Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion Online at Shuffle iT => Dominion General Discussion => Goko Dominion Online => Topic started by: AdamH on October 19, 2015, 01:09:42 pm
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Hi. I'm Adam. ("Hello, Adam.") You may remember me from Dominion. I'm also that jerk who was talking smack in SCSN's thread about his dll patches, the one who was overly paranoid about a bunch of stuff that nobody cares about, and the "MF Apologist." I was asked to stop polluting that thread with my differing opinion, which clearly and indisputably shows that my point of view is patently incorrect, so I did. I unfollowed that thread and stopped posting in it. I then made the mistake of going back to read it over the weekend and it made me deeply sad inside, but that's not exactly what I made this thread to talk about.
Let's assume that you're all right about all of this. Let's assume that MF's developers are completely incompetent and that we are entitled to a better gaming experience than what they offer. I am not conceding this point, but even if you believe all of this, it doesn't change this fact:
The only way we have of playing Dominion Online rests with Making Fun, and that will not change unless something big and unforseen happens.
If you don't like it, sorry. That's the way it is. I wish we still had Goko around, but we don't and it's not coming back. I still want to play Dominion Online and I want that experience to be as good as possible, I would assume that's what we all want here. Here's another fact that people seem to be losing sight of:
The MF Dominion client has been improving, and it still is being developed so it will continue to improve.
If you don't think it's improving fast enough, sorry. That's the way it is. If you don't like the order in which they choose to make their improvements, sorry. That's the wa--
Wait a tick, shouldn't we have a voice in this? Yeah actually we should. The problem is that our voice as a community has been really bad. We've spent pages of posts complaining about MF's software engineering process that we know absolutely nothing about. We've spent pages of posts complaining about MF's source code that we know absolutely nothing about (fact: stuff that gets spit out of a decompiler does not resemble the code MF writes, and is not grounds to criticize their design or anything else about them).
As a community, we've become so high on finding every small detail we can latch onto to say hateful things about MF and its developers. Whether or not you feel this is justified (pro tip: it isn't), it has resulted in representatives from MF no longer reading this forum (to my knowledge) and certainly not being able to get anything useful out of it.
A year ago, I bragged about this community to people I introduced the game to; today, I'm ashamed to be a part of it. The threads in here (the Dominion Online sub-board) have become so toxic, I'm seeing a side of people I used to have respect for that makes me want to have nothing to do with them. As a community, is this really what we want? Do we want to burn the bridge we have with MF, to throw away our chance to have our voice heard and to have features added that will make us happy?
A good portion of you just answered that question in your heads "yes". Really? You should seriously re-think that. If you think we have nothing to lose by doing this, that it's already completely hopeless, that's just not true. Uninstall the patch and look at the difference in animations between v40 and v43. It's not perfect now but it's come a long way, and do you know why? Because MF listened to people and improved their software from that. If you think that even if they listened to us they aren't capable of doing what we want, why does that matter? I mean, it's not true, so we are losing something here; it's either wait for MF to is this (pardon my language, I didn't make this term up) "circle jerk" worth it? I love whining just as much as the next guy, does it feel so good to whine and complain the way we are that it's worth throwing away our chances to have a voice? I really think you should reconsider.
We got less than 10 replies into pst's poll and already it's turned so toxic there. Just the results of that poll could be really helpful in letting MF know the one feature that's the most important to us as a community, but you can't scroll very far down the page before it's hard to take it seriously. People trying desperately to get something constructive out of this community are treated like crap, and it's really frustrating to be in that position. We're treating our own members with the same lack of respect we're giving MF (I don't know how pst feels, but I certainly feel that way). Why are we doing this? We are gaining nothing and losing everything.
Finally, the following is a harsh reality that needs to be said:
The dll patch is getting in the way of making Dominion Online a better experience.
Look, a decent amount of work has gone into that, and I'm not going to deny that it seems to make people's experience with v43 more enjoyable. Great. If you want to use it for your own benefit, if you want to sink time into expanding its capabilities, go right ahead and do that. Let's assume that it isn't a total waste of time. The fact is that MF is still making versions of their software that will eventually incorporate these features in a way that is actually robust and sustainable. The dll patch is a bandage that needs to be replaced every time there's an update to the software: the more complex and fancy you make that bandage, the more work it is to replace it. There is no guarantee that the dll patch isn't introducing new problems into the equation, and if someone experiences an issue that they want to report to MF, it can't really be handled properly with the patch installed.
Let me be clear: the patch in a vacuum is not the problem, it's the way our community has handled the patch and made grossly incorrect assumptions about the reality of MF's product from it. Did anyone out there ask MF if they could contribute in a constructive way towards Online Dominion by asking if MF would make a public-facing API or log file interface or something so that the changes made by the dll patch would be scalable, sustainable, etc? This would be a much better solution: something a lot more like Salvager, only still compatible with MF's continued development of their product.
If you don't want to be part of the solution, if you want to use the patch, fine. But if that's the route you take, please don't scream obcenities at the top of your lungs while the people who actually want to help are trying to have a mature conversation. The community here a year ago would have been able to handle this, let's see if it still can.
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Adam, I think you are taking a lot of things personally that are not meant personally. I also think you, I, and the majority of the rest of the forums want the same thing - good online Dominion. I also think you are committing the (understandable) internet mistake of assuming the (worst) few are representative of the many.
As an example, pst's poll is excellent and I see nothing negative directed at him in that thread. I see some comments that the poll could have been set up differently, but that's a normal discussion about the topic at hand and not an attack on him as the OP.
Anyway, post in the MF forums! Link them to pst's thread! I think the best way to improve Dominion Online is to lead by example (as opposed to long threads like this, but I know your heart's in the right place). I shall endeavor to do so as well.
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"I wish we still had Goko around..." Not a phrase I ever thought I'd hear uttered. And honestly I think MF now is a much better company, and in much better shape, than Goko was at release. Yes, they're clinging to a lot of old Goko shit for "feature parity", but most of the things they've created on their own and introduced have been quite nice. Look at the art in the campaigns, the overall design for the store and kingdom generator and such (barring whatever the hell they did to the seeking game crystal ball). It looks a lot better than Goko's.
Was MF's first "open beta" version disappointing? Yes. Do they still have issues to work on? Certainly. Is yelling at them like a dog who took a shit on your carpet going to help? No. I doubt yelling at a shitting dog even helps in that instance. We need to be firm, persistent, and critical, but not hateful.
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The latest version MF has some options to turn off animations.
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I want a deckbuilder to be a big deal someday, top 10 twitch thing someday. I don't really care whether it's Dominion, but at the current trajectory, that deckbuilder will never be Dominion. So I'm partial to the idea of online Dominion dying, that one day the deckbuilding flames may be reborn with a Big Deckbuilder, whether or not it's DXV that makes it, and he very well may, he's a great designer.
Such a death has a minor personal cost to me, as I do enjoy a little online Dominion from time to time, even in the current rough state. But it's not a big deal to me to go play my second favorite game while I wait for the Second Coming.
Perhaps AdamH will be less frustrated with the unconstructive nature of my posting in light of this knowledge. Honesty is better than the alternative, right?
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As an example, pst's poll is excellent and I see nothing negative directed at him in that thread. I see some comments that the poll could have been set up differently, but that's a normal discussion about the topic at hand and not an attack on him as the OP.
Anyway, post in the MF forums! Link them to pst's thread! I think the best way to improve Dominion Online is to lead by example (as opposed to long threads like this, but I know your heart's in the right place). I shall endeavor to do so as well.
I think Adam meant the comments directed at MF:
I really hope they go bankrupt if not today, then at least tomorrow, but seeing that they've just started branching out into the highly profitable business of selling fake passports (http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?7956-Purchase-Passports-visas-driver-s-license-ID-cards), visa's (http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?7957-Passports-buying-visas-driving-licenses-identity-cards-etc-%28paul_ericson75-yahoo-com%29) and driving licenses (http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?7955-Passports-buying-visas-driving-licenses-identity-cards-etc-%28paul_ericson75-yahoo-com%29), we're likely stuck with them for the foreseeable future.
With Goko/MF it's exactly the opposite. Whatever they do, they always find some way to screw it up.
Sure the functionality meets the basic needs, but you know they never used it much themselves, nor did they have a good feeling for the people that were going to.
Whoever works on it probably wishes he was doing something else.
I think this isn't a tone at which you're likely to let MF know: Oh, this guy, we should take him seriously. I think I wouldn't. However, most points SCSN makes in his post are truly valid: the match making is far from ideal and the chat should be in another place. I just don't get why it has to be said with this in the appendix. Also, the bold claims Stef makes in his post aren't really showing 'imagining other people complexly'.
And this surely isn't the harshest topic, and these surely not the harshest example and no one should feel like I'm attacking them personally. Because, frankly, I'm not.
However, I think we and MF both want a good Dominion experience: why else would they waste so much time and effort on making a product at all. Sure, the thing is far from perfect and I can name 5 things I would like changed from the top of my head. However, I don't think they're trying to 'ruin' Dominion Online once and for all and they eat orphan flesh and build meat dragons (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJOwdrTA8Gw) and they have a secret lab (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mws7gNM0Hpk) to go to and then they think of a plan, scream 'it's brilliant, brilliant, brrrilliant (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL0WDTcOZcM)' and then laugh with a lightning strike on the background.
I honestly don't.
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If anyone needs to be personally attacked, I volunteer as tribute.
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I wish we still had Goko around
I don't. I vastly prefer MF's Windows client over Goko + Salvager. With SCSN's patch, I prefer it over Isotropic. The reason why it's good now is that they've changed most of the things we've complained about. Complaining about it here might not help much, but if it doesn't help, it doesn't hurt either. I think the main thing that we could be doing better is taking the complaints to f.mf.
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I think you make a lot of very valid points about the fact that MF is who we've got, and if we love Dominion enough (as most of us do), finding constructive ways to approach the problems with the latest version are the best way to go.
However, I don't see how taking steps to make the game a more pleasant experience (with either the original Salavger or SCSN's .dll removing of animations) is not a constructive approach. Complaining about MF being terrible? Yeah, that gets us nowhere. But the popularity of the original Salavger and its features directly influenced things that were done in 2.0 - just look at the in-game log. I think the most proactive thing anyone can do is to say "this is not good enough, and I'm taking it into my own hands." That tells the developers how many people are dissatisfied with the problems and to what extent people are willing to do something about it.
What confuses me about your complaints is that this hardly seems different than the original Salvager in terms of its scope, and you didn't seem to have any problems with that fan-made extension to the original software. You're entitled to your opinion, but I don't see any difference, nor any real way in which it is more harmful.
Also, so this doesn't seem personal, as I post here like twice a year, I want to commend you for your contributions to the community! Your streams and League championship commentary are excellent, and you are a great ambassador for Dominion! I think it would do everyone well to look more toward a common goal of improving the online experience (which I'm sure everyone can agree on) and get past this in-fighting over how much everything sucks.
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What confuses me about your complaints is that this hardly seems different than the original Salvager in terms of its scope, and you didn't seem to have any problems with that fan-made extension to the original software.
It's the difference between making a new steering wheel for people to rip the factory wheel out of their Camrys and replace in if they're unsatisfied, versus selling a pair of driving gloves suggested for Camrys, in terms of architecture. There is some difference there.
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The dll patch is getting in the way of making Dominion Online a better experience.
Look, a decent amount of work has gone into that, and I'm not going to deny that it seems to make people's experience with v43 more enjoyable. Great. If you want to use it for your own benefit, if you want to sink time into expanding its capabilities, go right ahead and do that. Let's assume that it isn't a total waste of time. The fact is that MF is still making versions of their software that will eventually incorporate these features in a way that is actually robust and sustainable. The dll patch is a bandage that needs to be replaced every time there's an update to the software: the more complex and fancy you make that bandage, the more work it is to replace it. There is no guarantee that the dll patch isn't introducing new problems into the equation, and if someone experiences an issue that they want to report to MF, it can't really be handled properly with the patch installed.
Let me be clear: the patch in a vacuum is not the problem, it's the way our community has handled the patch and made grossly incorrect assumptions about the reality of MF's product from it. Did anyone out there ask MF if they could contribute in a constructive way towards Online Dominion by asking if MF would make a public-facing API or log file interface or something so that the changes made by the dll patch would be scalable, sustainable, etc? This would be a much better solution: something a lot more like Salvager, only still compatible with MF's continued development of their product.
If you don't want to be part of the solution, if you want to use the patch, fine. But if that's the route you take, please don't scream obcenities at the top of your lungs while the people who actually want to help are trying to have a mature conversation. The community here a year ago would have been able to handle this, let's see if it still can.
I dont understand your argument. How does any of this get in the way of makingOnline Dominion a better experience?
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The dll patch is getting in the way of making Dominion Online a better experience.
Lol! I take full responsibility for Dominion Online not being a lot better than it currently is. Sorry guys! Please don't beat me up too hard.
Let's assume that it isn't a total waste of time.
Of course it's a total waste of time—all of life is, including the ten thousands of hours we collectively spend playing Dominion. But what a marvelous waste it all is!
I love working on the patch, I love what the patch ends up doing for me, and I love that other people love what the patch ends up doing for them. The only thing I'm disappointed about is that you failed to appreciate this great gesture of love. I even included a function specifically for you:
private void checkUsername(string username)
{
if(username == "Adam Horton")
{
demandInKingdom(Cards.BlackMarket);
}
}
But even this I don't consider a waste of time, as I'm sure that you'll see the light some day (both with the patch and with Black Market). In the meantime: good luck with your own ways of making Dominion Online a better experience. They dramatically differ from mine, but the world would be one hell of a boring place if we all did the same thing.
