Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion Online at Shuffle iT => Dominion General Discussion => Goko Dominion Online => Topic started by: DavidTheDavid on March 30, 2015, 10:23:24 pm
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Hi, all. This is David from Making Fun. As you know, the game's redevelopment has been underway for some time. The game hasn't hit beta yet, but a lot of progress has been made. Once the game leaves beta, there will be a 1.0 release and the inevitable 2.0 release. The latter release will have a lot of refinements, including possibilities like something that's a customer service issue from time to time: reporting abusive players. I started a thread on our forums. Please feel free to comment there or here. I'll check on this thread every few days.
Besides reporting abusive players, what features are important to you? You should expect that much of the Salvager functionality will be incorporated into the game.
http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?6343-Features-Thread&p=32391#post32391 reads as follows:
Hi, all. As you know, the new version of the game is underway.
I have a question about a topic that comes up now and then: reporting abusive players.
What options would you like in the new game? They wouldn't make it to the 1.0 release, but at 2.0, we might address this.
How about the option to mute other players?
How about reporting people? The problem here is that some people report issues that aren't violations and CS spends a lot of fruitless time chasing perceived insults. On other hand, it's good to have a function that reports a chunk of text where someone might have been abusive. Direct quotations are powerful witnesses.
Besides reporting abusive players, what features are important to you?
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Adventures.
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You should expect that much of the Salvager functionality will be incorporated into the game.
Will they actually though?
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The ability for people to reconnect
The ability for me to choose if I should force an inactive player to resign or not (In case I think they legitimately disconnected)
Fewer lobbies, maybe just one for casual, one for pro, one for unrated
Get rid of the multi-page interface for Kingdoms; this will be especially important with the Adventures cards
Don't make me click any sliders to see VP/tokens/etc and the state of the deck
Built in point counter (optional)
Allow players to choose first player (optional)
Make the interface for cards that reorder cards (Scout, Cartographer, etc) more intuitive
Eliminate all drag and drop interface options and replace with buttons
Don't make the chat or log things you have to click to open; they should always be visible
Get rid of the fanfares at the end of the game or at least make them way less annoying
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The ability for people to reconnect
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In non-mobile settings, please make use of the entire screen.
Allow me to make a friendlist, and invite online friends to play, rather than having to hunt through rooms and open games.
Change all remaining click-drag to buttons.
Make sure pop-ups (of play area for Scheme, for example) space out cards enough that I can actually see what I'm clicking.
Add an undo button. It only needs to be there for a couple seconds (and obviously not for draw cards and things like that) - long enough for me to realize and want to correct a mistake, but not long enough for me to cheat. Or something like if I go to purchase something and didn't spend any Coin tokens, ask me if I'm sure I want to do that. It's too easy to mess something up because you're being absent-minded. The interface should realize human players are going to make mistakes, and cater to that.
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The ability for people to reconnect
The ability for me to choose if I should force an inactive player to resign or not (In case I think they legitimately disconnected)
Fewer lobbies, maybe just one for casual, one for pro, one for unrated
Get rid of the multi-page interface for Kingdoms; this will be especially important with the Adventures cards
Don't make me click any sliders to see VP/tokens/etc and the state of the deck
Built in point counter (optional)
Allow players to choose first player (optional)
Make the interface for cards that reorder cards (Scout, Cartographer, etc) more intuitive
Eliminate all drag and drop interface options and replace with buttons
Don't make the chat or log things you have to click to open; they should always be visible
Get rid of the fanfares at the end of the game or at least make them way less annoying
Ooh, nice. Thanks.
About the reconnect, I brought that up recently with the lead engineer. He has seen it working recently, so we need to know any details about where this is failing. It's one of those things, from a customer support perspective, that seems like a possible hardware problem for the client user: bad isp, outdated wireless card drivers, or who knows what. Or it could be something on our end, too.
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The ability for people to reconnect
The ability for me to choose if I should force an inactive player to resign or not (In case I think they legitimately disconnected)
Fewer lobbies, maybe just one for casual, one for pro, one for unrated
Get rid of the multi-page interface for Kingdoms; this will be especially important with the Adventures cards
Don't make me click any sliders to see VP/tokens/etc and the state of the deck
Built in point counter (optional)
Allow players to choose first player (optional)
Make the interface for cards that reorder cards (Scout, Cartographer, etc) more intuitive
Eliminate all drag and drop interface options and replace with buttons
Don't make the chat or log things you have to click to open; they should always be visible
Get rid of the fanfares at the end of the game or at least make them way less annoying
Ooh, nice. Thanks.
About the reconnect, I brought that up recently with the lead engineer. He has seen it working recently, so we need to know any details about where this is failing. It's one of those things, from a customer support perspective, that seems like a possible hardware problem for the client user: bad isp, outdated wireless card drivers, or who knows what. Or it could be something on our end, too.
I have never successfully reconnected or played against someone who has successfully reconnected on Dominion Online. I did not realize that was even an implemented feature.
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I have never been able to reconnect when I lose connection at all. I have seen a message that someone has reconnected in the past, but they usually never pop back in regardless.
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You should expect that much of the Salvager functionality will be incorporated into the game.
Which parts?
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What's important:
Point Counter
Cards that can be bought show on first page (ruins, etc.) Spoils, Tournament cards, etc. can be on another page
For non-pro games, the ability to choose who goes first.
In pro and non-pro games, the ability to choose identical starting hands (5/2, 4/3)
For non-pro games, the ability to select which expansions get randomized (a lot of casual players don't want to play with every expansion at once)
Option to have the log out on the side
Also, for the iOS and Droid versions, I think there should be an offline option to play bots. Lots of people use their tablets and phones where they don't get Internet connection and want to play a quick game. I have seen a lot of people playing Candy Crush just waiting around somewhere. My point is having an offline option will be HUGE for selling this game to the phone/tablet crowd. Also, a lot of people want a pass and play feature. That makes a lot of sense. I don't know how easy that would be to implement, but keep in my mind that a lot of revenue can come from the tablet/phone market. So, if you appease that market then sales should really take off, I think.
If possible:
non-random turn order. If you lose and play an opponent again, you go first.
PS: When the new version launches, should we expect Adventures with it or will that still be some time off?
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I agree with everything that has been said so far, especially jsh's post.
Also,
Display what (or at least how many) expansions a game host owns in Pro games
Salvager kingdom generation functionalities + display the options for generating the kingdom instead of the full kingdom in Casual/Unranked games
If you're running out of stuff to do, you might also want to let users use the bot AIs for simulation.
Also, if the fanfares need to be there (which is fine I think), they should count as music, not as a sound effect. I turn the music off because I want to listen to other music while playing Dominion without having annoying dissonances there that the composer did not intend to have, and the fanfares ruin that unless I also turn the sound effects off.
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Here are a few Salvager features that I really hope make it into the new version 1.0:
1. Logs displayed on the side that don't require clicking a pop-up. It's also great that they are CTRL+F searchable in Salvager so you don't have to spend time searching manually for that one thing you forgot.
2. Optional point tracking.
3. An easy way to enter custom Kingdoms for Casual games. I don't like the built in Deck Builder tool; it takes too long to find each card. I love the Salvager Kingdom generator where you can just copy and paste a fun Kingdom you found in text form. It's also nice to specify extra conditions when choosing the Kingdom, for example do you want at least 3 cards from Alchemy, or at least 1 Attack. (See this page: https://github.com/aiannacc/Goko-Salvager/wiki/Kingdom-Generator).
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(Echoing some other suggestions)
Very important
Cards that can be bought should always show on first page (including Ruins). Cards not in supply like prizes, madmen, spoils do not matter as much
Automatch based on a reasonable, non-volatile implementation of TrueSkill (see Isotropish for something reasonable)
Allow players to reconnect if something happens to their browser window yet they revisit the website in time to rejoin the game in progress
Good interface improvements
Logs displayed on side
Make it more difficult to accidentally discard a card you were actually intending to click on to play, with e.g. Hamlet and Storeroom
Making it more difficult to accidentally end your turn, e.g. when you had no actions left to play but were intending to click on a Play Treasures button (which you didn't realize was actually an End Turn)
A general undo action for non-draw actions would be useful, if it can be implemented - though I realize that's harder.
Undoing a coin token being played, and also allowing them to be played after normal treasures (but not after something like Venture) would be nice
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David, I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding about the reconnect feature. What people want is the ability to rejoin a game in progress even if they've quit their browser entirely. Isotropic worked like this. If you accidentally closed your window or tab, but then logged back in before the game ended, you just picked up right where you left off. You didn't go through the lobby or anything. If you left a game that's still in progress, you immediately resume that game upon logging back in.
I'm honestly surprised your system doesn't already detect when this is happening. Right now a player (or several players) can use the same account to log in multiple times and play several games simultaneously.
Add an undo button. It only needs to be there for a couple seconds (and obviously not for draw cards and things like that) - long enough for me to realize and want to correct a mistake, but not long enough for me to cheat. Or something like if I go to purchase something and didn't spend any Coin tokens, ask me if I'm sure I want to do that. It's too easy to mess something up because you're being absent-minded. The interface should realize human players are going to make mistakes, and cater to that.
PLEASE STOP ASKING FOR THIS. The immense amount of time it would take to implement and maintain is not worth it. Either that or it would be endlessly buggy.
Cards that can be bought should always show on first page (including Ruins). Cards not in supply like prizes, madmen, spoils do not matter as much
This is the number one most important feature. Anything that can be bought needs to be on page one so that players can see all of their buying options. All Supply piles need to be on page one so that a player can tell at a glance how close the game is to ending. Conversely, non-Supply piles should never be on page one, even if there's space for them. Empty non-Supply piles do not contribute to ending the game.
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I think many people would like the option to play another game with the same opponents once a game has finished (without going back to the lobby or anything else). Ideally the start player would be set properly according to the Dominion rules for a series of games.
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These are my most wanted features, as already mentioned by others players:
* Have the log, chat, and tokens always visible without clicking buttons
* Have the entire supply on a single page
* Remove drag-and-drop interfaces
* Have an optional point-counter
* Improved matchmaking that allows you to filter based on number of sets owned
Here are features which have not been mentioned and are less critical:
* Allow games to be spectated by others
* Allow using arbitrary images as avatars
* Use identical Trueskill parameters as isotropic
* Make the time-out timer visible to players
* Veto mode
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An option to play multiple coin tokens quickly would be nice in merchant guild games especially.
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Add an undo button.
PLEASE STOP ASKING FOR THIS. The immense amount of time it would take to implement and maintain is not worth it. Either that or it would be endlessly buggy.
Yes, a general-purpose undo button is not needed, BUT, a way to undo coin token spending and overpay amounts would be appreciated and is not very hard to do.
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I'm surprised there are so many requests to remove the drag-and-drop interfaces. This is meant to be cross-platform, guys, and those interfaces can be nice on phones and tablets. They should never be required, though, especially on a desktop. It's pretty awful that Watchtower never got buttons for the only two options it has (top-deck or trash). The discard and trash interfaces need to be redone anyway to allow for simultaneous discarding and trashing, so that should help.
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Since some people have said they never successfully reconnected, I'll chime in and say that I have, and I've also had opponents do so. But there's the five-minute timeout thing to contend with; you need to get your connection back fairly fast. I think what jsh meant by "reconnect" and "choose whether to make a disconnected opponent to resign" isn't about the five-minute timeout, but saving a game state and being able to pick it up at any future time. You'd need an interface like "my games in progress" that highlights whether the opponents for those games are online and available, i.e. not in the middle of another game.
So if someone disconnects and I think they'll be back, I can just say "pause this game" instead of forcing a loss on them. Later on that opponent and I can resume our game, whenever we happen to both come back online. Or better yet, just let all players agree to pause a game any time. If a player is disconnected and the other(s) say "pause this game," assume the disconnected player consents.
If you're running out of stuff to do, you might also want to let users use the bot AIs for simulation.
Not sure what you mean by this, but I'm gonna jump off the deep end with it: publish an API for us to write our own bots. (Note: I realize that would almost definitely allow us to make alternate user interfaces as well as bots, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.)
Repeats of other people's things:
Ability to choose who goes first in unrated games (useful for league/tournament sets among other things).
Option for identical starting hands (if both players agree to it).
Rematch button when a game ends, offers to play again with the same opponent(s) and rulesets. If they accept, skip matchmaking/lobby and go straight to the next game.
The controversial one:
Option for some small amount of kingdom control in pro games, whether it's iso-style veto or Donald's hate-list idea or something else along those lines (there are multiple long threads debating the best way to do this, if it should be done at all, on these forums).
Saving the most important for last: Don't lose features you have now! That includes ones provided by Salvager, since it's pretty ubiquitous. Seriously, I'm willing to wait longer for you to implement everything Salvager currently does before releasing the new interface.
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I didn't mean games should persist forever. I meant iso style, where if the opponent gets back in enough time to keep playing, we can resume.
The other way might work but you could potentially have huge numbers of abandoned games sitting around and I don't want to play games that take multiple days to coMplete.
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Add an undo button.
PLEASE STOP ASKING FOR THIS. The immense amount of time it would take to implement and maintain is not worth it. Either that or it would be endlessly buggy.
Yes, a general-purpose undo button is not needed, BUT, a way to undo coin token spending and overpay amounts would be appreciated and is not very hard to do.
Sorry, didn't realize this was a touchy subject, and I don't remember asking before for something like this... I don't know, have I ever? If I have, it was probably well over a year ago and I simply don't remember.
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Add an undo button.
PLEASE STOP ASKING FOR THIS. The immense amount of time it would take to implement and maintain is not worth it. Either that or it would be endlessly buggy.
Yes, a general-purpose undo button is not needed, BUT, a way to undo coin token spending and overpay amounts would be appreciated and is not very hard to do.
Sorry, didn't realize this was a touchy subject, and I don't remember asking before for something like this... I don't know, have I ever? If I have, it was probably well over a year ago and I simply don't remember.
I don't think it's pointed at you, but rather everyone who suggests it. The undo feature is just way too complicated to be a priority. You have to decide where to draw the line on undos, and depending on how the game is coded it could be a hassle jumping back a step too.
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If you're running out of stuff to do, you might also want to let users use the bot AIs for simulation.
Not sure what you mean by this
Like Geronimoo's simulator but with the Lord Bottington AI as the base.
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1. Automatch
2. Automatch
3. Automatch
4. A point tracker (by consent of all players) is very nice-to-have. It's preferred by a majority of players, but not all: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=10867.0.
5. Did I mention automatch? It's important because it's only fun to take a few minutes to play a game if I can quickly find one with another player of roughly comparable skill.
For automatch UI, consider "what would Hearthstone do?", because Blizzard has a keen design sense. In Hearthstone, the flow to play a competitive game is: select play from the menu, select Ranked (equivalent to Goko's Pro; as opposed to Casual, which does not display rankings), click Play. You are then matched and put into a game. That's it--no other step.
For online Dominion, 2-player uniform-random-kingdom is by far the most popular competitive format, and usually with point counting (but not deck tracking). It's high value to be able to quickly and easily play an evenly-matched game in this format, way more important than having lots of options for the settings of the game to play.
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For automatch, if you make a point counter, you should have whether or not you have to point counter as an automatch setting. The best idea I've seen is to have five levels, No VP Counter, Prefer No Counter, Either, Prefer Counter, and Always VP Counter. The "Prefer"s are people who, if there is someone who will play like they want, will get paired with them, but will play with people who want it on if they have to.
I really want this type of setting because I am definitely in the "Prefer No VP Counter" camp.
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1. Automatch
2. Automatch
3. Automatch
4. A point tracker (by consent of all players) is very nice-to-have. It's preferred by a majority of players, but not all: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=10867.0.
5. Did I mention automatch? It's important because it's only fun to take a few minutes to play a game if I can quickly find one with another player of roughly comparable skill.
For automatch UI, consider "what would Hearthstone do?", because Blizzard has a keen design sense. In Hearthstone, the flow to play a competitive game is: select play from the menu, select Ranked (equivalent to Goko's Pro; as opposed to Casual, which does not display rankings), click Play. You are then matched and put into a game. That's it--no other step.
For online Dominion, 2-player uniform-random-kingdom is by far the most popular competitive format, and usually with point counting (but not deck tracking). It's high value to be able to quickly and easily play an evenly-matched game in this format, way more important than having lots of options for the settings of the game to play.
Or you could just do it the way Salvager does it now — have a Quick Game button that creates the game and starts the automatch with the settings that you can choose on the settings page. The settings could default to 2-player Pro #vpany games, so that it'd still work the way you described for the most part, but you could also customize it if you wanted.
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I didn't mean games should persist forever. I meant iso style, where if the opponent gets back in enough time to keep playing, we can resume.
The other way might work but you could potentially have huge numbers of abandoned games sitting around and I don't want to play games that take multiple days to coMplete.
The way I've seen it on KGS (gokgs.com) is that disconnected games have a time limit of a few days to avoid pileup. If they're not resumed before that limit, they're either deleted with no rating effect or awarded to the player who stayed connected (I forget which they do).
Like Geronimoo's simulator but with the Lord Bottington AI as the base.
So start with Lord Bottington and let the user customize it? That would be nice but it seems like significant work. My thought of just providing a bot API might be even more work, or it might turn out to be less for MF, and shift the work to the community; we'd have to port Geronimoo's simulator onto whatever platform MF gave us. But then we'd have Geronimoo's sim able to play on Goko, and whatever else we might cook up in the future.
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Automatch is the main deal breaker for me - the difficulty in finding a game against someone of similar level hurts a lot.
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No lobbies
No lobbies. When you want to play a particular person it's easier to use that players name than to agree on meeting in "secret chamber III" or something like that.
Normally you want to play a game when you've entered the site, and then you press one of two big buttons: "Play against robots" or "Play against other players".
Next choice will be the number of players.
These will match you against suitable opponents. Of course you can finetune these automatch settings, but there should be fine defaults for new players.
Tables and chat
Matching gets you a table which is something more than a game. You can play several games after each other on the same table without having to get up and sit down again. The table has a chat, so you can chat before the game begins. When a multiplayer game can't be found at once some players may be seated beforehand. So when you are two players waiting for a third you can still chat while waiting, discussing whether you'd like to play on two instead, if anyone knows someone who might want to join, or just about the weather.
After a game there's an big button "play again against the same opponents". If everyone does, that happens. Others at the table can see when you press that.
A not as prominent option is to try the same board again, which is something players want to do sometimes. The same thing here, if everyone switches that on it happens, and you can see if others do.
You can still try to find a match outside the table while still sitting at it. You aren't leaving the table until you are moving to a new one (since there are no lobbies). That will lead to more chatting about the game afterwards while you are waiting for your next game, instead of people quitting as fast as they can to get back to searching the lobbies.
Two players waiting for a third should be able to play a two-player game instead, but no one of them should be forced into a two-player game if they only wanted to play three-player. So have such a switch "willing to play with what we have now" available for all players, starting the game if all or on, and resetting them off when someone joins the table.
Other matching
You can mark your opponents with "like to play with" and "don't like to play with", and matching will consider that next time. When you mark that you don't want to play with someone they don't get to know that. They aren't put on a list of players to avoid for anyone. It's just your decision, and could be for any reason. There are some drawbacks with this, but it needs to be done. You shouldn't be forced to play games you don't like. Maybe it is because they are rude, or too slow for you, or maybe it's your ex-boyfriend that you don't want to interact with. It doesn't matter if it's fair or not.
You can have friends, and see what other friends are logged in and challenge them to a game.
Rating
Just one rating, with the primary aim to aid automatch. So make sure that most games are played rated, and don't make it sound like it's something special. (No "Are you a real professional now so that you are ready to play with the 'pro' rating?", but rather the unratedness is just something that happens when playing with a fixed deck, like repeat games with the same kingdom.
That's the primary aim, but of course making top lists of top players is an important secondary aim as well.
Cards
There is not one player hosting a game. The table you get after matching is "neutral". When a game starts at the table the cards available are the cards anyone brought to the table (like it would do if they met afk and combined what they had). A basic card like Smithy that everyone "has" doesn't get a higher probability of appearing than a card that only one player at the table has – every possible card gets the same probability.
This way there is better reason to start buying cards even if you're not ready to buy them all. With the current setup there is not much reason to buy a single set if you don't play robots, because with few cards you will often play against someone with more cards anyway, so your cards won't be used. But with this scheme there is better reason to buy your favourite set to make sure that cards from it can appear in all games you play.
You wouldn't have to bring all your cards to the game. If you hate that Possession, move it to the cards-I-keep-at-home pile. (This avoid people not buying a particular set because there's one card there they don't want to get in their games as often.) You're not safe though – someone else might have brought it to the table. Probably only few players will bother taking away cards they've bought like that, but it can be very useful for some.
[some of the above is reused from a posting a made in 2013]
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About logs, part of the consideration is that the game will be cross platform. The lead developer Jeff can speak to this far better than I, so I'm stepping outside my area here. But since the game will be built on Unity, a log would look fine on a laptop browser window, but scaled down to mobile, it would simply consume space while being too small to serve a purpose. Again, that's what I think I remember was said about that, and I don't want to put bad info out there.
Anyhow, thanks for the ideas. I can't promise what will get into the game and what won't. I do player support, not game design, but the developers can consider these ideas and how they fit with their vision of the game and what's currently being planned.
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The most important thing to me is automatch, no question. I consider Goko to be lacking the functionality of logging on at any time to get a game of Dominion in against real people without it.
Also: abolish any idea of the concept of these lobbies.
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It feels slightly odd suggesting something I don't want when other people seem to, but here we go: I don't want first player to be decided by the official rules if you play rated games against the same player repeatedly. That rule is great for playing in person with friends, but an unnecessary distortion in competitive play.
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About logs, part of the consideration is that the game will be cross platform. The lead developer Jeff can speak to this far better than I, so I'm stepping outside my area here. But since the game will be built on Unity, a log would look fine on a laptop browser window, but scaled down to mobile, it would simply consume space while being too small to serve a purpose. Again, that's what I think I remember was said about that, and I don't want to put bad info out there.
