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[with any cards in hand]

If you are used to the 1st Edition printing of Masquerade, then you are right, it would be wrong.

However, the game uses the 2nd Edition wording that starts with

+2 Cards
Each player with any cards in hand passes ...
(emphasis mine)

The reason is a hard to achieve but "deadly for your opponent" situation described in the wiki:

In the first edition of Intrigue, Masquerade did not make an exception for players with no cards in hand—such a player would receive a card but be unable to pass one, and so the player to their left would pass a card but not receive one. As a result of this, it was sometimes possible to set up pins with Masquerade where one player would repeatedly have to pass cards without receiving them, until they were left with no cards in hand on their turn, and over the course of several turns be forced to pass their entire deck away. The card was revised in the second edition to eliminate this possibility.

No, there is no such general way. In some countries, including Germany, some (all?) boxes come with codes that can be redeemed on dominion.games for getting 1 year of 1 expansion. I guess that is what those people did.

I'm a Gold subscriber since the beginning (just for reference).

The question is do you dislike many of the Gold level cards (those in the Gold sub but not the Silver sub), or "just a few"? Possession is widely recognized as a very strange card and many players have banned it from their games (you can be 5 cards + 3 landscape cards, and also dislike (50% lower probability than normal cards) the same amount).

It's true that the newer expansions all introduce new mechanics and getting them "all at once" with the Gold sub instead with 1 per year with a new expansion is a daunting task. The plan to have more levels than base only, Silver, Gold has been worked on, but it's unclear when it will be implemented.  :-[

As far as I understand, there was nothing you could have done in that case.

My personal idea to solve this problem would be to have an "anti-autoplay" in the sense that selecting that option would make sure you always get an "End Action" button if you have Villagers, no matter if the game thinks doing anything else would be "useless". In that case, you could have converted the last Villager to an Action, then ended the Action phase, and gotten $1 more from the Diadem.

I don't know how hard that would be to do.

When you go to the "Matching" tab (the one you land on automatically after login), on the right side you have a pane named "Friends". Everyone you have declared your friend (when it is a one-side relationship, this is often called "following" that player) and is logged in will be listed there, with their status (logged in, at a table, playing).

When they are on a table, you can join them there via a button. This is the way most people set up their games when they want to play with someone they know: One makes a table, the other joins it. That's also the way most people watch high profile games (from the Dominion League or other tournaments). You declare a good or interesting player as your friend (it doesn't have to be reciprocated), then join their table and watch the game(s) they play.

Done (both)!

Thanks for pointing it out and reminding me. I removed the bug from the list.

[Merchant]

Modifications September 2021:

 
• 21-09-26:
  
     
  • Removed Merchant bug (see previous posting), as it is the correct behaviour.

It means for whatever reason your IP address is considered to be from Germany, not Japan. Are you using a VPN of some kind?

Works fine for me on Windows Firefox for e.g. game 85953012
What device, OS and browser are you using?

Done (both)!

Thanks for the report, monte_carlo.

Unfortunately, it's a long-standing known bug  :-[

Obviously, when you don't (surely) know how many points you have, you don't even know if ending the game will be good for you, so of course then maximize points.

My advice was general, I've seen it happen countless times in games where all players know the point total and there were no "bite me in the back" cards like Museum and Traveller exchanges (or something similar) that could screw you over.

The like/dislike/banned lists are relatively short (only 5 "portrait" cards and 3 landscape cards).

Familiar cards was the feature that was initially thought to help players into the game. But since it is unused in rated games, and unrated automatch games have turned out to be unpopular, this isn't much use.

The new feature (previewed some time ago) will allow several levels of card complexity, with 0 being the base game only.

Unfortunately that's not possible at the moment. A feature like this (even more general) is in thr works. I'm sorry there isn't better news  :-[