Messages

My top two:

1. Playable without the log.
2. Fix all the bugs in how the cards work (which includes tokens not appearing and even Journey token being the wrong way). EDIT: Also that there is no way to know where set-aside cards can be seen. You have to already know to hover over your user name, which usually means reading it in the forum. I consider this a bug.

These two are way, way above any new features, such as adding Stash or inheritence, logs or leaderboards. Fix bugs before you add new stuff.

[I will of course let you go]

. If we agree to play Settlers of Catan and then you lose interest after a while and want to leave, I will of course let you go

You phrase this as if you have any say in the matter whatsoever. You don't!

I aplogize for phrasing it wrong. I didn't mean "let you" literally. I was talking about *how* I would do it. Can you imagine a situation, let's say a tournament, where it would be very harmful if a player dropped out mid-game or even mid-tournament. In those situations, the organizer would ultimately have to let that player go, but (given that there were no valid reason, such as illness or an emergency) the organizer would explain that it's not okay and try to persuade the player to stay. That's what I would not be doing in the original scenario. But I think you understood my point and was just being argumentative.

Why not? Having a resign button is a variant in any case, just like a VP counter. The rules say nothing about being able to resign.

I hope this is sarcasm.

It's not. According to the rules, you take your turn, you don't resign. By starting to play a game, all players agree to play by the rules. If you play Dominion IRL, some people might be okay with resigning, others not. It all depends on the game group. But you have to decide or know that in advance. If we agree to play Settlers of Catan and then you lose interest after a while and want to leave, I will of course let you go, but it's not a desirable situation for me, because I could have spent that time playing a game with somebody who didn't quit in the middle. So there's an unspoken agreement from the start that we will finish playing the game (barring any unforeseen event), just because that's the game. You finish it. There is no option in the rules to end the game before it ends. If there were, people would always be fine with it. Since there isn't, people are generally not fine with it. (I'm talking about almost all boardgames played IRL.)

Of course the presence of a resign button online means that now it's part of the deal. But it's just a nice-to-have feature, it has nothing to do with the game of Dominion. It's not something that the developers are required to provide, like Philip was suggesting.

Personally I prefer if my opponent lets me finish my last turn, but ultimately that decision is up to him and not something that should be enforced from above.

Why not? Having a resign button is a variant in any case, just like a VP counter. The rules say nothing about being able to resign. It's just a question of finding a balance between the actual rules of the game and what feels best to the greatest amount of people (most of whom would never post here btw, a very easy thing to forget).

On isotropic you could only resign at the start of your turn, and only if you had any decisions in your action phase. If your opponent had you in some kind of lock, or you discarded all your cards to torturer, you couldn't resign at all.

Don't get me wrong, isotropic was great, but this was certainly not something to be jealous of.

Ok, fair enough. I still thinks my other reasons stand.
As far as switching to AI... Sounds like a lot more work to implement. And it's still going to foster the bad form of resigning a few seconds before the game is over. If I was about to buy the last Province, it doesn't really make a difference if I do it against a bot. I'll still feel like I was subjected to a rage quit or at least an annoyed gesture. Switching to bot makes more sense if someone resigns earlier in the game. But of course, since the bot will probably be terrible at playing the other player's deck, it's not really going to tell me much about how the game would have played out.

I agree that it's generally good sportsmanship to only resign on your turn, however, I also feel it is very poor sportsmanship to "decksturbate" your last turn rather than winning the game expeditiously. If an opponent has enough coins to win and end the game, but instead proceeds to chain a bunch of actions together to draw their whole deck or pull off that Really Cool Combo, I won't hesitate to resign in the middle of it.

How fast does the last turn have to be compared to a normal turn? It sounds like you're just feeling impatient because you lost. I know, I feel that too. I try to control it. I really notice that it's a cultural thing. Before, everybody would have the patience to wait one more turn (out of 25-50). Now, the culture is that people are resigning during the last turn; people are doing it to you all the time, so why should you have to wait for a turn that is one second longer than it needs to be? The mere presence of this button during the last turn fosters this culture.

I see your problem and want to do something about it, but I don't think disabling the resign button is a step in the right direction.

Allowing you to continue against an AI seems like a much better idea, that would also solve your problem?

I only said disabling it during opponents' turns. As I said, it was like that on Isotripic and no-one ever thought it was a problem.

Just want to say that I agree that it currently works opposite of what the card text says. The card text is there in the online version too. That's what we're supposed to be following when we play. So there is a face-up side and a face-down side to the token. It should be clear which side is which. Colored being face-down and B/W being face-up is definitely opposite of what 99.9% of people would think, so it's crazy that this was implemented and that anybody is defending it.

