical amount of deserving to exist that the other cards didn't. The data has piled up since Alchemy came out; I wouldn't make Possession today, but have stopped short of dropping it from Alchemy, because to be friendly we would need to sell the replacement separately for people who already bought Alchemy.]

While I agree that Possession encourages some weird deck construction, it was around before Donate was published and not replaced in 2nd edition (to my knowledge).  I feel that an interaction between two cards that causes a stalemate like this should have been caught during playtesting and this is a huge miss.  Individually, each have their own merit and while I understand the general dislike for Possession, I like that it makes you look at the kingdom a little differently.

It's unfortunate because I feel that I have to mark one of these cards as "unfamiliar" so I don't run into this situation again, and I'd rather not do that.

Possession wasn't replaced in the 2nd edition because Donald X decided that there weren't enough duds to replace cards from the other sets besides Base and Intrigue. And the basic problem of stalemate Possession games existed before Donate whenever you had strong trashing like Chapel, it's just that even Chapel doesn't trash as efficiently as Donate.

You don't need Swindler to exist for the game to be Dominion. You don't need whatever card for it to be Dominion. This is a point that may be a lot more visible to me than to other people, given my vantage point; Possession is just like all these other cards that some people hated that weren't published, except that it got published. Not having Possession just doesn't mean much to me; it's like not having that Village that Spied every time you played an attack, or whatever other thing you don't actually have. Possession made it to cardboard, but not because it had some magical amount of deserving to exist that the other cards didn't. The data has piled up since Alchemy came out; I wouldn't make Possession today, but have stopped short of dropping it from Alchemy, because to be friendly we would need to sell the replacement separately for people who already bought Alchemy.

http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=16338.msg708668#new

Normally these posts just talk about new stuff, but today I also get to talk about the old stuff. Why did I replace cards? Right, to make the sets better. The main set and Intrigue have the most duds - the most cards that experienced players rarely buy, that usually aren't worth considering. Or, in the case of some main set cards, that just didn't add much to the game, didn't give you things to do. Seaside is 3rd but much better by this metric; after Seaside there just aren't many duds to speak of in any one expansion. I have big plans to fix wordings in every pre-Empires set, but only Dominion and Intrigue are getting new cards.

Has anyone ever had the pleasure of playing a game with Donate and Possession in the kingdom and any village?  It essentially boils down to each player trashing their deck down to Village-Village-Possession-Possession-Possession or something similar and consequently staring at each other across the computer screen trying to figure out what to do at this point (an offer draw button was brought up by both of us).

Yes, an "offer draw" button would be a very useful feature.

What are people's experiences with this?  Is this, dare I say it, a "broken" combination?  Am I completely missing something?

Is it as bad as you say. I blame Possession, though, not Donate.

As a side note, I feel that Donate is bordering on absurdly strong as it is.  Trashing whatever you want out of your deck at any time seems too easy.

Donate is absurdly strong but still fun.  Possession is a poorly designed card because it encourages you to ruin your own deck. Not fun. And Donate provides the perfect means of ruining your deck.

This is a great suggestion, and this feature should also show what all of the Kingdom cards are, even if they are on the bottom of split piles. Like Knights, Castles, Gladiator/Fortune, and so on. But like AdamH says, the main screen should just be the kingdom cards / events / landmarks.

Not a bug. Because Donate's effect happens after the turn, it has strange interactions with Outpost. In particular, you get a 3-card Outpost hand, then Donate happens after the turn and you end up with 5 cards because of Donate.

If you run into this jerk, resign, black list them, and sent Stef a private message on this forum to report them. When an account is banned my understanding is that all of the games they played no longer contribute to the ranking system. I understand the impulse not to give in to this terrible bully, but there's no need to do that. It would be nice if this and other features of the client were documented on the client itself, instead of people needing to come to the forums. It would also be nice if there was a way to report abusive behavior directly from the client instead of needing to register for these forums to send Stef a PM.

The rating system has been updated so that games played by banned players do not contribute: http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=604.msg7582#msg7582

when a user gets banned, all rated results now will be retroactively removed. I.E. when you meet a notorious slowplayer, feel free to resign & blacklist