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Adam, I think you are taking a lot of things personally that are not meant personally. I also think you, I, and the majority of the rest of the forums want the same thing - good online Dominion. I also think you are committing the (understandable) internet mistake of assuming the (worst) few are representative of the many.
The one thing I took personally: being asked to stop posting in SCSN's thread. Countless posts are critical of MF developers in a way that is insensitive enough to be taken personally by them if they read them, and as a developer myself I empathize with them. Whether or not these things were meant personally doesn't excuse how insensitive they are.
As an example, pst's poll is excellent and I see nothing negative directed at him in that thread. I see some comments that the poll could have been set up differently, but that's a normal discussion about the topic at hand and not an attack on him as the OP.
If I was him, I'd be annoyed at the way that discussion has gone. But I tried to be careful not to speak for him on that matter. Sorry if I was unclear.
Anyway, post in the MF forums! Link them to pst's thread! I think the best way to improve Dominion Online is to lead by example (as opposed to long threads like this, but I know your heart's in the right place). I shall endeavor to do so as well.
I have PMs and E-mails with various members of the MF staff. Things have been improved as a direct result of these things. I've been trying my best to get some feedback from this community to give to them, but it's so difficult and frustrating to do. I'm going to continue doing what I'm doing, this thread has little to do with that.
I want a deckbuilder to be a big deal someday, top 10 twitch thing someday. I don't really care whether it's Dominion, but at the current trajectory, that deckbuilder will never be Dominion. So I'm partial to the idea of online Dominion dying, that one day the deckbuilding flames may be reborn with a Big Deckbuilder, whether or not it's DXV that makes it, and he very well may, he's a great designer.
Such a death has a minor personal cost to me, as I do enjoy a little online Dominion from time to time, even in the current rough state. But it's not a big deal to me to go play my second favorite game while I wait for the Second Coming.
Perhaps AdamH will be less frustrated with the unconstructive nature of my posting in light of this knowledge. Honesty is better than the alternative, right?
I want a deckbuilder to be the same thing. I've spent countless hours making Dominion on Twitch a thing; providing resources for people to get streaming, trying to grow the audience in every single way I can imagine for my stream but also for everyone who wants to stream Dominion. I think I can safely say that I've done more on this front than anyone else in the world, by a lot. Dominion is certainly the closest thing we have that could get there: I'm not ready to give up, I'm not even close. It's true that the quality of MF's client will influence Dominion Online's success as a game that's streamed: this is one of the reasons I'm trying so hard to improve it (and have already done far more than anyone else on F.DS with the exception of DXV himself in terms of results).
You have done nothing but whine and say incredibly insensitive, hateful, and just plain incorrect things about MF. Why do you want Dominion to fail? Do you think some other deckbuilder can't succeed as long as anyone is playing Dominion on a computer? I'm trying to build something up here by being productive: you have done the exact opposite. So while I appreciate your honesty, I will still ask you to change.
What confuses me about your complaints is that this hardly seems different than the original Salvager in terms of its scope, and you didn't seem to have any problems with that fan-made extension to the original software. You're entitled to your opinion, but I don't see any difference, nor any real way in which it is more harmful.
I dont understand your argument. How does any of this get in the way of makingOnline Dominion a better experience?
Thank you for asking this, I will try to elaborate on this so it makes more sense, because I can see how it wouldn't. If I get details wrong, I'm sorry, but I've heard directly from the developers that this is the case so I can assure you that if there's a hole in my argument, it's because I screwed up talking about it.
Salvager came about (for the most part) after Goko was done making changes on its software, though there was some overlap. Most of the features of Salvager didn't involve changing the way Goko's client functioned, but rather reading certain bits of information and using the browser to present them in a way that was more pleasing. There was pretty much no risk of messing up the way Goko ran because you were running Salvager.
This is not entirely true, some of the features added later on did this, but if I remember correctly (some details are admittedly a little fuzzy, so if I'm wrong please someone correct me) that was done after it was clear Goko wasn't ever going to get better without being scrapped and turned into what we have now with MF. The important distinction is that we weren't getting in the way of Goko improving their product the right way.
The dll patch doesn't do any of these things in that same way. It modifies the binaries that are running MF's app, so it's plausible that problems could be introduced this way. This actually makes it harder for MF to track down issues because now you have to verify that it's not because of the dll patch. Effectively, your feedback isn't valuable to MF if you are using the dll patch while collecting it.
It's implementing features that MF is planning to implement anyways, which seems a little strange to me, but that particular part isn't hurting anything other than our reputation. I also realize I'm not going to win people over trying to argue that: someone made a button you can press that makes things prettier right now, OK some people want to press the button.
There are ways to accomplish what the dll patch does that don't have these issues. They require (or would be greatly aided by) MF's support, but nobody bothered to ask them for it. Maybe it's not possible, but man, did we have to just do this thing without even asking?
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You either aren't understanding my point, or you do and you're being a troll. I'd appreciate it if you did neither. Or you could just not post in my thread, I don't appreciate your interference.
Just because you want your patch to be perfect doesn't make it so. There are real consequences to what you're doing, which is why MF has made a EULA that prevents you from doing it. Being insensitive and dismissive doesn't make you correct. Get over yourself.
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You either aren't understanding my point, or you do and you're being a troll. I'd appreciate it if you did neither. Or you could just not post in my thread, I don't appreciate your interference.
Just because you want your patch to be perfect doesn't make it so. There are real consequences to what you're doing, which is why MF has made a EULA that prevents you from doing it. Being insensitive and dismissive doesn't make you correct. Get over yourself.
I'm being friendly here and still you feel the need to go on with this silly hostility? I'm more than willing to bury the hatchet and move on.
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Dudes, you guys both need to troll eachother's threads. It's better for the long term if people butt heads and express their ideas. Where would the world be if Stephen Douglas asked Lincoln to go home so he could switch over to monologue as soon as they disagreed in the debate, or vice versa.
It was wrong for SCSN to tell you to leave his thread, and it is wrong for you to tell SCSN to leave this thread. As long as you're on topic and not disrupting a forum game, you should have free speech to communicate your ideas in any on-topic thread you choose. You guys need to respectfully agree to disagree about things and both let the community hear your angle on the story so that we benefit from the maximum number of view points and maximum amount of discussion. Neither of you have like, told somebody there mother is a murloc, so there's nothing intolerable about the manner of disagreement such that it's not beneficial.
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There are ways to accomplish what the dll patch does that don't have these issues. They require (or would be greatly aided by) MF's support, but nobody bothered to ask them for it. Maybe it's not possible, but man, did we have to just do this thing without even asking?
People have been asking for specific features for over a year. Over and over and over we've had polls and discussions about what we want to see changed, what's the worst problem, what information do we send to MF, etc. And so far MF has responded with almost nothing. Not a damn thing.
So someone decides to take care of some of the features in an entirely optional patch that is a pain to install--this isn't a Chrome plugin that you just click a button--and your best argument against the patch is that MF might not be able to tell if a problem is caused by the changed DLL. But the only people who are using the changed DLL are the sort of people who can figure out that if there's a bug, and they want to send info to MF, they're going to have to remove the patch. Seriously, come on, you're assuming that we're all unreasonable or stupid.
More later...
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I don't think the concerns raised against SCSN's patch are very well founded. I suppose you have a point that if everyone here just stopped talking to MF and only relied on SCSN to make to playable, then they would have a hard time knowing what the clients (us) want, but I don't think that's going to happen. They don't seem to be in danger of not knowing what things are wrong.
I'm not sure you should be differentiating it from Salvager so much. It's an end-user modification that changes your game experience, and individuals get to choose whether to use it or not. These things are good, and really shouldn't be discouraged.
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Dudes, you guys both need to troll eachother's threads. It's better for the long term if people butt heads and express their ideas. Where would the world be if Stephen Douglas asked Lincoln to go home so he could switch over to monologue as soon as they disagreed in the debate, or vice versa.
It was wrong for SCSN to tell you to leave his thread, and it is wrong for you to tell SCSN to leave this thread. As long as you're on topic and not disrupting a forum game, you should have free speech to communicate your ideas in any on-topic thread you choose. You guys need to respectfully agree to disagree about things and both let the community hear your angle on the story so that we benefit from the maximum number of view points and maximum amount of discussion. Neither of you have like, told somebody there mother is a murloc, so there's nothing intolerable about the manner of disagreement such that it's not beneficial.
Pretty sure that kind of talk belongs over in the Hearthstone threads. This here is about Dominion.
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I'm being friendly here and still you feel the need to go on with this silly hostility? I'm more than willing to bury the hatchet and move on.
If you want to bury the hatchet, start here.
please leave this thread alone.
And until you have something meaningful to add to this discussion, then I would prefer it if you said nothing.
Just because you call yourself friendly doesn't mean you are.
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There are ways to accomplish what the dll patch does that don't have these issues. They require (or would be greatly aided by) MF's support, but nobody bothered to ask them for it. Maybe it's not possible, but man, did we have to just do this thing without even asking?
People have been asking for specific features for over a year. Over and over and over we've had polls and discussions about what we want to see changed, what's the worst problem, what information do we send to MF, etc. And so far MF has responded with almost nothing. Not a damn thing.
So someone decides to take care of some of the features in an entirely optional patch that is a pain to install--this isn't a Chrome plugin that you just click a button--and your best argument against the patch is that MF might not be able to tell if a problem is caused by the changed DLL. But the only people who are using the changed DLL are the sort of people who can figure out that if there's a bug, and they want to send info to MF, they're going to have to remove the patch. Seriously, come on, you're assuming that we're all unreasonable or stupid.
More later...
This is basically what I was getting at above, but better said.
Though, in MF's defense, they did speed up the game quite a bit in their recent releases, which is (I believe) one of the things the patch does.
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There are real consequences to what you're doing, which is why MF has made a EULA that prevents you from doing it.
Donald made it clear that if MF tried to enforce that part of the EULA with any sort of sanctions on SCSN (or anyone using the patch), that he would be supremely unhappy... and that he can pull the plug on MF.
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I'm being friendly here and still you feel the need to go on with this silly hostility? I'm more than willing to bury the hatchet and move on.
If you want to bury the hatchet, start here.
please leave this thread alone.
The meaning of the paragraph I wrote can't be reduced to its final segment, so here is it in its entirety:
To be clear: I made this patch for my personal use and decided to release it for the benefit of others. If you like to use it: you're welcome and I'll continue to provice you updates for as long as I'm capable. If you're not interested: you're equally welcome, but please leave this thread alone.
To make another attempt at reconciliation: you're more than welcome to resume posting in my thread, though I'm personally not interested in legal considerations and to the extent that there is stuff you'd still like to add on that specific matter, it's better to discuss that in a separate thread (taking into account Donald's excellent response explaining why any legal action from MF would be extremely unlikely).
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There are ways to accomplish what the dll patch does that don't have these issues. They require (or would be greatly aided by) MF's support, but nobody bothered to ask them for it. Maybe it's not possible, but man, did we have to just do this thing without even asking?
People have been asking for specific features for over a year. Over and over and over we've had polls and discussions about what we want to see changed, what's the worst problem, what information do we send to MF, etc. And so far MF has responded with almost nothing. Not a damn thing.
So someone decides to take care of some of the features in an entirely optional patch that is a pain to install--this isn't a Chrome plugin that you just click a button--and your best argument against the patch is that MF might not be able to tell if a problem is caused by the changed DLL. But the only people who are using the changed DLL are the sort of people who can figure out that if there's a bug, and they want to send info to MF, they're going to have to remove the patch. Seriously, come on, you're assuming that we're all unreasonable or stupid.
More later...
This is basically what I was getting at above, but better said.
Though, in MF's defense, they did speed up the game quite a bit in their recent releases, which is (I believe) one of the things the patch does.
The whole point of this thread is to get people like you to reconsider your views. You're upset, but the facts behind the reasons why you're upset are just incorrect.
If they're not moving fast enough for you, sorry. But they're getting things done, and tearing them down will only make it take longer.
Seriously, come on, you're assuming that we're all unreasonable or stupid.
Have you been reading the posts here? Just see it from MF's perspective and you'll understand why they don't post here anymore.
There are real consequences to what you're doing, which is why MF has made a EULA that prevents you from doing it.
Donald made it clear that if MF tried to enforce that part of the EULA with any sort of sanctions on SCSN (or anyone using the patch), that he would be supremely unhappy... and that he can pull the plug on MF.
Well I don't think they're going to enforce that (to the best of my knowledge) so it doesn't really matter: the point I was trying to make is that we never considered working with them, we just skipped right to the part where we're getting in their way.
And I don't know what Donald's intentions are, but suffice it to say that I think pulling the plug on MF for doing that would be a really bad move on his part and I would lose a lot of respect for him. Luckily, that's not happening in this universe so it doesn't matter at all.
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We've spent pages of posts complaining about MF's software engineering process that we know absolutely nothing about. We've spent pages of posts complaining about MF's source code that we know absolutely nothing about
This is an absurd claim. We know plenty about their software engineering process by just looking at what they've produced: a bug-ridden rewrite (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html) that has been in development way longer than it should have. We don't need the source to know things are bad.
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We've spent pages of posts complaining about MF's software engineering process that we know absolutely nothing about. We've spent pages of posts complaining about MF's source code that we know absolutely nothing about
This is an absurd claim. We know plenty about their software engineering process by just looking at what they've produced: a bug-ridden rewrite (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html) that has been in development way longer than it should have. We don't need the source to know things are bad.
This is simply incorrect and it's exactly the kind of insensitive stuff that is so unbecoming of us. I don't understand how the article you link is relevant for supporting your claim. I don't know what evidence you have to support your claim that their software is "bad".