It should be really easy to toggle the visibility of e.g. the log based on the platform and/or user settings. Quite a few of us find the game unplayable without a constantly visible log, at least if the new version will bear any kind of visible resemblance to the current one.
Letting a cellphone or a tablet screen be the bottleneck for what the desktop version is allowed to display would be a design decision of Goko-level incompetence.
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Cards
There is not one player hosting a game. The table you get after matching is "neutral". When a game starts at the table the cards available are the cards anyone brought to the table (like it would do if they met afk and combined what they had). A basic card like Smithy that everyone "has" doesn't get a higher probability of appearing than a card that only one player at the table has – every possible card gets the same probability.
This way there is better reason to start buying cards even if you're not ready to buy them all. With the current setup there is not much reason to buy a single set if you don't play robots, because with few cards you will often play against someone with more cards anyway, so your cards won't be used. But with this scheme there is better reason to buy your favourite set to make sure that cards from it can appear in all games you play.
You wouldn't have to bring all your cards to the game. If you hate that Possession, move it to the cards-I-keep-at-home pile. (This avoid people not buying a particular set because there's one card there they don't want to get in their games as often.) You're not safe though – someone else might have brought it to the table. Probably only few players will bother taking away cards they've bought like that, but it can be very useful for some.
[some of the above is reused from a posting a made in 2013]
I like this, but it would require changing it to choosing your opponent before choosing your cards, which is opposite their current setup.
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About logs, part of the consideration is that the game will be cross platform. The lead developer Jeff can speak to this far better than I, so I'm stepping outside my area here. But since the game will be built on Unity, a log would look fine on a laptop browser window, but scaled down to mobile, it would simply consume space while being too small to serve a purpose. Again, that's what I think I remember was said about that, and I don't want to put bad info out there.
Yes, a side-log should only appear on desktop machines, not on tablets. My cursory research into Unity reveals that it should be able to detect which platform is running. A side-log is a make-or-break feature for many players. Your devs need to bite the bullet and implement it for the non-mobile platforms.
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I would prefer to not be prompted with a pop-up effect for things during my own turn. I understand if my opponent plays a Torturer and I have a Moat, he needs to wait until I do or do not reveal before he can continue. But if I Trash a card and I have Market Square in my hand, I already know ahead of time whether or not I want to reveal it. Don't pause everything and ask me. There should be some solution like creating a button in some designated area that I can choose to activate or not. (Maybe "Reveal Reactions" that becomes actives/appears only when Reactions can be revealed? If you click it, you can then choose reactions to reveal. If you don't, you can just play cards like normal.)
Also, for the love of god, no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no dragging cards to locations. God, no. Make it stop. Please, make it stop.
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Get rid of the multi-page interface for Kingdoms; this will be especially important with the Adventures cards
And, in cases where there legitimately isn't enough screen real-estate to display everything on one page, apply some logic to which cards to kick to page 2. For example, kick non-Supply cards (Spoils, Madman, Prizes, etc.) all the time, but absolutely never kick the 11th Kingdom card Young Witch creates (or Ruins) to Page 2.
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I know this has basically zero chance of happening, but having the option to play with a text-only interface like you could on Isotropic would be fantastic.
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I know this has basically zero chance of happening, but having the option to play with a text-only interface like you could on Isotropic would be fantastic.
Someone read my mind and found one of the ulterior motives behind my "bot API" request :)
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About the log, I believe what Hearthstone does is to write out some log data to a text file, which can be interpreted by 3rd-party programs. So if you're not able to make a side log part of the official UI, consider something like that as an alternative.
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About the log, I believe what Hearthstone does is to write out some log data to a text file, which can be interpreted by 3rd-party programs. So if you're not able to make a side log part of the official UI, consider something like that as an alternative.
I think that already exists, and is where http://gokosalvager.com/ (http://gokosalvager.com/) gets its data from. If you search for a game and view the raw (unprettified) log, it's hosted on http://dominionlogs.goko.com/ (http://dominionlogs.goko.com/), not Andrew's server.
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About logs, part of the consideration is that the game will be cross platform. The lead developer Jeff can speak to this far better than I, so I'm stepping outside my area here. But since the game will be built on Unity, a log would look fine on a laptop browser window, but scaled down to mobile, it would simply consume space while being too small to serve a purpose. Again, that's what I think I remember was said about that, and I don't want to put bad info out there.
Anyhow, thanks for the ideas. I can't promise what will get into the game and what won't. I do player support, not game design, but the developers can consider these ideas and how they fit with their vision of the game and what's currently being planned.
I can see two ways to implement a log. One: Simply have an option where players can turn side log on. So, if you are on a tablet, it's not bothering you. Two: As others have said, you can have Unity detect what OS someone is using. Personally, it would probably be easier to let people turn the log on or off, and who knows maybe some people don't want a log who play on a PC, but having a log is pretty important as you can see by a lot of these posts.
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About the log, I believe what Hearthstone does is to write out some log data to a text file, which can be interpreted by 3rd-party programs. So if you're not able to make a side log part of the official UI, consider something like that as an alternative.
I think that already exists, and is where http://gokosalvager.com/ (http://gokosalvager.com/) gets its data from. If you search for a game and view the raw (unprettified) log, it's hosted on http://dominionlogs.goko.com/ (http://dominionlogs.goko.com/), not Andrew's server.
1. Aren't we talking about the new implementation, where there's no presumption that anything exists?
2. As far as I know, those logs only appear once the game is done. I'm talking about writing a log to a local text file continuously as the game is played, so that another app can monitor it and display the output in a window. This would accomplish about the same thing as Salvager's side log does now, except would work with a non-web app.
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Also, the log being color-coded would be helpful, rather than having what we have now when you push the log button.
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Please could we have lots more sound effects,
Some examples:
clapping when we win.
a ZOINK noise when we play a swindler
a nelson HA-HA when opposing player picks up a curse
a coin spinning everytime you play a treasure
a lightning bolt for every zap played
he bots saying 'im the winner' in an italian accent
The voice of Donald tutting everyime someone tries to say a rude word in chat
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Features that I think are most important: (most or all have already been mentioned, so I'm just adding my vote)
- better kingdom builder to choose which cards to use including choosing particular cards, just "random from these 2 expansions", random excluding particular cards, random with certain cards more or less likely than others, or a mix of those options.
- always visible log and chat
- all buyable cards on the main screen
- interface stuff: an alternative to card-dragging & make it harder to misclick with cards like Hamlet.
- I'm assuming there will be some kind of automatch. My request is in automatch settings, be able to choose "either pro or casual", "perfer pro", or "perfer casual" instead of just "pro only" or "casual only". This may not apply if the rating systems change and we don't have pro and casual anymore.
EDIT: FYI, for any Making Fun people new to the forums who don't already know: Ozle's posts are all jokes. Don't take them seriously...
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About logs, part of the consideration is that the game will be cross platform. The lead developer Jeff can speak to this far better than I, so I'm stepping outside my area here. But since the game will be built on Unity, a log would look fine on a laptop browser window, but scaled down to mobile, it would simply consume space while being too small to serve a purpose. Again, that's what I think I remember was said about that, and I don't want to put bad info out there.
Anyhow, thanks for the ideas. I can't promise what will get into the game and what won't. I do player support, not game design, but the developers can consider these ideas and how they fit with their vision of the game and what's currently being planned.
The log is crucial to have on non-mobile platforms. When people stream Dominion on twitch, they are playing it on a desktop or a laptop, and the log makes it possible for the viewers to tell what's going on in the game (otherwise, it's impossible).
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1. Aren't we talking about the new implementation, where there's no presumption that anything exists?
I'm optimistically presuming what we have now will still be there. I also listed that in my first post in this thread: the single most important "feature" for the rewrite is to maintain all features we currently have, including those provided by Salvager, except those replaced by something that does the same job better. Basically my only request for version 1.0 is, "Don't break anything that works now."
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I second most of these suggestions. Here's another one that I tried to bring to Goko's attention early on in their closed beta, but they had already dug their grave with their platform:
Animation and gameplay need to have independent timing. Animations should not block gameplay.
Don't prevent me from clicking something just because there's an animation going on. Don't use animations as a constraint on the speed of bots. If there are long sequences of animations that would make it difficult to keep things in sync while I take more actions, try making those animations happen in parallel instead. (Do you see what Goko does with the VP from Goons? That's an example of animations that run in series instead of in parallel, and the result is really bad. Don't do that.)
For some examples of other games:
Hearthstone almost gets this right. You can queue up actions while things are animating. However, Hearthstone can end up with long animations that run in series, preventing the other player's turn from starting -- someone took this to an extreme and set up a turn that would take 40 hours to resolve.
Prismata, as far as I can tell, does this exactly right. People can choose to play it at lightning speeds, and the game interface will not interfere.
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By the way, thank you for bringing this thread to where the community is, instead of making us register for some forum of yours like Goko would have done. I really appreciate it.
You're going to get a lot of harsh feedback, and that's because we've seen the promised land of Isotropic and had it taken away from us. If you can deliver on the promise made, like, four years ago that Dominion Online can be better than Isotropic, you will have a very loyal community, the kind that spreads virally on Twitch and stuff.
But if you really go through with things like hiding the log in a pop-up, like Goko tried to do and Salvager fixed -- that's going to burn a lot of goodwill right away. That would be taking away even more from us than we've already lost, for the sake of a mobile Dominion-playing community that does not, at this moment, exist. I think that Goko's widely-publicized failure had two causes: one, because the platform they designed was bad and they couldn't maintain it, but two, because any game depends on word of mouth. The only community that could give them word of mouth hated them, and considered them the enemy who was killing Isotropic, and therefore had no patience for their explanations and apologies.
I wish you luck on the release.
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TBH, the +1s on posts speak volumes here.
But LastFootnote's comments ring especially true, he has a very level head about this stuff and may quite possibly be a genius. Have you at MF considered closed beta testing or having at least one representative from this community to be in closer contact with?
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For my part, I'm mostly echoing the desire to have all the features in the current implementation plus Salvager, including a visible log for desktop versions. The easy access to the log matters to many players, and is especially important for streaming the game on Twitch or something.
But I really want to see all supply piles, including the Young Witch bane card and Ruins, on one page.
One small thing I'd like to add, consider changing the interface for rearranging cards with stuff like Scout and Navigator. If I remember correctly, cards are clicked one at a time to be put on top of the deck. This is rather unforgiving if the player accidently clicks the wrong card, and forces the player to visualize the desired order in his or her head in advance. Instead, the player should be able to rearrange the cards without having them put on the deck until the rearranging is finished and a confirm order button is selected. This lets the player visually verify the current card arrangement before committing to it. Cards can be reordered by having clicked cards move to the top of the arrangement, though drag-and drop isn't too bad an idea here.
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I do wanna say that I really appreciate how you're reaching out to the player base to get suggestions on what changes to make and what improvements to implement. I'm sure years of pent up frustration about Goko Dominion are being vented in the thread right now, so I just wanted to make sure y'all know how much this is appreciated.
Most of my suggestions echo others. Persistently visible logs on desktop are an absolute must have. There isn't a "good enough" option to get to logs with a button click, they have to always be there. Mobile, whatever, it's cool if that isn't a thing there. Reduce the number of situations where a second page is necessary - Young Witch and Looters shouldn't trigger it. In general, cards that are not in the Supply can go on page 2, but everything in the Supply should be on page 1. Card concatenation is really nice. In situations where you have to select from a lot of cards (Scheme from a big turn) provide some way to make cards visible. When putting cards back on top of the deck "in any order", the interface should be less ambiguous - it ain't intuitively obvious that you click the cards in reverse order.
Really minor pet peeve, when the button to display the whole kingdom is picked, all ten Knights are just spread out over the entire kingdom so you have to read the kingdom over two pages, defeating the entire purpose of the feature. Just leave the Knights represented by the randomized card on page 1 of that view, and show all 10 on page 2.
I don't know if this is fixable, but the act of pausing the game to check if the other player wants to react inherently reveals to the curent player that the other player has that card in hand. I don't think there's a way around this but it's an unfortunate gameplay consequence that gives away some info.
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Thanks, all, for the continued replies. Very much appreciated.
And thanks for pointing out the +1's, AdamH. I wasn't looking at those, but that's good info.
Oh yeah, and I still am curious what people think about reporting abusive players. Should it be built in? What would you like it to look like? That's one of those issues that comes my way on occasion, so the developer asked what my supervisor and I think about it.
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Regarding abusive players, Salvager has a blacklist and for most of us that is adequate. I'd say implement something similar
This isn't the best place to get feedback or ideas on that issue, since many of us play with folks who are ranked beyond a certain level and we don't come across abuse so often as the general player base
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What would constitute an abusive player in this context? I can think of four possibilities, none of which would require serious intervention from MF. These are, in decreasing order of severity, 1) verbal rudeness in the chat bar; 2) slow players; 3) repeat quitters and 4) people who game the leaderboards.
#3 is probably already adequately addressed via the public Quit Percentage.
#4 is often reported and investigated by members of this forum, so I think that MF could rely on forum members to assemble evidence. But this could probably be solved by requiring that placement on the top echelon of the leaderboard require multiple games, at regular intervals, against a large number of high-level opponents.
#1 is probably solved with a mute and/or blacklist feature. For severe cases, it might be nice to have a 'report' button, and set a threshold--say, 20 'reports' from different opponents--before MF investigates the chat logs, so that MF has to get involved in only the most serious cases.
#2 is probably the hardest problem to police--but again, it's probably easier to simply let players blacklist perceived slow-players than have MF get involved.
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Oh yeah, and I still am curious what people think about reporting abusive players. Should it be built in? What would you like it to look like? That's one of those issues that comes my way on occasion, so the developer asked what my supervisor and I think about it.
On the whole I find this to be one of the most well-mannered online communities I've ever been part of. In the rare instance that someone is abusive, I just block them with Salvager's blacklist feature, so I'd say that's adequate.
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I don't know if this is fixable, but the act of pausing the game to check if the other player wants to react inherently reveals to the curent player that the other player has that card in hand. I don't think there's a way around this but it's an unfortunate gameplay consequence that gives away some info.
What I've heard some places do before is to make it so that in any case where there may be a reaction, it pauses for a few seconds to make it seem like the other person maybe has it.
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Number one thing for me would definitely be reconnect. I remember complaining about that on the MF forums even before I joined f.ds. Players with weak internet connections NEED to be able to refresh without being penalized and get back to the same screen they were on. For more information, read LastFootnote's post on the issue.
People haven't been saying this but please keep unrated mode. It's great for training, experimentation, kingdom design, and just playing when you aren't completely on your game.
Chris's suggestion about the knights being spread out on the "big cards" page has been bugging me as well. If this isn't too hard to implement, I'd suggest using the knights placeholder card on that page but make it clickable so that it links to descriptions of all ten knights.
Separate buttons for discard and trash, discard and topdeck, trash and topdeck, etc. instead of drag and drop - again, already been said, but worth mentioning again. Also, I think there needs to be a way to get people familiar with the colors (green for play, red for trash, yellow for discard, etc.). They're good choices but there's gotta be some way to accidentally ignore them less.
Oh here's one! Warn someone when they're about to time out if they've taken too long on a turn.
And here's another thing that would take a while to implement and might not be favored by everyone, but I'd like some kind of social feature. It could (and probably should) be as simple as a one-way friendlist/whitelist of people you know or like playing with, and you could somehow tell when they are online and what server they are in.
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Although the reporting feature would be a nice bonus, I think the ability to blacklist specific players is far more important. Hope that's in the new version, along with the ability to filter based on rating.
I also think the ability to see what card sets someone has before joining a pro game is much needed. (I don't mean show the kingdom, of course; I mean show what sets the kingdom will be generated from.) This seems like such a basic need that I hesitate to even call it a feature.
And I agree with everyone that the always-visible log is a must-have for the desktop version.
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On the subject of telling what expansions people have, I think you should get rid of table titles. Just print the names of the users, their levels, their sets, and any special stuff going on in the match (VP counter for instance). I have seen a fair amount of gross table names over the last few years, and there's no reason for them to exist really.
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Is there a reason for tables to exist in the first place? This isn't games.yahoo circa 1998.
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Please get Adventures in asap.
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David, I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding about the reconnect feature. What people want is the ability to rejoin a game in progress even if they've quit their browser entirely. Isotropic worked like this. If you accidentally closed your window or tab, but then logged back in before the game ended, you just picked up right where you left off. You didn't go through the lobby or anything. If you left a game that's still in progress, you immediately resume that game upon logging back in.
Too expand on this, it should be even possible to reconnect from another device/after restarting your computer, provided this happens in a reasonable timeframe.
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Please get Adventures in asap.
This!
Please take my money.
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To echo this, I posted here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=11993.msg461542#msg461542) a while back about opportunity: I'm practically foaming at the mouth to start streaming some Adventures, and people REALLY want to watch that now. If Adventures can be released online in the next month or so, there's a huge opportunity for both Making Fun and streamers for free visibility.
If it takes much longer than that, it's a HUGE opportunity lost. I know it's not reasonable to expect that Adventures will be online any time soon given how slow this entire process has been, but maybe there's still a chance? Pretty please?
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To echo this, I posted here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=11993.msg461542#msg461542) a while back about opportunity: I'm practically foaming at the mouth to start streaming some Adventures, and people REALLY want to watch that now. If Adventures can be released online in the next month or so, there's a huge opportunity for both Making Fun and streamers for free visibility.
If it takes much longer than that, it's a HUGE opportunity lost. I know it's not reasonable to expect that Adventures will be online any time soon given how slow this entire process has been, but maybe there's still a chance? Pretty please?
The thing is, what I don't want them to do is rush out a product to try to take advantage of timing, and end up releasing something which is sub-standard. I expect they're going as fast as they can.
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To echo this, I posted here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=11993.msg461542#msg461542) a while back about opportunity: I'm practically foaming at the mouth to start streaming some Adventures, and people REALLY want to watch that now. If Adventures can be released online in the next month or so, there's a huge opportunity for both Making Fun and streamers for free visibility.
If it takes much longer than that, it's a HUGE opportunity lost. I know it's not reasonable to expect that Adventures will be online any time soon given how slow this entire process has been, but maybe there's still a chance? Pretty please?
Seconded. Seems like a very difficult demand though, and I'll be streaming Adventures either way tho.
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To echo this, I posted here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=11993.msg461542#msg461542) a while back about opportunity: I'm practically foaming at the mouth to start streaming some Adventures, and people REALLY want to watch that now. If Adventures can be released online in the next month or so, there's a huge opportunity for both Making Fun and streamers for free visibility.
If it takes much longer than that, it's a HUGE opportunity lost. I know it's not reasonable to expect that Adventures will be online any time soon given how slow this entire process has been, but maybe there's still a chance? Pretty please?
The thing is, what I don't want them to do is rush out a product to try to take advantage of timing, and end up releasing something which is sub-standard. I expect they're going as fast as they can.
I asked about this just yesterday actually, in response to a question on our forums. Here's what I was told:
Our first priority is getting the 2.0 version of the existing game out for web and then mobile. After those are live it will be a high priority to get Adventures live. "High", but not necessarily "highest". Adventures will be a major effort requiring substantial enhancements to the engine, AI and user interface, and we already have a long list of post-launch enhancements to the existing game.
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In terms of features:
Number one is Stability. Okay, this maybe isn't a feature, but it needs to run, run well, not break all that often. That might sound obvious, but it's not something we've always had.
Number two is a good matchmaking system. Minimal functionality means I need to be able to play against a specific person if I want (this enables the League, tournaments, playing with friends) as well as being able to have the system match people in open play against other people with a reasonable set of parameters (number of players, rating range, set ownership). The current 50-in-a-lobby just doesn't make sense at all - stick everyone in the same pool.
Number three is speed. I shouldn't be forced to wait for animations if I don't want animations. Similarly with music, noises, etc etc. It would be very nice to have an option (key word here is option, it should be possible to have it either on or off) to have the game make a noise at me if it's my turn to do something, any time the game is waiting for me. Or in matchmaking, it would be nice to have the option to make it hit me with a noise if a match has been made, and I just need to click to start the game.
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To echo this, I posted here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=11993.msg461542#msg461542) a while back about opportunity: I'm practically foaming at the mouth to start streaming some Adventures, and people REALLY want to watch that now. If Adventures can be released online in the next month or so, there's a huge opportunity for both Making Fun and streamers for free visibility.
If it takes much longer than that, it's a HUGE opportunity lost. I know it's not reasonable to expect that Adventures will be online any time soon given how slow this entire process has been, but maybe there's still a chance? Pretty please?
The thing is, what I don't want them to do is rush out a product to try to take advantage of timing, and end up releasing something which is sub-standard. I expect they're going as fast as they can.
Yes, we are all excited about Adventures, but I think there is ultimately more value in building a stable and maintainable product. People will come to play Adventures, but they'll stay for the quality product.
Still, it's good to have implementing Adventures be a high priority after version 2.0 is launched. When Goko first released Dominion Online, many players in the community considered the initial lack of all the cards as a turnoff point. For Adventures, it's maybe not as dramatic because there won't be an open online implementation of Dominion that has the cards beforehand, but there will still be many players with the physical copy of Adventures waiting to jump online once Adventures is included.
Best of luck, by the way.
Edit: For the record, count me in to the group that's really excited to have the Adventures expansion online. I don't have much of an IRL playgroup.
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I'm not saying they should push it out and have it be bad. Maybe it sounds like I was suggesting that but I'm not, just to be clear.
I've decided that stupid optimism that everything will be perfect is the way to go here until I'm proven wrong, then I'll make sure to broadcast my overly emotional and melodramatic disappointment for the internet to see.
While playing a Minion board.
With Knights.
And Tournament.
Out of the Black Market deck.
I need to go cry now :'(
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How did I miss this thread?
Alas I haven't time to fully read it. Just tagging, back later...