EDIT: I think the best solution is a token that shows the symbol when it's face-up and is just blank (in your color) when it's face-down - exactly like the physical game. Only the journey token will ever be facedown by the player, so there will be no confusion. It will start face-up, and when you play/buy something that flips it, it will be obvious. It's the only token there (except for Coin/VP tokens) and the only thing that flips.

If my opponent has decided to resign, I would rather have him resign immediately than let me play out a long turn, think about how to spend my 20 coins in the best way to safeguard victory and then have him resign.

On Isotripic we used to say, I'll resign now. Of course then you have to trust the other player. That was never a problem though.
I still think it's a much smaller problem that you sometimes have to play one more turn, than the problem of people resigning during the last turn.

A list of each player's deck at the end of the game is something I hope is in the works anyway.

I think the original idea would definitely be an analysis of Dominion. It would tell you how a strategy works on average, same as the simulators do. The simulators could also be said to remove the "reliability" aspect by the same token. In any case it doesn't sound like a good use of server resources to shuffle thousands of times for a single game analysis.

I see no reason why resigning should be available unless it's your turn. That was how it was implemented on Isotropic and I can't remember anybody ever questioning it. I can't remember how it was implemented on Goko/MF.

Resigning should of course be possible, but I see no reason why you can't wait until your turn to do it. The biggest problem is the following: It seems it's becoming more and more common to resign in the last turn if your opponent is winning, often just a few seconds before the game is finished anyway. I think it's common courtesy to let the winner finish their last turn. The other side of that is that the winner should do it in a timely manner; but in a game of usually 25 to 50 turns in a two player game (counting each player's turns), one more turn of normal length (or actually whatever is left of that turn at the point when you feel like hitting the "resign" button) hardly matters in terms of time, and doesn't give you the right to cut it short. It's usually just poor sportsmanship and/or annoyance.

As for resigning mid-game, the same applies in terms of time: Waiting half-a-turn more before resigning does not make a difference for you. Although I've gotten used to it, it doesn't always feel nice to be interrupted in the middle of your play. The main reason is the resigning just before you're about to lose though.

There is a drawback to incomplete games in general. You never get to see how your strategy worked in the endgame, or how your opponent's strategy worked. You never get to learn how to *play* your strategy in the endgame. Your opponent just assumed (rightly or wrongly) that you would play it well and win, but you never got to try and see how it worked out in the end, or how close the game would have been. Dominion isn't just played to determine a winner and a loser, but to actually try, you know, playing the kingdoms - against your opponent of course. That said, I get that it's no fun to continue playing when you feel like you have no chance, especially if it's early in the game already, or there's no end in sight. As it gets close to ending, I feel like it's good sportsmanship to see it through - but you can't regulate that: either there is a resign button or there isn't. But there is one easy fix to avoid people resigning during the last turn of their opponent: Making the resign button available only on your turn.

I have (obviously) read the forum posts, so I am now aware of this pitfall.  But the rule is pretty recherche and I think that a lot of beginning and mid-level casual players will be (a) mystified as to why their expensive Prince card is not having the expected results and (b) pretty cheesed off when they realize that they wasted a Huge investment--in two separate cards!!--with no warning about what would happen.

On the other hand; it's not the worst thing in the world to happen . . . at most, a one-time lesson in advanced Dominion gameplay.  So, it would not be the first fix/change I'd make, if I were a ShuffleIt programmer.

I'm not opposed to your suggestion. But I just want to add that it's not forum posts that should be the basis for knowing how Prince works. It's the actual rulebook. How Prince works on Durations is explained there. (And it's also available online from Rio Grande. There are also rules documents on BGG and wiki.dominionstrategy.com.)

Right, having re-examined the events, I think you're right. When I made this thread, I had just started playing and I assumed the "left table" message was a timeout. But probably he just waited until almost timeout to leave.

I've asked this before when I've made a bug report, but nobody has bothered to answer. I've also seen other people ask it.

I see that many bug reports state a game number and something like "in frankfurt". How do I find this info?

Good analysis of the situation. Prince is a weird card in the sense that it has a sentence in parenthesis whose nature is unclear to me: If it is some necessary instruction, why is it in parenthesis? It seems to be necessary, as otherwise it clearly should work with Duration cards (which get discarded sometime, just later than other cards, so "loose track" should not apply to them).

Yes, I also used to think that instructions in parenthesis are not necessary, but Donald has clarified that that's not necessarily the case. And on Prince it's a necessary instruction.