I really think you should reconsider your opinion.
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To make another attempt at reconciliation: you're more than welcome to resume posting in my thread, though I'm personally not interested in legal considerations and to the extent that there is stuff you'd still like to add on the matter, it's better to discuss that in a separate thread (taking into account Donald's excellent response explaining why any legal action from MF would be extremely unlikely).
It's OK when DXV talks about the legal considerations in your thread because that's what you wanted to hear. You kicked me out because I said something you didn't like. If I'm wrong, prove it.
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We didn't try working with them? I think all the flaws of their implementation where pointed out in their forum month ago.
Also, I think it's highly unlikely that the patch slowed down improvements of the NF client. I don't believe the ioption to turn off animations was implemented so quickly after the patch was released is a coincidence.
Also, with the client not being beta anymore, accepting a worse experience in order to find potential bugs more easily is ridiculous.
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I don't know what evidence you have to support your claim that their software is "bad".
With us being the customers, our opinion of it is what determines wether the software is bad or not.
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the point I was trying to make is that we never considered working with them, we just skipped right to the part where we're getting in their way.
This does not seem like a fair characterization. I don't think anything done here has gotten in their way, unless you just mean complaining. But it's, like, a forum.
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To make another attempt at reconciliation: you're more than welcome to resume posting in my thread, though I'm personally not interested in legal considerations and to the extent that there is stuff you'd still like to add on the matter, it's better to discuss that in a separate thread (taking into account Donald's excellent response explaining why any legal action from MF would be extremely unlikely).
It's OK when DXV talks about the legal considerations in your thread because that's what you wanted to hear. You kicked me out because I said something you didn't like. If I'm wrong, prove it.
I offered to bury the hatchet, not to revive an old fight or pick up a new one.
Here is my hand, it's up to you to shake it.
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We didn't try working with them? I think all the flaws of their implementation where pointed out in their forum month ago.
They've fixed some of what we told them back then and will fix the rest when they can. The fact that some people here don't like how quickly that's happening doesn't change the fact that they are still doing what we asked.
I don't believe the ioption to turn off animations was implemented so quickly after the patch was released is a coincidence.
I have messages from people at MF dated from before the patch was ever talked about saying that all animation issues we had talked about should be worked in by versions 42 and 43, including the option to turn them off. Did you read their release notes?
Also, with the client not being beta anymore, accepting a worse experience in order to find potential bugs more easily is ridiculous.
I never said people shouldn't use the patch if they want to (in this thread). The point I'm trying to make is that if you use the patch, then your voice on what they should improve shouldn't take that into account...
The problem of actually hindering progress can be mitigated if we just know how to deal with it. That's all I'm trying to do here. SCSN thinks his you-know-what doesn't stink and a bunch of people upvoted his posts, so yay it's as simple as 1-2-3! No, there's more to it than that. Let's not trip over ourselves trying to make things better.
And you also don't get to have it both ways: you can't go behind MF's back with this patch and at the same time claim you're trying to help without telling the whole story, all while saying incorrect and insensitive things about the MF developers. Either you're trying to help, or you're just here to whine and get your juice box.
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I think the reason why people are mad is because we participated in the closed beta and made some suggestions that still aren't implemented. That being said, I'm happy with what they've done and that the client has been improving rather rapidly. I still don't like that the game looks like it's from the 90s (trust me my wife thought I was playing an old version of it with the cursor) but performance-wise, it's coming along. I did play a game with navigator the other day and the dragging mechanism needs to be high on their list.
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To make another attempt at reconciliation: you're more than welcome to resume posting in my thread, though I'm personally not interested in legal considerations and to the extent that there is stuff you'd still like to add on the matter, it's better to discuss that in a separate thread (taking into account Donald's excellent response explaining why any legal action from MF would be extremely unlikely).
It's OK when DXV talks about the legal considerations in your thread because that's what you wanted to hear. You kicked me out because I said something you didn't like. If I'm wrong, prove it.
I offered to bury the hatchet, not to revive an old fight or pick up a new one.
Here is my hand, it's up to you to shake it.
You should invite him to post in your thread without caveating it.
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We've spent pages of posts complaining about MF's software engineering process that we know absolutely nothing about. We've spent pages of posts complaining about MF's source code that we know absolutely nothing about
This is an absurd claim. We know plenty about their software engineering process by just looking at what they've produced: a bug-ridden rewrite (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html) that has been in development way longer than it should have. We don't need the source to know things are bad.
This is simply incorrect and it's exactly the kind of insensitive stuff that is so unbecoming of us. I don't understand how the article you link is relevant for supporting your claim. I don't know what evidence you have to support your claim that their software is "bad".
I really think you should reconsider your opinion.
Likewise, I would really appreciate some evidence from you to support the contrary. My post was talking about their software engineering practices, not the software itself.
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Also, I think it's highly unlikely that the patch slowed down improvements of the NF client. I don't believe the ioption to turn off animations was implemented so quickly after the patch was released is a coincidence.
In fairness, I'm totally willing to believe it was a coincidence. It was on their list and they got around to it.
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You are absolutely correct that things are getting better - I agree! What makes us all so frustrated is that one of the big reasons things are getting better is that they just gave us a way to turn off a feature that they added. Months later, we (most visibly) went one step back, one step forward.
Now there are features I like they've added they don't get enough credit for: re-match, for one, is amazing. It could use some work (start player based on loser of previous match, for example) but the ability itself is splendid and I use it a lot.
On the other hand, I think it's reasonable to feel that
1) things are getting better
2) things aren't getting better fast enough
because at the pace they're going, it is entirely reasonable to think it will take a year to get to an online client most of us would be happy with. And even then, I'd be worried you were being optimistic. We saw how the long wait for a re-write left us with something identical.
It's not impossible to both be happy with improvements and frustrated with the pace.
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To make another attempt at reconciliation: you're more than welcome to resume posting in my thread, though I'm personally not interested in legal considerations and to the extent that there is stuff you'd still like to add on the matter, it's better to discuss that in a separate thread (taking into account Donald's excellent response explaining why any legal action from MF would be extremely unlikely).
It's OK when DXV talks about the legal considerations in your thread because that's what you wanted to hear. You kicked me out because I said something you didn't like. If I'm wrong, prove it.
I offered to bury the hatchet, not to revive an old fight or pick up a new one.
Here is my hand, it's up to you to shake it.
You should invite him to post in your thread without caveating it.
Adam is welcome to post in my thread just like everyone else.
The caveat that I prefer discussion to be about feedback and suggestions, and that matters of legality and/or MF be moved to (a) separate thread(s) apply to everyone equally.
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To make another attempt at reconciliation: you're more than welcome to resume posting in my thread, though I'm personally not interested in legal considerations and to the extent that there is stuff you'd still like to add on the matter, it's better to discuss that in a separate thread (taking into account Donald's excellent response explaining why any legal action from MF would be extremely unlikely).
It's OK when DXV talks about the legal considerations in your thread because that's what you wanted to hear. You kicked me out because I said something you didn't like. If I'm wrong, prove it.
I offered to bury the hatchet, not to revive an old fight or pick up a new one.
Here is my hand, it's up to you to shake it.
You should invite him to post in your thread without caveating it.
Adam is welcome to post in my thread just like everyone else.
The caveat that I prefer discussion to be about feedback and suggestions, and that matters of legality and/or MF be moved to (a) separate thread(s) apply to everyone equally.
So if Donald posts some followup, you will tell him to make a separate thread?
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Yes, in fact if I had modding powers I'd have split off into a separate thread all the legal talk—including Donald's contributions—long ago, and I probably should have asked theory or michaeljb to do just that in the first place. In any case, right now the thread is on topic and I'd like it to remain that way.
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I offered to bury the hatchet, not to revive an old fight or pick up a new one.
Here is my hand, it's up to you to shake it.
I'm not interested in shaking or not shaking your hand so that you can look good by offering to do this. It seems like you don't even understand anything you've said to me that might have come across the wrong way. If you really want to bury the hatchet, you have to acknowledge that the hatchet exists, and actually dig a hole, etc. You can't just say "everything is OK" and expect things to be fine from now on.
Do you not understand why I still feel slighted by your response in that thread? Here's a hint: putting it in context doesn't change the way I feel about it, I had the context then, you know.
Yes, in fact if I had modding powers I'd have split off into a separate thread all the legal talk—including Donald's contributions—long ago, and I probably should have asked theory or michaeljb to do just that in the first place. In any case, right now the thread is on topic and I'd like it to remain that way.
Making this happen would go a long way towards me believing you, but you were just fine telling me to go eff off but you didn't say a single word to DXV or anyone else at the time who supported your claim. You also ignored every other thing I said in that thread that was trying to get some value out of what you had done -- that all just went out the window.
Whether you chose to dismiss me because of my arguments or it was personal doesn't really matter. You put something out there into the internet and don't feel like you have to deal with any of the negative consequences of it, you just want to accept the praise. And it was at my expense and nobody else's. It didn't make me feel good, and until you realize that and maybe try and do something about it, I'm not really interested in attempting a conversation with you in it -- it's just "interference".
...and if we can get past that, we may visit all of the personal attacks you've made on me in the chat during my league matches when I wasn't looking. I review those videos, you know. We have a long way to go before hands get shaken.
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We've spent pages of posts complaining about MF's software engineering process that we know absolutely nothing about. We've spent pages of posts complaining about MF's source code that we know absolutely nothing about
This is an absurd claim. We know plenty about their software engineering process by just looking at what they've produced: a bug-ridden rewrite (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html) that has been in development way longer than it should have. We don't need the source to know things are bad.
This is simply incorrect and it's exactly the kind of insensitive stuff that is so unbecoming of us. I don't understand how the article you link is relevant for supporting your claim. I don't know what evidence you have to support your claim that their software is "bad".
I really think you should reconsider your opinion.
Likewise, I would really appreciate some evidence from you to support the contrary. My post was talking about their software engineering practices, not the software itself.
I'm not trying to say they're amazing. I'm not making a positive claim here. You said they were bad, I'm asking you to prove it, I don't have a burden of proof here. My position is that we don't know enough about their SW engineering practices to make a judgment about them.
I would think it takes evidence to back up the strong words that have been used about them, and the evidence that has been presented so far has not been valid or compelling to me.
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You are absolutely correct that things are getting better - I agree! What makes us all so frustrated is that one of the big reasons things are getting better is that they just gave us a way to turn off a feature that they added. Months later, we (most visibly) went one step back, one step forward.
Now there are features I like they've added they don't get enough credit for: re-match, for one, is amazing. It could use some work (start player based on loser of previous match, for example) but the ability itself is splendid and I use it a lot.
On the other hand, I think it's reasonable to feel that
1) things are getting better
2) things aren't getting better fast enough
because at the pace they're going, it is entirely reasonable to think it will take a year to get to an online client most of us would be happy with. And even then, I'd be worried you were being optimistic. We saw how the long wait for a re-write left us with something identical.
It's not impossible to both be happy with improvements and frustrated with the pace.
They've said a few times that with them not having to keep Goko functional, they can make changes a lot faster.
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They've said a few times that with them not having to keep Goko functional, they can make changes a lot faster.
I certainly want this to be true. But this is a great example of what I'm talking about - I've heard this before. Back when they re-wrote all the code, I thought, "Oh hey, a lot of this is crap, but they're starting from scratch - so many of these fundamental flaws can be fixed! Then it'll just be standard bugs/fancy feature-adding to the finish line. Huzzah!"
So I want to believe the pace of improvement is going to increase. I really do. But I have no faith that reality will materialize. I would love to be wrong.
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I think it's just a lot easier to change your own code instead of other people's.
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I please hope that what I have to say will be heard amongst the fighting. I THINK MF DOMINION IS BASICALLY THERE WITH BEING A BETTER EXPEREIENCE THAN GOKO.
HOWEVER, it would be nice if we could be matched with other people our similar skill level. This is actually super important imo, but I'm not gonna rage about it, I think enough people have done that already. I've not been posting during this conflict about MF, not because I don't care. I actually care ALOT! I Can agree with things on both sides of the argument. I think MF is almost there guys. If they can just add a matchmaker and fix a few other MINOR issues, I think we would have a product we ALL can enjoy.
Thanks, Microman
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so that you can look good by offering to do this.
Looking good to some people on the internet is the last thing I care about. I would never have picked this username if it were otherwise. I'm spending my evening on writing these posts because I want to make things up. There are some unanswered posts in the patch thread right now that I'd find much more joy in responding to (let alone actually working on the thing), so if nothing else: at least grant me the courtesy of accepting that my intentions are genuine.
It didn't make me feel good, and until you realize that
You banning me from your chat so that I couldn't comment on the championship match—something I had been looking forward to for most of the afternoon—didn't feel good either. Mic eventually unbanned me out of pity after I sent him countless of tear-soaked pms, but it was only for the last two games, and the whole affair had already ruined what would otherwise have been an enjoyable experience.
We've both done and/or said things the other would rather have seen we didn't, so we're both responsible for things getting ugly between us (and I do understand most the things you wrote). I don't think exhaustively recounting who did what, determining the precise share of blame and screaming at the other person that he should be the one making amends is going to bring us any closer to a resolution, so I'll leave it at this: I'm willing to get over it and be happy to forgive and move on. I hope you're willing to do the same.
...and if we can get past that, we may visit all of the personal attacks you've made on me in the chat during my league matches when I wasn't looking.
There are two things I should make clear about my comments on people's Dominion game in the chat of streams and, to a lesser extent, also on this forum in general:
1. I'm saying the exact same things to people's faces as I say behind their back. My comments to streams are made with the full knowledge that they might and probably will be read back later, so there's absolutely no sneakiness or cowardice going on. I take full responsibility for all of them. I'm also not applying different standards to different people, except for the common sense thing of focussing on the big issues with worse players and the smaller issues with better ones who are more likely to do the big things right.