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I asked about this just yesterday actually, in response to a question on our forums. Here's what I was told:
Our first priority is getting the 2.0 version of the existing game out for web and then mobile. After those are live it will be a high priority to get Adventures live. "High", but not necessarily "highest". Adventures will be a major effort requiring substantial enhancements to the engine, AI and user interface, and we already have a long list of post-launch enhancements to the existing game.
So like half a year?
I'm not clear on what you are actually doing: Are you rewriting the whole thing from scratch or are you using anything Goko made?
Also, i don't know how many people care about AI, are you sure this should be higher priority then getting Adventures out?
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Welp! It sounds like it will be a full year before we get Adventures Online.
Just one suggestion for MF, during your spare time, if you guys are bored or stuck or something, it wouldn't hurt to try programming an Adventures card or two. That way it will be less to program later, and who knows, it might give you guys a rush of creativity. Just saying.
Anyway, I think that a solid Dominion implementation that also works on tablets will do wonders for this game. I can imagine a lot of people downloading the app for their tablets. So, I can see why getting version 2.0 is top priority. Although, I am a bit worried since it seems we don't even have the MF 1.0 version out yet.
Oh, and if people complaining about other players is a big time consuming issue for you guys, I strongly recommend creating a black list feature. That will hopefully cut down on time that should instead be spent on working on the game rather than frivolous things. Well, complaints aren't frivolous, but too many people complaining can really bog things down for time. I get it.
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Just one suggestion for MF, during your spare time, if you guys are bored or stuck or something, it wouldn't hurt to try programming an Adventures card or two. That way it will be less to program later, and who knows, it might give you guys a rush of creativity. Just saying.
Aww, that's cute.
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Even at lower levels, I have never personally felt the need for a way to address other players' attitudes. That's not to say I've never encountered unpleasant players, but not ones that were so much of a problem that I couldn't just ignore them and move on. Although this does remind me of the frustrating but different case of attempting to use automatch and repeatedly getting paired with a player who refuses to play.
And yeah I've gotta echo the concern that picking cards from a long list, like with Scheme, where all you can see is the left edge of the card, just isn't enough. Having to remember the edge of a card's art to properly select your target for an effect just isn't okay. And it's even worse with Prince, where cards played with Prince are included with the rest of them, with no reminder that you might be picking the wrong one and ripping it off Prince. That's horrid.
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I asked about this just yesterday actually, in response to a question on our forums. Here's what I was told:
Our first priority is getting the 2.0 version of the existing game out for web and then mobile. After those are live it will be a high priority to get Adventures live. "High", but not necessarily "highest". Adventures will be a major effort requiring substantial enhancements to the engine, AI and user interface, and we already have a long list of post-launch enhancements to the existing game.
So like half a year?
I'm not clear on what you are actually doing: Are you rewriting the whole thing from scratch or are you using anything Goko made?
Also, i don't know how many people care about AI, are you sure this should be higher priority then getting Adventures out?
tl;dr It's being rebuilt on Unity.
So this history predates my involvement with the game, and I'm betting that some of you old-timers know this history pretty well but here goes. From what I understand, Goko built a proprietary platform that would serve for all the games they offered. That effort went pretty badly. MakingFun became involved and first tried to patch what they could, closing something 200 tickets. However, it became apparent that what the game needed was a platform built just for it, as opposed to Goko's all-things-for-all-games platform. So we've been building a game that uses the Unity platform which will get us on web and mobile. From what I know about Mobile, the only hitch is for Chrome users, which frustrates me a bit as I use a Chromebook for the great majority of my online work and play, and prefer Chrome browser when elsewhere.
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The screenshots on your Steam Greenlight look a lot like the old version. Are those from the new implementation or the old one?
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The screenshots on your Steam Greenlight look a lot like the old version. Are those from the new implementation or the old one?
Here's what our CEO said on the Steam discussion boards:
LastFootnote, part of why it has taken so long is we really TRIED to improve the existing game. We closed > 100 bugs on the live version. We didn't want to start over. But eventually we had to make that tough decision. All you are voting for here is do you want to see a NEW version of Dominion come to Steam. The screenshots are a combination of work-in-progress and the live version (for the benefit of people who haven't seen it). Our main goal is to get the existing functionality live as a starting position. And not have to reboot the servers every week. We are a few months from shipping the game still. Please give us your 'up' vote here and reserve judgement once you see the new game. After all, it will still be a free download to get the entire base set of Dominion, which is a heck of a deal.
There are some other comments he made there that you might find interesting too, including some comments on Adventures: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/comments/398496969
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After reading those posts, and TheDavid's here asking about features/feedback, I'm somewhat pleased. Dominion Online is in better hands than it was pre-MF.
Which is not to say the next release will be perfect, but it looks like everything will only get better from here, and then some. Not a high bar, but it's good to know it's being cleared and there is reason to be hopeful there'll be a nice implementation.
And that is, uh, my professional opinion as a software engineer.
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After reading those posts, and TheDavid's here asking about features/feedback, I'm somewhat pleased. Dominion Online is in better hands than it was pre-MF.
Which is not to say the next release will be perfect, but it looks like everything will only get better from here, and then some. Not a high bar, but it's good to know it's being cleared and there is reason to be hopeful there'll be a nice implementation.
And that is, uh, my professional opinion as a software engineer.
As someone currently studying software engineering, I've learned quite a few lessons about how things can go wrong by observing Goko. It's nice to see MF being motivated to improve Dominion Online as best they can.
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tl;dr It's being rebuilt on Unity ... which will get us on web and mobile. From what I know about Mobile, the only hitch is for Chrome users, which frustrates me a bit as I use a Chromebook for the great majority of my online work and play, and prefer Chrome browser when elsewhere.
The other hitch I can see from Unity's site and other searching is that Unity web player is only supported for Windows and Mac, so a desktop Linux user like me is out of luck if you're only doing web and mobile (i.e. no native desktop builds). It's not exactly encouraging when old threads like these are the top google hits:
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/15227/is-there-an-unity-webplayer-for-linux-.html
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/20888/what-can-i-do-for-linux-support.html
While I'm here asking technical things, I've brought up the idea of providing an API for bots and/or alternate clients a few times, and still wonder if that would be considered at all. It would let the community address the Linux thing if that's not enough users to be worth your time, and let folks like the Salvager contributors continue to, well, contribute (afaik there's not much new work being done on Salvager now, it doesn't seem worth it when we know the upcoming release will make the extension stop functioning, but if the upcoming release allows for any kind of community contribution, we've already shown that we're willing to put time into that).
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tl;dr It's being rebuilt on Unity ... which will get us on web and mobile. From what I know about Mobile, the only hitch is for Chrome users, which frustrates me a bit as I use a Chromebook for the great majority of my online work and play, and prefer Chrome browser when elsewhere.
The other hitch I can see from Unity's site and other searching is that Unity web player is only supported for Windows and Mac, so a desktop Linux user like me is out of luck if you're only doing web and mobile (i.e. no native desktop builds). It's not exactly encouraging when old threads like these are the top google hits:
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/15227/is-there-an-unity-webplayer-for-linux-.html
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/20888/what-can-i-do-for-linux-support.html
While I'm here asking technical things, I've brought up the idea of providing an API for bots and/or alternate clients a few times, and still wonder if that would be considered at all. It would let the community address the Linux thing if that's not enough users to be worth your time, and let folks like the Salvager contributors continue to, well, contribute (afaik there's not much new work being done on Salvager now, it doesn't seem worth it when we know the upcoming release will make the extension stop functioning, but if the upcoming release allows for any kind of community contribution, we've already shown that we're willing to put time into that).
I love this idea. Please please please do this.
There is not one player hosting a game. The table you get after matching is "neutral". When a game starts at the table the cards available are the cards anyone brought to the table (like it would do if they met afk and combined what they had). A basic card like Smithy that everyone "has" doesn't get a higher probability of appearing than a card that only one player at the table has – every possible card gets the same probability.
This way there is better reason to start buying cards even if you're not ready to buy them all. With the current setup there is not much reason to buy a single set if you don't play robots, because with few cards you will often play against someone with more cards anyway, so your cards won't be used. But with this scheme there is better reason to buy your favourite set to make sure that cards from it can appear in all games you play.
You wouldn't have to bring all your cards to the game. If you hate that Possession, move it to the cards-I-keep-at-home pile. (This avoid people not buying a particular set because there's one card there they don't want to get in their games as often.) You're not safe though – someone else might have brought it to the table. Probably only few players will bother taking away cards they've bought like that, but it can be very useful for some.
This seems like a great way to address the "I don't want to play with cards I don't like" issue. Certainly I like it much better than veto mode or Donald's blacklists idea. I agree that it would also encourage people to buy single sets more frequently rather than either buying everything and hosting or searching for someone who's bought everything.
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I was thinking about this, and it would be an easy fix.
Whenever someone clicks the "Play Treasures" button, it would be nice to print a line in the game log saying "Adam Horton has $55 and 12 buys" (with the correct numbers obvs). One of the nice things about the Goko version is that it shows the opponent's money and buys at all times, but if you didn't see their turn very well then you might have trouble figuring out what their income was. Or maybe you're looking at a game log.
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A bigger, alternative interface for desktop screens.
It would be very nice if you could avoid the 2nd supply page (like by having a third row of cards).
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Whenever someone clicks the "Play Treasures" button, it would be nice to print a line in the game log saying "Adam Horton has $55 and 12 buys" (with the correct numbers obvs)
Why would I want to know how many dollars and buys Adam Horton has whenever I click the Play Treasures button? :P
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A bigger, alternative interface for desktop screens.
It would be very nice if you could avoid the 2nd supply page (like by having a third row of cards).
Yeah, the cards can afford to be a lot smaller.
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Hmmm... I somehow missed this thread, too. I added my +1s to above posts and compiled my list:
THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER:
+ Ability to reconnect if...
1) Internet connection is spotty or slow
2) Browser is closed or page is refreshed.
3) Player is logged out.
(#1 is what is implemented in client now and sometimes works. #2 and #3 are NOT implemented in any way but is what people expect with a reconnect feature. LF explained well, above.)
It's been on my (everyone's) list forever (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=7256.msg209007#msg209007).
The second most important thing ever:
Eliminate lags, freezes, loading issues (much fewer than the early days, but they still exist).
Important:
+ Auto-Match based on ranking.
+ Fewer lobbies with larger capacities. Ideally, based on game type (pro, casusal, unrated, with friends, etc.)
+ If a player quits a multiplayer game, replace him with an AI. Do not end the game for everyone.
+ Report abusive players. Salvager handles this correctly: allow a personal blacklist and an option to block top 10% most blacklisted players. MF can add it's own "block reported players" option.
Somewhat Important:
+ Ability to buy all cards with cash money (promos, new base card art, Adventures,....)
+ Ability to play a rematch (same game settings) with opponents with one click (using rules of Dominion for determining starting player). If any opponent declines, back to the lobby you go.
+ Ability to play a rematch with the same exact kingdom.
+ Improvements to Deck Builder (renamed as Kingdom Builder).
+ Implement kingdom selection features for causal/unrated games (e.g. 5 Intrigue, 5 Hinterlands randomized within expansion or Mountebank + 9 random cards)
+ Ability to watch a game. Or remove this tempting button from the client!!
+ Force resign if player takes too long (after a certain amount of time, allow a "force the other player to resign" button to appear). Ideally, this could be set like chess programs allow clocked games of various lengths.
Would be nice:
+ Minimize use of second page; especially for Young Witch bane and ruins. For example, basic treasures and victory cards can be stacked or otherwise reduced in size. They do not need to be the same size as kingdom cards. Their art is not that great.
+ Keep Pro relatively uniform in options that stick to the rules of Dominion. Give more options to unrated (e.g. choose player order, point counter, identical starting hands, etc.)
+ Improve Buttons:
1) End Turn button should be moved away from other buttons. It's too easy to accidentally end your turn!
2) Add buttons for top decking, discarding where you have to drag and drop. Don't necessarily eliminate the drag and drop option.
+ Add fun achievements. (e.g. http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=11954.msg431145#msg431145)
+ Add recommended sets of 10.
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Not sure about this, but doesn't Salvager do some fiddling with the button positioning to prevent accidentally clicking a dangerous button when you expected a different one to appear? I can't remember the details or an example, but I vaguely remember the defaults being an annoyance before using the extension. I'd definitely want the improved button positioning in the new client.
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Not sure about this, but doesn't Salvager do some fiddling with the button positioning to prevent accidentally clicking a dangerous button when you expected a different one to appear? I can't remember the details or an example, but I vaguely remember the defaults being an annoyance before using the extension. I'd definitely want the improved button positioning in the new client.
Yes it does. The button moves to the side. In the new Dominion client, a new position would have to be found if there is no sidebar.
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I asked about this just yesterday actually, in response to a question on our forums. Here's what I was told:
Our first priority is getting the 2.0 version of the existing game out for web and then mobile. After those are live it will be a high priority to get Adventures live. "High", but not necessarily "highest". Adventures will be a major effort requiring substantial enhancements to the engine, AI and user interface, and we already have a long list of post-launch enhancements to the existing game.
The Adventures news is disappointing, but understandable. It looks like the most complex Dominion expansion ever made, by a lot, and I understand if that takes some time.
This post did bring up a point I wanted to make while you guys are working on this and before it's too late. When you release Dominion 2.0, will you be taking down Dominion 1.0? I really hope you do not, and please hear me out here.
As you've said, you'll be releasing 2.0 out for the web and mobile first, then you'll work on post-launch enhancements (including, presumably, any suggestions you guys implement from this thread), and then Adventures after that. Since Adventures will not be coming out with 2.0, and a variety of enhancements will not be happening until after launch, I fear that when Dominion 2.0 launches, it will end up being a net downgrade for players of Dominion 1.x with Salvager installed.
Without Salvager, Dominion 1.x is almost unplayable, and before Salvager came out, many players were driven away by the official implementation of Dominion Online. From what I've seen, in preview screenshots online (and please correct me if I'm wrong), Dominion 2.0 will be reusing the same interface as Dominion 1.0, down to the positions of cards, the positions of buttons, the off-screen log and chat windows which cover the game when triggered, etc. So while the stability improvements and whatever features you all manage to throw in by then will be great, the dropping of Salvager support without the features re-implemented in the new version of Dominion will mean that for the hardcore players, Dominion 2.0 will be a downgrade and a return to features of Dominion 1.x that made people quit in the past.
I guess the point I'm trying to get to is, if you can keep Dominion 1.x up until Dominon 2.0 is competitive with Salvager, it would save us a lot of headache. If you're planning on having all the Salvager features implemented at launch, then good for you guys, we'll figure it out I guess.
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After playing some 4 player casual games, I have become suspicious that player turn order is not random. It looks like the table creator gets a random seat then the other players are filled in based on the seat in which they joined the game.
This is not good and should be fixed.
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Not sure about this, but doesn't Salvager do some fiddling with the button positioning to prevent accidentally clicking a dangerous button when you expected a different one to appear? I can't remember the details or an example, but I vaguely remember the defaults being an annoyance before using the extension. I'd definitely want the improved button positioning in the new client.
Yes it does. The button moves to the side. In the new Dominion client, a new position would have to be found if there is no sidebar.
It only moved End Actions and End Turn, there were a few other "dangerous" buttons. I started working on giving every button a unique position until real life took the free time I had for that, and with the new version on its way, major new development on Salvager doesn't seem worthwhile any more (if they consider my API request on the other hand...)
Anyway the new client should definitely do more to prevent misclicks than the old.
- No two buttons in the same position. Or to put it another way, never hide one button and show a different one in the same spot.
- Maybe confirmation/are-your-sure dialogs for certain actions? (Trashing a card?)
There was some discussion about this in the huge Salvager thread a while back but it's pretty hard to find anything in that thread now.
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An easy way to enter custom Kingdoms for Casual games. I don't like the built in Deck Builder tool; it takes too long to find each card. I love the Salvager Kingdom generator where you can just copy and paste a fun Kingdom you found in text form.
I just wanted to ditto this. I don't think that the UI designers for Goko Dominion Online understood the use case for designed kingdoms. Even if you specify a particular kingdom, you still usually only want to play it once. Coding the "Deck Builder" was a waste of time from this perspective. The interface to enter a comma-separated list of kingdom cards actually dates back to isotropic.
A nice thing about allowing entering a kingdom as text is that 3rd-party kingdom generators can generate a kingdom as text, which can be copied into the game to play it. Sort of an example (although it doesn't generate the kingdoms, just the weighting for the kingdom): http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=11749.0 (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=11749.0).
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I asked about this just yesterday actually, in response to a question on our forums. Here's what I was told:
Our first priority is getting the 2.0 version of the existing game out for web and then mobile. After those are live it will be a high priority to get Adventures live. "High", but not necessarily "highest". Adventures will be a major effort requiring substantial enhancements to the engine, AI and user interface, and we already have a long list of post-launch enhancements to the existing game.
The Adventures news is disappointing, but understandable. It looks like the most complex Dominion expansion ever made, by a lot, and I understand if that takes some time.
This post did bring up a point I wanted to make while you guys are working on this and before it's too late. When you release Dominion 2.0, will you be taking down Dominion 1.0? I really hope you do not, and please hear me out here.
As you've said, you'll be releasing 2.0 out for the web and mobile first, then you'll work on post-launch enhancements (including, presumably, any suggestions you guys implement from this thread), and then Adventures after that. Since Adventures will not be coming out with 2.0, and a variety of enhancements will not be happening until after launch, I fear that when Dominion 2.0 launches, it will end up being a net downgrade for players of Dominion 1.x with Salvager installed.
Without Salvager, Dominion 1.x is almost unplayable, and before Salvager came out, many players were driven away by the official implementation of Dominion Online. From what I've seen, in preview screenshots online (and please correct me if I'm wrong), Dominion 2.0 will be reusing the same interface as Dominion 1.0, down to the positions of cards, the positions of buttons, the off-screen log and chat windows which cover the game when triggered, etc. So while the stability improvements and whatever features you all manage to throw in by then will be great, the dropping of Salvager support without the features re-implemented in the new version of Dominion will mean that for the hardcore players, Dominion 2.0 will be a downgrade and a return to features of Dominion 1.x that made people quit in the past.
I guess the point I'm trying to get to is, if you can keep Dominion 1.x up until Dominon 2.0 is competitive with Salvager, it would save us a lot of headache. If you're planning on having all the Salvager features implemented at launch, then good for you guys, we'll figure it out I guess.
I do know that it has been discussed, but I do not know what's been decided. I think that having both up initially would solve a lot of problems. I imagine that we will get notice of the rollout plan as we get closer to the release.
Thanks again to everyone.
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I guess the point I'm trying to get to is, if you can keep Dominion 1.x up until Dominon 2.0 is competitive with Salvager, it would save us a lot of headache. If you're planning on having all the Salvager features implemented at launch, then good for you guys, we'll figure it out I guess.
I do know that it has been discussed, but I do not know what's been decided. I think that having both up initially would solve a lot of problems. I imagine that we will get notice of the rollout plan as we get closer to the release.
Thanks again to everyone.
Pleasepleasepleaseplease discuss making Dominion 2.0 extensible in a way that lets Salvager or something like it keep existing. You have players who want to help customize the interface, and have demonstrated that they can do it well. We figured stuff out on our own the first time around, how much more cool stuff could we do if we had a documented platform to start working on?
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I guess the point I'm trying to get to is, if you can keep Dominion 1.x up until Dominon 2.0 is competitive with Salvager, it would save us a lot of headache. If you're planning on having all the Salvager features implemented at launch, then good for you guys, we'll figure it out I guess.
I do know that it has been discussed, but I do not know what's been decided. I think that having both up initially would solve a lot of problems. I imagine that we will get notice of the rollout plan as we get closer to the release.
Thanks again to everyone.
Pleasepleasepleaseplease discuss making Dominion 2.0 extensible in a way that lets Salvager or something like it keep existing. You have players who want to help customize the interface, and have demonstrated that they can do it well. We figured stuff out on our own the first time around, how much more cool stuff could we do if we had a documented platform to start working on?
Exposing the client source code or the server API would be really nice. However great a job you guys do on the UI, there will be plenty of potential customers who want something more or different, and plenty of other folks who will cheerfully oblige them if you make your platform accessible.
Incidentally, I see some requests for Salvager features in this thread. Please don't conclude from those requests that people really want Salvager's UI quirks.
People are asking for Automatch or Autokick because they're better than the horror of with Goko's ill-conceived and half-finished UI. But Automatch and Autokick are crap compared to a seek graph (http://www6.chessclub.com/helpcenter/b2primer/rightseek.html) or even a simple seek command (http://www6.chessclub.com/help/seeking) and formula-based (http://www6.chessclub.com/help/formula) challenge system like ICC has.
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This is not a high priority, but it would sometimes be nice to have an option to “cancel game” if all players agreed, which didn't have any impact on players’ ratings. This could be used to avoid what all players agree is an awful board, or to resolve a stalemate (e.g., involving Possession). To avoid repeated pestering, it could be that if I offer to cancel the game and you decline, I can't offer again until you have done so.
It would also be nice if Pro games (which should be renamed to something more descriptive like "ranked") had an option for cards you wanted to play with more or less often, to be implemented if and only if both players chose the same more/less option for that card. If I don't like Scout, and you don't like Scout, we can play a Pro game that is less likely to have Scout.
This has been discussed before on these forums in the context of excluding some cards entirely. For example, one way to implement this might be that I could check to put Scout in Never, 1/2, 1/3, 2x, or 3x as often as other cards. Then if I pick Never and you pick 1/3, Scout is selected for the Kingdom 1/3 as frequently as other cards (when both players agree on the direction but not the magnitude of the change, use the less extreme preference).
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While I agree it's not a high priority, I feel like being able to manipulate how kingdoms are picked is something that would take a relatively small amount of time to implement but have a high reward for those who will use it.
