"Crown" Logic

[randomjoyz]

Having to use undo to get your intended outcome because you are misled by the client or can't tell what the client is going to do is bad UI design, not an ideal use of the undo button. The Undo button (assuming it can't be abused) should be only needed for careless play mistakes.

Edit: spelling.

But miss playing a crown when you have done it once before is a careless play mistake, and that first time is learning how to use the client. But honestly, it is pretty intuitive if you are paying attention, when you play an action during your action phase, it's going to be played like an action, and further, it should be played as an action.

With this being said, I am not condemning anyone for making silly careless mistakes. I have made this mistake a few times myself, I'm human after all.

[randomjoyz]

People actually seem to think that the current interface is the best?

The voice of people who are new to the game and new to the online client is the one that should be listened to. And whatever they say they want, there should be a good reason why not if they can't have it. "The code is harder to maintain and harder to write" is not a good enough reason.

Anyways, it's definitely possible to write it the way I've suggested, though it's a pretty low priority. The discussion here has gone in all sorts of directions so I'm not going to continue it anymore.

What? They should listen to the people who don't necessarily understand how the client works yet? There is a good reason not to make crown automatically work in the way the way you say it should. The reason is that when you play a crown during the action phase, you are telling the game you want to play the card like an action, so that is what it should do. I noticed in another post you mentioned remake and a hand full of copper. I want to point out that this is a very different situation, when you play a remake with a hand full of copper, the only possible outcome is that 2 copper will get trashed(you can not decide you only want to remake one of the copper, the card says "do this twice" and not "you may do this twice"), so it makes sense for the game to do that automatically.

They should not make it so that crown automatically plays as a treasure when you have actions left, regardless of it being a smart move or not, you should be able to make it if that is what you chose, even if there is no edge reason to do so.

They should not make it ask you if you are sure you want to do so and so, this would be annoying to the player who is paying attention and playing the cards carefully and deliberately.

I couldn't care less if they want to make it clearer what phase you are in, but this is unnecessary as anyone paying attention can easily tell what phase they are in. The real solution, pay attention, and if you make a mistake, undo. (demanding something be changed because you made a mistake is absurd)

Oh and, another argument I have seen you make a few times is "It doesn't matter if it is elegant/logical/right if it's what the people want", well people are arguing with you and I don't see that many agreeing with you. And further it does matter if the game is executed correctly, this a game where you make decisions based on carefully written statements on the cards. If we are not following those statements literally then what the hell are we doing?


My argument stems from 2 indisputable facts and 1 opinion.

fact1: If you tell the client to do something, the client should do that something rather than something else.

fact2: If it is legally possible to play a hand in a certain way, then you should be able to do that in the client.

opinion: if you play your cards carefully and deliberately, the client should not second guess your decisions.

[Donald X.]

People actually seem to think that the current interface is the best?

I don't imagine it is. For sure it should not be possible to click on Crown in your Action phase and find out you blew it and were supposed to click to end the phase first.

"The code is harder to maintain and harder to write" is not a good enough reason.

That is not the reason! Bad code is easier to write, not harder!

Donald X.'s number one rule of programming, for all of you eager to learn it, is, "say what you mean." When you don't, you get bugs. These people who need to be protected from a scary "are you sure" button, they also need to be protected from bugs. The ability to fix bugs does not sufficiently compensate for having them in the first place.

Anyways, it's definitely possible to write it the way I've suggested, though it's a pretty low priority.

I think it's great that so many people, including you, are suggesting fixes to the UI that they would like, including for Crown. This particular fix you want, I would not get too attached to it.

[AdamH]

I made the mistake of coming back to read this after I said I wouldn't. Now I'm going to make another mistake by replying. Woooo!

What? They should listen to the people who don't necessarily understand how the client works yet?

Yes, this is exactly what I'm saying. And it's a really important thing that is obviously not going to be popular among many people who take the time to post here.

Anyone who plays with this client is going to get used to it, regardless of how bad the interface is. I've been there, I got used to the Goko interface (#BURN). Anyone who does this was going to play the game regardless, so yeah there is some value in making them happy but it doesn't *really* matter all that much in terms of the success of Dominion as an online game and the success of this particular client.

On the other hand, there are going to be a lot of people who get a link and try this thing out and could potentially be really turned off by the first 10 minutes of using this client. Every single person who could possibly be a user of this thing will go through that test, so by that reason alone it's the most important thing and those people are the target audience for pretty much all of the UI decisions. But on top of that, Dominion online needs to have an interface that's welcoming for new players and even viewers who are unfamiliar with the game to expand its audience if it wants a reasonable chance of succeeding as an online game.