2. None of my comments about someone's game are ever meant as a judgment of the player as a human being. I mean, I do horrible things and pick atrocious strategies all the time and say exactly that about my own game in my stream, that doesn't make me a terrible person lol. In fact I cannot comprehend why people would ever conflate the two. Would anyone take it personal if a 3-year old came up to them and said "bladeeboo daa"? I'm exactly like that 3-year old, although he's likely more intelligent and definitely more inventive. I'm just spewing nonsense all the time, though usually with a core of seriousness inside them. Laugh off the hull—that's what it's meant for most of all—and you get to the useful bit within.
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How did you know I have a soft spot for Will Smith? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSpJQlBJCzA&t=1m41s)
Let me be clear: if you say something that I think is personal or beyond the line, I'm not going to have any extra tolerance for it.
But anyways, I'll go the other 10% here. We can be fine again.
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Man, I offered you a handshake, a kiss is taking things too far.
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Man, all I want is a game that does not lag and adventures would be nice
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Man, all I want is a game that does not lag and adventures would be nice
that is clearly too much to ask for
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I want a game that offers a handshake and a kiss.
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I want a game that offers a handshake and a kiss.
There's a name for those kinds of games.
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I want a game that offers a handshake and a kiss.
There's a name for those kinds of games.
.... Making "Fun"?
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Let's assume that MF's developers are completely incompetent and that we are entitled to a better gaming experience than what they offer.
If it's not just one guy then it could be a decent guy and two awful guys or whatever - they're each their own person.
I think obv. they are not completely incompetent. They have basically blown it one way, that's right, I can get it down to one thing. That one thing is speed. What they have is fine for some point along the journey from nothing to the perfect program; it's just taken too long to get here.
I don't know how many man-hours Dominion gets per week, or whatever else. At one point somebody (supposed to be working on Dominion for MF) wasn't doing anything and was fired or some such; I'm not digging up the exact story because I probably shouldn't tell it. But you know. I can believe there's some of that, and some "we have to spend our time on these hidden pictures programs that pay the bills." Still, progress has been too slow.
The only way we have of playing Dominion Online rests with Making Fun, and that will not change unless something big and unforseen happens.
I'm not sure that's true (maybe there's a Vassal version or something), but it's certainly the intention.
At this point Jay and I have to, while desperately trying not to be affected by the sunk cost fallacy, consider where we are and how best to get where we want to be. Despite the slow progress - and believe me Jay is not impressed - we don't see how to do better.
The MF Dominion client has been improving, and it still is being developed so it will continue to improve.
Yes, it's continuing to improve, which is crucial; again the issue from my perspective is entirely one of speed.
Wait a tick, shouldn't we have a voice in this? Yeah actually we should.
I'm not sure what this voice is supposed to accomplish or can hope to accomplish, that it isn't already accomplishing.
(fact: stuff that gets spit out of a decompiler does not resemble the code MF writes, and is not grounds to criticize their design or anything else about them).
That's partially right, partially wrong. Some things that look bad because it's decompiled might not look bad in the actual code; e.g., Jeff said the "if (x == 0)" ahead of multiplying x was there because there was commented-out debugging code that was supposed to be skipped (but wait, if it's only needed for debugging, why not tie it to the debugging and thus comment it out at the same time?). Other things that look bad are bad, they are not the decompiler giving the programmers a bad name.
The threads in here (the Dominion Online sub-board) have become so toxic, I'm seeing a side of people I used to have respect for that makes me want to have nothing to do with them.
Well I don't know your specific examples, but it feels a lot less bad to me than when I quit the forums.
Do we want to burn the bridge we have with MF, to throw away our chance to have our voice heard and to have features added that will make us happy?
I'm not sure there's even a way to do this. MF will consider you as people; if f.ds makes a big anti-MF statement and then Kirian posts some feature requests, they're not going to say "no way, you're one of those f.ds guys." If they somehow became career-suicide-insanely spiteful, they would still need to answer to me and Jay or be done.
The dll patch is getting in the way of making Dominion Online a better experience.
I don't see how this is possible. It means a few people who might complain about something might instead not bother, they've got a fix. But plenty of people don't have the patch and will complain about whatever it is; the complaining will get done for sure.
Did anyone out there ask MF if they could contribute in a constructive way towards Online Dominion by asking if MF would make a public-facing API or log file interface or something so that the changes made by the dll patch would be scalable, sustainable, etc? This would be a much better solution: something a lot more like Salvager, only still compatible with MF's continued development of their product.
I don't think MF will be interested in that in the short term, nor should they be; whatever man-hours they have for Dominion, man, let them spend them on the actual work. It's potentially something to bring up in the long term.
The logs are already public, if you know how to get at them, which I posted somewhere.
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Of course it's a total waste of time—all of life is, including the ten thousands of hours we collectively spend playing Dominion. But what a marvelous waste it all is!
I don't think is an accurate perspective. There's no universal context in which something can be judged to be a waste of time or not. Within smaller contexts, many things are not wastes of time, even time-wasting activities.
In general, when you can say some concept applies to everything, you've blown it on your concept; you'll get more value from words if you shift your concept so it does not apply to everything. And people tend to do this; they understand that a bad movie is a waste of time in a way that a good movie is not, and so on.
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We've spent pages of posts complaining about MF's software engineering process that we know absolutely nothing about. We've spent pages of posts complaining about MF's source code that we know absolutely nothing about
This is an absurd claim. We know plenty about their software engineering process by just looking at what they've produced: a bug-ridden rewrite (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html) that has been in development way longer than it should have. We don't need the source to know things are bad.
In the article you link to, the author is fond of absolute statements that help make a point more forcefully, but in fact underneath that he is saying, code that is working well probably should not be rewritten from scratch. Not that you should never rewrite working code, nor that you should probably not rewrite code that isn't working. He cites all the bug fixes and knowledge that went into the code being rewritten; he is only talking about code that actually has those fixes and that knowledge.
Obviously sometimes it is 100% the move to rewrite something from scratch. Usually, and ideally, that code never made it out.
We can argue about how good the Goko code was (and not just be guessing, since some of it was public), but it had significant issues, and was built to do something no longer wanted (support arbitrary new games). I do not fault MF at all for deciding to rewrite it from scratch.
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To make another attempt at reconciliation: you're more than welcome to resume posting in my thread, though I'm personally not interested in legal considerations and to the extent that there is stuff you'd still like to add on the matter, it's better to discuss that in a separate thread (taking into account Donald's excellent response explaining why any legal action from MF would be extremely unlikely).
It's OK when DXV talks about the legal considerations in your thread because that's what you wanted to hear. You kicked me out because I said something you didn't like. If I'm wrong, prove it.
Well that's probably partly true, but I mean, I'm me. I was going to get to articulate a popular opinion for sure.
Companies do not tend to get mad at fans who make mods, because that would be nuts and bad for business; note the lack of lawsuits over Salvager. I did not present the most basic or complete argument; I presented the argument that had the most chance of ending that line of reasoning.
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Also, I think it's highly unlikely that the patch slowed down improvements of the NF client. I don't believe the ioption to turn off animations was implemented so quickly after the patch was released is a coincidence.
In fairness, I'm totally willing to believe it was a coincidence. It was on their list and they got around to it.
I think there's no chance whatsoever that there's any connection. I personally told Jeff that that patch existed, and he said he'd already announced it in the MF forums as something coming in 2.0.43.
Then he read that thread and pointed out some of the incorrect assumptions about what the actual code looked like, based on the decompiled code.
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Did Jeff share any thoughts on inserting the "JackOfAllTrades" -> "Jack of All Trades" replacement line into the general log coloring function?
I hope he blamed it on that guy they fired—it's certainly what I would do and at least somewhat more believable than "the decompiler made it up".
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Did Jeff share any thoughts on inserting the "JackOfAllTrades" -> "Jack of All Trades" replacement line into the general log coloring function?
No, he didn't say anything about that, or my concern about using strings where enums are what you mean. He just made a few comments. I reported the bugs; he worked out that Possession was consistently misspelled (by an English-not-first-language person, yes you are Dutch and can scoff at that). He noted that the variable you called "white" they called something like "color." He remembered you from when David decided not to read these forums anymore.
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Haha, glad to hear the love is mutual. I hope David is still enjoying those TV shows of his that make him oblivious to their software's defects. There's some really captivating stuff out there these days, so I can't entirely fault him.
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I think obv. they are not completely incompetent. They have basically blown it one way, that's right, I can get it down to one thing. That one thing is speed. What they have is fine for some point along the journey from nothing to the perfect program; it's just taken too long to get here.
Maybe you have access to something I don't, but what does this even mean? Is it taking too long for your liking? Is it taking too long for Joe F.DSGuy's liking? Man, that one isn't hard to do; I know at least 55% of us have a shrine in our bedrooms for isotropic, counting the number of days since she passed (RIP?) and that includes the whole Goko thing. Is there a schedule that they are woefully behind? Who made that schedule? What was it based on? Did they ever promise us anything by a specific date? Is this being measured in calendar days or engineer-hours? What about that guy who got fired? Can we actually blame the people who are still there, trying to clean up that mess? What was the impact of that? What units is that in?
Before these questions are answered, it's only whining about how we want what we think we're entitled to. As someone who deals with answering and asking these questions as a professional, I hope you can understand how people on the internet who just want to whine because it feels good don't quite measure up to my expectations, and how I would hope they have the same expectations as I do so that what they are whining about is actually worth reading. I mean, I always feel better when I whine that way...
Wait a tick, shouldn't we have a voice in this? Yeah actually we should.
I'm not sure what this voice is supposed to accomplish or can hope to accomplish, that it isn't already accomplishing.
I guess it would be nice if people from MF could just read these forums, see constructive comments about what people want to see, and then know what those meant? I guess that's hopeless at this point?
[...] Other things that look bad are bad, they are not the decompiler giving the programmers a bad name.
Maybe you've seen some source code, I'm pretty sure nobody else on these forums has. It's an unfinished product, isn't it? I mean, even if there was some legitimately bad practice that made it into a release, isn't the correct response to be like "hey, I found something in your code, you should probably fix that" instead of "ZOMG THEY'RE ALL IDIOTS LOLOL I COULD DO A BETTER JOB #ISOWASBETTER"? One of those things makes everyone's life better, the other makes us look like a bunch of jerks. Why are we attempting to justify the jerky one? I don't get it.
The threads in here (the Dominion Online sub-board) have become so toxic, I'm seeing a side of people I used to have respect for that makes me want to have nothing to do with them.
Well I don't know your specific examples, but it feels a lot less bad to me than when I quit the forums.
Umm, well sure we feel differently about how bad it is. OK we're allowed to do that. But I don't know if I should point to specific posts. Would that be rude? I bet you I could find 55 posts that are nothing but people being toxic. Umm, in the absence of finding and linking those posts, let's just say that you can look in the last several pages of the "Latest Release" thread, and there's a lot of them in SCSN's patch thread, and the "Open Beta Ending Soon" thread (funny story, instead of typing "Ending" I typed "Engine" the first time. Lol.) Usually the worst posts are the ones with the most upvotes.
Did anyone out there ask MF if they could contribute in a constructive way towards Online Dominion by asking if MF would make a public-facing API or log file interface or something so that the changes made by the dll patch would be scalable, sustainable, etc? This would be a much better solution: something a lot more like Salvager, only still compatible with MF's continued development of their product.
I don't think MF will be interested in that in the short term, nor should they be; whatever man-hours they have for Dominion, man, let them spend them on the actual work. It's potentially something to bring up in the long term.
The logs are already public, if you know how to get at them, which I posted somewhere.
Umm, are you talking about game logs, or logs of things that are happening in the software? If it's the second one and those already exist, then why aren't we just using those instead of patching their dll?
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I think obv. they are not completely incompetent. They have basically blown it one way, that's right, I can get it down to one thing. That one thing is speed. What they have is fine for some point along the journey from nothing to the perfect program; it's just taken too long to get here.
Maybe you have access to something I don't, but what does this even mean? Is it taking too long for your liking?
Too long for me dude. I can't speak for you or whoever.
There's no question of "entitlement" from my perspective. Team RGG and DXV are looking to have a sufficiently-finished program up. Team MF is trying to be successful; they took on a project that has to be successful or they've thrown away money. It's a licensor / licensee situation. It's not that I'm "entitled" to better sub-licenses; it's that I should try to avoid poor sub-licensing situations.
I had lunch with some Funsockets guys in October 2011. I had lunch with some Making Fun guys in March 2014.
I don't think I have words harsh enough to adequately express how long it's taken. Maybe there's something in Yaghan. Wait I can try understatement. It has taken too long for my liking.
I guess it would be nice if people from MF could just read these forums, see constructive comments about what people want to see, and then know what those meant? I guess that's hopeless at this point?
Well Jeff just read a thread, but yes, and fortunately it's not so bad. They read their forums and you can post whatever stuff there. If other people aren't doing that, someone can summarize stuff posted here if they feel like it. And I read these forums and post there and email them.
Maybe you've seen some source code, I'm pretty sure nobody else on these forums has. It's an unfinished product, isn't it? I mean, even if there was some legitimately bad practice that made it into a release, isn't the correct response to be like "hey, I found something in your code, you should probably fix that" instead of "ZOMG THEY'RE ALL IDIOTS LOLOL I COULD DO A BETTER JOB #ISOWASBETTER"? One of those things makes everyone's life better, the other makes us look like a bunch of jerks. Why are we attempting to justify the jerky one? I don't get it.