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While I agree it's not a high priority, I feel like being able to manipulate how kingdoms are picked is something that would take a relatively small amount of time to implement but have a high reward for those who will use it.
But is also a very contentious issue for ranked games.
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While I agree it's not a high priority, I feel like being able to manipulate how kingdoms are picked is something that would take a relatively small amount of time to implement but have a high reward for those who will use it.
But is also a very contentious issue for ranked games.
Some options would be contentious (banning cards etc), while for example, choosing the number of sets or which sets to use from the ones you have shouldn't be an issue, since you have such options anyway by simply not purchasing sets.
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I think all sets should be required for (pro-)rated games, so if someone doesn't have all of them, they can only play rated games with soemone who does (if the sharing model stays the same).
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I think all sets should be required for (pro-)rated games, so if someone doesn't have all of them, they can only play rated games with soemone who does (if the sharing model stays the same).
This is not going to be implemented because it reduces the incentive to buy the first set.
In the current setup, it would be good if you could see how many sets someone had when they hosted a pro game in the lobbies. Any automatch feature should let you specify a minimum number of sets to match with someone as in the current Salvager feature. Salvager makes the person with more cards the host, so if you own all the cards, you'll get to play games with all the cards. With those features in place, I'd see no reason to require all sets for pro games.
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This is not a high priority, but it would sometimes be nice to have an option to “cancel game” if all players agreed, which didn't have any impact on players’ ratings. This could be used to avoid what all players agree is an awful board, or to resolve a stalemate (e.g., involving Possession). To avoid repeated pestering, it could be that if I offer to cancel the game and you decline, I can't offer again until you have done so.
I don't think "cancel kingdom" will happen. I was one of the people to pitch it in older threads, Donald X came out strongly against it with simple examples of how one could use it to game ratings, and I eventually got convinced he was right and stopped talking about it. Similar things went down with some of the other veto-like proposals, and other ideas for giving players partial control over rated kingdoms. Pretty much anything allows some amount of ratings-gaming, so there's no perfect solution, and I think DXV has already decided which of the imperfect ones to recommend to MF.
For a rated-but-kingdom-controlled format, I do have an idea that might get around the ratings-gaming issues, but it gets around them by turning kingdom selection into a metagame deliberately, which makes it so different from the current pro that if it were ever implemented it would probably warrant a separate leaderboard. Inspired by MtG draft tournaments, you could have a "drafted kingdom" format, where players take turns adding a card until the kingdom is complete, and then play that kingdom. I don't now if this would even be fun, let alone whether MF ought to implement it, it's just something that occurred to me at some point during all those other threads.
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Exposing the client source code or the server API would be really nice. However great a job you guys do on the UI, there will be plenty of potential customers who want something more or different, and plenty of other folks who will cheerfully oblige them if you make your platform accessible.
Incidentally, I see some requests for Salvager features in this thread. Please don't conclude from those requests that people really want Salvager's UI quirks.
People are asking for Automatch or Autokick because they're better than the horror of with Goko's ill-conceived and half-finished UI. But Automatch and Autokick are crap compared to a seek graph (http://www6.chessclub.com/helpcenter/b2primer/rightseek.html) or even a simple seek command (http://www6.chessclub.com/help/seeking) and formula-based (http://www6.chessclub.com/help/formula) challenge system like ICC has.
This! People have been asking for the letter of what Salvager does, I've even said "don't lose features from Salvager without replacing them," but the "without replacing them" part is important. If you want to use a published matching algorithm that works better than what's been done with Salvager that's great. Or use an alternative to whatever other feature Salvager provides. Just don't summarily drop the things Salvager added.
And I'm glad to have someone else here advocating for an accessible/extensible platform, hi Andrew! Relatively few of us would be directly impacted by that (the folks who would code to it), but there's a big potential for indirect benefit through many people using what others create.
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I don't think "cancel kingdom" will happen. I was one of the people to pitch it in older threads, Donald X came out strongly against it with simple examples of how one could use it to game ratings, and I eventually got convinced he was right and stopped talking about it. Similar things went down with some of the other veto-like proposals, and other ideas for giving players partial control over rated kingdoms. Pretty much anything allows some amount of ratings-gaming, so there's no perfect solution, and I think DXV has already decided which of the imperfect ones to recommend to MF.
Donald articulated the potential complaints with a veto mode but concluded that a veto mode based on the intersection of all players’ choices is “very friendly” and "If pros mostly liked it then for sure I would have it there."
The basic complaint is: suppose that a not-so-strong player vetoes a card that makes it easier for him to beat strong players. If a strong player vetoes it, the strong player gains a ranking advantage relative to other strong players who don't veto it.
Suppose we get a board where a simple IGG rush is the only viable option. We might both say "this looks awful" and make a gentleman's agreement that neither of us gains IGG. Or we could use the "cancel Kingdom" button, if it exists. Or if there was a veto mode based on the intersection of ban lists, we might have both vetoed IGG in the first place. A player who is much stronger benefits in the rankings from any of these options, including the gentleman's agreement.
But there are cards that much reduce the skill factor and thus in a sense hinder high-level competitive play. IGG and to a somewhat lesser extend Swindler ruin many otherwise interesting kingdoms. And it is already possible to use a mutually agreed upon banlist, as long as you're fine with playing with 9 cards: you can just make a gentleman's agreement not to buy a certain card. I've done so on multiple occasions against another good player in IGG games, and I'd much like this process to be automated.
Despite not being one of the people who don't like the neo-veto mode concept, I am going to try to sum up the complaint against it.
If there's neo-veto-mode for pro games:
1. ...and you don't use it, you may perceive yourself to be at a disadvantage relative to players who do use it. They never have to face down turn one Mountebank and you sometimes do (in games that aren't vs. them), and so on. Note that it's not important whether or not you actually have a disadvantage, only that you perceive yourself to have a disadvantage.
2. ...and you use it to avoid feeling at a disadvantage, you may instead feel like you are missing out on playing with cards you'd otherwise enjoy playing with.
3. ...whether you use it or not, you may personally feel that this makes the leaderboard less meaningful.
My suspicion however is that if we have neo-veto-mode only for casual games, many players will say, add this to pro games plz. Again there is the question, what is "pro" supposed to mean anyway. Currently it means "you don't see the cards before the game, and there's a different leaderboard."
It still seems like some pros would actually hate the intersection, would feel like other pros either had an unfair advantage over them in games they weren't in (if they didn't hate-list stuff) or else like they weren't getting to play with all the cards (if they did). So uh dunno there. ...
The intersection is very friendly. If pros mostly liked it then for sure I would have it there. Again there are the noted potential problems. I don't know how many pros care that much but obv. a nonzero number.
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I'm not a fan of any veto mode.
The earlier suggestion of Dominion draft sounds fun, but man, I can't see MF implementing that anytime soon. I'd rather they get Adventures up. It would be fun though if say we are given 30 or so random kingdom cards and we take turns deciding which ones to have. Maybe there could be a separate draft of like 6 events and we each pick one from the six. Anyway, this is something much better for an irl tournament, but it would be fun.
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Can we just allow the kingdom selection methods to be very external and sandboxy and ask for several leaderboards? Default leaderboard is when kingdom selection is the way it is now. Then you have a koala leaderboard, a giraffe leaderboard, and a zebra leaderboard, and all of those only consist of games where the kingdom was handpicked, but that can have a significance people decide upon later. koala might mean that it's fully random but people are gentlemanning out of IGG and stuff, giraffe might mean an isotropish veto mode was used in an external app, zebra might just mean it was a game for dominion league and hey lets see if the ratings come out different when people are playing mega serious. Dingo might mean LastFootnote style kingdoms and crocodile might mean drafted kingdoms. Then you don't have to ask MF to implement any of the kingdom selection methods or the system of verifying a certain kingdom selection method was used, all they have to do is instantiate several other leaderboards in addition to the default one, which shouldn't be that much harder than instantiating the default one.
The game would only count for a certain auxillary leaderboard if both players agree that the game meets the requirements of that leaderboard. So when some guy makes custom trap boards and asks people to play with him all game, that never makes it onto Dingo board because other players will either be like "wtf does Dingo leaderboard mean" or "I read on f.ds Dingo board is for such and such kingdom selection method, I don't trust you that that was how this kingdom was selected."
Well, anyway, it's just an idea I had. And I think stuff that requires minimal amounts of work from MF is a good thing.
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The question is how many leaderboards provided by MF would be enough? I think the way to do what you want would be to tie the leaderboards to the third-party apps that provide the "stuff" for that leaderboard (kingdoms generated by specific rules, alternate ranking algorithms like isotropish, etc). And for that all we need from MF is an accessible platform to write our own code against, which also opens up other good possibilities.
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The question is how many leaderboards provided by MF would be enough? I think the way to do what you want would be to tie the leaderboards to the third-party apps that provide the "stuff" for that leaderboard (kingdoms generated by specific rules, alternate ranking algorithms like isotropish, etc). And for that all we need from MF is an accessible platform to write our own code against, which also opens up other good possibilities.
100. A leaderboard is just a bunch of strings for player names and a bunch of numerical values, it shouldn't take up much space.
I'm all for an accessible platform for us to write our own code against, and stuff, but if even providing that interface is too much work for Making Fun then manual opt-in leaderboards would be nice.
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100. A leaderboard is just a bunch of strings for player names and a bunch of numerical values, it shouldn't take up much space.
I'm not sure where the arbitrary number came from, but in any case there's also the question of enforcing what any given leaderboard means...
other players will either be like "wtf does Dingo leaderboard mean" or "I read on f.ds Dingo board is for such and such kingdom selection method, I don't trust you that that was how this kingdom was selected."
I don't think that will prove sufficient. I think it's at least as likely, probably more, that players who aren't active on f.ds will say, "whatever, let's play."
I'm all for an accessible platform for us to write our own code against, and stuff, but if even providing that interface is too much work for Making Fun then manual opt-in leaderboards would be nice.
Providing that interface is probably less work than making opt-in leaderboards. Opt-in leaderboards would be a new feature, but the client-server interface has to exist no matter what. There is one now, it's not documented but the first Salvager devs figured out quite a bit of it by experiment. There will be a new one with the new version, so most of what's needed is for MF to release some documentation about it, which they may well create for internal use anyway.
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Why so many leader boards? I think one is all we need.
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Two suggestions:
Have an extensive private beta with lots of folks from these boards, and don't release it until it is feature parity with the existing online system. Especially with how badly the original Goko rolled out, profitable Online Dominion probably really can't survive another botched launch.
Keep the existing Online Dominion up even after the new one is released. Let players "vote with their feet" to move over to the new system once they think it is better. If nobody is moving, then the new implementation isn't ready yet. Shutting down the current one prematurely would likely annoy current customers, and it is the current customers that are going to help spread the word of a new mobile release.
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Why so many leader boards? I think one is all we need.
Agreed. Any alternatives (like isotropish or whatever else) should be hosted by a third party (like isotrophish on gokosalvager). But of course that means you need a platform that third parties can build on (like we kinda-sorta have now).
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Thanks once more. Still reading these. More importantly, I've pointed the people that actually matter to the thread. :)
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Thanks once more. Still reading these. More importantly, I've pointed the people that actually matter to the thread. :)
You should post for them/have them post questions here. Dialogue is way better than throwing ideas at a wall. :)
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Thanks once more. Still reading these. More importantly, I've pointed the people that actually matter to the thread. :)
You should post for them/have them post questions here. Dialogue is way better than throwing ideas at a wall. :)
This! If they want clarification on any matters, this is a good spot to post. Anyway, I'm glad they're reading this.
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Thanks once more. Still reading these. More importantly, I've pointed the people that actually matter to the thread. :)
You should post for them/have them post questions here. Dialogue is way better than throwing ideas at a wall. :)
This! If they want clarification on any matters, this is a good spot to post. Anyway, I'm glad they're reading this.
I would also point them to the Rules Questions section on here or to our wiki; there are quite a few arcana in Dominion rules that most casual players won't care about, but that hardcore players most certainly will. For instance, while Dominion Online currently does give players the option to choose in which order to resolve start-of-turn effects (essentially from Durations and Prince), it does not give the player the option to choose to resolve Throne Room'd plays of the same card separately, which Donald X recently ruled players are able to do. If I have a Prince'd Workshop and a Throne Room'd Wharf waiting for me at the start of my turn, I should be able to choose to draw 2 cards from one Wharf play, then gain something from Workshop, then draw 2 more cards from the other Wharf play.
Basically, anything under "other rules clarifications" on a card's wiki page should be taken into account.
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MF developers shouldn't have to pore over the Rules Questions board or the Wiki; there should just be a dedicated forum for bug reports.
In any case, right now I think we're a lot more concerned with essential Salvager features being implemented than edge cases where you care about the order of a Princed Workshop and a Throned Wharf.
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MF developers shouldn't have to pore over the Rules Questions board or the Wiki; there should just be a dedicated forum for bug reports.
In any case, right now I think we're a lot more concerned with essential Salvager features being implemented than edge cases where you care about the order of a Princed Workshop and a Throned Wharf.
The referenced example was a Throned Merchant Ship and a Princed Storyteller. The order there is actually extremely important, and it's better to have that groundwork laid out than have to try to fix it later.
I'd rather have MF paying attention and being proactive than waiting for tetchy players to complain after an incorrect rules implementation causes them to lose a tournament game.
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Throned merchant ship and princed storyteller is absolutely an edge case. On top of needing a minimum of five cards to work, with only some replaceable by only a few more alternatives, that kind of play is almost never going to be a good strategy on a board with all those power cards together. Imean, you are talking about a hypothetical kingdom that has powerful durations, highway/bridge, throne/kc, and prince, but where the only thing you've got going on is princing a storyteller so that you can use some (but not all) of your throned duration money to draw cards. Don't divorce hypothetical speculation about cards from the realities of playing the game. Edit: my apologies for derailing the topic, I just emphatically do not think that this sort of thing is worth the developers' time.
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Throned merchant ship and princed storyteller is absolutely an edge case...
How about a throned amulet and a guide? That probably already feels a lot less edge-case-y, requiring only 3 cards and something that can very well be the best strategy. And when we get all the Adventures cards there will be a lot more situations like this.
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Throned merchant ship and princed storyteller is absolutely an edge case...
How about a throned amulet and a guide? That probably already feels a lot less edge-case-y, requiring only 3 cards and something that can very well be the best strategy. And when we get all the Adventures cards there will be a lot more situations like this.
Yes, it's not going to be such a rare thing, and will absolutely matter that they get it right. And fortunately that will be easy for them; odds are it will happen just due to letting you order start-of-turn effects, with no special attention paid to Throne Room.
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Throned merchant ship and princed storyteller is absolutely an edge case...
How about a throned amulet and a guide? That probably already feels a lot less edge-case-y, requiring only 3 cards and something that can very well be the best strategy. And when we get all the Adventures cards there will be a lot more situations like this.
Yes, it's not going to be such a rare thing, and will absolutely matter that they get it right. And fortunately that will be easy for them; odds are it will happen just due to letting you order start-of-turn effects, with no special attention paid to Throne Room.
Unfortunately, this is not currently the case.
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The problem is that currently Making Fun uses the cards themselves to represent their start-of-turn effects, which breaks down when the card is no longer present or when it was played multiple times.
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That's unfortunate.
That model works for Forking a Staggershock in MtG, but not for Throne Rooming a Caravan. I do kind of feel like this is a case where the game's own rules make things challenging, since the duration card stays on the table as a reminder, and it's tempting to use that for something as a coder, but technically according to the game rules the card isn't actually doing anything when it's sitting there as a reminder (even though it cares about the things it's "not doing" to decide whether to be discarded!)
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I think playing Throned Duration effects and their resolution to not be much of an edge case. Adventures will be adding more Durations, and I'm pretty sure the order we want to resolve the throned effects will matter. Anyway, since it is being discussed in this thread, hopefully MF notices.
Either way, MF should have a dedicated thread for bug reports. Although, I think having the game working within the rules of the game should always be a top priority, along with having the Salvager features.
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I asked about this just yesterday actually, in response to a question on our forums. Here's what I was told:
Our first priority is getting the 2.0 version of the existing game out for web and then mobile. After those are live it will be a high priority to get Adventures live. "High", but not necessarily "highest". Adventures will be a major effort requiring substantial enhancements to the engine, AI and user interface, and we already have a long list of post-launch enhancements to the existing game.
So like half a year?
Consider another couple months more on version 2 and at least three more on Adventures.
I'm not clear on what you are actually doing: Are you rewriting the whole thing from scratch or are you using anything Goko made?
- We're rewriting Goko's backend platform from scratch. Goko's platform is something like 30 different kinds of servers running in a large distributed network, which handle most of what goes on with the site ...but none of which knows anything at all about Dominion. We're replacing it with a server written for Dominion with a DB schema designed for Dominion. The point of this is maintainability (and therefore stability) and performance.
- We're rewriting Goko's frontend client from scratch. The HTML5 animation library is actually pretty sweet, but we're replacing it with a Unity client that will work on tablets, run on personal computers natively, run on the web, and (later), run on phones.
- The only thing we're keeping from Goko is the backend game server, which handles what happens in-game (rules, AI, directions about game to UI). As has been pointed out in this thread, there are known rules bugs mostly in rare edge cases (I track 14 of them), but in the grand scheme of things, addressing these will not be hard when we aren't swamped by more serious bugs in the core system.
Also, i don't know how many people care about AI, are you sure this should be higher priority then getting Adventures out?
It's not a higher priority at all; it's part of getting Adventures out. A lot of users exclusively play AI.
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Thanks Lord Humanton. Your post was very enlightening. And, I'm taking your time frame as a rough estimate. Anyway, it is a bit sad that we are likely looking at another half year before Adventures is online, but I understand the reasoning.
So, essentially what you're saying is that Dominion takes 30 servers to run it that technically don't even run the game. lol. That's hilarious.
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Two suggestions:
Have an extensive private beta with lots of folks from these boards, and don't release it until it is feature parity with the existing online system.
This is pretty much the plan, actually. We already have the invite list for the first round, which we hope to start within a week. Then we'll post to open it up to people in these kinds of forums. Then eventually we'll make it a public beta and announce it on the site.
Feature parity is approximately the goal (although that's quite a big deal!) It's certainly true that our mission is to migrate onto a system that we can actually maintain and improve, rather than focusing on new features. That said, there is no point in re-implementing some of the bad stuff. For example, people want to generate kingdoms like the millions of Dominion picker phone apps out there do; they don't want to do it like Deck Builder. Another example is the awful room/table metaphor that was copied from the first version of the Internet Gaming Zone in 90's. So, if the launch is temporarily missing stuff, it will be because we're in the process of replacing it with something entirely new and better.
Especially with how badly the original Goko rolled out, profitable Online Dominion probably really can't survive another botched launch.
I think we agree, but it's a little bit apples-and-oranges. Goko wasn't trying to launch a game; it was trying launch a system for game developers to make their games in. Dominion Online happened to be one of the sample games. Contrast this to Making Fun, which actually is a game developer/publisher, and where the players are actually the customers.
Keep the existing Online Dominion up even after the new one is released. Let players "vote with their feet" to move over to the new system once they think it is better. If nobody is moving, then the new implementation isn't ready yet. Shutting down the current one prematurely would likely annoy current customers, and it is the current customers that are going to help spread the word of a new mobile release.
We will have both running side-by-side, initially with purchases only allowed on the version 1 system and migrated to the version 2 system. This won't last forever though, because the version 1 system is too expensive to run.
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Feature parity is approximately the goal (although that's quite a big deal!) It's certainly true that our mission is to migrate onto a system that we can actually maintain and improve, rather than focusing on new features. That said, there is no point in re-implementing some of the bad stuff. For example, people want to generate kingdoms like the millions of Dominion picker phone apps out there do; they don't want to do it like Deck Builder. Another example is the awful room/table metaphor that was copied from the first version of the Internet Gaming Zone in 90's. So, if the launch is temporarily missing stuff, it will be because we're in the process of replacing it with something entirely new and better.
Thanks for the responses Lord Humanton!
I don't think "feature parity" necessarily means keeping every existing feature verbatim, rather it means pretty much what you said: covering the same use cases that the existing features do, with similar or better quality. To use an example from earlier in the thread, Andrew aka ragingduckd pointed out that while a lot of people have asked for automatch like the Salvager extension provides, there are much better matchmaking algorithms out there and any of those would probably make all of us just as happy as we are with Salvager, if not more so.
That said I think it can't be stressed enough that we really want feature parity (by the use case definition) with current version plus Salvager, NOT just the current version. Honestly I consider the current UI sans Salvager to be only barely usable.
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Consider another couple months more on version 2 and at least three more on Adventures.
So, five months total, or two months for re-launch, then one more month till Adventures releases?
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That said I think it can't be stressed enough that we really want feature parity (by the use case definition) with current version plus Salvager, NOT just the current version.
Seriously, I'm willing to wait longer for you to implement everything Salvager currently does before releasing the new interface.
Obviously we don't want to break anything, including salvager features, but realistically, some salvager features are higher priority than others. I'm not going to tell someone that the only reason he can't play on his tablet is that we haven't added a Greeting Message feature yet. :-/ So we'll have automatch, game log sidebar, VP counter, animation speed tweaks, stacking duplicate cards... and be trying hard for a personal blacklist and kingdom generation (if we can't, then ASAP after)... while we're going to defer the greeting message, gravitars, notifications, common blacklist, isotropish ratings, extra logging... And some features become moot.
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Consider another couple months more on version 2 and at least three more on Adventures.
So, five months total, or two months for re-launch, then one more month till Adventures releases?
I meant five. If it weren't for version 2, we'd be releasing Adventures this month.
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Obviously we don't want to break anything, including salvager features, but realistically, some salvager features are higher priority than others. I'm not going to tell someone that the only reason he can't play on his tablet is that we haven't added a Greeting Message feature yet. :-/ So we'll have automatch, game log sidebar, VP counter, animation speed tweaks, stacking duplicate cards... and be trying hard for a personal blacklist and kingdom generation (if we can't, then ASAP after)... while we're going to defer the greeting message, gravitars, notifications, common blacklist, isotropish ratings, extra logging... And some features become moot.
