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I strongly agree with this idea.

Also I'd love to somehow be able to tell in-game whether the person I'm playing with is a "friend". I friend basically anybody I have positive interactions with in the chat, so I don't always remember all of them.

Ugh, auto-buy. Now there's a feature that shouldn't exist, and certainly shouldn't get in the way of other, more important features.

From my cursory research, that would also make refreshing the page resign you.

And in general we want people to be able to quit their browsers and the re-enter a game, perhaps even on a different machine. I've done that more than once.

I hate hate hate it when a site pops up a dialog when I try to close its tab/window. I do not appreciate having my browser hijacked. Now if there's some way to send a message to the server without popping up a dialog or otherwise disrupting the browser, I'm tentatively for it. If not, I'm against doing this. Having to occasionally wait for a user to time out is a small price to pay for not having a terrible dialog pop up.

And to be clear, I try to always resign if I have to suddenly leave a game. I still don't want this feature.

Hello. I just tracked down this thread after recently posting a similar request and being forwarded Donald X's pithy response. I just want to state for the record that I completely agree with Hertz Doughnut's in-depth reply near the end of this thread. I'm among the people who always balances out the starting hands when playing IRL. And it's clear that there is at least a moderately significant population of Dominion players who share this preference and would appreciate the option for privately created tables.

You say his response was pithy, but I think he does a fine job of explaining his reasoning here in detail.

There is nothing magical about the opening shuffle, any more than any other luck that's in the game. And I agree that the next shuffle is usually at least as important, and often more so. Shuffling your opening buys to the bottom is a huge disadvantage. Should we change the shuffling algorithm to avoid that next? Where does it end?

And if you always play with identical starting hands in your IRL games, well I feel like you haven't got much of a leg to stand on from an empirical evidence standpoint. How do you know it makes your games better if you do it every game?

Yeah Shuffle iT could implement this for privately created tables. There are a dozen other things that I hope they prioritize first.

But what was so interesting (I'm putting on my psychologist cap here) was the strength of his conviction.  I had expected a response like, "Well, I think it's a dumb idea.  But if you want to make the game less fun, then sure, it can be an opt-in option, for those who want it."  But the unequivocal "no!" tells me that DX really sees this option as something extremely bad for the game.  He seems to have a lot invested in this decision.

I'm guessing it has something to do with the fact that he's had this same conversation a bunch of times in the past.

I understand the OP. I play Dominion because I enjoy playing Dominion, not to increase my rank. It can be frustrating when an opponent abruptly resigns. I wanted to see how my deck played out.

I'm not saying resigning shouldn't be an option, just stating my feelings. Talking about resigning, as josh suggests, goes a long way. I wish more people did it.

All righty then. I personally would have warned this person before banning them if all they said was the F-word, but it's not up to me.

In any case, it would be really nice to be able to squelch people in chat. It would make situations like this a lot easier for everyone involved, especially the people who it seems you're trying to help by having a seemingly-tougher-than-industry-standard ban policy.

If somebody's being toxic, I'd rather they be banned and not spread their toxicity around. Being able to mute them is not sufficient. I strongly support a "tougher-than-industry-standard ban policy". From what I can gather, the industry standard is to let toxic behavior run rampant.

I'm starting to wonder if part of the solution needs to be charging for access to the base game. There needs to be some way to keep banned players from simply opening another account.

I have also had this issue just now on my MacBook. Inheritance was clearly visible, but I didn't find out about Battlefield until my opponent got VP from it.

Game #8024800

No, sorry. It won't quite be available in time for Essen.

Cross-posting an old post of mine:

I think better AI should be a top priority for Shuffle iT right now, probably second after eliminating all the log-only UI stuff. iOS and Android versions are important, but not having them is just putting off potential future players (who may already be totally put off by the subscription anyway). The bad AI is damaging player experiences right now. Here's a recent example of a new player who played a game where he lost to Lord Rattington, where Lord Rattington played Smithy-BM. The game AI should never ever play Smithy-BM, because it amounts to telling the player the game is broken. The game itself knew that the best strategy was this boring one! There should be a "bad" AI that messes around buying a bunch of stuff, like a newbie would. And then there should be some "good" AIs that play more complex strategies. No AI should be intentionally playing a boring strategy.

I just cross my fingers that Stef understands that a good game AI isn't one that wins the most. It's one that's challenging but not too challenging, and overall fun to play against.

I don't think Lord Rattington "knows" that Smithy-BM is the move, to any degree, ever. It doesn't know anything. It just tends to play mostly money, whether it's good or not.

I think you misunderstand. I know that Lord Rattington doesn't know anything, and you know that, but the new players that are getting beaten consistently by Lord Rattington don't know that. They see themselves getting beaten by this terrible AI using a boring "strategy" and assume that it's a good AI and that the boring strategy is the correct one.

I think the move is to make a bot that's as good as possible, and then use it as a base for other bots, by just handicapping them or lying to them (e.g. the attacky bot spends the first 6 turns overestimating attacks). I wouldn't start out trying to design a fun bot.

Yes, agreed. But having fun AIs is still more important than lots of other things, so I'm hoping there won't be a large time gap between the advent of the "best" AI and the advent of some lesser ones.

Cross-posting an old post of mine:

I think better AI should be a top priority for Shuffle iT right now, probably second after eliminating all the log-only UI stuff. iOS and Android versions are important, but not having them is just putting off potential future players (who may already be totally put off by the subscription anyway). The bad AI is damaging player experiences right now. Here's a recent example of a new player who played a game where he lost to Lord Rattington, where Lord Rattington played Smithy-BM. The game AI should never ever play Smithy-BM, because it amounts to telling the player the game is broken. The game itself knew that the best strategy was this boring one! There should be a "bad" AI that messes around buying a bunch of stuff, like a newbie would. And then there should be some "good" AIs that play more complex strategies. No AI should be intentionally playing a boring strategy.

I just cross my fingers that Stef understands that a good game AI isn't one that wins the most. It's one that's challenging but not too challenging, and overall fun to play against.

And it's happening again. At least now it gives a dialog: "No gameserver available."

I assume customers' subscriptions will be extended to compensate for all this downtime?

I've noticed this with other releases in the past, though the problem is much more severe now of course. Maybe it will get some attention now that there's a big stink.

It seems that Shuffleit would benefit with some line of testing before their updates are released to the public. I know somewhere around here there was a mention of automated testing by one of the devs. That would be a step in the right direction but it's not the whole picture. I think having a group of testers to run through "internal" builds before they are released to the public would benefit everyone quite a bit.

I agree with you in general, Adam, but is it possible this wasn't caused by a new release? Seems like maybe people are being kicked to these rooms because the games are failing to start automatically, perhaps because servers are down.

Something is wrong, and because this mickey mouse operation only has two employees and they're in the same time zone, there's nobody to fix it. That's what's up.

keeping score was against the rules (because the rules don't explicitly allow it, it isn't allowed)

You only mean automatically, right? If I keep score by remembering everything (which I can't, but some people probably can) it cannot be forbidden, can it?

Correct. You're not allowed to write down notes about game state during the game, but you are (obviously) allowed to use your memory to keep track of things.