1) no amount of being unfinished excuses bad programming! I have seen only whatever tiny fragments that were posted (this time; I saw some Goko code previously). Some stuff was the decompiler; some wasn't. There was nothing unclear about it. An explanation of good programming is beyond the scope here.
2) I did tell them about the things that were pointed out that looked like bugs. I snapped into action; no point not fixing bugs.
Usually the worst posts are the ones with the most upvotes.
So that's the secret. Sweet.
Umm, are you talking about game logs, or logs of things that are happening in the software? If it's the second one and those already exist, then why aren't we just using those instead of patching their dll?
Game logs. I thought you were referring to those, since some people want them to uh get stats from them. I don't know what you mean about other logs, but, useful or not, whatever it is isn't available.
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1) no amount of being unfinished excuses bad programming! I have seen only whatever tiny fragments that were posted (this time; I saw some Goko code previously). Some stuff was the decompiler; some wasn't. There was nothing unclear about it. An explanation of good programming is beyond the scope here.
2) I did tell them about the things that were pointed out that looked like bugs. I snapped into action; no point not fixing bugs.
You are the hero Gotham needs, something not deserves? I never saw that movie. Obviously if everybody was just like Donald X. the world would be a much better place <3. Ahem. Moving on.
But that first point, like, that contradicts itself. How can you say that something is bad programming without saying what good programming is? The only things I've seen posted here that look like things that actually need fixed are extremely minor issues. Like, one-line fixes. It's not perfect, but we're taking things that can easily happen, aren't that awful, and are easy to fix, and we're blowing it up and saying these people are completely incompetent at their job. Not only is that incorrect, but it makes us look really bad for no actual benefit whatsoever.
Umm, are you talking about game logs, or logs of things that are happening in the software? If it's the second one and those already exist, then why aren't we just using those instead of patching their dll?
Game logs. I thought you were referring to those, since some people want them to uh get stats from them. I don't know what you mean about other logs, but, useful or not, whatever it is isn't available.
OK then, I was originally talking about the second thing. Then my point is that instead of just patching their dll, maybe someone could have asked MF "hey, I want to write an extension or whatever for your software and having some internal log files that output X, Y, and Z would help. I'd also like a config file that lets me modify A, B, and C if you don't want to make a user interface for it". This is an actual solution that's elegant and scalable, but we were so busy complaining that we convinced ourselves they would never do something like this or that they were too incompetent to do so, neither of which we have actual reasons to believe.
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You are the hero Gotham needs, something not deserves? I never saw that movie. Obviously if everybody was just like Donald X. the world would be a much better place <3. Ahem. Moving on.
It's fun to be subtle, but I have no idea what you are attempting to communicate here or how it relates to what I said. You said the bugs should be reported, I said they were. It's data, not meant to suggest any personality on my part.
But that first point, like, that contradicts itself. How can you say that something is bad programming without saying what good programming is?
It's simply beyond the scope. I don't have the time to teach a programming class right now. I don't need to convince you of anything badly enough to talk at length about programming. Say what you mean! That's the 4-word version.
This is an actual solution that's elegant and scalable, but we were so busy complaining that we convinced ourselves they would never do something like this or that they were too incompetent to do so, neither of which we have actual reasons to believe.
Again it does not make sense to have them spend time now on making tools for other people to do programming they could be doing instead.
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You are the hero Gotham needs, something not deserves? I never saw that movie. Obviously if everybody was just like Donald X. the world would be a much better place <3. Ahem. Moving on.
It's fun to be subtle, but I have no idea what you are attempting to communicate here or how it relates to what I said. You said the bugs should be reported, I said they were. It's data, not meant to suggest any personality on my part.
My fanboy is just showing, that's all...
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I'd also like a config file that lets me modify A, B, and C if you don't want to make a user interface for it". This is an actual solution that's elegant and scalable, but we were so busy complaining that we convinced ourselves they would never do something like this or that they were too incompetent to do so, neither of which we have actual reasons to believe.
I don't know why you're making this assumption, but this was literally my first suggestion to Jeff when I started talking about the animations & delays. "How about you put all the delays in a config file and let us play with it for a while until we think it's right and then suggest that back to you". And like most suggestions I made to Jeff, he said it was an interesting idea. And like all suggestions I made to him, nothing actually happened.
I honestly don't get why you think the whole of f.ds is just complaining. I started to complain after trying out everything you're suggesting now, and noticing that didn't work. I'm not at all complaining because I like complaining, because in fact I don't.
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Before these questions are answered, it's only whining about how we want what we think we're entitled to. As someone who deals with answering and asking these questions as a professional, I hope you can understand how people on the internet who just want to whine because it feels good don't quite measure up to my expectations, and how I would hope they have the same expectations as I do so that what they are whining about is actually worth reading. I mean, I always feel better when I whine that way...
Man, I don't think this is about entitlement. That's a big straw man. It's about, hey, this is a product and it's supposed to be good, because when you do something, you do it right. Moreover, we want to use the product, and there isn't an alternative.
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I haven't said much about this topic, but I'd rather put my faith in MF making some good progress in the coming months now that Goko has shut down than jump straight to the Salvager-like that in an ideal world shouldn't be needed in the first place.
I've seen them make progress in the client across the patches. I guess some of you, notably Donald, find the progress not fast enough. Fair enough.
With regards to the difference between changing a .dll file and changing client-side code on a browser like Salvager did, there is no meaningful difference in this case because Salvager ended up adding major functionality like automatch that goes beyond cosmetic changes. Though patching someone else's .dll files is something that isn't normally recommended? Modifying HTML/JavaScript/CSS client side is one of the things browsers were designed to allow and encourage to some extent.
From my perspective I don't have grounds to say MF's staff is incompetent, but if they are understaffed then that's going to have a negative effect on Dominion Online no matter how good they are. The codebase is surely larger than what Dougz had to deal with when maintaining Isotropic.
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The codebase is surely larger than what Dougz had to deal with when maintaining Isotropic.
Maybe because of the need for a shop and campaign, and a bunch of bad practice.
I hope you're not one of those people that assumes wrapping a prettier GUI around something immediately makes it exponentially more difficult to maintain. Well, maybe it is if you have animations colliding with eachother but that'd be their own foot they shot prioritizing a feature few want or need.
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I hope you're not one of those people that assumes wrapping a prettier GUI around something immediately makes it exponentially more difficult to maintain. Well, maybe it is if you have animations colliding with eachother but that'd be their own foot they shot prioritizing a feature few want or need.
I think you'd be surprised how many people that play Dominion want animations. Like, my guess is that the number is over 90%, and that's a conservative guess. Also, do you really expect Dominion with no animations to take off as a game people want to watch on stream? I've talked to a lot of people (a few on this forums like funkdoc, even) who have a TON of experience streaming games. They know what people want to see and they know the biggest obstacles ahead of Dominion. If we had a good, pretty client, it would go a long way towards increasing the game's popularity.
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I wanted to type "some people want and nobody needs", but maybe there's someone out there with a visual disability where they can't see the cards well without animations, so I averaged it out, and then that's what you got.
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The codebase is surely larger than what Dougz had to deal with when maintaining Isotropic.
Maybe because of the need for a shop and campaign, and a bunch of bad practice.
I hope you're not one of those people that assumes wrapping a prettier GUI around something immediately makes it exponentially more difficult to maintain. Well, maybe it is if you have animations colliding with eachother but that'd be their own foot they shot prioritizing a feature few want or need.
It's not (or shouldn't be) exponentially more difficult to maintain something with a prettified GUI than something that doesn't, but if you expect to be making lots of changes to the GUI like everyone here wants along with the game and server logic like Iso had then yes the GUI adds to the maintenance cost. Of course, how difficult something is to maintain depends more or less on how well it was written with maintainability in mind. They were able to make lots of changes to the GUI during the Beta (like those maligned bane card animations), so I guess it can't be an incomprehensible mess right?
They were also providing a bunch of much needed updates to the campaign during the Beta.
But the game logic should be comparable in complexity to Iso's which was able to implement all the cards up to Adventures.
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Adam - I just want to put on the record that I disagree with pretty much everything you've written in this thread:
1/ We probably all started coming to these forums because we love dominion and I think it is perfectly natural for people to want to vent when things are not going well for online dominion (which they are not)
2/ I think the tone you take in your posts on this thread does way-not-enough credit to you fellow forum members - who in my personal experience are generally polite, urbane, witty, knowledgeable, and very often inventive and proactive
3/ You have plenty of inventive excuses as to why MF might be doing a better job than they seem to be doing but the fact for me is I only have an iPad, not a computer. Normally I'd play dominion with my best friend once or twice a week (he lives too far from me for us to play IRL). Now at least in part because of MFs development priorities there is no version that is playable on an iPad and I'm feeling pretty miffed ... is that what you'd characterise as my "sense of entitlement"
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Well, I'm not saying you have to be happy about the way things have been going. In your position, I'd try the web-based client they have, and then if that didn't work, be very upset that I can't play Dominion.
At least you're polite about it. I mean, the fact that you disagree with me hasn't changed my mind, oh well. +1 for you :)
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Also, do you really expect Dominion with no animations to take off as a game people want to watch on stream?
I loved watching streaming Dominion back in the Iso days. There were no animations whatsoever when streaming Dominion first became a thing; and people watched it.
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Also, do you really expect Dominion with no animations to take off as a game people want to watch on stream?
I loved watching streaming Dominion back in the Iso days. There were no animations whatsoever when streaming Dominion first became a thing; and people watched it.
Back in my day, we used to get the log of each turn printed in the daily paper. One game lasted three weeks, but god dammit, we'd rush down the steps every morning to see what went down that turn.
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I watched the crap out of iso videos, but the unfortunate reality is that we in the F.DS community are a small minority of people who play Dominion online and a slightly-larger-but-still-small minority of people who watch Dominion on video or stream, and most everyone else would prefer animations and a client that's easy to follow.
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I watched the crap out of iso videos, but the unfortunate reality is that we in the F.DS community are a small minority of people who play Dominion online and a slightly-larger-but-still-small minority of people who watch Dominion on video or stream, and most everyone else would prefer animations and a client that's easy to follow.
I would think a prominent, persistent log of recent actions would be more useful for stream friendliness than animations. You can make the animations for mining a silver into a gold 3 seconds if you want, I still might turn away and miss it. Leave a log event on screen for 3 minutes that summarizes recent gain and cursing events, it's hard for me to miss it. At worst I need to pause it to catch up on my lapse in attention.
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I watched the crap out of iso videos, but the unfortunate reality is that we in the F.DS community are a small minority of people who play Dominion online and a slightly-larger-but-still-small minority of people who watch Dominion on video or stream, and most everyone else would prefer animations and a client that's easy to follow.
I would think a prominent, persistent log of recent actions would be more useful for stream friendliness than animations. You can make the animations for mining a silver into a gold 3 seconds if you want, I still might turn away and miss it. Leave a log event on screen for 3 minutes that summarizes recent gain and cursing events, it's hard for me to miss it. At worst I need to pause it to catch up on my lapse in attention.
Agreed. We need a log that has a white background. Otherwise, it is completely unreadable on a stream.
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I watched the crap out of iso videos, but the unfortunate reality is that we in the F.DS community are a small minority of people who play Dominion online and a slightly-larger-but-still-small minority of people who watch Dominion on video or stream, and most everyone else would prefer animations and a client that's easy to follow.
I understand the visual aesthetics are important to casual players, but do you have anything to back up that the card animations in particular are either in demand or liked by anyone? Displaying the cards with art, visual representations of card movement, etc. are one thing, but the glowing glittery animations all over the place are another. I'm having trouble finding even a casual fan who thinks the game is more watchable that way. It's a huge premise to just assume that it's wanted.
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The most streamed online version of a board game is probably MTGO, which has no animations at all. So I'm not sure how you establish that animations are popular.
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Really, why should we see the cards moving? The only thing I can think of is for first-time players that don't understand Trash, Hand, In-Play, Discard, Deck, Reveal "locations". But, they can just appear in those places, they don't have to physically move from A to B. Once you know what those things are, you'll never want to see the cards move.
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Really, why should we see the cards moving? The only thing I can think of is for first-time players that don't understand Trash, Hand, In-Play, Discard, Deck, Reveal "locations". But, they can just appear in those places, they don't have to physically move from A to B. Once you know what those things are, you'll never want to see the cards move.
False. I want to see cards move.
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Also, Dominion Online switched the position of Followers and Princess from Goko. Feature parity broken!
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I fell prey to insanity and reported three bugs (http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?7990-Three-Bugs), one of which was a reminder of something I reported just over 20 months ago, but I happen to be known for my lack of patience.
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Really, why should we see the cards moving? The only thing I can think of is for first-time players that don't understand Trash, Hand, In-Play, Discard, Deck, Reveal "locations". But, they can just appear in those places, they don't have to physically move from A to B. Once you know what those things are, you'll never want to see the cards move.
False. I want to see cards move.
Okay, well, cats probably agree with you.
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Really, why should we see the cards moving? The only thing I can think of is for first-time players that don't understand Trash, Hand, In-Play, Discard, Deck, Reveal "locations". But, they can just appear in those places, they don't have to physically move from A to B. Once you know what those things are, you'll never want to see the cards move.
False. I want to see cards move.
Okay, well, cats probably agree with you.
My preference matches yours, but that's not a healthy or helpful comment.
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Man, this is already a really long thread, but I have a few things to add even to what's been said.
1) First of all, like most people, I think AdamH is probably overdoing it here on his defense of MF and his insistence that the majority of what we have done as a community has been unhelpful or even destructive to Making Fun. To Adam specifically: you are incredibly emotionally invested in this right now and I think that is making it hard for you to look at any of these issues in an unbiased way.