So yeah, new players who don't know how the client and/or game works are the most important audience for UI decisions.

My argument stems from 2 indisputable facts and 1 opinion.

fact1: If you tell the client to do something, the client should do that something rather than something else.

fact2: If it is legally possible to play a hand in a certain way, then you should be able to do that in the client.

opinion: if you play your cards carefully and deliberately, the client should not second guess your decisions.

I don't disagree with any of this, and nothing I've suggested violates any of this. All I want is for the most common case to make sense in terms of user inputs. This is possible to do with Crown as I've explained above many times and the only arguments I've been given for why this should not be done have been the following:

1. It would be harder to implement/maintain the code for this.
2. I would prefer the implementation the way it is.

As for 1, well that's just not a good reason to make a worse product. As for 2, the answer is to have an option to make the UI different if people just can't get used to it.

Anyways, it's definitely possible to write it the way I've suggested, though it's a pretty low priority.

I think it's great that so many people, including you, are suggesting fixes to the UI that they would like, including for Crown. This particular fix you want, I would not get too attached to it.

I fully realize that the devs of this product will probably not listen to me. Even so, I think I'm right about this and I think the my way is the best way. By bringing it up here and having people people post their counterarguments, some of the time I see a problem with my argument and then I back off (maybe there is some reason why it has to be the way it is, as unfortunate as that would be). That didn't happen here.

So yeah I know they probably won't take my advice even though I think I'm right. But I have this thing where if they don't take my advice, and the reason for that is possibly because I didn't defend my position properly, then I'm not OK with that. It's why I'll soon be submitting my sixth audition video for Survivor when they haven't called me back for the last five, because I'm not OK with me not being cast on the show and the reason for that being because I didn't try my hardest to get on.

[Witherweaver]

For the record, I'm not saying harder to implement, as much as not correct to implement. 

[randomjoyz]

ok adam, so let me try to understand what you think should happen.


Situation: hand (crown, copper, copper, copper,copper) your turn starts, you click crown(click1), you click copper(click2), you now have $1

In this situation, what are you suggesting happens differently before or after any click#?

[Witherweaver]

People actually seem to think that the current interface is the best?

I don't imagine it is. For sure it should not be possible to click on Crown in your Action phase and find out you blew it and were supposed to click to end the phase first.

So how do you think it should function?

[AdamH]

ok adam, so let me try to understand what you think should happen.


Situation: hand (crown, copper, copper, copper,copper) your turn starts, you click crown(click1), you click copper(click2), you now have $1

In this situation, what are you suggesting happens differently before or after any click#?

umm, I think in that case you should have $2 because Crown doubled a Copper.

I think I know where you're going with this. Please forgive me if I'm wrong. I think you're going to say next "what if I wanted to play Crown as an Action, Crowning nothing, then just play the Copper? This is a legal thing I can do so what are the inputs?"

My answer to that would be: you click on Crown, then that button comes up that says "Crown nothing" (because that's an option regardless of what phase you're in) -- if you click that button and there's an option for which phase you wanted to play that Crown in (which there is in this case), another prompt comes up which asks you if you wanted to play that Crown as an Action or as a Treasure while doing nothing with it.

All legal plays are possible with an interface that allows you to just click the card you want to Crown after clicking Crown(s) and having that determine what phase you wanted. If there is a +1 Card token on Crown then that prompt has to come up earlier but otherwise this is what it looks like. Or maybe there's another way to do it that works better with the existing code, I dunno, this is just one possibility.

The point is that the most common thing people want to do has the most intuitive interface for new players while the more obscure things, like playing a Crown to not double things when you could and then also caring about your Action count, will require more input from the user. Also, it's a lot easier for the user to understand why they're being asked for more input (because they're doing something weird) as opposed to the simpler interface "I click a Crown and then click the thing I want to double".

EDIT: punctuation

[randomjoyz]

no that is exactly where I was going. your suggestion violates my "opinion: if you play your cards carefully and deliberately, the client should not second guess your decisions." as well as a new opinion I have which is, the game should not be suggesting moves for me.

I can't see more then 1 or 2 random people here and there (out of thousands) rage quitting over this so that seems like a non issue to me.  (of course this is just a guess and not a real statistic)

It just seems backwards to me that you would decide how a card was played after you already played it instead of playing it and having it act according to how when/how you played it.

but I think we can agree to disagree because all that is left is my opinion vs yours and I think we both understand each other.


edit (because this is driving me insane):

as it is now you: (click end actions) (click crown) (click copper)
*what you want: (click crown) (click play as treasure) (click copper)

your ways is the same amount of clicks but from the view of someone reading the cards and playing according to what the cards say/how the game is played, your way is backwards and confusing. I think it's better for the client to stay pure and intuitive from a logical standpoint, rather than being built around mistakes that a less logical player might make.

