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1

General Discussion / Re: Random Stuff Part III

« on: September 12, 2016, 12:45:21 pm »

If you can spare $1000, I'd go with the Grado Statement Series, which are the headphones I have.

I'm not familiar with those particular headphones, but generally speaking, getting headphones that cost more than $100 is a massive waste unless you also have a decent headphone amplifier because the built-in headphone amps in computers and such are horrible crap.

These are actually good about that; but yes, when I use my computer (which I typically don't do for music but occasionally do for other media) it is rather lackluster. My media player itself powers them beautifully.

2

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Black Market?

« on: September 12, 2016, 12:10:51 pm »

I would support having all cards in the Black Market deck and ignoring the setup text on the cards in the black market. So you don't have an extra pile for Young Witch, you don't get a coin token from Baker, and your miserable Urchin never grows up, your Hermits never lose their minds, etc. In addition to being simpler, it makes a certain amount of sense that a 'hidden' element of the game cannot affect setup. Of course, if you include every card in the BM deck, the question of whether to randomize the order each iteration is mostly moot.

Young Witch would be strong but probably ok. Death Cart would be super broken, and Marauder and Cultist would suck.

Death Cart would still tear your deck apart, piece by piece. It just doesn't give you the convenient fuel. Yeah, both Young Witch and Death Cart would get better, some cards would get worse. But we are talking about the effects of a promo card on a handful of cards which will have a small chance of appearing in any game with that promo, and are limited to one copy each. I'm fine with that.

3

General Discussion / Re: Random Stuff Part III

« on: September 12, 2016, 11:28:10 am »

Re: personal music listening equipment

If you can spare $1000, I'd go with the Grado Statement Series, which are the headphones I have. Admittedly, this would also require that your music player and music files are of sufficient quality to shine through.

That being said, you aren't going to get a great experience out of any earbuds, so having ones that work on both sides is pretty good if that's the game you're in.

Re: rap

There is garbage music in every genre, and in fact, it is that garbage you are mostly likely to casually encounter. I don't tend to seek out rap, but I do listen to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (the album containing the song Monster that chris mentioned) quite frequently. 

4

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Black Market?

« on: September 12, 2016, 11:16:14 am »

I would support having all cards in the Black Market deck and ignoring the setup text on the cards in the black market. So you don't have an extra pile for Young Witch, you don't get a coin token from Baker, and your miserable Urchin never grows up, your Hermits never lose their minds, etc. In addition to being simpler, it makes a certain amount of sense that a 'hidden' element of the game cannot affect setup. Of course, if you include every card in the BM deck, the question of whether to randomize the order each iteration is mostly moot.

5

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion Mini-Set for Travel

« on: September 06, 2016, 01:54:25 pm »

I find that a couple of dice helps substitute tokens fairly well, if you're tight on space and want to play with them. So long as the numbers don't get too ridiculous - Goons and maybe Merchant Guild would be out.

A standard set of role-playing dice contains a d%.

6

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Creating Dominion

« on: August 31, 2016, 03:13:05 pm »

Re: compensation (in any field)

location, location, location

7

General Discussion / Re: Worst Thing Of All Time Clickbait Extravaganza

« on: August 29, 2016, 12:09:57 pm »

Incidentally, I recently had the opposite of the girl thing happen. I was in a supermarket, and I heard a kid screaming from several isles over, and I got very angry (I don't like kids in general, poorly behaved kids are rage-inducing, mostly towards the parents). I walked over that way despite this because I needed stuff over there, and I round the corner to see a girl that once rejected me semi-disinterestedly holding onto this kid's hand, apparently not giving a damn about it. The feeling was strange, but much of it was a feeling that justice had been served. The relevant ages involved and lack of a ring (yes I looked) made it even more triumphant in a way.

Does this make me a terrible person? No, I was one before this happened.

8

Dominion League / Re: S16 Champion Match: Sunday 21-8, 19:00 UTC

« on: August 22, 2016, 08:59:03 am »

At a certain point, it was intentional

The thing is, most of that discussion was centered on the interactions in general between Swindler and shelters, which is meaningfully different than the interaction between Swindler and ruins. Hopefully nobody was using the audio as semi-entertaining background noise, as they would have picked up some very bad Swindler play advice!