2) Unlike a lot of people here, I actually totally agree with AdamH in saying that some of the things that people have said on the forums have been unwarrantedly negative toward the developers of Making Fun. There have been some incredibly negative things said, and to some extent it is making this community look bad, and I would say making it a less enjoyable place to spend time. Negativity has a negative effect on things, and to me the people who are claiming that this is not the case are behaving absurdly defensive towards themselves and this community in general.
3) Despite the fact that there has been unwarranted hostility towards Making Fun on these forums, there has also been some pretty nasty behavior back on the part of Making Fun toward us, particularly from DavidtheDavid. As their PR guy, he's done in my opinion a pretty halfhearted job of trying to meet our complaints. It is his job to accept complaints on behalf of their company, not to return our complaints with non-sequiters, smugness or vaguely concealed disdain. And since I have been somewhat active on the MF forums, I am afraid to say that this hasn't really changed. Maybe there are some people out there who think this particular employee is just great, but it will be a long time until I am one of them, and he has done as much to make things toxic around here as any of the most vocal critics of Making Fun.
Well, I'm not saying you have to be happy about the way things have been going. In your position, I'd try the web-based client they have, and then if that didn't work, be very upset that I can't play Dominion.
Unrelated, but if anyone at all can make the web alpha client actually work, I'd love to hear about what you did. Because for me it is an error screen and nothing more, and when I tried to report this to MF, (http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?7936-Web-Alpha-Fails-to-Work-for-my-Chromebook) I was met with nothing except for DavidtheDavid's unfortunate condescension.
Another aside, but AdamH, if I continue to find myself in the position I am in now (completely unable to actually play Dominion Online on any of my devices), you may have finally found another person who can match your ability to create long, sometimes pointless but always passionate rants.
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Really, why should we see the cards moving? The only thing I can think of is for first-time players that don't understand Trash, Hand, In-Play, Discard, Deck, Reveal "locations". But, they can just appear in those places, they don't have to physically move from A to B. Once you know what those things are, you'll never want to see the cards move.
False. I want to see cards move.
Okay, well, cats probably agree with you.
My preference matches yours, but that's not a healthy or helpful comment.
I meant 'cause, like, the cards move across the screen, so for a cat it would be like when they follow the laser pointer around. So if you're playing with card animations, your cat can be entertained without you needing to use your laser pointer :)
It wasn't supposed to be snarky.
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my bones are roused
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my bones are roused
I have that effect on people.
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To Adam specifically: you are incredibly emotionally invested in this right now and I think that is making it hard for you to look at any of these issues in an unbiased way.
Are you for serious? I don't understand how you can possibly know what's going on for me emotionally right now? I don't know where this comes from.
3) Despite the fact that there has been unwarranted hostility towards Making Fun on these forums, there has also been some pretty nasty behavior back on the part of Making Fun toward us, particularly from DavidtheDavid.
So isn't David not actually an employee of MF? Didn't I hear that somewhere? In any case, I don't read what he's saying as condescending. I'm not sure how you can, but maybe you can. OK. I don't know what to say to you.
As for the animations, I've been told that they make it easier to figure out what's going on while watching a stream. I was told by F.DS people to make my animation speed Very Fast on Goko, and I was told by every other viewer who told me when I asked that they would prefer slower animations so they could follow the action better. So I compromised and put them on Fast.
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David's response to a fair few complaints has been along the lines of "Well you haven't played it enough" or "You're doing it wrong" and that's not something you really want in a PR person. He should be seeing what we have to say, giving polite, but informative answers to our questions, and that's it. He should not be in a defensive mode, or at least not an antagonistically defensive mode.
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David's response to a fair few complaints has been along the lines of "Well you haven't played it enough" or "You're doing it wrong" and that's not something you really want in a PR person. He should be seeing what we have to say, giving polite, but informative answers to our questions, and that's it. He should not be in a defensive mode, or at least not an antagonistically defensive mode.
not only that, but he also has seemed to have little to no understanding of what we asked him or suggestions we made. And it seemed that instead of taking everything we said and directly quoting us to the rest of MF, he kept trying to decipher what we were saying and giving his own uneducated explanation as to what we really want. This in my opinion is not just being a poor PR person, but being an uncaring and lazy person. Now these are just my opinions. And for the record I am not someone who points fingers, but when I see important suggestions and questions being handled by someone who seems to not care and not understand the dominion client as a whole, it gets me a little steamed. I love dominion too much to see it get destroyed because there is a lack of care towards it. (Not MF as a whole but at least one person for sure)
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Where can I read more of what this awful David fellow does? Because apparently what iguana linked was just a sample, and that was pretty bad.
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3/ You have plenty of inventive excuses as to why MF might be doing a better job than they seem to be doing but the fact for me is I only have an iPad, not a computer. Normally I'd play dominion with my best friend once or twice a week (he lives too far from me for us to play IRL). Now at least in part because of MFs development priorities there is no version that is playable on an iPad and I'm feeling pretty miffed ... is that what you'd characterise as my "sense of entitlement"
I don't know what this means in terms of a timetable, but they are currently testing an iPad version; I could be trying it now if I had an iPad.
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You are my favorite reptile.
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To Adam specifically: you are incredibly emotionally invested in this right now and I think that is making it hard for you to look at any of these issues in an unbiased way.
Are you for serious? I don't understand how you can possibly know what's going on for me emotionally right now? I don't know where this comes from.
If I had to guess, he's basing the conclusion off the very long and passionate posts you have on the subject, the very defensive reactions you've had to posters in this and other threads, etc. This isn't an insult or a way to suggest your feelings on the topic aren't valid / "correct" / whatever - just a recognition that you really love Dominion and have a strong emotional investment in the subject that may impact how you communicate with others. Many of us do. I do, SCSN does, you do, probably we all do.
Calling it like I see it - SCSN can be a bit of an abrasive dick sometimes but it really seemed like throughout this entire thread he wasn't trying to be the least bit hostile about anything, and you still spent a lot of time arguing with him. Based on how you've interacted in the past this may / may not be warranted, I'm not going to judge all that, but that to me indicated there was more at play for you than a cold and calculated reading of the facts of the situation. We all have some degree of emotional investment in this game which drives us to rationalize feelings we already had about it ("MF sucks at programming" being validated by decompiled source code or "FDS doesn't do anything but complain" being validated by FDS threads or what have you).
This paragraph gets kinda out there, just a heads up. One of the hardest things for highly intelligent / "nerdy" people to do (really everyone) is to separate emotional thought processes from purely logical ones. There really aren't purely logical thoughts - humans use their emotional spaces to help sort through complex problems that would be less efficient to purely logically parse. Happens all the time without you even necessarily realizing it. I don't really think anyone is truly good at purely logical thoughts separate from emotion - I think we're all just logic emulators running on emotional processors if you will. So what I'm saying, is that anyone with a strong emotional investment in anything is bound to reach conclusions that others with strong emotional investments won't necessarily reach, and that part of finding common ground is to recognize one's own state and try to deescalate the situation for everyone.
3) Despite the fact that there has been unwarranted hostility towards Making Fun on these forums, there has also been some pretty nasty behavior back on the part of Making Fun toward us, particularly from DavidtheDavid.
So isn't David not actually an employee of MF? Didn't I hear that somewhere? In any case, I don't read what he's saying as condescending. I'm not sure how you can, but maybe you can. OK. I don't know what to say to you.
To be perfectly honest, "David isn't an MF employee" might be one of the bigger cognitive backflips I've heard anyone make to defend MF. He explicitly joined this forum in order to collect comments and pass them on to developers; this was his stated intention for posting here and making threads. His user title on this forum is "Dominion Online Staff" and he is an admin on the MF forums Regardless of where he is on the payroll, he's acting as an agent and public representative of MF, very obviously so, and his actions reflect on the organization he represents.
If you don't see how some of his posts have been really, really condescending, I also don't know what to tell you. I'm suspecting they just aren't coming to mind for you - he's made a lot of pretty good posts here too before he left and I think he got a lot of unnecessary flak for doing a very hard job. But dig through his post history, and try to see how they could come across to people whom have been playing 2.0 for months and making these suggestions through numerous channels while seemingly being ignored. Being told "hey dude it's an alpha buddy!!! of course it doesn't work!!!" in response to someone obviously distraught that they suddenly have no way to play a game they paid $60 for, that's really condescending, no way around that.
As for the animations, I've been told that they make it easier to figure out what's going on while watching a stream. I was told by F.DS people to make my animation speed Very Fast on Goko, and I was told by every other viewer who told me when I asked that they would prefer slower animations so they could follow the action better. So I compromised and put them on Fast.
Animations on Goko and animations on MF being totally different things - animations on Goko show people cards and where they are going. Animations on MF do a lot more than that, and these are for the most part the animations people were complaining about. Most people seemed like they would have been satisfied by "Goko animations but Salvager fast", which took until 2.0.42.1 to happen. In the mean time, more of the glittery unnecessary animations were added, so you can see how this frustrated players a lot.
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You people...
You say it's hard for anyone to understand their emotions, therefore you all know exactly what's going on in my head emotionally because it's hard for me to do it. That's completely ridiculous. I'd think that after two years (wait, has it been three already? We're close) of watching my videos and complaining about how "emotional" I am, maybe people would just realize that that's how I speak and that's part of who I am. Am I not in control of my emotions? I can think of two times where I've actually lost control of my emotions on anything related to you all in three years, and what did I do? I turned off the video and stopped streaming, I didn't write a post about it.
Very few of you have ever met me IRL, very few of you have directly interacted with me over the inernet. How can you possibly say you know my emotions better than I do? Like, that's super-condescending. We're all different people.
3) Despite the fact that there has been unwarranted hostility towards Making Fun on these forums, there has also been some pretty nasty behavior back on the part of Making Fun toward us, particularly from DavidtheDavid.
So isn't David not actually an employee of MF? Didn't I hear that somewhere? In any case, I don't read what he's saying as condescending. I'm not sure how you can, but maybe you can. OK. I don't know what to say to you.
To be perfectly honest, "David isn't an MF employee" might be one of the bigger cognitive backflips I've heard anyone make to defend MF.
Did you see me defending anyone with that statement? Like, actually read what I'm saying and don't put words in my mouth. If it feels like I'm being hard on you it's because both of your responses to my posts are things that are particularly grating to me, where you're misrepresenting what I say and who I am like you know better than I do what I mean. What did I do about it? I went to sleep so I wouldn't be emotional about it.
Never did I say that other people wouldn't find it condescending or not to their liking. People can think that if they want to, but I don't. Maybe this is because of the several PMs we've exchanged, maybe that helps, I dunno? The whole point of this thread is to appeal to some people who are speaking out of anger and try to get them to think critically about what they're saying. There are valid criticisms of MF to be had, I don't see why we have to resort to invalid ones that make us look like jerks and don't accomplish anything. There's plenty to whine about constructively.
The next paragraph came off a little angry so I think I should be done typing now. Better not type anything that people could use to tell me I'm being too emotional.
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...
You are my favorite reptile.
And you are my favorite demonic hellspawn wrought from the anguish of sinners, sent from the pit, who bested me in combat using tactics unholy and vile.
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I've met Adam irl. You guys are misrepresenting him. He's way more emotional than that. When we met he openly wept about how making his own shuffle luck in life brought him to that place.
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I don't think we should judge Adam's emotional state on account of meeting you. I mean it THE jsh357 we're talking about.
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I just wanted to point out that I love you all.
Take some free ASCII hearts:
<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
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Very few of you have ever met me IRL, very few of you have directly interacted with me over the inernet. How can you possibly say you know my emotions better than I do? Like, that's super-condescending. We're all different people.
Last night I wrote a long post on a variety of subjects and ran the risk of not expressing my viewpoint very well. Today I'm going back and looking at it and finding in particular the first point I made (addressed to you) pretty flawed. I didn't mean to imply that I knew what was going on in your head or to make any kind of broad judgment about how you handle emotions. Actually what I like most about your streams is what strikes me as an acute ability to keep a level head and make rational decisions even when you have really bad luck. I definitely think some people do not give you nearly enough credit for this ability and I'm sorry if I implied in any way that I am one of those people because I am not. I'm in a really weird position here actually because I am an AdamH fanboy in the same sense that you have said that you are a DXV fanboy. In fact if I got the chance to play dominion with you my reaction would probably be pretty similar to the reaction you had when you first got to play dominion with Donald X back on Isotropic.
If I could go back and rephrase everything I said last night, I think I would say something like this:
Unlike most people, I think AdamH is making a lot more correct points than the forum is giving him credit for here. The environment on the forums actually has been pretty toxic. I noticed it shortly after first coming here in January and I think that it has gotten a lot worse in the past couple of months. That said, I also want to give the majority of people here credit that AdamH is probably going somewhat too far in making statements that are defending Making Fun, especially considering that they have definitely made some bad gestures toward F.DS as a community. In particular, I'm not a huge fan of their PR guy. Yes, he's done plenty of good things for the company, but some of his statements went over the line and only contributed toward increasing the toxic atmosphere in these forums. If it is true that he doesn't like reading the posts here anymore, that situation is at least partially of his own making. At any rate, considering that there is bad blood on both sides, maybe the best route here would be to follow SCSN and collectively bury the hatchet. Considering that they are claiming that they will be able to increase their pace of work on this new version of Online Dominion, now looks like as good a time as any to give Making Fun another shot.
To Adam: I'm really sorry if I spoke to you in a way that you perceived to be condescending. It is always risky to come out and talk about a person that I do not know in full. I simply had not seen my perspective (I think, a more moderate one) represented anywhere in this thread and felt it would be constructive to the thread to offer it.