Sounds like you've got your priorities in the right place.
I don't even think Isotropish ratings are important. Just make sure people can get the logs and they can try out whatever rating system they want.
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Thank you all for the posts!!! I counted over 50 distinct ideas and I've recorded every one. Even though they may be known, the prioritization is useful. I've organized them by the number of distinct posters who supported them (unscientific I know but better than nothing.) Based on that, here are the top 10 (or so):
1. Always-visible game logs (on non-mobile)
2. Automatch
3. Kingdom cards on 1st page (esp. if ruins, bane)
4. Real kingdom generation
5. Better reconnect
6. Button options instead having to drag
7. Support Adventures set
8. VP Counter
9. Blacklist
10. Prevent misclicks
11. API
12. Who-goes-first adjustments
13. Rematch
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Thank you all for the posts!!! I counted over 50 distinct ideas and I've recorded every one. Even though they may be known, the prioritization is useful. I've organized them by the number of distinct posters who supported them (unscientific I know but better than nothing.) Based on that, here are the top 10 (or so):
1. Always-visible game logs (on non-mobile)
2. Automatch
3. Kingdom cards on 1st page (esp. if ruins, bane)
4. Real kingdom generation
5. Better reconnect
6. Button options instead having to drag
7. Support Adventures set
8. VP Counter
9. Blacklist
10. Prevent misclicks
11. API
12. Who-goes-first adjustments
13. Rematch
I made a poll. More data is better, right?
http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=13027
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Thank you all for the posts!!! I counted over 50 distinct ideas and I've recorded every one. Even though they may be known, the prioritization is useful. I've organized them by the number of distinct posters who supported them (unscientific I know but better than nothing.) Based on that, here are the top 10 (or so):
1. Always-visible game logs (on non-mobile)
2. Automatch
3. Kingdom cards on 1st page (esp. if ruins, bane)
4. Real kingdom generation
5. Better reconnect
6. Button options instead having to drag
7. Support Adventures set
8. VP Counter
9. Blacklist
10. Prevent misclicks
11. API
12. Who-goes-first adjustments
13. Rematch
I made a poll. More data is better, right?
http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=13027
I'm not sure that this kind of poll is the best way to construct such a ranking. Only letting people choose 3 things seems pretty arbitrary. Even if most people agree that Automatch > Cards on 1 page > game logs > reconnect, if those people all vote for the 1st 3 we don't really get useful information about the rest of the ordering. If a poll seemed necessary, I would suggest just linking to a google forms type thing where people could either rank or rate each thing on a scale 1-10.
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(Condorcet (http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/) is the way to go if you want a mathematically ideal result)
But I'd say Drab's simple forum poll is fine... it's not like we're going to have a precise impact on the outcome of MF's development plans, they just need a rough idea
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(Condorcet (http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/) is the way to go if you want a mathematically ideal result)
Not so. Note that we aren't looking for a single winner. Instead of ranking candidates, we can assign them scores, then add them up for each candidate. That's more expressive.
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Not so. Note that we aren't looking for a single winner. Instead of ranking candidates, we can assign them scores, then add them up for each candidate. That's more expressive.
Oh god, for a moment I thought you meant the Borda count, but you mean range voting. Yeah, range voting works fine. I was kind of disappointed to learn about its emergent adequateness after learning so much about Condorcet.
Condorcet: "Look at me! I am optimal under certain assumptions because AWESOME MATH WITH AWESOME WEIRD EDGE CASES."
Range voting: "Hi, I'm over here not making those assumptions, and generally doing the right thing with boring arithmetic."
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Condorcet does give you a results list that ranks all the options according to voters' preference
Range voting would be fine as well
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I find the match found alert system really useful in the automatch settings.
As it lets you browse away while you wait for a match.
I also think having a "its your turn to do something in game" alert would be a great feature.
Ideally audio plus tab highlighting.
Helps if your opponent is playing very slowly, especially in games with discard attacks.
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I also think having a "its your turn to do something in game" alert would be a great feature.
Ideally audio plus tab highlighting.
Helps if your opponent is playing very slowly, especially in games with discard attacks.
+1, this is a great idea for interactions like discard attacks, Advisor, Oracle. Any kind of notification (like the start-of-turn beep) if I haven't interacted with the game window in the last ~4 seconds would be nice.
(I love that it's Rabid requesting this feature since.. well, he and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to game pace. Oh, Rabid's turn is starting? I'm going to go make some tea.. ;)
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I'm not sure if it was stated here, but if we are talking about an always visible game log, we are talking about an always visible log of the current and last turn (I assume). Otherwise you have people all the way scrolling back to turn 1 to count how many points they have, which is not what you want.
Especially not in Garden games etc., as this just takes a lot of time.
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I'm not sure if it was stated here, but if we are talking about an always visible game log, we are talking about an always visible log of the current and last turn (I assume).
No, I certainly want the full thing, text-searchable as Salvager's is.
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I'm not sure if it was stated here, but if we are talking about an always visible game log, we are talking about an always visible log of the current and last turn (I assume). Otherwise you have people all the way scrolling back to turn 1 to count how many points they have, which is not what you want.
Which is why you enable the point counter so that people know how many points they have without having to scroll back to turn 1.
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I'm not sure if it was stated here, but if we are talking about an always visible game log, we are talking about an always visible log of the current and last turn (I assume). Otherwise you have people all the way scrolling back to turn 1 to count how many points they have, which is not what you want.
Which is why you enable the point counter so that people know how many points they have without having to scroll back to turn 1.
There are players who use this to figure out the exact contents of decks (search for "Awaclus gains Wandering Minstrel" and count the results).
I am just going to leave this here without any comment, because I don't really feel like getting in that debate again. But this makes it very similar to the drheld thing from years back.
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Thx Lord Humanton for the detailed answer on what exactly you are doing. Going to greenlight now.
Regarding log/deck tracker
If you keep the searchable full game log, just add a deck tracker that displays how many of each card are in everyones deck. Either that information should not be available at all, or it should be available without the hassle of going through the entire log.
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Thx Lord Humanton for the detailed answer on what exactly you are doing. Going to greenlight now.
Regarding log/deck tracker
If you keep the searchable full game log, just add a deck tracker that displays how many of each card are in everyones deck. Either that information should not be available at all, or it should be available without the hassle of going through the entire log.
This. Also, maybe fork (what have I done? should have known better...)
:e also, I think that should be decided ex cathedra by Donald. He has stated often enough that these are all variants, and it is his to decide which variant we play online.
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Thank you all for the posts!!! I counted over 50 distinct ideas and I've recorded every one. Even though they may be known, the prioritization is useful. I've organized them by the number of distinct posters who supported them (unscientific I know but better than nothing.) Based on that, here are the top 10 (or so):
1. Always-visible game logs (on non-mobile)
2. Automatch
3. Kingdom cards on 1st page (esp. if ruins, bane)
4. Real kingdom generation
5. Better reconnect
6. Button options instead having to drag
7. Support Adventures set
8. VP Counter
9. Blacklist
10. Prevent misclicks
11. API
12. Who-goes-first adjustments
13. Rematch
This is great. I think you guys have a pretty good idea of what's important and also the order of what's important. Although, all 13 of these things you listed are pretty important. Anyway, thanks so much for posting.
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Regarding log/deck tracker
If you keep the searchable full game log, just add a deck tracker that displays how many of each card are in everyones deck. Either that information should not be available at all, or it should be available without the hassle of going through the entire log.
That's a step way too far for me. I think a fully-visible log should be something you can get after the game, and iso's "most recent 3 turns" or whatever is ideal for the realities of online play without turning into a full-fledged variant.
But I unfortunately gather that this is not what most people want.
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I agree with Voltaire for the record. The existing log system is a byproduct of how goko mistakenly makes the entire log public knowledge.
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I don't really mind the log either way.
Didn't Isotropic show the whole log when the VP tracker was on, and only the last two turns when it was off?
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Although I am disappointed with the long timeframe, and aware that it may take even longer, I have to say that the past few posts from Lord Humanton are the first time since Goko started that I've felt I was hearing something from a human who understands design issues are difficult and not an MBA. Thanks very much for listening!
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Regarding log/deck tracker
If you keep the searchable full game log, just add a deck tracker that displays how many of each card are in everyones deck. Either that information should not be available at all, or it should be available without the hassle of going through the entire log.
That's a step way too far for me. I think a fully-visible log should be something you can get after the game, and iso's "most recent 3 turns" or whatever is ideal for the realities of online play without turning into a full-fledged variant.
But I unfortunately gather that this is not what most people want.
I'm not sure I want the information to be available, what I was saying was that if it is available, it should be immediately available, and not only by going through the log.
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(Condorcet (http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/) is the way to go if you want a mathematically ideal result)
But I'd say Drab's simple forum poll is fine... it's not like we're going to have a precise impact on the outcome of MF's development plans, they just need a rough idea
I mean I think that Lord Humanton's list is basically fine, but I think if we are going to conduct some kind of poll then Drab's isn't super useful and we should do something like range voting (or a Condorcet ranking method).
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I find the match found alert system really useful in the automatch settings.
As it lets you browse away while you wait for a match.
I also think having a "its your turn to do something in game" alert would be a great feature.
Ideally audio plus tab highlighting.
Regarding browsing away and tab highlighting, it's just a guess, but I suspect a significant portion of the regular Dominion players will prefer to use an app compiled specifically for their OS rather than continuing to go through a browser. Anyway, there'll be that choice.
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Condorcet does give you a results list that ranks all the options according to voters' preference
Range voting would be fine as well
But instead of throwing away the data on just how much each thing was wanted, we can have it. What we want isn't really voting; we just want to know how much everyone wants each thing.
Condorcet is cool, why did I speak up to shout it down when in fact it's this cool thing that does address some problems with voting. For me in the end the solution to problems with voting is usually not to use anything that would properly be called "voting." Voting just throws away so much data.
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I find the match found alert system really useful in the automatch settings.
As it lets you browse away while you wait for a match.
I also think having a "its your turn to do something in game" alert would be a great feature.
Ideally audio plus tab highlighting.
Regarding browsing away and tab highlighting, it's just a guess, but I suspect a significant portion of the regular Dominion players will prefer to use an app compiled specifically for their OS rather than continuing to go through a browser. Anyway, there'll be that choice.
Good point.
In which case please change my request to:
When the game is not in focus, alert me to the fact that it is my turn to act via both audio and visual.
For example changing the colour of the Dominion app tab on the windows taskbar.
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But Automatch and Autokick are crap compared to a seek graph (http://www6.chessclub.com/helpcenter/b2primer/rightseek.html) or even a simple seek command (http://www6.chessclub.com/help/seeking) and formula-based (http://www6.chessclub.com/help/formula) challenge system like ICC has.
Yeah, I'm familiar with the seek graph, and helped on the design of it, which occurred in the 90's while I was writing an ICC interface. Since then it has been copied by most other serious chess servers, such as Chess.com and Chess Cube. Incidentally, I was the Director of Technology for the ICC for over six years and during that time we invented some cool alternate designs for this, as the seek graph is a bit overwhelming for newbies.
For automatch UI, consider "what would Hearthstone do?", because Blizzard has a keen design sense. In Hearthstone, the flow to play a competitive game is: select play from the menu, select Ranked (equivalent to Goko's Pro; as opposed to Casual, which does not display rankings), click Play. You are then matched and put into a game. That's it--no other step.
Expect something much more like Hearthstone for the first iteration. Blizzard did an excellent job with Hearthstone and set a very high bar. (It's a nice position to be in to have many thousands of employees and literally spend billions of dollars a year.)
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I find the match found alert system really useful in the automatch settings.
As it lets you browse away while you wait for a match.
I also think having a "its your turn to do something in game" alert would be a great feature.
Ideally audio plus tab highlighting.
Regarding browsing away and tab highlighting, it's just a guess, but I suspect a significant portion of the regular Dominion players will prefer to use an app compiled specifically for their OS rather than continuing to go through a browser. Anyway, there'll be that choice.
I think the point is to be able to do something else while waiting for a match (or for the game to need your attention), so OS-level notification of some kind for a native app would serve the same purpose that browser notifications do now.
Obviously we don't want to break anything, including salvager features, but realistically, some salvager features are higher priority than others. I'm not going to tell someone that the only reason he can't play on his tablet is that we haven't added a Greeting Message feature yet. :-/ So we'll have automatch, game log sidebar, VP counter, animation speed tweaks, stacking duplicate cards... and be trying hard for a personal blacklist and kingdom generation (if we can't, then ASAP after)... while we're going to defer the greeting message, gravitars, notifications, common blacklist, isotropish ratings, extra logging... And some features become moot.
Fair enough, I might be exaggerating a little... I'm a programmer too so I've seen how things can get "pushed out" to never :) But I also understand the need to prioritize. That's why I'm one of the few people agitating for an API... if that's in place, you get the luxury of the community maybe picking up some lower-priority features and doing them for you.
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One more minor thing that hasn't been brought up yet:
The game shouldn't end immediately when a player doesn't do something for some amount of time, instead when this happens the other players should be given the option to make the unresponsive player resign.
So if someone needs to get the door / read the cards they can take their time for that if their opponent is ok with it.
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One item that hasn't been mentioned much because most people here play little multiplayer: when someone resigns or quits in multiplayer, the game should not end. Instead, the best bot should replace the player who resigned/quit.
In fact, more people here might play multiplayer if this were changed.
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First the important stuff. This have been already said; a +1 from me.
- Reconnect.
- Better time-out rules. Perhaps check the cumulative time above a given per turn limit. Enable vote to kick button after passing a time limit.
- Automatch & Rematch.
- Better custom kingdom building. This includes importing from logs and other text with a specified format. How do you try out designed kingdoms from design contests for example?
Some other suggestions:
- Enable us to give goko-coins to others. Especially if you time the release of the new expansion with the christmas season.
- Show 3-player and 4-player games and stats separately. Some people doesn't take these games seriously.
- Show the sets a "pro" mode could possibly contain. The game title is not a good solution.
- Change the name of "pro" mode. It really is random, rated. Casual is custom, rated. As a new player I avoided "pro" mode because of the name.
- Improve "pro" mode full random. I avoid the alchemy set because i have heard it doesn't mix well in full random.
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I avoid the alchemy set because i have heard it doesn't mix well in full random.
it does
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Hi Sten-Åke, welcome to the forum!
Alchemy does mix well, actually -- potion-cost cards can be very good even when there's only one in the kingdom. Don't underestimate them.
(Apothecary in particular is often much more powerful than it looks at first blush, but all are generally very good, with the exception of Transmute which is a bit of a dud)
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(Apothecary in particular is often much more powerful than it looks at first blush, but all are generally very good, with the exception of Transmute which is a bit of a dud)
Philosopher's Stone is also pretty weak outside of the combo with Herbalist. It unfortunately anti-synergizes with most of the other Potion cards too. A generator for interesting kingdoms might have a rule like "only include Transmute if there's another potion card in the kingdom", which would give Transmute a big boost, but I don't know if much could be done to salvage Philosopher's Stone.
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One item that hasn't been mentioned much because most people here play little multiplayer: when someone resigns or quits in multiplayer, the game should not end. Instead, the best bot should replace the player who resigned/quit.
In fact, more people here might play multiplayer if this were changed.
For the record JW means a game of 3 or more players. I know the screen says multiplayer for playing a two-player game.
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Alchemy does mix well, actually -- potion-cost cards can be very good even when there's only one in the kingdom. Don't underestimate them.
This. Actually, it makes it much less interesting if there are multiple potion-cost cards in the kingdom (unless one of them is Transmute or Philosopher's Stone), since a Potion is often an auto-buy even with just one potion-cost card in the kingdom and when there are multiple, the decision to buy Potion every time usually becomes trivial.
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Alchemy does mix well, actually -- potion-cost cards can be very good even when there's only one in the kingdom. Don't underestimate them.
This. Actually, it makes it much less interesting if there are multiple potion-cost cards in the kingdom (unless one of them is Transmute or Philosopher's Stone), since a Potion is often an auto-buy even with just one potion-cost card in the kingdom and when there are multiple, the decision to buy Potion every time usually becomes trivial.
Actually, with multiple potion costs cards Pstone becomes a less interesting card. On very rare boards, it is worth getting transmute.
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Actually, with multiple potion costs cards Pstone becomes a less interesting card.
True, but it doesn't affect the interestingness of the other cards.
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One item that hasn't been mentioned much because most people here play little multiplayer: when someone resigns or quits in multiplayer, the game should not end. Instead, the best bot should replace the player who resigned/quit.
In fact, more people here might play multiplayer if this were changed.
I would say replace them with the bot closest to them in rating (or perhaps the one with the lowest rating higher than theirs).
Also, can we keep the alchemy discussion elsewhere? We've definitely had this conversation before and I would prefer the MF people not have to wade through it to see feature suggestions.
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Okay, I'm gonna pitch a far-out idea, since MF does seem receptive to users developing on their platform (API made the list of desired features)...
If setting up and documenting a good API proves challenging, what about open-sourcing the client? That ought to accomplish the same things as an API for client extension, and then some. People who wanted to develop features the way we did on Salvager could literally put them into a version of the client. They could also contribute those features directly back to MF, to potentially be folded into the official product if desired.
I'm bringing this up now because I just realized that in the current version, we mostly do have the client source. Since it's HTML+JS, we can hit "view source" in the browser, inspect the DOM, etc. That's what made Salvager possible in the first place; people were able to look under the hood of the existing client to see where/how an extension could hook into it. So releasing the client source would be giving user-devs what they have now, just in a nicer, more official way.
Note I said client, not server, obviously MF has a vested interest in keeping some or all of the online Dominion code private and I respect that. Even a client-side source release could be under a license with terms like, "this code and modifications to it can only be used to connect to MF's Dominion server(s)."
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One item that hasn't been mentioned much because most people here play little multiplayer: when someone resigns or quits in multiplayer, the game should not end. Instead, the best bot should replace the player who resigned/quit.
In fact, more people here might play multiplayer if this were changed.
I would say replace them with the bot closest to them in rating (or perhaps the one with the lowest rating higher than theirs).
This has certainly been suggested before. On the plus side:
1) Everybody's time isn't be wasted if there's an interesting battle, but one player is a jerk or has connection problems.
2) It takes away king-maker power, e.g. if one of the remaining players is building up an awesome engine while another is just buying VP cards
I think it's a good feature, but also has some issues:
1) Replacement would work a lot better if there were a real variety of bot strengths, but right now, that's not the case. There is basically only Serf Bot who plays like a beginner, and the rest who play like experienced middle-of-the-road players. (Really Lord Bottington is supposed to the best, as the others are dumbed down in certain ways, but in practice, that only comes into play on certain types of boards, like when Village Bot is buying a millions Schemes because it makes him happy.) So, I like this whole idea better when there's a much better bot (btw I can do very easily as soon as I get time) and better variations on dumbing it down.
2) Ratings may be involved, which is a catalyst for making players very upset, especially if they see something unexpected. In this case some will see a bait-and-switch on their opponent: "I had a great strategy geared to that opponent and then a bot stepped in playing differently and it ruined my plans and made me lose rating points." And rating the game at the time of the quit doesn't fix this, because a player will be unhappy that he got rated as a loser when he ultimately won the game. So I like this better for unrated games.
Also, can we keep the alchemy discussion elsewhere? We've definitely had this conversation before and I would prefer the MF people not have to wade through it to see feature suggestions.
Okay, I had a lot to say on that topic, but I'll keep quiet. :-)
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I think a player that drops out doesn't need to be replaced by a bot. The game can continue without that player. It's possible that there will need to be some very rudimentary AI for the cases where the player dropped during his/her own turn, but that's it. Yes it means that there will be too many Victory/Curse cards in cases where all but two players drop out very early, but that doesn't just ruin those games.
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When a player in a multiplayer game drops out, I think the other players should be prompted if they want to continue the game. If all players agree, then the game continues.
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Without going back and reading the whole thread:
For Mobile development, has the idea come up to allow multiple games without time-out issues? Playing your turn would be the Mobile equivalent of replying to a text message, or snapchat, or facebook/twitter post. I know this is probably a long shot, but it is becoming more common in mobile gaming to have multiple "matches" without worrying about being timed out.
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Without going back and reading the whole thread:
For Mobile development, has the idea come up to allow multiple games without time-out issues? Playing your turn would be the Mobile equivalent of replying to a text message, or snapchat, or facebook/twitter post. I know this is probably a long shot, but it is becoming more common in mobile gaming to have multiple "matches" without worrying about being timed out.
I know async gameplay was discussed on these forums, and people pointed out that it would take forever to do things like, play an Advisor engine, or a Scrying Pool game when a player has Moat/other reactions.
Edit: It would probably be okay with Base only, at worst you have Militia to worry about, but I'd rather see a synchronous version working first.
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Without going back and reading the whole thread:
For Mobile development, has the idea come up to allow multiple games without time-out issues? Playing your turn would be the Mobile equivalent of replying to a text message, or snapchat, or facebook/twitter post. I know this is probably a long shot, but it is becoming more common in mobile gaming to have multiple "matches" without worrying about being timed out.
I know async gameplay was discussed on these forums, and people pointed out that it would take forever to do things like, play an Advisor engine, or a Scrying Pool game when a player has Moat/other reactions.
Ah, right. Forgot about the interactive decisions.
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Replacement would work a lot better if there were a real variety of bot strengths, but right now, that's not the case.
I've noticed most quits either happen at the start of the game (turn 1), or very close to the end (turn 15). If it's very early then I don't care about the result and so I'd rather start a new game than play with a bot. If it's very late then the bot's strength doesn't matter as much because "buy as many victory cards as possible" becomes a pretty good strategy regardless of the kingdom. So a variety of bot strengths would be nice, but it may be less important than you think.
