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Wow! That's wild. Thank you for the detailed explanation :)

Game 55869372

Three different times this game I managed to discard a Village Green with a Vassal. Was pretty excited to experience this synergy. All three times VG triggered twice and either this is a bug or there's some rules nuance I don't understand.

The first two times I discarded a VG with Vassal, I elected to play the VG at the start of my following turn. At the start of both of those following turns, I got +2 cards and +4 actions (from only one VG each time).

On the final turn of the game, I played my VG that turn and immediately got +2 cards and +4 actions.

Any ideas? I did a command+f search and couldn't find any other mention of this interaction.

I would prefer that such messages come via private message to me (which already happens), so they can be dealt with non-publicly. We had cases where harassers followed the people that had reported them using new account names.

Understood.  Thanks for the guidance!

Thirded! This is horrible.

I don't know if we'll ever know for sure that anything was done about it.  If I recall, mods usually like to keep it pretty quiet when they do take action against a player or account.

Is it now allowed to call out users by name in these forums? A few years back I started a thread about the perennial "play faster!" requests and my post was redacted to remove the username of an opponent. Recently, however, I've seen a number of posts that seem to allow usernames to remain, even in a negative context.

I have no strong feelings about this either way, just trying to understand the forum policy!

YOu would think that at lower levels on the ladder I would meet people at my level, but it appears to not be the case.
Any suggestions?

Two things come to mind.  First, check what the min/max opponent ranking range is in your automatch settings.  Idk what you're ranking is, but let's say it's 45... if your automatch range is +/-10 (the default I think), then you're still maybe getting matched against rank 55 players who are going to be *much* better than you.  I'm rank 57 give or take and I enjoy a +/- 6 opponent ranking range.

Second, a player's ranking reflects how many games they win and against what ranking of opponents, right? But due to the nature of online play, this ranking doesn't track exactly with a player's understanding of the game (or skill, as a less-quantifiable quality than "ranking").  For instance, maybe there's some player who understands the game well enough to regularly place at tournaments and if they only ever played online when they were perfectly focused they would easily be rank 60-something; but day-to-day, on the ladder, they are distracted, or drunk, or whatever, and these bad play habits means their ranking is quite a bit lower than it could be. As far as the automatch system can tell, maybe you and this player are the same ranking, but if you have the bad luck to match with this player at a moment in which they are very focused, you'll get trounced because if you control for bad habits around online play, they are the much more skilled player.

Years ago I made the decision to never play before my first coffee and to never play after my third beer and damn if my rating didn't jump 4 points in like two weeks.

It appears this has happened to several people.  I know a couple of folks have reported it as a bug.

Thanks for mentioning this.  I didn't think to put this down as a bug.  I did find one recent post there describing the same problem.

I'm having the same problem.  I didn't think to report it as a bug and started this topic: http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=4328.msg18458#msg18458

Sorry to this happening to anybody, but also glad it's not just me.

iirc mods are mostly European, so they're probably catching some Zs atm, but hopefully this will get resolved soon!

Hi all,

I have no idea what just happened, but my rating has randomly dropped by about 19 points.  I'd been holding it down at about 57 for weeks now.  I played a couple games earlier today and was at like 57.4 or something. When I logged on just now to look for a match my rating was 38-point-something?!

I have thousands of games played on this account (same username in game), over the entire existence of this iteration of online Dominion (have been playing w/ same username since isotropic), i.e. even if I lost dozens of consecutive games I'd expect my rating to drop by 3-5 points max. 

Has this happened to anyone else? How does this get fixed?

I've not been too active on these forums before but lots of love for this community.  Please help.  Thanks!

-Professor Yes

EDIT: I'm still showing as number 240 on the leaderboard with a rank of 57, which is encouraging, but I want to be able to match with similarly skilled players which I'm not sure how to do at present.

Thanks for the encouraging words.  I'll know to just not let it get to me in the future.  Also, thanks to whoever redacted my opponent's name, I should've known better than to put that specific info in the first place and I'll be sure not to if I ever am voicing frustrations again.

[redacted]

Hi... this has been a problem that has plagued online dominion since the isotropic days, and through all incarnations since.  Occasionally a player angrily requests that I "play faster".  This happened most recently just now vs. username redacted. 

I was not intentionally playing slow, I was merely taking what probably amounted to 15 seconds to consider possible lines of play.  I had been dealt a 5/2 split for a fairly complicated board where I think the 4/3 split would have been better.  I'm an hugely experienced player but was not immediately sure what the correct move was—indeed that an experience player can still face such uncertainty is one of the reasons I've been enjoying this game for so many years.  Anyway, in this short amount of time that I was thinking for, redacted entered into chat "play faster please".  I went to type a response along the lines of "I'm focused, I just need a few seconds to consider possible lines of play please", but before I could even type that out they resigned.  Accompanying their resignation was another message in chat to effect of that they were blacklisting me.

Now, frankly, I'm thrilled if I never have to play against someone so grumpy and impatient as this person clearly was.  I just wanted to open this topic, and get my version of the story in writing for two reasons 1.) to facilitate, if anyone else is interested, a discussion around when/if ever it is appropriate to request that your opponent plays faster, and 2.) provide a reference for the mods if they investigate why redacted and I blacklisted each other, for I strongly believe that my conduct was not at all inappropriate.

As regards reason 1: I understand that sometimes people intentionally play slow, and I like so many other, find that annoying also. I don't ever intentionally play slow.  But surely 15-30 seconds can be considered a reasonable amount of time to think about a turn, yes? Maybe sometimes even a whole minute? Especially at the start of the game, for as we all know the first moves are often the most important.