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I just wanted to point out that I love you all.
Take some free ASCII hearts:
<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
Stop getting emotional.
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since my name got dropped itt i guess i should say some words~
honestly, i haven't been a big fan of a lot of what adam's been saying as of late, but i'm kind of an unusual case. i come from a community entirely built around calling everybody garbage, in much harsher form than anybody on this forum ever has. hell, you can beat 1000 other players to win a tournament, and top players will STILL think of you as a fraud because you used "cheap" strategies that are going to get patched out in the next update, or because there weren't any japanese players there, or whatever. i'm not going to pretend that's a good thing...but i do think it breeds a good mentality in the people who can tolerate it and remain part of the scene. that's still a hell of a lot more people than dominion has, fwiw.
so yea, i don't really mind ~negativity~. mic and SCSN were absolutely BRUTAL to me when they happened to watch a league match that i streamed. like, if i showed adam the logs i have, i bet he'd make another long-ass post about driving away newer players and such. but i want to get better and that kind of stuff is exactly what i hope to get!
to get more on topic here...
since i got brought up as the Streaming Veteran, i can offer some thoughts on that. i definitely agree that iso wouldn't have a hope in hell of attracting the kind of viewer base that could get anyone twitch partner, and some kind of visual engagement is necessary; chess is about the only exception, and even that stalwart needed a charismatic streamer with funny catchphrases. that said, i would also argue that bad visual engagement is worse for streaming than no visual engagement at all, and this is why i don't think goko/MF can ever reach that level either. the new animations, crystal ball, etc. are exactly the kind of shit that gets clowned on by today's gamers and prevents them from ever taking your game seriously. beyond that, the general graphical style (avatars etc.) are also that horribly out of touch. it's not a coherent "retro" aesthetic like you see in so many indie games today, and it's obviously not modern 3D graphics - it occupies a no man's land typically associated with facebook games and mobile shovelware.
i asked on twitter if anyone could see themselves paying $90 for a 2015 game that looked like MF dominion, and included a pic of the title screen. the response? zero positive, a bit of negative, mostly crickets. the last part might be the worst sign - not making people care enough to say anything is as good as a hard "no" from a company's perspective. this is why it troubles me that MF seems to be assuming that getting on steam will make them the money they need - steam is AWFUL for indies/small-time devs. it's just too crowded of a marketplace for anyone to stand out unless you get the kind of promotion that, say, undertale did, plus there's the fact that people are far more hesitant to pay $5 for an indie game than $70 for a "AAA" game. i don't like MF's chances in the long run if this is the basket they're putting most of their eggs in.
because of these issues, i have given up any hope of getting my friends to play online dominion. even for longtime gamers, visuals do matter quite a bit, and there's all the uncertainty over how good the finished product will be and whether it will last. maybe people who just play eurogames won't be deterred, but the people i know have a hell of a lot more competing for their interest.
so that's where my negativity comes from here. this is such a wonderful game, but it's giftwrapped in weeks-old sashimi with maggots crawling all over it. adam acts like it's MF or nothing, but there's another option he's forgetting: quit dominion and look for a similarly great game with an actual good online experience. there are more of those now than ever before, and it's obviously a far easier path to take if you never played dominion in the first place.
i truly *want* to be optimistic, but i've seen enough stories like this that by default i prepare for the worst...
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Yeah, ok like that's ever gonna happen. Like Adam, many of us fell in love with Dominion in a way that most people don't with other games. This is FLIPPING DOMINION, and there is no way we are going to give up our favorite game just because an online gaming company can't "get it right". We will never give up on the game we love. Wow, I feel fired up now.
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But the intentions are pretty different (also having background in online gaming). People are being rude for the sake of being rude, something I've never experienced in Dominion. Personally, I have never seen SCSN insulting somebody on any stream. Sure, he is pretty direct about how he sees certain strategies, but to me that's really helpful, even though it means your personal pride has to suffer for it, maybe. (I don't see why it should, though).
Sure, you could prefer another style, but that shouldn't be the choice of the one receiving feedback
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i asked on twitter if anyone could see themselves paying $90 for a 2015 game that looked like MF dominion, and included a pic of the title screen.
You should have gone the extra mile and included a proper animated gif. Those soap bubbles emanating from the cards aren't going to trick casual players into spending any money when they're perceived to be standing still.
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i asked on twitter if anyone could see themselves paying $90 for a 2015 game that looked like MF dominion, and included a pic of the title screen.
You should have gone the extra mile and included a proper animated gif. Those soap bubbles emanating from the cards aren't going to trick casual players into spending any money when they're perceived to be standing still.
(http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/useravs/avatar_1561_1427930248.jpg)
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i asked on twitter if anyone could see themselves paying $90 for a 2015 game that looked like MF dominion, and included a pic of the title screen.
You should have gone the extra mile and included a proper animated gif. Those soap bubbles emanating from the cards aren't going to trick casual players into spending any money when they're perceived to be standing still.
(http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/useravs/avatar_1561_1427930248.jpg)
(https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/12/03/ae/1203aef9fa89e406219d1b9fd00ee313.jpg)
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Yeah, ok like that's ever gonna happen. Like Adam, many of us fell in love with Dominion in a way that most people don't with other games. This is FLIPPING DOMINION, and there is no way we are going to give up our favorite game just because an online gaming company can't "get it right". We will never give up on the game we love. Wow, I feel fired up now.
I dunno about that, I as well as many other people stopped playing online Dominion when Iso went down. I would play more IRL than I do, but the people in my game group aren't into it as much as I am, with the exception of Jonts.
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Yeah, ok like that's ever gonna happen. Like Adam, many of us fell in love with Dominion in a way that most people don't with other games. This is FLIPPING DOMINION, and there is no way we are going to give up our favorite game just because an online gaming company can't "get it right". We will never give up on the game we love. Wow, I feel fired up now.
I dunno about that, I as well as many other people stopped playing online Dominion when Iso went down. I would play more IRL than I do, but the people in my game group aren't into it as much as I am, with the exception of Jonts.
But you are already not playing for the forseeable future yeah? How many people who didnt stop playing then are going to stop playing now?
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Yeah, ok like that's ever gonna happen. Like Adam, many of us fell in love with Dominion in a way that most people don't with other games. This is FLIPPING DOMINION, and there is no way we are going to give up our favorite game just because an online gaming company can't "get it right". We will never give up on the game we love. Wow, I feel fired up now.
I dunno about that, I as well as many other people stopped playing online Dominion when Iso went down. I would play more IRL than I do, but the people in my game group aren't into it as much as I am, with the exception of Jonts.
But you are already not playing for the forseeable future yeah? How many people who didnt stop playing then are going to stop playing now?
The fact that I didn't like Goko as much as Iso was the main reason I stopped. Obviously MF and Goko are more similar than Iso was to Goko; I'm just saying that some people did stop playing because a company couldn't get an online implementation right.
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I dunno about that, I as well as many other people stopped playing online Dominion when Iso went down. I would play more IRL than I do, but the people in my game group aren't into it as much as I am, with the exception of Jonts.
Goko was still better than IRL though, even without Salvager.
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Online implementations don't really compete with physical copies of the game. There is many a Friday a night that I went out to play FNM, which is sometimes inferior and has excessive downtime between rounds, instead of staying in and playing on Goko, because I wanted to get out of the house, see people face to face, etc.
The Tuesday nights when I stay in and decide I'm going to play Dominion or Hearthstone are where a more proper competition is taking place. And I'm pretty sure that's how it is for most people.
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We've talked about this a little bit already offline, I hadn't read this yet. Anyways, I feel like the only thing left to say here is a bunch of ASCII hearts, but there are already so many in this thread. Oh well. <3
adam acts like it's MF or nothing, but there's another option he's forgetting: quit dominion and look for a similarly great game with an actual good online experience. there are more of those now than ever before, and it's obviously a far easier path to take if you never played dominion in the first place.
Yeah that's an option for some people, but not me, man. If Dominion Online was shut down forever and it never came back, what would I do? Well I would cry. A lot. If I ever stopped crying (doubtful) then I would just focus myself on the IRL Dominion scene I'm trying to cultivate locally (which has actually been going quite well recently, btw, and should be growing pretty quickly in the coming months). I will not let the reason Dominion Online doesn't take off be anything I could have done something about.
i come from a community entirely built around calling everybody garbage, in much harsher form than anybody on this forum ever has.
I have always had high expectations of this community and that will never change. There's a quote from the movie Stand and Deliver (which I watched because Wandering Winder recommended it to me <3) that says "people will rise to the expectations you set for them." If you think they're not reasonable, that's fine. You may be right, but I won't change them because of that. I will go down with the ship.
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Adam Horton is cray
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You say it's hard for anyone to understand their emotions, therefore you all know exactly what's going on in my head emotionally because it's hard for me to do it. That's completely ridiculous. I'd think that after two years (wait, has it been three already? We're close) of watching my videos and complaining about how "emotional" I am, maybe people would just realize that that's how I speak and that's part of who I am. Am I not in control of my emotions? I can think of two times where I've actually lost control of my emotions on anything related to you all in three years, and what did I do? I turned off the video and stopped streaming, I didn't write a post about it.
Very few of you have ever met me IRL, very few of you have directly interacted with me over the inernet. How can you possibly say you know my emotions better than I do? Like, that's super-condescending. We're all different people.
That really, really wasn't what I was saying at all. The part of my post discussing emotions was pretty broad and general, and merely used some things you've done as a jumping off point for how we all could be emotionally charged, and how it can inform our perceptions of others and our logical conclusions without conscious awareness. I'm certainly not saying anything applies to you and nobody else; I thought the examples where I talked about people that weren't you (SCSN, me, etc) would make that more clear. I was trying to de-escalate by pointing out the different perspectives we're all coming from and why there can be so much tension over what's ultimately our preferences on how a card game simulator should look and feel. I was also trying to defend SCSN, who whole I don't see eye to eye on with a lot of things, honestly didn't seem like they were trying to antagonize you in this particular thread, just explaining himself and repeatedly offering to put it behind him.
My post, in summary:
> I think iguana was talking about your emotions due to the obvious passion and energy you put into your posts here along with defensiveness.
> We all have an emotional stake in all of this and it will always influence all of our actions, that's how I think humans are.
> SCSN wasn't really being a huge dick in this thread
> David's an agent and representative of MF and his actions reflect on the organization.
> David made a lot of great posts and a good faith effort, and he got way too much flak for it, but he was also sometimes condescending.
> Not all animations are equal.
I wrote the post at like 6:30 AM and that probably influenced my wording choice and stuff, so I probably didn't communicate my intentions well. I truly am sorry for that, I didn't intend to pick on you. I have a lot of respect for you and your streams; our F.DS Championship match was some of the best matches I've played all year, I really don't mean malice here.
3) Despite the fact that there has been unwarranted hostility towards Making Fun on these forums, there has also been some pretty nasty behavior back on the part of Making Fun toward us, particularly from DavidtheDavid.
So isn't David not actually an employee of MF? Didn't I hear that somewhere? In any case, I don't read what he's saying as condescending. I'm not sure how you can, but maybe you can. OK. I don't know what to say to you.
To be perfectly honest, "David isn't an MF employee" might be one of the bigger cognitive backflips I've heard anyone make to defend MF.
Did you see me defending anyone with that statement? Like, actually read what I'm saying and don't put words in my mouth.
>"So isn't David not actually an employee of MF?"
>"I don't read what he's saying as condescending. I'm not sure how you can..."
>"I don't know what to say to you"
My interpretation of these statements is that you're making two implicit points. 1 is that David by not being an employee of MF, isn't acting as their representative and we can't judge the company by their actions. 2 is that you didn't think David was being condescending and that you view interpretations that see him that way as ridiculous / unfounded. I'm not sure why you brought up that you didn't think he was being condescending and that you didn't understand how others could see him as condescending, if you weren't saying that. I'm really confused here, I'm not sure what you were trying to get across, if you weren't defending David's actions or MF as a company.
If it feels like I'm being hard on you it's because both of your responses to my posts are things that are particularly grating to me, where you're misrepresenting what I say and who I am like you know better than I do what I mean. What did I do about it? I went to sleep so I wouldn't be emotional about it.
I don't really mean to be critcial of healthy emotional responses to stress, but I mean, I made that post at like 7 AM dude. You replied about 45 minutes later. I don't think you went to bed.
Never did I say that other people wouldn't find it condescending or not to their liking. People can think that if they want to, but I don't. Maybe this is because of the several PMs we've exchanged, maybe that helps, I dunno? The whole point of this thread is to appeal to some people who are speaking out of anger and try to get them to think critically about what they're saying. There are valid criticisms of MF to be had, I don't see why we have to resort to invalid ones that make us look like jerks and don't accomplish anything. There's plenty to whine about constructively.
Honestly, I have to agree with your general point here - whining isn't constructive, doing stuff is. I really respect how you made a video highlighting the difficult to describe animation problem and sent it to MF for review. Clearly nobody had done that before, and the problem wasn't well understood before you did, and you directly led to fixing it. That's the kind of approach I hope people do more. (And I do realize that beta testers have given detailed, long descriptions of complaints and features that have been ignored before, I'm not trying to knock them or legitimize their frustration either.)
What does confuse me here, is the juxtaposition between "never did I say other people wouldn't find it condescending" and "we don't have to resort to invalid criticisims" - the implication here is that you think the criticisms of David's condescension / temperament aren't valid. What are you saying isn't valid, if not that?
The next paragraph came off a little angry so I think I should be done typing now. Better not type anything that people could use to tell me I'm being too emotional.