Don't punish logic, the real word does that enough!

[Donald X.]

I made the mistake of coming back to read this after I said I wouldn't. Now I'm going to make another mistake by replying. Woooo!

The important thing is the happy memories we're making.

[Donald X.]

So how do you think it should function?

Well I haven't thought it through - I just know it shouldn't partially resolve without knowing what phase it is.

Let's see. My first thought is what isotropic did for "maybe this is a mistake" situations. Not for Crown, isotropic never had Crown functioning. Doug Z. said it would require a lot of changes to his code, and then stopped updating isotropic; I imagine it was less fun of a project when only a few people were using it.

Anyway, you know, on isotropic, you would click say on a Copper in your hand despite having actions you could play, and instead of playing the treasure it would add a question mark after it. And if you clicked on it again then okay it would jump to your Buy phase and play it.

If a giant question mark shows up on a card in your hand, maybe that's just baffling. It could be "Sure?" If you click the card again, okay it does it (and if you click something else, the "Sure?" goes away). A general solution to these situations, which there are probably more of. For Crown in particular, it happens if you try to play it in your Action phase with no Action cards in hand. And there's a button to skip to the Buy phase.

[Cave-O-Sapien]

edit (because this is driving me insane):

as it is now you: (click end actions) (click crown) (click copper)
*what you want: (click crown) (click play as treasure) (click copper)

Is this really what this whole thread is about?

[AdamH]

edit (because this is driving me insane):

as it is now you: (click end actions) (click crown) (click copper)
*what you want: (click crown) (click play as treasure) (click copper)

Is this really what this whole thread is about?

It's not. I didn't see this edit, but I guess I should clarify.

When I click Crown, it shouldn't prompt me whether it should be doubling an Action or a Treasure every time I have a choice. Granted, I think this would be better than the current interface that exists, but I don't think it's best and it's not what I'm suggesting.

The interface should know what I'm playing Crown as based on the next non-Crown card that I click, so in this case what I want is (start of turn) (click Crown) (click Copper) and then I get $2. I only get a prompt if ((the +1 Card token is on the Crown pile) or (I choose not to double anything with my Crown)) and (I get a choice for what phase to play it in).

On a side note, I really wish you would have read my previous posts where I state that this is what I wanted multiple times instead of assuming this is what I wanted and making the comments you have. But I guess you can't have everything.


People are allowed to not like it, but nobody has shown that this in invalid in any way. I feel like that's important to point out. There are some that say this is beginning to resolve the card without knowing what phase it is. By some interpretations of those words, maybe they are right but like, it doesn't matter.

If I'm playing the tabletop game and I Crown a Copper at the start of my turn and my opponent shouts "HEY NO YOU DID NOT ENTER YOUR BUY PHASE YOU CROWNED NO ACTIONS AND PLAYED A COPPER YOU HAVE $1 THERE ARE NO TAKEBACKSIES I DO NOT GRANT YOU THIS" I would stop playing games with that person because that's ridiculous. I just feel like I should only have to go through that explicit step when it actually matters and just be able to play my cards in the obvious way the rest of the time.

[Polk5440]

edit (because this is driving me insane):

as it is now you: (click end actions) (click crown) (click copper)
*what you want: (click crown) (click play as treasure) (click copper)

Is this really what this whole thread is about?

Cheeky, but no. What the thread suggested is that the interface does not intuitively lead many users to (click end actions) (click crown) (click copper) when you want to play crown as a Treasure for a variety of fixable reasons. Instead it leads people to repeatedly (click crown) (click copper) (be confused) (ask for undo) (maybe be granted undo) (click end actions) (click crown) (click copper) (be annoyed). 

Furthermore, improvements in the interface were suggested which may lead to visual improvements, other button placements, and different button combinations to get Crown to do what the user intends it to do more intuitively.

[Donald X.]

People are allowed to not like it, but nobody has shown that this in invalid in any way. I feel like that's important to point out. There are some that say this is beginning to resolve the card without knowing what phase it is. By some interpretations of those words, maybe they are right but like, it doesn't matter.

Incorrect. It is invalid at the most basic of levels. It sets the program up to be buggy and is bad programming.

In case anyone thought that I'd chosen this moment to change my mind!