Also, I haven't been following this thread too closely, but has Linux support been confirmed yet? I would have no way of playing otherwise.
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Also, I haven't been following this thread too closely, but has Linux support been confirmed yet? I would have no way of playing otherwise.
Nor would I. I haven't seen confirmation or denial, just a statement that desktop support will initially be through Unity Web Player, although in this thread Lord Humanton has implied that there would be native desktop builds. Unity Web Player is for Win/Mac only, so Linux users would need a native build, though I have also found some google results about getting Unity Web player for Windows to run under Wine (but I doubt I'd go to that much trouble... no offense, I love Dominion but getting stuff to work under wine can be a real headache sometimes).
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I haven't been following this thread too closely, but has Linux support been confirmed yet? I would have no way of playing otherwise.
At the very least you should be able to able to play in a browser, because we'll target Unity 5's WebGL build, which just needs any browser supporting WebGL and asm.js.
Incidentally, ignore anything you read about the Unity webplayer and Linux, because that's old tech. It's based on the Netscape plugin API which is being phased out in browsers these days due to the security holes it creates.
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I haven't been following this thread too closely, but has Linux support been confirmed yet? I would have no way of playing otherwise.
At the very least you should be able to able to play in a browser, because we'll target Unity 5's WebGL build, which just needs any browser supporting WebGL and asm.js.
Incidentally, ignore anything you read about the Unity webplayer and Linux, because that's old tech. It's based on the Netscape plugin API which is being phased out in browsers these days due to the security holes it creates.
Sweet! The post I read about you guys using webplayer was months ago, if you've decided to step up to WebGL that's great news for us Linux users!
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Without going back and reading the whole thread:
For Mobile development, has the idea come up to allow multiple games without time-out issues? Playing your turn would be the Mobile equivalent of replying to a text message, or snapchat, or facebook/twitter post. I know this is probably a long shot, but it is becoming more common in mobile gaming to have multiple "matches" without worrying about being timed out.
I would prefer rated games weren't like this. Too many ways to abuse this. Simply don't play any time you are about to lose. But, for unrated games, sure this could work.
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Kind of inspired by the league disconnect discussion, but I actually see a ton of other applications for this:
It would be awesome to be able to somehow start a game from a given gamestate and play it out. Probably this would have to be linked to the logs. Speaking of, it would be nice if the post-game logs actually perfectly recorded gamestate (I believe there are currently some issues with Masquerade).
Obviously, these (especially the former) are lower priority features, but I think that would be pretty cool for restarting an unfinished game, seeing how things would have played out differently if you'd made a different decision, etc.
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What about a "pause" or "save" function? If you get interrupted, either online or IRL, you can come back later without losing anything?
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I would say replace them with the bot closest to them in rating (or perhaps the one with the lowest rating higher than theirs).
That makes sense. Also, a player who quits/resigns from a 3+ player game should be treated as losing to all of the remaining players regardless of how the bot that replaces them does.
I think a player that drops out doesn't need to be replaced by a bot. The game can continue without that player. It's possible that there will need to be some very rudimentary AI for the cases where the player dropped during his/her own turn, but that's it. Yes it means that there will be too many Victory/Curse cards in cases where all but two players drop out very early, but that doesn't just ruin those games.
In addition to what you mention, another impact would be with cards that care about the player to your left/right. For example, a Masquerade/Militia/King's Court pin only destroys the deck of one opponent, but if that person resigns then you can move on to the next opponent in line. Possession could play out similarly. Tribute might no longer be a reliable +Actions, and so on.
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I would say replace them with the bot closest to them in rating (or perhaps the one with the lowest rating higher than theirs).
That makes sense. Also, a player who quits/resigns from a 3+ player game should be treated as losing to all of the remaining players regardless of how the bot that replaces them does.
Yes, this was absolutely my thinking. The bot is merely to improve the experience of the remaining players.
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I don't think I've seen this request yet, which may mean it's not incredibly important to the community. But…
One thing I dislike about the current implementation is that, when cards are trashed, there's nothing in the play area reminding you that the card was played. For some cards, like Feast, it's not as big a deal, but when you get into crazy Procession chains or have Knights giving you +whatevers and then getting killed off, it can be confusing to see the play area because it's hard to figure out what happened.
Obviously the log partially solves this problem, and you face the same issue in real life (although I find that it's much easier to keep up with what people do IRL). But I think it would help to have some way of showing how those cards were played, like a ghosted/semi-transparent version of the card remaining in the play area. For really complex chains of actions and for understanding what happens at the start of the turn with durations, it would improve the experience.
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Besides automatch, my biggest complaint about the current implementation is the poorly designed UI. This has a few facets:
1. It encourages misclicks. Important buttons, such as "End Turn", should have dedicated space away from other oft-used buttons -- instead, it's easy to click them after playing coin tokens, etc. If the main way to play a card is to click it, then that shouldn't also be the trigger for discarding or trashing cards. Good UI design can help discourage these types of misclicks, but Goko's Dominion encourages them.
2. Buyable cards should not be on a second page.
3. The game log and chat should always be visible, searchable, and copy/pasteable. None of this popup nonsense where you can't even paste in a URL (say, to the Dominion Strategy Forums).
If you get the UI right, the game becomes much more playable by many more customers. Get it wrong, and you get an angry bunch of hardcore fans while casual fans try it once and walk away.
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Thanks for the complete list, Lord Humanton. Although I personally would like to see reconnect prioritized higher than automatch - am I the only one on this?
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As long as we're dreaming, I also have a wish that I think would mean a major overhaul of things that are supposed to stay the same in this new version, but that would lead to a much more streamlined experience especially when playing multiplayer,
Simply put: Allow stuff to be done beforehand when possible.
A simple example would be when player A plays Militia and players B and C have to discard. Let them discard simultaneously so C doesn't have to wait for B to discard. Of course things should really happen in the order they should happen. The interface would just in many cases to act beforehand in a way that would only be seen by themselves until it's time for it to actually happen.
If C doesn't want to discard until after they've seen if B discards Tunnels that's possible by just waiting, but B have to discard before getting to know what C discarded.
The attacker A on the other hand could go on with their turn without having to wait for anyone if they don't want to. Not until everyone has discarded this actually happens.
Of course it can be important to know how the other players react. In those cases it might be good to wait, but at other times you can just continue playing quickly.
It can be a bit tricky, but I don't think this would have to be very complicated. There would be a queue of things that have been decided but that haven't actually happened yet, where each player can have one event where they have to decide something. As soon as everyone has seen the first event on the queue it actually happens, etc.
A more complete example with A, B and C and it's A's turn:
1. A plays Village. No interaction, so nothing special.
2. A plays Margrave. Playing an attack is a possible interaction so now things are different. Let's say B has a Horse Traders and thus has to decide if setting it aside. There is a status text "B chooses a reaction" or something like that.
3. A executes the Margrave, getting 3 cards and 1 buy, but this happens only for A for the time being. Also C (who has no choice) draws a card, and then has to discard, but only in "C's reality".
4. Now all three players have something to do. A can play a new action, B still has to decide if setting the HT aside, and C has to discard cards. The status message is still about B (and the clock is on B) and A and C might want to wait to see what happens, but can also act.
Suppose A is first and plays a Masquerade. As before A immediately draws 2 cards in "Reality A". No one else notices anything about this.
5. Next suppose C discards down to 3 to the Margrave. Then C will se A draw cards and play Masquerade, since there are no new decisions for C to do before that. Similarly A will see C discarding cards immediately. Only B is stuck on where the game "actually" is. These are the events on the queue that haven't really happened yet:
- A draws 3 cards and gets 1 buy (seen by A and C)
- B should act out their part of the Margrave (has not happend at all)
- C draws 1 card and discards some cards (seen by A and C)
- A plays Masquerade (seen by A and C)
- A draws 2 cards (seen by A and C)
- A should pass a card (A's current decision)
- B should pass a card (still unknown)
- C should pass a card (C's current decision)
Suppose that B continues to be the slow player. As soon as A and C have passed cards A can continue; maybe trashes a card, plays a bunch of Treasures and buys a couple of cards. In A's and C's reality it is now B's turn while B is still stuck on that Horse Trader.
Finally B sets the Horse Traders aside; gets to see everything happening, drawing, discarding, and passing a card, and then quickly it is their turn and everyone is in synch again.
But there can be information leakage!
Yes, that's possible. C may chat "uh oh, I didn't expect a Masquerade" which will warn B before B discards. You could argue that you shouldn't get to see chats before you are in synch with the chatter, but I think a better solution is simply to wait for the others when you want to do something like this. The important thing is to avoid unnecessary waits when it really doesn't matter to you how what the others do.
It can be tricky!
Indeed. Suppose A's first buy in the example was a Province and B has a Fool's Gold. Then A should see whether B trashes it before buying the next card (maybe Noble Brigand!). Then we must have A start waiting after that first buy since there is no way to know what B will do or even if B will pass Fool's Gold to C. If the reaction that B is thinking about using for the Margrave is Secret Chamber instead there's even less knowing if Fool's Gold will be in any hand.
But fortunately most of the time it will not be that complicated, and it does not have to be complete at all. Just having some logic for doing like this can come a long way from unnecessary waits that you wouldn't do if playing afk. Also some of the complications will only happen when specific cards are in the game. When Fool's Gold is in the game some things have be done more by the letter. When Caravan Guard is in the game some other things have be done more carefully, etc.
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Improve the AI for bots and charge for "one-on-one" bot time in a private chatroom... date bots.
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I'm not sure if it was stated here, but if we are talking about an always visible game log, we are talking about an always visible log of the current and last turn (I assume).
No, I certainly want the full thing, text-searchable as Salvager's is.
The fact that the full thing exists on Goko is one of the reasons I don't play on Goko. Isotropic had a great system of showing the most recent couple of turns; being able to see the entire game removes an important element from the game of Dominion; and leads to the possibility of tedious games while you wait for people to search through logs looking at old turns.
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I'm not sure if it was stated here, but if we are talking about an always visible game log, we are talking about an always visible log of the current and last turn (I assume).
No, I certainly want the full thing, text-searchable as Salvager's is.
The fact that the full thing exists on Goko is one of the reasons I don't play on Goko. Isotropic had a great system of showing the most recent couple of turns; being able to see the entire game removes an important element from the game of Dominion; and leads to the possibility of tedious games while you wait for people to search through logs looking at old turns.
Does anybody seriously go digging through the entire log when making decisions in-game, though? This hasn't been a practical problem in my experience even though it's theoretically doable.
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I'm not sure if it was stated here, but if we are talking about an always visible game log, we are talking about an always visible log of the current and last turn (I assume).
No, I certainly want the full thing, text-searchable as Salvager's is.
The fact that the full thing exists on Goko is one of the reasons I don't play on Goko. Isotropic had a great system of showing the most recent couple of turns; being able to see the entire game removes an important element from the game of Dominion; and leads to the possibility of tedious games while you wait for people to search through logs looking at old turns.
Does anybody seriously go digging through the entire log when making decisions in-game, though? This hasn't been a practical problem in my experience even though it's theoretically doable.
It's possible that it's a problem more in theory than in practice. I'm bothered by the fact that the option exists; even if people don't tend to take advantage of it. People also might only do it when it really matters; which might be only once every several games; etc.
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I'm not sure if it was stated here, but if we are talking about an always visible game log, we are talking about an always visible log of the current and last turn (I assume).
No, I certainly want the full thing, text-searchable as Salvager's is.
The fact that the full thing exists on Goko is one of the reasons I don't play on Goko. Isotropic had a great system of showing the most recent couple of turns; being able to see the entire game removes an important element from the game of Dominion; and leads to the possibility of tedious games while you wait for people to search through logs looking at old turns.
Does anybody seriously go digging through the entire log when making decisions in-game, though? This hasn't been a practical problem in my experience even though it's theoretically doable.
It's possible that it's a problem more in theory than in practice. I'm bothered by the fact that the option exists; even if people don't tend to take advantage of it. People also might only do it when it really matters; which might be only once every several games; etc.
Iso also displayed the full log when the point counter was enabled. And people indeed use the log to search for deck compositions using the browser's text-search (ctrl-f). I learned the trick from Stef who credited Hyphenated, and I've since seen others use it too. It's really fast and not at all game-disrupting. Typing "o gains Mini" and seeing 6 hits tells me I indeed have 6 Minions!
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typing "o gains Mini" and seeing 6 hits tells me I indeed have 6 Minions!
Yuck yuck not Dominion yuck. At least not the Dominion I want to play. To each their own. But this variant should not be the default, should be an opt-in somehow or something.
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Iso also displayed the full log when the point counter was enabled. And people indeed use the log to search for deck compositions using the browser's text-search (ctrl-f). I learned the trick from Stef who credited Hyphenated, and I've since seen others use it too. It's really fast and not at all game-disrupting. Typing "o gains Mini" and seeing 6 hits tells me I indeed have 6 Minions!
I also play this way and have long since Iso times.
Those not wanting a full log should just play without a VP counter.
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Iso also displayed the full log when the point counter was enabled. And people indeed use the log to search for deck compositions using the browser's text-search (ctrl-f). I learned the trick from Stef who credited Hyphenated, and I've since seen others use it too. It's really fast and not at all game-disrupting. Typing "o gains Mini" and seeing 6 hits tells me I indeed have 6 Minions!
I also play this way and have long since Iso times.
Those not wanting a full log should just play without a VP counter.
Well yeah, a VP counter is also a variant. I didn't know or didn't remember that Iso's VP counter was tied into a full-game log.
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Oh, one thing that I don't remember if I mentioned: Friend list. This will probably go hand in hand with being on Steam, but for those who don't use Steam, it will be useful to be able to add people you enjoyed playing with, or IRL friends, so you can always just invite a friend to a game, rather than the two of you hunting for a free room while talking to each other over some 3rd party chat thing.
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And people indeed use the log to search for deck compositions using the browser's text-search (ctrl-f). I learned the trick from Stef who credited Hyphenated, and I've since seen others use it too. It's really fast and not at all game-disrupting. Typing "o gains Mini" and seeing 6 hits tells me I indeed have 6 Minions!
Using the number of search results is a nice trick. Now I feel dumb for not realizing that Salvager includes a de facto deck tracker. (Not that it's entirely Salvager's doing, since the full log is there anyway. But the built-in log window is not searchable.)
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I've never used the log to do that, but I have used it to check when the other player last reshuffled. Without that, it's difficult to check what actions missed the shuffle, which is very important for endgame scenarios. This is especially true when people play their turn fairly quickly.
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As long as we're dreaming, I also have a wish that I think would mean a major overhaul of things that are supposed to stay the same in this new version, but that would lead to a much more streamlined experience especially when playing multiplayer,
Simply put: Allow stuff to be done beforehand when possible.
A simple example would be when player A plays Militia and players B and C have to discard. Let them discard simultaneously so C doesn't have to wait for B to discard. Of course things should really happen in the order they should happen. The interface would just in many cases to act beforehand in a way that would only be seen by themselves until it's time for it to actually happen.
If C doesn't want to discard until after they've seen if B discards Tunnels that's possible by just waiting, but B have to discard before getting to know what C discarded.
The attacker A on the other hand could go on with their turn without having to wait for anyone if they don't want to. Not until everyone has discarded this actually happens.
Of course it can be important to know how the other players react. In those cases it might be good to wait, but at other times you can just continue playing quickly.
It can be a bit tricky, but I don't think this would have to be very complicated. There would be a queue of things that have been decided but that haven't actually happened yet, where each player can have one event where they have to decide something. As soon as everyone has seen the first event on the queue it actually happens, etc.
A more complete example with A, B and C and it's A's turn:
1. A plays Village. No interaction, so nothing special.
2. A plays Margrave. Playing an attack is a possible interaction so now things are different. Let's say B has a Horse Traders and thus has to decide if setting it aside. There is a status text "B chooses a reaction" or something like that.
3. A executes the Margrave, getting 3 cards and 1 buy, but this happens only for A for the time being. Also C (who has no choice) draws a card, and then has to discard, but only in "C's reality".
4. Now all three players have something to do. A can play a new action, B still has to decide if setting the HT aside, and C has to discard cards. The status message is still about B (and the clock is on B) and A and C might want to wait to see what happens, but can also act.
Suppose A is first and plays a Masquerade. As before A immediately draws 2 cards in "Reality A". No one else notices anything about this.
5. Next suppose C discards down to 3 to the Margrave. Then C will se A draw cards and play Masquerade, since there are no new decisions for C to do before that. Similarly A will see C discarding cards immediately. Only B is stuck on where the game "actually" is. These are the events on the queue that haven't really happened yet:
- A draws 3 cards and gets 1 buy (seen by A and C)
- B should act out their part of the Margrave (has not happend at all)
- C draws 1 card and discards some cards (seen by A and C)
- A plays Masquerade (seen by A and C)
- A draws 2 cards (seen by A and C)
- A should pass a card (A's current decision)
- B should pass a card (still unknown)
- C should pass a card (C's current decision)
Suppose that B continues to be the slow player. As soon as A and C have passed cards A can continue; maybe trashes a card, plays a bunch of Treasures and buys a couple of cards. In A's and C's reality it is now B's turn while B is still stuck on that Horse Trader.
Finally B sets the Horse Traders aside; gets to see everything happening, drawing, discarding, and passing a card, and then quickly it is their turn and everyone is in synch again.
But there can be information leakage!
Yes, that's possible. C may chat "uh oh, I didn't expect a Masquerade" which will warn B before B discards. You could argue that you shouldn't get to see chats before you are in synch with the chatter, but I think a better solution is simply to wait for the others when you want to do something like this. The important thing is to avoid unnecessary waits when it really doesn't matter to you how what the others do.
It can be tricky!
Indeed. Suppose A's first buy in the example was a Province and B has a Fool's Gold. Then A should see whether B trashes it before buying the next card (maybe Noble Brigand!). Then we must have A start waiting after that first buy since there is no way to know what B will do or even if B will pass Fool's Gold to C. If the reaction that B is thinking about using for the Margrave is Secret Chamber instead there's even less knowing if Fool's Gold will be in any hand.
But fortunately most of the time it will not be that complicated, and it does not have to be complete at all. Just having some logic for doing like this can come a long way from unnecessary waits that you wouldn't do if playing afk. Also some of the complications will only happen when specific cards are in the game. When Fool's Gold is in the game some things have be done more by the letter. When Caravan Guard is in the game some other things have be done more carefully, etc.
I disagree: I think it would get very complicated. Suppose that instead of a Horse Traders, B had a Secret Chamber. While B is deciding his reaction to Margrave, A goes ahead and plays his next action, which is a Smugglers, gaining a Gold. Now B plays his Secret Chamber, triggering a shuffle and drawing random two cards into his hand, one of which happens to be a Tunnel, which he chooses not to top-deck. Now player B has to discard down due to the Margrave and he discards the Tunnel. However, after revealing it, he can't gain a Gold because the Gold pile is empty -- player A just took the last Gold with his Smugglers!
This can't be allowed to happen, because player B should have had the first chance to get that Gold. Somehow the game server would have to figure out that it was theoretically possible for the rules to be violated and disallow A's action. I'm sure it's possible to do this for all possible cases with a complicated enough set of logic; however, if this were implemented it be both confusing to the players. For example, player A can't play that Smugglers in this case, so he'd be scratching his head wondering why.
A much more manageable idea, which has been kicked around before, is just to allow players to start to respond to attacks (and Masquerade) out of order, even though the responses will be re-played in order. It certainly would be nice people if everybody could just start discarding their cards or revealing their Moats, as people often do IRL. This still has complications. For example, if player B and C can both discard and reveal a Tunnel, player B must be allowed to get the last Gold. (in which case player C will probably decide to keep his Tunnel in his hand anyway for his Upgrade) So there'd need to be bullet-proof rules set up for when asynchronicity would be permitted.
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Well, you could do it like a queue; you allow player C to submit his order to discard and reveal his Tunnel, which he can't take back, even though it isn't resolved until after player B's choices are resolved. (I'm imagining here player A played a Militia, and both player B and C had Tunnel in their hand.) It's up to player C to realize there's only one Gold in the supply and choose whether or not to wait on what player B does.
So you could have a sort of floating order queue thing for reactions and halt the game if the queue absolutely needs to be flushed. I haven't though it through, though; it may not be realizable.
Edit: So in the Smugglers case, gaining a card might be something that requires queue flushing.
Edit2: And it would be your responsibility as the Smuggler's player to know that that Gold might be gone by the time Smugglers is played.
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You don't have to do complete async. Just allowing players the option to queue choices when it is not their turn would speed things up a bit. So this would apply only in 3+ player games. I really only notice slowdown from waiting for other players in 3+ player games for discard attacks and Bishop trashing. So something that would speed this up a bit would be appreciated.
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I disagree: I think it would get very complicated. Suppose that instead of a Horse Traders, B had a Secret Chamber. While B is deciding his reaction to Margrave, A goes ahead and plays his next action, which is a Smugglers, gaining a Gold. ...
To do it perfectly would be very complicated, but the low-hanging fruit is what's important. I got a bit carried away with a more complicated example, but the important thing is what happens often, like waiting for three people to discard sequentially. You can go on the safe side all the time, and then start making exceptions for that which matters the most (and still isn't too hard to do).
With your Smuggler example, when a list of cards possible to gain is created that perhaps isn't returned until some kinds of events on the queue are gone. There could be more of less complicated rules looking at the queue to see if there is anything there that might empty the Gold pile, but there could also be a general simpler rule "oh, you want to gain a card? that's so complicated so we should have an empty queue except for harmless events of types A, B and C" first.
Somehow the game server would have to figure out that it was theoretically possible for the rules to be violated and disallow A's action. I'm sure it's possible to do this for all possible cases with a complicated enough set of logic; however, if this were implemented it be both confusing to the players. For example, player A can't play that Smugglers in this case, so he'd be scratching his head wondering why.
