In a game just now I played Catapult. I trashed a copper but my opponent *instantly* discarded a copper - too fast for them to have manually selected it I think?
So this bit of automation reveals that they have a hand of only copper.
I know it's not much in the grand scheme of things but it's still an info leak and a bit unfair... assuming I'm right that this *was* automation?
Best
Tim
You are right that this was automation.
I don't personally care about the information leakage, but I think this should just be an option with the default being off, more for preventing confusion than anything else.
These are the sorts of automatic decisions that I hate, -- not because they can reveal information -- but because they are unexpected. If my opponent plays a discard attack, I expect that I will need to choose two cards. For those edge cases where there is no choice and the game does it for me, it throws me off.
YMMV, but for me the disruption to my cognitive processes ("wait, what happened and why?") exceeds the benefit of having the trivial action done for me.
Same automation is often annoying with swindler. You play swindler as your last action, there's only one card in play with the same cost, the card is automatically given, you don't see that, you enter your buy phase but you don't know, you see "i can buy copper and curse", you think "swindler trashed a copper". you buy a curse.
And another example of annoying / confusing automation in a game tonight:
I played a Black Market and the cards didn't appear.
Looking in the log, they had gone straight to the bottom of the Black Market deck.
After an undo this happened again and then my opponent and I figured out that they were too expensive for me to afford any - which is fine, but by gosh it was confusing! The game should display a message to this effect as I was baffled for a while.