I never said anything about you being too emotional. I even said your feelings were valid (well, not invalid and not incorrect). I'm just talking about how it informs our actions, even when we're not obviously overcome by emotions. I'm beginning to think you weren't just talking to me and that maybe I'm being a bit shitty by assuming it was 100% directed at me.
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I'm beginning to think you weren't just talking to me
:)
I'm being a bit shitty by assuming it was 100% directed at me.
nah :P
Wow, I'm feeling terse tonight.
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So, Chris is me's post took about 5 minutes to load on my phone, so at first I thought it was just an enormous, empty post of nothing, which, honestly, is what I feel this thread has devolved into. AdamH, everyone else, this has just turned into one great big hateful circle jerk. Can't we just go back to talking about what we all came to this forum for in the first place? You know, Dominion?
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So, Chris is me's post took about 5 minutes to load on my phone, so at first I thought it was just an enormous, empty post of nothing, which, honestly, is what I feel this thread has devolved into. AdamH, everyone else, this has just turned into one great big hateful circle jerk. Can't we just go back to talking about what we all came to this forum for in the first place? You know, Dominion?
I couldn't disagree more. Like, I wonder if you're being sarcastic here.
Many people who have responded to this thread still hold very different opinions from me. At least in here those disagreements are being treated with respect when they can't be worked out. In the other threads I've noticed a big decrease in the amount of venom in peoples' posts.
And even within this thread, there are people finding common ground when previously it was too loud to do so. I can go digging in these other threads now, asking specific (and important) questions of these people and now they understand I'm not just being antagonistic but I'm trying to be helpful.
I've gotten everything I wanted out of this thread, and yeah I think the discussion is sort of calming down, but this has been very theraputic for me and I don't think I'm the only one. I don't feel like the discussion here is getting in the way of other discussions that are happening that aren't about Dominion online. I also feel like it's restored a lot of my positive feelings about the community in general.
I don't feel any hate towards anyone in this thread right now. Not even dislike. Are you?
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Maybe it's just my disinclination to read multiple posts quoting each other that are each practically essays.
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So you're complaining about the content of posts that you don't even read?
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Maybe it's just my disinclination to read multiple posts quoting each other that are each practically essays.
That's why we have tl;dr; gifs. Good god man there's a wealth of internet to choose from!
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How can people who enjoy a game with cards like Saboteur and Sea Hag not enjoy tearing eachother apart on internet forums. I mean, really.
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Lucifer loves everybody! He treats us all with the same amount of love and understanding... Why the hell we are not the satanic community yet?
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Lucifer loves everybody! He treats us all with the same amount of love and understanding... Why the hell we are not the satanic community yet?
Lots of things treat us all with the same amount of love and understanding; e.g., an amoeba.
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Why does Black Market show me more love than it shows to Adam Horton, though??
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Why does Black Market show me more love than it shows to Adam Horton, though??
It's mutual.
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Lucifer loves everybody! He treats us all with the same amount of love and understanding... Why the hell we are not the satanic community yet?
Lots of things treat us all with the same amount of love and understanding; e.g., an amoeba.
Amoeba doesn't grin sarcastically and sexually to you from the dark corner, that's why.
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Did anyone out there ask MF if they could contribute in a constructive way towards Online Dominion by asking if MF would make a public-facing API or log file interface or something so that the changes made by the dll patch would be scalable, sustainable, etc?
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.)
But skimming the forums, I assume they didn't do it :) Also seems like disappearing from here wasn't such a bad thing, but I guess I'll find out for sure if/when I really come back.
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How about we stop arguing and play Dominion ;)
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If we're still improving Dominion Online, I would recommend that we make the sets cheaper. A lot of people don't have the money to want to buy Dominion online sets. Personally, I worry that I won't get value out of the online cards because MF could crash or something. Even though this forum probably has little to no power to make this happen, I have been playing a lot of base cards games when I join randomly. I don't mind playing with the base cards, but a lot more people had expansions back on Goko. Maybe it's just because MF is new and people want to decide if it's worth the investment? That's my two cents.
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If we're still improving Dominion Online, I would recommend that we make the sets cheaper. A lot of people don't have the money to want to buy Dominion online sets. Personally, I worry that I won't get value out of the online cards because MF could crash or something. Even though this forum probably has little to no power to make this happen, I have been playing a lot of base cards games when I join randomly. I don't mind playing with the base cards, but a lot more people had expansions back on Goko. Maybe it's just because MF is new and people want to decide if it's worth the investment? That's my two cents.
I don't quite understand what you're saying here. Is it that MF has more freeloaders than Goko used to have, and being one of the freeloaders yourself that is annoying?
I do agree that MFs pricing is quite absurd and very much hurting Dominion Online. But as it stands my biggest problem is that about 15% of my games don't make it to the finish line.
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If we're still improving Dominion Online, I would recommend that we make the sets cheaper. A lot of people don't have the money to want to buy Dominion online sets. Personally, I worry that I won't get value out of the online cards because MF could crash or something. Even though this forum probably has little to no power to make this happen, I have been playing a lot of base cards games when I join randomly. I don't mind playing with the base cards, but a lot more people had expansions back on Goko. Maybe it's just because MF is new and people want to decide if it's worth the investment? That's my two cents.
I don't quite understand what you're saying here. Is it that MF has more freeloaders than Goko used to have, and being one of the freeloaders yourself that is annoying?
I do agree that MFs pricing is quite absurd and very much hurting Dominion Online. But as it stands my biggest problem is that about 15% of my games don't make it to the finish line.
I'm saying I wouldn't be a freeloader if the expansions were a tad cheaper.
And try the iPad/Kindle version, the only reason my games don't finish are if I resign or if my opponent does.
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If we're still improving Dominion Online, I would recommend that we make the sets cheaper. A lot of people don't have the money to want to buy Dominion online sets. Personally, I worry that I won't get value out of the online cards because MF could crash or something. Even though this forum probably has little to no power to make this happen, I have been playing a lot of base cards games when I join randomly. I don't mind playing with the base cards, but a lot more people had expansions back on Goko. Maybe it's just because MF is new and people want to decide if it's worth the investment? That's my two cents.
I don't quite understand what you're saying here. Is it that MF has more freeloaders than Goko used to have, and being one of the freeloaders yourself that is annoying?
I do agree that MFs pricing is quite absurd and very much hurting Dominion Online. But as it stands my biggest problem is that about 15% of my games don't make it to the finish line.
I'm saying I wouldn't be a freeloader if the expansions were a tad cheaper.
And try the iPad/Kindle version, the only reason my games don't finish are if I resign or if my opponent does.
I have played some games on my tablet, but it takes so much longer to do so, both for lag and "clicking". Not to mention the too-many-cards-in-hand probably being worse. Its playable, but I would never use it with a computer available.
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I'm saying I wouldn't be a freeloader if the expansions were a tad cheaper.
Yes I can understand that. I paid around $45 for my account and at the time I considered it quite much for something where I wasn't really sure what I was going to get.
Man, a monthly fee would be so much better, except when they also think up of a ridiculous prize for that.
It would also give them a very healthy incentive to consider things like these stability issues actually important, as I certainly would cancel my subscription for next month.
And try the iPad/Kindle version, the only reason my games don't finish are if I resign or if my opponent does.
I know not everyone has the same problems as I do. I could try randomly buying a new computer, or even a new kind of computer. But seriously is that what its coming down to?
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I'm saying I wouldn't be a freeloader if the expansions were a tad cheaper.
Yes I can understand that. I paid around $45 for my account and at the time I considered it quite much for something where I wasn't really sure what I was going to get.
Man, a monthly fee would be so much better, except when they also think up of a ridiculous prize for that.
It would also give them a very healthy incentive to consider things like these stability issues actually important, as I certainly would cancel my subscription for next month.
And try the iPad/Kindle version, the only reason my games don't finish are if I resign or if my opponent does.
I know not everyone has the same problems as I do. I could try randomly buying a new computer, or even a new kind of computer. But seriously is that what its coming down to?
Nowadays they're $85 for all the sets, and (maybe just for me) it's hard to spend $85 dollars on a website. I'd rather have $85 worth of Dominion cards in my hands, knowing that I have them. And I didn't realize the problem was your computer, not MF.
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Nowadays they're $85 for all the sets, and (maybe just for me) it's hard to spend $85 dollars on a website. I'd rather have $85 worth of Dominion cards in my hands, knowing that I have them. And I didn't realize the problem was your computer, not MF.
I never said the problem was my computer. My computer doesn't have problems with anything except for MF, and I've heard some other people that have similar issues with MF as I do.
However, I also seem to be one of the unlucky ones, as not many people have as many problems with it as I do. Or maybe they just got really tired of complaining. Or they never were into dominion as much as I was, and simply gave up on it. I just don't know, this is all assumptions.
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If we're still improving Dominion Online, I would recommend that we make the sets cheaper. A lot of people don't have the money to want to buy Dominion online sets. Personally, I worry that I won't get value out of the online cards because MF could crash or something. Even though this forum probably has little to no power to make this happen, I have been playing a lot of base cards games when I join randomly. I don't mind playing with the base cards, but a lot more people had expansions back on Goko. Maybe it's just because MF is new and people want to decide if it's worth the investment? That's my two cents.
I don't quite understand what you're saying here. Is it that MF has more freeloaders than Goko used to have, and being one of the freeloaders yourself that is annoying?
I do agree that MFs pricing is quite absurd and very much hurting Dominion Online. But as it stands my biggest problem is that about 15% of my games don't make it to the finish line.
I'm saying I wouldn't be a freeloader if the expansions were a tad cheaper.
And try the iPad/Kindle version, the only reason my games don't finish are if I resign or if my opponent does.
I have played some games on my tablet, but it takes so much longer to do so, both for lag and "clicking". Not to mention the too-many-cards-in-hand probably being worse. Its playable, but I would never use it with a computer available.
Are you using a Android tablet? Because I've been finding the iPad version OK ...
I won't say many good things about the MF version of Dominion but one good thing for me has been the release of the iPad version. I've played Dominion pretty much exclusively on a iPad for the last couple of years and the iOS version that came out a month or so again has significantly improved things for me. No crashes. No lag. Able to see how many victory point and coins I have for the first time in years. Able to open chat ("GG y'all").
Now if they could only manage to get Adventures programmed sometime this decade my only issues will be the amateur-hour art direction and the clunky UI.
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I never said the problem was my computer. My computer doesn't have problems with anything except for MF, and I've heard some other people that have similar issues with MF as I do.
However, I also seem to be one of the unlucky ones, as not many people have as many problems with it as I do. Or maybe they just got really tired of complaining. Or they never were into dominion as much as I was, and simply gave up on it. I just don't know, this is all assumptions.
I was in a similar position once. I was one of a few people who simply could not run the MF/Goko program. They eventually made some big change that happened to fix it (prior to their rewrite). They guessed that it involved some outdated OS thing that it wasn't letting me update.
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If we're still improving Dominion Online, I would recommend that we make the sets cheaper. A lot of people don't have the money to want to buy Dominion online sets. Personally, I worry that I won't get value out of the online cards because MF could crash or something. Even though this forum probably has little to no power to make this happen, I have been playing a lot of base cards games when I join randomly. I don't mind playing with the base cards, but a lot more people had expansions back on Goko. Maybe it's just because MF is new and people want to decide if it's worth the investment? That's my two cents.
I don't quite understand what you're saying here. Is it that MF has more freeloaders than Goko used to have, and being one of the freeloaders yourself that is annoying?
I do agree that MFs pricing is quite absurd and very much hurting Dominion Online. But as it stands my biggest problem is that about 15% of my games don't make it to the finish line.
I'm saying I wouldn't be a freeloader if the expansions were a tad cheaper.
And try the iPad/Kindle version, the only reason my games don't finish are if I resign or if my opponent does.
I have played some games on my tablet, but it takes so much longer to do so, both for lag and "clicking". Not to mention the too-many-cards-in-hand probably being worse. Its playable, but I would never use it with a computer available.
Are you using a Android tablet? Because I've been finding the iPad version OK ...
I won't say many good things about the MF version of Dominion but one good thing for me has been the release of the iPad version. I've played Dominion pretty much exclusively on a iPad for the last couple of years and the iOS version that came out a month or so again has significantly improved things for me. No crashes. No lag. Able to see how many victory point and coins I have for the first time in years. Able to open chat ("GG y'all").
Now if they could only manage to get Adventures programmed sometime this decade my only issues will be the amateur-hour art direction and the clunky UI.
Yeah, never got around to trying it on one of the ipads we have at work. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if it was significantly better.
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Man, a monthly fee would be so much better, except when they also think up of a ridiculous prize for that.
Probably seemed that way when you paid it without being sure what you'd get, but in retrospect that $45 has gotten you how many months of play? For me it's probably 1.5-2 years, or $2-3/month and getting cheaper the more months I play. Probably less than a subscription would've been. You're certainly right about subscription revenue providing an incentive to improve the game, but to some extent new-buyer revenue could do that too, so I guess maybe MF thinks they can attract enough new buyers to maintain the game long term? Who knows what their business people think, but at the price I paid, it's hard to knock the deal I've gotten so far.
For improving the online play experience, I still like something I threw out back when MF asked for feature requests on these forums: open the client source. Most games, I wouldn't bother suggesting such a thing, but this community has already proven it will contribute, see Salvager and arguably SCSN's mod to the new client. I'm not saying use a do-what-you-want OSS license like *GPL or Apache; it's reasonable for MF to want more control than that. I'm also not suggesting they open everything; give would-be contributors the front end, not the back end. We had that pre-Unity since the html and javascript was right there if one cared to read it, and the biggest result was Salvager. Maybe given the chance, we would do something that good again.