I think A should be able to play Smugglers. What A might notice is that he can't pick what card to gain immediately. Still, the interface all this time shows that it's waiting for B to act. When B is really slow I agree there can be scratching. You understand that it is B that is slowing the game down, but it would seem like you got to do half a turn anyway. When B isn't really slow, but only slightly after the others, it will only be noticeable by everything being more smooth.
A much more manageable idea, which has been kicked around before, is just to allow players to start to respond to attacks (and Masquerade) out of order, even though the responses will be re-played in order. It certainly would be nice people if everybody could just start discarding their cards or revealing their Moats, as people often do IRL. This still has complications. For example, if player B and C can both discard and reveal a Tunnel, player B must be allowed to get the last Gold. (in which case player C will probably decide to keep his Tunnel in his hand anyway for his Upgrade) So there'd need to be bullet-proof rules set up for when asynchronicity would be permitted.
I don't see that as something totally different because it is used only for attacks. It's probably true that most of the low-hanging fruit has to do with those, but as you write there are complications with that as well, so I don't see that there is that much easier to use the framework only for those. There are things that aren't that complicated and would be nice that don't have to do with reactions, and would work with the more general queue. It would for example be nice if I could start playing my turn when the player before me is making choices about Stashes when shuffling in the cleanup phase. With the general queue that would follow naturally from that as soon as there is nothing the previous player can do that affects my hand I could play my first card.
I think it's fun to think of what can be done asynchronously, but it won't be perfect and there is no reason for it to be. Anything that might be complicated could just demand that the queue is empty before it returns. Then you could take one step more and make some things possible to do if there are only certain kinds of events on the queue, focusing on what seems to be most irritating then.
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Hi David,
I'm new here and this is my first post. There are an impressive amount of responses here. I wonder if you are still reading everything in this thread?
In any case, thanks for the fantastic game. My suggestion is to think more about the experience of new users. Most of these suggestions are for a small elite group of experts and die-hard dominion fans. Likewise, the online game is not designed to be easily accessible to newcomers. I think you are missing out of the opportunity to greatly expand your game, make more money, and attract more new people who will stay and become players/customers. Here's a few ideas:
1. Make it easier to find this game. It is not listed on facebook games or google play. I've been playing games for years and had no idea this game existed.
2. Change the booting feature.... unless you are deliberately trying to lose customers? OK, lets say I am new and come to multiplayer for the first time, here's what happens. I go into a room, join a game, and BAM, "so-and-so has kicked you out." Try another table and, BAM same thing. Why is everybody kicking me out? Why does nobody like me? What have I done wrong? Why are there all these different rooms? What do they mean? Why can't I enter some of the rooms? Am I being banned? Do people not want me in this room? I guarantee you that you are losing thousands of potential players and customers right in this moment. The message should say "We are sorry your rating does not qualify to sit at this table, please visit our beginners table" AND there needs to be a special space for beginners.
3. Prioritize working on the social aspect of the game, not the geeky stuff. Create a way for people to have a friend list, a way to find their friends again, a way for there to be tournaments anyone can easily find out about and join, a way to post pictures for your avatar, a way to log in using your facebook account and real photo. Since you are charging, I am assuming that you are trying to turn a profit. Facebook has 350 million users. You could have a lot more users to. Working on the social piece is going to be FAR more bang for your buck then tinkering with minor changes to game play.
Those are my thoughts. Your game is super great. Thanks so much for making it.
CAT GIRL
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For automatch UI, consider "what would Hearthstone do?", because Blizzard has a keen design sense. In Hearthstone, the flow to play a competitive game is: select play from the menu, select Ranked (equivalent to Goko's Pro; as opposed to Casual, which does not display rankings), click Play. You are then matched and put into a game. That's it--no other step.
Expect something much more like Hearthstone for the first iteration. Blizzard did an excellent job with Hearthstone and set a very high bar. (It's a nice position to be in to have many thousands of employees and literally spend billions of dollars a year.)
This is off topic sorry, but Hearthstone was actually developed by a relatively small team compared to a normal Blizzard title:
http://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Design_and_development_of_Hearthstone
Team 5 are the team behind the development of Hearthstone. Until near the end of the closed beta, the team comprised only 15 members, the smallest team at Blizzard.
No doubt there are some aspects of Hearthstone where having lots of resources is a big advantage, like the high-quality voice acting and the interactive 3D boards. For some things though, like the matchmaking UI, the idea of that can be imitated without having to go through as much design iteration it must have taken to get it right in the first place. Some design choices Hearthstone makes actually make the game cheaper to make, like how the only communication options are emotes and friend chat, which I assume must make moderation less expensive, which seems important given the huge number of people who play Hearthstone.
(Unrelated to resources, a luxury Hearthstone has is that it's a computer game only and isn't restricted to follow existing rules, so they can just throw out anything that doesn't play well on a computer, like taking actions during your opponent's turn. Dominion unfortunately has several features that work badly in a computer interface, like Minion-Moat interactions and an awkward effect-ordering resolution system. I really don't envy you guys having to design a UI for effect ordering.)
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2. Change the booting feature.... unless you are deliberately trying to lose customers? OK, lets say I am new and come to multiplayer for the first time, here's what happens. I go into a room, join a game, and BAM, "so-and-so has kicked you out." Try another table and, BAM same thing. Why is everybody kicking me out? Why does nobody like me? What have I done wrong? Why are there all these different rooms? What do they mean? Why can't I enter some of the rooms? Am I being banned? Do people not want me in this room? I guarantee you that you are losing thousands of potential players and customers right in this moment. The message should say "We are sorry your rating does not qualify to sit at this table, please visit our beginners table" AND there needs to be a special space for beginners.
That should be solved by a good auto-match system, where you just click "search for game", and than get paired with a player of approximately your skill, which they also can't reject anymore (except by resigning the game and therefore losing it)
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thanks for your reply dstu
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Hi David,
I'm new here and this is my first post. There are an impressive amount of responses here. I wonder if you are still reading everything in this thread?
In any case, thanks for the fantastic game. My suggestion is to think more about the experience of new users. Most of these suggestions are for a small elite group of experts and die-hard dominion fans. Likewise, the online game is not designed to be easily accessible to newcomers. I think you are missing out of the opportunity to greatly expand your game, make more money, and attract more new people who will stay and become players/customers. Here's a few ideas:
1. Make it easier to find this game. It is not listed on facebook games or google play. I've been playing games for years and had no idea this game existed.
2. Change the booting feature.... unless you are deliberately trying to lose customers? OK, lets say I am new and come to multiplayer for the first time, here's what happens. I go into a room, join a game, and BAM, "so-and-so has kicked you out." Try another table and, BAM same thing. Why is everybody kicking me out? Why does nobody like me? What have I done wrong? Why are there all these different rooms? What do they mean? Why can't I enter some of the rooms? Am I being banned? Do people not want me in this room? I guarantee you that you are losing thousands of potential players and customers right in this moment. The message should say "We are sorry your rating does not qualify to sit at this table, please visit our beginners table" AND there needs to be a special space for beginners.
3. Prioritize working on the social aspect of the game, not the geeky stuff. Create a way for people to have a friend list, a way to find their friends again, a way for there to be tournaments anyone can easily find out about and join, a way to post pictures for your avatar, a way to log in using your facebook account and real photo. Since you are charging, I am assuming that you are trying to turn a profit. Facebook has 350 million users. You could have a lot more users to. Working on the social piece is going to be FAR more bang for your buck then tinkering with minor changes to game play.
Those are my thoughts. Your game is super great. Thanks so much for making it.
CAT GIRL
I agree with your first point. I don't know if this will be on Facebook, but it should be. I know they will have this in the app store and through Steam, so there is that. One thing to also remember is that MF is pretty much rebuilding a game by a company that had no clue what they were doing. Goko did a terrible job which everyone on this forum pretty much agrees on.
For point two, I think all of us on this forum are asking for that. A good automatch feature should handle it. Maybe there could be a place for beginners to play. But, trust me we want the same thing, and we want the lobbies gone.
For point three, I like your idea for the social aspect. I think this can really ring with the casual gamer, turning Dominion into a more social thing. An excellent suggestion.
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Hi David,
I'm new here and this is my first post. There are an impressive amount of responses here. I wonder if you are still reading everything in this thread?
In any case, thanks for the fantastic game. My suggestion is to think more about the experience of new users. Most of these suggestions are for a small elite group of experts and die-hard dominion fans. Likewise, the online game is not designed to be easily accessible to newcomers. I think you are missing out of the opportunity to greatly expand your game, make more money, and attract more new people who will stay and become players/customers. Here's a few ideas:
1. Make it easier to find this game. It is not listed on facebook games or google play. I've been playing games for years and had no idea this game existed.
2. Change the booting feature.... unless you are deliberately trying to lose customers? OK, lets say I am new and come to multiplayer for the first time, here's what happens. I go into a room, join a game, and BAM, "so-and-so has kicked you out." Try another table and, BAM same thing. Why is everybody kicking me out? Why does nobody like me? What have I done wrong? Why are there all these different rooms? What do they mean? Why can't I enter some of the rooms? Am I being banned? Do people not want me in this room? I guarantee you that you are losing thousands of potential players and customers right in this moment. The message should say "We are sorry your rating does not qualify to sit at this table, please visit our beginners table" AND there needs to be a special space for beginners.
3. Prioritize working on the social aspect of the game, not the geeky stuff. Create a way for people to have a friend list, a way to find their friends again, a way for there to be tournaments anyone can easily find out about and join, a way to post pictures for your avatar, a way to log in using your facebook account and real photo. Since you are charging, I am assuming that you are trying to turn a profit. Facebook has 350 million users. You could have a lot more users to. Working on the social piece is going to be FAR more bang for your buck then tinkering with minor changes to game play.
Those are my thoughts. Your game is super great. Thanks so much for making it.
CAT GIRL
As an elite expert and a die-hard dominion fan, all of these sound like really important suggestions. Automatch or a seek graph should fix point 2. A friends list is something I've wanted for ages. None of this "meet me in outpost as dawn's rose-red fingers first touch the sky" nonsense. Also a way to chat directly with any friend online would be good (I think someone suggested this up above, and obviously it will come with Steam, but I would make a steam-independent way too).
Re the booting feature, it's not an automatic boot implemented by MF/Goko, but rather people using the browser extension to auto-kick based on rating criteria. It does have an option of sending a message in the chat explaining the reason, which I'm surprised more people don't use.
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Hi BeyondAwesome and GeoLib
Thank you for your thoughtful replies.
I seriously didn't think anyone would still be reading here, the thread post is so long. I'm really impressed with how dedicated everyone is here, and it's nice to know what is in the works upcoming. See you on the outpost when dawn's redrose fingers first touch the sky...
cat girl
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Oh good, someone else mentioned social features - I'm not insane!
It doesn't have to go as far as profiles or even a messaging system, but having a friendlist would be amazing. I could see it as a sidebar or a separate page. It could show everyone's username, avatar, level/rating, and online status. If they're online you would also see which server they're in and if they're in the middle of a game, and if they're free there would be a "request game" button. And then games started through the friendlist would go in a separate server so as not to take up space in the public ones. That just about covers every option you'd want, right? Oh and a blacklist would be good too.
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We don't need to micromanage how MF sets up their servers. I bet that, unlike Goko, they can manage to design a server with a capacity of more than 50.
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Yes, I'm still checking in. :)
Hi BeyondAwesome and GeoLib
Thank you for your thoughtful replies.
I seriously didn't think anyone would still be reading here, the thread post is so long. I'm really impressed with how dedicated everyone is here, and it's nice to know what is in the works upcoming. See you on the outpost when dawn's redrose fingers first touch the sky...
cat girl
Yes, I'm still checking in. Thanks for the feedback and ideas. :)
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2. Change the booting feature.... unless you are deliberately trying to lose customers? OK, lets say I am new and come to multiplayer for the first time, here's what happens. I go into a room, join a game, and BAM, "so-and-so has kicked you out." Try another table and, BAM same thing. Why is everybody kicking me out? Why does nobody like me? What have I done wrong? Why are there all these different rooms? What do they mean? Why can't I enter some of the rooms? Am I being banned? Do people not want me in this room? I guarantee you that you are losing thousands of potential players and customers right in this moment. The message should say "We are sorry your rating does not qualify to sit at this table, please visit our beginners table" AND there needs to be a special space for beginners.
3. Prioritize working on the social aspect of the game, not the geeky stuff. Create a way for people to have a friend list, a way to find their friends again, a way for there to be tournaments anyone can easily find out about and join, a way to post pictures for your avatar, a way to log in using your facebook account and real photo. Since you are charging, I am assuming that you are trying to turn a profit. Facebook has 350 million users. You could have a lot more users to. Working on the social piece is going to be FAR more bang for your buck then tinkering with minor changes to game play.
The booting thing isn't really Goko/MF's fault... the Salvager browser extension is probably doing that to you. (See gokosalvager.com, to probably improve your experience with the current version of the game) Lacking a solid matchmaking system, the people behind Salvager hacked together one of their own, and it included things like, "I only want to play with people near my rating," but the best that could be done with only a browser extension was to automatically click the "kick" button when someone joined who's outside your preferred people to play with. So that's probably what you're seeing, especially if you're joining games that have things like "5000+" in the name.
So as has been mentioned, good matchmaking will fix that (Salvager won't need to do "bad matchmaking" any more). In the meantime, using Salvager yourself will make it easier to find games, since it does provide some auto-matching. Salvager also gives you custom avatars, and lets you see ones other users have uploaded through Salavager.
Friend list, yeah, we all want that. If this new version wasn't coming up, Salvager would probably end up doing that at some point, I think we had it on our feature list, and kept putting it off cause it was big :)
Tournaments and other organized play... it'd be nice if MF did some of that officially, but there's plenty of it without them actually, much of it organized right here. I see you've already found the League...
So yeah, some of those things aren't totally MF's fault, they're partly the fault of a community that tried its best to provide those things without being able to actually make changes to the game.
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I haven't been following this thread too closely, but has Linux support been confirmed yet? I would have no way of playing otherwise.
At the very least you should be able to able to play in a browser, because we'll target Unity 5's WebGL build, which just needs any browser supporting WebGL and asm.js.
Incidentally, ignore anything you read about the Unity webplayer and Linux, because that's old tech. It's based on the Netscape plugin API which is being phased out in browsers these days due to the security holes it creates.
Sweet! The post I read about you guys using webplayer was months ago, if you've decided to step up to WebGL that's great news for us Linux users!
Due to your guys' interest in this, we tried creating a native build for Linux for the first time today. It works.
theblankman, if you would like to beta-test (really alpha-test) the Linux build, please message me with your email.
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I disagree: I think it would get very complicated. Suppose that instead of a Horse Traders, B had a Secret Chamber. While B is deciding his reaction to Margrave, A goes ahead and plays his next action, which is a Smugglers, gaining a Gold. ...
To do it perfectly would be very complicated, but the low-hanging fruit is what's important. I got a bit carried away with a more complicated example, but the important thing is what happens often, like waiting for three people to discard sequentially. You can go on the safe side all the time, and then start making exceptions for that which matters the most (and still isn't too hard to do).
With your Smuggler example, when a list of cards possible to gain is created that perhaps isn't returned until some kinds of events on the queue are gone. There could be more of less complicated rules looking at the queue to see if there is anything there that might empty the Gold pile, but there could also be a general simpler rule "oh, you want to gain a card? that's so complicated so we should have an empty queue except for harmless events of types A, B and C" first.
Emptying itself can be pretty complicated to foresee. Maybe when player A plays a Bishop, I choose to trash my Feodum because there are 10 Silvers in the supply and I'm the only one who has Feodums. But then I find that the 3 players before me each trashed a Hunting Grounds, chose to gain Estates, and then revealed a Trader for each Estate.
But I didn't mean to imply that emptying a supply pile is the only complication with allowing player A to continue playing cards. For example, in this case with the Bishop, player A might next play a Graverobber and what he sees in the trash will be vastly different without all those Hunting Grounds in there. IRL we play a little loose with the rules (who would insist on making the next player wait because they haven't finished their clean-up phase?), but I think even IRL, I wouldn't let player A continue playing all his action cards while the rest of us are still dealing with our reactions.
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Thank you Blank Man for your detailed reply.
I do have goko now it definitely makes the game so much better. You are right everything will work much better with a matchmaking system. I changed my avatar - but really only serious insiders will know that you need a small file that is a png, and most people wouldn't know how to do that anyway. I am quite ok to be kicked out of a game now, but my first day at dominion it was weirdly demoralizing. I think whoever made goko salvager did a bangup job, it greatly improves the game, I was just surprised they haven't changed the "this person has kicked you out" language, it's so intimidating and would be so easy to change.
How did you know I found the league? You are really paying attention :)
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How did you know I found the league? You are really paying attention :)
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23087358/Dominion/Bildschirmfoto%20vom%202015-04-25.png)
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I haven't been following this thread too closely, but has Linux support been confirmed yet? I would have no way of playing otherwise.
At the very least you should be able to able to play in a browser, because we'll target Unity 5's WebGL build, which just needs any browser supporting WebGL and asm.js.
Incidentally, ignore anything you read about the Unity webplayer and Linux, because that's old tech. It's based on the Netscape plugin API which is being phased out in browsers these days due to the security holes it creates.
Sweet! The post I read about you guys using webplayer was months ago, if you've decided to step up to WebGL that's great news for us Linux users!
Due to your guys' interest in this, we tried creating a native build for Linux for the first time today. It works.
theblankman, if you would like to beta-test (really alpha-test) the Linux build, please message me with your email.
If you need some more people to install a Linux version I would volunteer, but I don't have so much time to play and test, so if you want to limit your alpha-users, you better might take someone else.. ;)
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Thank you Blank Man for your detailed reply.
I do have goko now it definitely makes the game so much better. You are right everything will work much better with a matchmaking system. I changed my avatar - but really only serious insiders will know that you need a small file that is a png, and most people wouldn't know how to do that anyway. I am quite ok to be kicked out of a game now, but my first day at dominion it was weirdly demoralizing. I think whoever made goko salvager did a bangup job, it greatly improves the game, I was just surprised they haven't changed the "this person has kicked you out" language, it's so intimidating and would be so easy to change.
How did you know I found the league? You are really paying attention :)
Catgirl, you can use the following thread to mention how the current auto kick feature is demoralizing for new players. http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=8163.0
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Thank you Blank Man for your detailed reply.
I do have goko now it definitely makes the game so much better. You are right everything will work much better with a matchmaking system. I changed my avatar - but really only serious insiders will know that you need a small file that is a png, and most people wouldn't know how to do that anyway. I am quite ok to be kicked out of a game now, but my first day at dominion it was weirdly demoralizing. I think whoever made goko salvager did a bangup job, it greatly improves the game, I was just surprised they haven't changed the "this person has kicked you out" language, it's so intimidating and would be so easy to change.
How did you know I found the league? You are really paying attention :)
Total coincidence, the board shows newest post in each forum, happened to be yours in the Events/etc one right before I came to check in on this thread, and your name is all caps so it's noticeable.
The "you have been kicked out" popup is Goko's, I don't think Salvager could've easily changed the wording on it. I agree that in the new version, however you find games, the language when someone declines to play with you should be milder. Salvager does have an option to explain its auto-kicks in the lobby chat, that's the best we could do, so if you see a chat like, "CATGIRL: Sorry theblankman, my rating limit is 9000," that's from Salvager. The problem with using the public lobby chat for that purpose is that it got kind of spammy, so most people turned that option off.
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Hi BeyondAwesome and GeoLib
Thank you for your thoughtful replies.
I seriously didn't think anyone would still be reading here, the thread post is so long. I'm really impressed with how dedicated everyone is here, and it's nice to know what is in the works upcoming. See you on the outpost when dawn's redrose fingers first touch the sky...
cat girl
Threads get way longer than this... http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=11642
I haven't been following this thread too closely, but has Linux support been confirmed yet? I would have no way of playing otherwise.
At the very least you should be able to able to play in a browser, because we'll target Unity 5's WebGL build, which just needs any browser supporting WebGL and asm.js.
Incidentally, ignore anything you read about the Unity webplayer and Linux, because that's old tech. It's based on the Netscape plugin API which is being phased out in browsers these days due to the security holes it creates.
Sweet! The post I read about you guys using webplayer was months ago, if you've decided to step up to WebGL that's great news for us Linux users!
Due to your guys' interest in this, we tried creating a native build for Linux for the first time today. It works.
theblankman, if you would like to beta-test (really alpha-test) the Linux build, please message me with your email.
I also run linux if you guys want more testers. I haven't played in a little while, but the semester will be over in a couple weeks, so I'll probably be back to lots of dominioning.
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All the important stuff has been said, and it's great to see that there's a dialogue going here. My top priority is how long it takes to get into a game. I guess automatch will fix this. And for some reason the lack of buttons for Watchtower particularly annoys me, probably because it seems like an easy fix. But I don't want to just repeat things, so here are a couple other things I didn't see yet in this thread:
When I play with friends who are new to Dominion, they wish they could see the whole card in the Supply because they don't know what they do. The art is not as useful to them during their Buy phase as the card text would be. I know you don't have room for the whole card, but maybe let people pick whether they see the top half or the bottom half? Or have the art switch to card text on hover so you don't have to click through them all?
It would be nice if the Estates stayed by the other Victory cards in Platinum/Colony games.
There should be (or maybe there already is and I just can't find it) a list of known rules bugs, not pages of forum-style bug reports to search through. Whenever Band of Misfits/Herbalist shows up, I think, do I risk it? I wonder if they've fixed this...
I really appreciate that you're taking the time to fix everything properly and not just rushing out Adventures. Thanks!
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It would be nice if the Estates stayed by the other Victory cards in Platinum/Colony games.
Not a biggie, but this one will be in the new version.
There should be (or maybe there already is and I just can't find it) a list of known rules bugs, not pages of forum-style bug reports to search through. Whenever Band of Misfits/Herbalist shows up, I think, do I risk it? I wonder if they've fixed this...
Okay, I will compile a single list and post it.
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There should be (or maybe there already is and I just can't find it) a list of known rules bugs, not pages of forum-style bug reports to search through. Whenever Band of Misfits/Herbalist shows up, I think, do I risk it? I wonder if they've fixed this...
crlundy, I just posted a list of rules issues:
http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?6501-Known-Discrepancies-between-Dominion-Online-and-the-Official-Rules&p=33111#post33111
It's actually a bit off-topic for this thread because the game server/AI is the one area of the system we are not tackling for the version 2 release.
I've got 15 items, including Band of Misfits + Herbalist. Someone please tell me what I forgot (ideally with a link to another forum discussion!) and I'll add it.
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There should be (or maybe there already is and I just can't find it) a list of known rules bugs, not pages of forum-style bug reports to search through. Whenever Band of Misfits/Herbalist shows up, I think, do I risk it? I wonder if they've fixed this...
crlundy, I just posted a list of rules issues:
http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?6501-Known-Discrepancies-between-Dominion-Online-and-the-Official-Rules&p=33111#post33111
It's actually a bit off-topic for this thread because the game server/AI is the one area of the system we are not tackling for the version 2 release.
I've got 15 items, including Band of Misfits + Herbalist. Someone please tell me what I forgot (ideally with a link to another forum discussion!) and I'll add it.
Thank you for compiling the list. That's great!
The last bug is not quite right. You don't trash to the discard pile, for one (I'm guessing that's a typo). Trashing is atomic, so you trash all the cards at once, however your opponent can see every card you trash regardless because the trash is public information. So the real difference is that all the on-trash effects should trigger simultaneously, nothing to do with what your opponent can see.
Discarding to e.g. Torturer, however, you should be able to choose your two cards and then discard them together so your opponent can only see one. I think the way to do this is to have people click on things which go up into a box on the top and then have a button to discard/trash them all at once. If they want, they can rearrange things in this box (for discarding), but they aren't forced to choose an order every time (because you almost never care). They could also click on things in this box to move them back to hand (so they haven't committed to anything until they hit the trash/discard button).
Another feature request: I want to be able to see all of my opponents information at once. Currently, if I expand out their deck area so I can see how many cards and coin tokens they have, it covers the actions/buys/coins area, which is really annoying.
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Another feature request: I want to be able to see all of my opponents information at once. Currently, if I expand out their deck area so I can see how many cards and coin tokens they have, it covers the actions/buys/coins area, which is really annoying.
Quoting to give this more attention. It's something quite annoying but so old I'd given up on the idea it could be fixed.
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crlundy, I just posted a list of rules issues:
http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?6501-Known-Discrepancies-between-Dominion-Online-and-the-Official-Rules&p=33111#post33111
It's actually a bit off-topic for this thread because the game server/AI is the one area of the system we are not tackling for the version 2 release.
I've got 15 items, including Band of Misfits + Herbalist. Someone please tell me what I forgot (ideally with a link to another forum discussion!) and I'll add it.
Hermit should not trigger (to become Madman) if you bought a card with Black Market. Currently done wrong by Dominion online: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=11911.msg480415#msg480415
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There should be (or maybe there already is and I just can't find it) a list of known rules bugs, not pages of forum-style bug reports to search through. Whenever Band of Misfits/Herbalist shows up, I think, do I risk it? I wonder if they've fixed this...
crlundy, I just posted a list of rules issues:
http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?6501-Known-Discrepancies-between-Dominion-Online-and-the-Official-Rules&p=33111#post33111
It's actually a bit off-topic for this thread because the game server/AI is the one area of the system we are not tackling for the version 2 release.
I've got 15 items, including Band of Misfits + Herbalist. Someone please tell me what I forgot (ideally with a link to another forum discussion!) and I'll add it.
Thank you for compiling the list. That's great!
The last bug is not quite right. You don't trash to the discard pile, for one (I'm guessing that's a typo). Trashing is atomic, so you trash all the cards at once, however your opponent can see every card you trash regardless because the trash is public information. So the real difference is that all the on-trash effects should trigger simultaneously, nothing to do with what your opponent can see.
Discarding to e.g. Torturer, however, you should be able to choose your two cards and then discard them together so your opponent can only see one. I think the way to do this is to have people click on things which go up into a box on the top and then have a button to discard/trash them all at once. If they want, they can rearrange things in this box (for discarding), but they aren't forced to choose an order every time (because you almost never care). They could also click on things in this box to move them back to hand (so they haven't committed to anything until they hit the trash/discard button).
Oops, I've corrected this. It got convoluted because the originally ticket was about being able to select multiple cards with trashing. The ultimate fix should change trashing, discarding, and putting back cards, but it's only discarding that applies to this particular list.
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crlundy, I just posted a list of rules issues:
http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?6501-Known-Discrepancies-between-Dominion-Online-and-the-Official-Rules&p=33111#post33111
It's actually a bit off-topic for this thread because the game server/AI is the one area of the system we are not tackling for the version 2 release.
I've got 15 items, including Band of Misfits + Herbalist. Someone please tell me what I forgot (ideally with a link to another forum discussion!) and I'll add it.
Hermit should not trigger (to become Madman) if you bought a card with Black Market. Currently done wrong by Dominion online: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=11911.msg480415#msg480415
Thanks. I've added this.
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Another feature request: I want to be able to see all of my opponents information at once. Currently, if I expand out their deck area so I can see how many cards and coin tokens they have, it covers the actions/buys/coins area, which is really annoying.
Quoting to give this more attention. It's something quite annoying but so old I'd given up on the idea it could be fixed.
I would still love to have some keyboard shortcuts for things like expanding or collapsing all opponents' info at once.
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Another feature request: I want to be able to see all of my opponents information at once. Currently, if I expand out their deck area so I can see how many cards and coin tokens they have, it covers the actions/buys/coins area, which is really annoying.
Quoting to give this more attention. It's something quite annoying but so old I'd given up on the idea it could be fixed.
I would still love to have some keyboard shortcuts for things like expanding or collapsing all opponents' info at once.
I'd probably use keyboard shortcuts if they existed but I find in general as an app developer that they're are an "advanced user" thing; i.e. people look for them after they're very familiar with the rest of the UI and want to speed up their interactions. So I'd understand if MF makes that low priority. That said, if MF takes the earlier request from AI, myself and others to make Dominion 2.0 extensible and/or open-source the client, then "advanced user" features like keyboard shortcuts would be just the thing for a potential "Salvager 2.0" to provide.
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There should be (or maybe there already is and I just can't find it) a list of known rules bugs, not pages of forum-style bug reports to search through. Whenever Band of Misfits/Herbalist shows up, I think, do I risk it? I wonder if they've fixed this...
crlundy, I just posted a list of rules issues:
http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?6501-Known-Discrepancies-between-Dominion-Online-and-the-Official-Rules&p=33111#post33111
It's actually a bit off-topic for this thread because the game server/AI is the one area of the system we are not tackling for the version 2 release.
I've got 15 items, including Band of Misfits + Herbalist. Someone please tell me what I forgot (ideally with a link to another forum discussion!) and I'll add it.
Thank you for compiling the list. That's great!
The last bug is not quite right. You don't trash to the discard pile, for one (I'm guessing that's a typo). Trashing is atomic, so you trash all the cards at once, however your opponent can see every card you trash regardless because the trash is public information. So the real difference is that all the on-trash effects should trigger simultaneously, nothing to do with what your opponent can see.
Discarding to e.g. Torturer, however, you should be able to choose your two cards and then discard them together so your opponent can only see one. I think the way to do this is to have people click on things which go up into a box on the top and then have a button to discard/trash them all at once. If they want, they can rearrange things in this box (for discarding), but they aren't forced to choose an order every time (because you almost never care). They could also click on things in this box to move them back to hand (so they haven't committed to anything until they hit the trash/discard button).
Another feature request: I want to be able to see all of my opponents information at once. Currently, if I expand out their deck area so I can see how many cards and coin tokens they have, it covers the actions/buys/coins area, which is really annoying.
Expanding upon some of this, this is really important. It is super easy to accidentally trash or discard a card currently. Also, you don't choose one card at a time. They are chosen all at once. So, there should be a confirm button and you should be able to click to select/deselect cards that you want to trash or discard so you don't accidentally trash/discard something important.
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I haven't been following this thread too closely, but has Linux support been confirmed yet? I would have no way of playing otherwise.
At the very least you should be able to able to play in a browser, because we'll target Unity 5's WebGL build, which just needs any browser supporting WebGL and asm.js.
Incidentally, ignore anything you read about the Unity webplayer and Linux, because that's old tech. It's based on the Netscape plugin API which is being phased out in browsers these days due to the security holes it creates.
Sweet! The post I read about you guys using webplayer was months ago, if you've decided to step up to WebGL that's great news for us Linux users!
Correction: I found out I was mistaken about one thing. Internet Explorer 11 supports webGL and asm.js, but doesn't support the Web Audio API that the Unity webGL uses. Therefore, if we want to support IE, we might have to additionally support the old webplayer, at least until IE steps up or gets replaced entirely by Spartan. The webplayer itself won't run any longer in Chrome as of this month:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/04/chrome-42-npapi
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I haven't been following this thread too closely, but has Linux support been confirmed yet? I would have no way of playing otherwise.
At the very least you should be able to able to play in a browser, because we'll target Unity 5's WebGL build, which just needs any browser supporting WebGL and asm.js.
Incidentally, ignore anything you read about the Unity webplayer and Linux, because that's old tech. It's based on the Netscape plugin API which is being phased out in browsers these days due to the security holes it creates.
Sweet! The post I read about you guys using webplayer was months ago, if you've decided to step up to WebGL that's great news for us Linux users!
Correction: I found out I was mistaken about one thing. Internet Explorer 11 supports webGL and asm.js, but doesn't support the Web Audio API that the Unity webGL uses. Therefore, if we want to support IE, we might have to additionally support the old webplayer, at least until IE steps up or gets replaced entirely by Spartan. The webplayer itself won't run any longer in Chrome as of this month:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/04/chrome-42-npapi
So... we have to play in Firefox?
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So... we have to play in Firefox?
This is already true for me! I use Chrome normally and Firefox for MF Goko DomO. there was an unresolvable security reason that stopped it from working in Chrome.
I feel like I am ahead of the curve, having disabled Java in Chrome long ago to avoid getting malware, which I got just before doing that. However there are sure lots of websites that use it.
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I haven't been following this thread too closely, but has Linux support been confirmed yet? I would have no way of playing otherwise.
At the very least you should be able to able to play in a browser, because we'll target Unity 5's WebGL build, which just needs any browser supporting WebGL and asm.js.
Incidentally, ignore anything you read about the Unity webplayer and Linux, because that's old tech. It's based on the Netscape plugin API which is being phased out in browsers these days due to the security holes it creates.
Sweet! The post I read about you guys using webplayer was months ago, if you've decided to step up to WebGL that's great news for us Linux users!
Correction: I found out I was mistaken about one thing. Internet Explorer 11 supports webGL and asm.js, but doesn't support the Web Audio API that the Unity webGL uses. Therefore, if we want to support IE, we might have to additionally support the old webplayer, at least until IE steps up or gets replaced entirely by Spartan. The webplayer itself won't run any longer in Chrome as of this month:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/04/chrome-42-npapi
So... we have to play in Firefox?
You'd have to play in either Firefox or Chrome (for the webgl build) or IE 11 (for the webplayer build), unless your operating system happened to be Linux, OSX, or Windows, in which case you could use a native build.
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I haven't been following this thread too closely, but has Linux support been confirmed yet? I would have no way of playing otherwise.
At the very least you should be able to able to play in a browser, because we'll target Unity 5's WebGL build, which just needs any browser supporting WebGL and asm.js.
Incidentally, ignore anything you read about the Unity webplayer and Linux, because that's old tech. It's based on the Netscape plugin API which is being phased out in browsers these days due to the security holes it creates.
Sweet! The post I read about you guys using webplayer was months ago, if you've decided to step up to WebGL that's great news for us Linux users!
Correction: I found out I was mistaken about one thing. Internet Explorer 11 supports webGL and asm.js, but doesn't support the Web Audio API that the Unity webGL uses. Therefore, if we want to support IE, we might have to additionally support the old webplayer, at least until IE steps up or gets replaced entirely by Spartan. The webplayer itself won't run any longer in Chrome as of this month:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/04/chrome-42-npapi
So... we have to play in Firefox?
You'd have to play in either Firefox or Chrome (for the webgl build) or IE 11 (for the webplayer build), unless your operating system happened to be Linux, OSX, or Windows, in which case you could use a native build.
All aboard!
(http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2013/183/c/b/all_aboard_the_steam_train_by_captnpenguin-d6bqwke.png)
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This has been on my mind a lot, but if Events end up on page 2, it can be super easy to forget they are there or even to check for Events. My suggestions is to shrink the border size of Events so they are the same as the other cards, cropping out part of the picture. However, when people click on the Event, they can see the full-size thing.
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This has been on my mind a lot, but if Events end up on page 2, it can be super easy to forget they are there or even to check for Events. My suggestions is to shrink the border size of Events so they are the same as the other cards, cropping out part of the picture. However, when people click on the Event, they can see the full-size thing.
How about this:
For PC users, just use the entire screen. Fit everything.
For mobile users, put ALL cards on a separate screen, and have the primary screen be your play area, hand, trash, other players, etc.
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This has been on my mind a lot, but if Events end up on page 2, it can be super easy to forget they are there or even to check for Events. My suggestions is to shrink the border size of Events so they are the same as the other cards, cropping out part of the picture. However, when people click on the Event, they can see the full-size thing.
If Events are on Page 2, it will mean something has gone horribly wrong.
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This has been on my mind a lot, but if Events end up on page 2, it can be super easy to forget they are there or even to check for Events. My suggestions is to shrink the border size of Events so they are the same as the other cards, cropping out part of the picture. However, when people click on the Event, they can see the full-size thing.
How about this:
For PC users, just use the entire screen. Fit everything.
For mobile users, put ALL cards on a separate screen, and have the primary screen be your play area, hand, trash, other players, etc.
From the latest version that I saw, the installed app for PC lets you play on a fixed, full-screen or in windowed mode. I was testing some things, so I used windowed mode so that I could go to my document and then the game without issue. In full-screen, if I tabbed away to another window, the game minimized. I was running on a split screen (which worked great) so with my large monitor, the game was fine in windowed mode.
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This has been on my mind a lot, but if Events end up on page 2, it can be super easy to forget they are there or even to check for Events. My suggestions is to shrink the border size of Events so they are the same as the other cards, cropping out part of the picture. However, when people click on the Event, they can see the full-size thing.
How about this:
For PC users, just use the entire screen. Fit everything.
For mobile users, put ALL cards on a separate screen, and have the primary screen be your play area, hand, trash, other players, etc.
From the latest version that I saw, the installed app for PC lets you play on a fixed, full-screen or in windowed mode. I was testing some things, so I used windowed mode so that I could go to my document and then the game without issue. In full-screen, if I tabbed away to another window, the game minimized. I was running on a split screen (which worked great) so with my large monitor, the game was fine in windowed mode.
...and did everything fit on one page?
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This has been on my mind a lot, but if Events end up on page 2, it can be super easy to forget they are there or even to check for Events. My suggestions is to shrink the border size of Events so they are the same as the other cards, cropping out part of the picture. However, when people click on the Event, they can see the full-size thing.
How about this:
For PC users, just use the entire screen. Fit everything.
For mobile users, put ALL cards on a separate screen, and have the primary screen be your play area, hand, trash, other players, etc.
From the latest version that I saw, the installed app for PC lets you play on a fixed, full-screen or in windowed mode. I was testing some things, so I used windowed mode so that I could go to my document and then the game without issue. In full-screen, if I tabbed away to another window, the game minimized. I was running on a split screen (which worked great) so with my large monitor, the game was fine in windowed mode.
...and did everything fit on one page?
I only had access to the basic set, so there were no stacks on a second screen. Everything else looked good. Edit: I guess it also depends on what you mean by everything. Just card stacks? Card stacks and logs? I don't want to incur the displeasure of Lord Humanton, so I'll leave details for him. And I'm sure once the first round of beta starts, word will get out.
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Spring is now here. Can't wait.
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This has been on my mind a lot, but if Events end up on page 2, it can be super easy to forget they are there or even to check for Events. My suggestions is to shrink the border size of Events so they are the same as the other cards, cropping out part of the picture. However, when people click on the Event, they can see the full-size thing.
How about this:
For PC users, just use the entire screen. Fit everything.
For mobile users, put ALL cards on a separate screen, and have the primary screen be your play area, hand, trash, other players, etc.
From the latest version that I saw, the installed app for PC lets you play on a fixed, full-screen or in windowed mode. I was testing some things, so I used windowed mode so that I could go to my document and then the game without issue. In full-screen, if I tabbed away to another window, the game minimized. I was running on a split screen (which worked great) so with my large monitor, the game was fine in windowed mode.
...and did everything fit on one page?
I only had access to the basic set, so there were no stacks on a second screen. Everything else looked good. Edit: I guess it also depends on what you mean by everything. Just card stacks? Card stacks and logs? I don't want to incur the displeasure of Lord Humanton, so I'll leave details for him. And I'm sure once the first round of beta starts, word will get out.
We plan to open the beta-test up to members of this forum in ~3 weeks.
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We plan to open the beta-test up to members of this forum in ~3 weeks.
Great! Count me in! I am looking forward to it.
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We plan to open the beta-test up to members of this forum in ~3 weeks.
(http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/507/956/eff.png)
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Alright!! Can't wait to see the new and drastically improved online dominion! Count me in as well.
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Alright!! Can't wait to see the new and drastically improved online dominion!
Funny thing to say, because (for example, if you read my posts at the beginning of this thread) the drastic improvements are exactly the ones you won't be able to see. The rewrite of the backend will make things more stable and faster. The rewrite of the front-end will get us to more platforms, but the platform releases will be staged, so that won't matter to you for a while. And both rewrites will mean that we'll actually have a code base we can manage and make rapid improvements to in the future.
Count me in as well.
We have a limited number of slots for this test, because it's distracting to keep up with. However, (repeating what I just posted in another thread), if you are interested in joining the closed beta test, you promise to keep it secret, you have an email+password login on your account (not Facebook/Google+/Twitter for right now), you're playing on Windows, MacOS, or Linux, and you'd find it interesting to play on a feature-incomplete system, please message me this info: your name, your email, your Dominion Online login (if different from your email), your Making Fun forum name (create one if you don't have it), and what OS you are on. I'll add the first 25 complete replies.
Or you could just wait, because in a couple weeks we'll open up the beta for everybody to test. :-)
Right now we are only testing Windows, MacOS, and Linux native builds. We'll start focusing on finalizing the web builds in mid-June and then move on to finalizing builds for tablets.
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if you are interested in joining the closed beta test...
I'll accept people and email them details on Monday.
Or you could just wait, because in a couple weeks we'll open up the beta for everybody to test. :-)
I've posted a summary of our roadmap here:
http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?6715-Version-2-Coming&p=34309#post34309
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Oh please oh please oh PLEASE say we can transfer previously-bought cards to version 2. So excited!
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Oh please oh please oh PLEASE say we can transfer previously-bought cards to version 2. So excited!
They've already said you can, but it's also in the link just provided.
Note that your account including all sets and cards you have purchased will be transferred to the version 2 site on the night of June 10.
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Oh please oh please oh PLEASE say we can transfer previously-bought cards to version 2. So excited!
Yes.
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Sorry if this has been mentioned already, but it bugs me a bit that logs don't mention what triggered the end of the game. Isotropic logs would have a line at the end saying something like, "Provinces ran out" or "x, y and z ran out", which was helpful.
It would also be nice if the contents of the trash was listed as well.
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It's time for a post mortem on how we did on the top issues for this forum:
Thank you all for the posts!!! I counted over 50 distinct ideas and I've recorded every one. Even though they may be known, the prioritization is useful. I've organized them by the number of distinct posters who supported them (unscientific I know but better than nothing.) Based on that, here are the top 10 (or so):
1. Always-visible game logs (on non-mobile)
YES, this was put into 2.0 for non-mobile. (#8 on the new features list)
https://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?7889-Exiting-Open-Beta-Sunset-of-Goko-Site (https://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?7889-Exiting-Open-Beta-Sunset-of-Goko-Site)
2. Automatch
YES, the seeking feature in 2.0. (#6 on the new features list)
3. Kingdom cards on 1st page (esp. if ruins, bane)
YES, in 2.0 the number of displayed piles was upped to 12 for a wide screen resolution from Goko's 10. (#7 on the new features list)
In 2.1 it was further increased to 14 piles. The Ruins pile was relocated by the Curses so it didn't take up a kingdom slot. Some piles such as prizes were consolidated into a single pile
https://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?10154-Release-Notes-v-2-1-with-Adventures (https://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?10154-Release-Notes-v-2-1-with-Adventures)
4. Real kingdom generation
YES, in 2.0.41.
https://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?7785-Release-Notes-v-2-0-41 (https://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?7785-Release-Notes-v-2-0-41)
5. Better reconnect
YES. This was improved over multiple releases of the 2.0 beta and overhauled in 2.0.47.
6. Button options instead having to drag
PARTIALLY, for example using the trigger resolution dialog added in 2.1. This was a work in progress.
7. Support Adventures set
YES, in 2.1.
8. VP Counter
YES in 2.0, with updated seeking options in 2.0.46.
9. Blacklist
NO. This (and other social features) would have been released in late Spring 2016, but we heard the license news and had to shut down development.
10. Prevent misclicks
YES in 2.1, when key buttons were relocated to address this.
11. API
NO, because we deemed this less important after a mod was released. It seemed sufficient in the short run to just make sure no code was obfuscated.
12. Who-goes-first adjustments
NO. Again, it certainly would have been implemented in 2016.
13. Rematch
YES in 2.0. (#9 on the new features list)
So we'd managed to get as far as 9.5/13 of these particular requests. Thanks again for all your input.