9

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Band of Misfits and Gear

« on: August 17, 2016, 08:03:52 pm »

I actually didn't know the official ruling about setting aside zero cards with Gear/Haven.  Why does it work that way?  I don't get the reasoning behind that ruling.  To me that seems to contradict the "do as much as you can" principle (i.e., why don't you keep Gear/Haven out, then try to put the set-aside cards into your hand at the start of your next turn, but fail to do so because there are no set-aside cards?)  Note that I'm not arguing that the ruling should be different, I'm just confused as to why that ruling is the way it is.

I believe the ruling for Duration cards is that they stay out for as long as they are "doing something". If you don't set aside cards with Gear/Haven, they have "nothing to do", so they don't get set aside.

EDIT: ninja'd

10

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion Discord Server

« on: August 17, 2016, 01:39:48 pm »

can someone explain to me what discord is and what the appeal of this new site / service / whatever is before I sign up for it? generally I am skeptical of sites based on the names of my little pony villains

If you are familiar with Slack, its kinda like that with respect to chat features, except that the built-in integrations are geared towards gaming, not IT work. It also has voice chat features for playing games with a "squad", which I assume would work out pretty decently for quick games and discussion (but I haven't tried it). It is useful to find games, and we ran a little tournament yesterday that worked out pretty well.

11

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How good is Alchemy?

« on: August 17, 2016, 10:10:00 am »

Alchemy is a pretty good set, but its not as fun or rewarding as Empires. Both are better than Intrigue.

12

Dominion General Discussion / Re: could you ever see yourself playing Dominion for money?

« on: August 16, 2016, 02:45:09 pm »

And Dominion is missing, I think, one key element:  there's just about zero incentive for a FLGS to sponsor a Dominion tournament, much less one every week.

My FLGS runs Friday Night Magic, like just about every other FLGS.  Assuming they get 24 people to show up, they take in $360 in entry fees, and "spend" 120 boosters on the draft itself and prizes.  They turn a small profit on the tournament itself.  You can't do that with Dominion.

The big reason to run an MTG tournament from a store's perspective is to sell product: constructed tournaments will always feature people buying singles last minute to complete sideboards or whatever (even watched someone crack packs for a solid 10 minutes trying to find an uncommon the store was out of). Stores don't even have to structure tournaments to be intrinsically profitable to be worth it (even though they will bitch and moan endlessly about how the tournament structure is killing them and refuse to acknowledge their true status as loss leaders). However, you can't endlessly sell Dominion products to tournament-goers; at best you might sell an expansion or three to someone who doesn't actually own the whole thing yet.

13

Dominion General Discussion / Re: could you ever see yourself playing Dominion for money?

« on: August 16, 2016, 10:01:58 am »

Players could even get together and secretly play as a team.

This hasn't destroyed the Magic: The Gathering Online mostly because the big prize for online events is qualification for invitation-only "paper" tournaments. A similar model could work well for Dominion if it was big enough. It'd be a long time before we had to worry about that though.

I will admit to thinking about running simulators at the beginning of online matches, but I've never actually done it. If I had, I probably wouldn't have tried to play Beggar/Gardens against MegaGoons last league season. As for card counting, I don't use any aids to do this while playing online, which would be pretty trivial to do, but I don't think it would ruin the game if people did so. They'd get better results in Dominion Online, but they'd probably cap their paper performance because they'd never get used to doing it mentally.

14

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Iso index

« on: August 11, 2016, 02:07:28 pm »

What I don't actually understand is why we use TrueSkill at all. The purpose of TrueSkill is to provide a rating method for multiplayer (>2) games, which is all well and good because you can play 3 and 4 player rated games online. The thing is, we don't rate multiplayer games. The only games that are used to generate the ratings are 2 player, non-bot games. It would make much more sense to use the Glicko or Glicko2 systems, which TrueSkill is based on, if we're just doing 2-player ratings. Why? Because its simpler to calculate and to understand, and, its not patented by Microsoft.

There's not like a reason other than that's what dougz chose for isotropic, where I believe it also included multiplayer games. Continuing to use trueskill allowed people to at least believe they could compare current ratings with their past ones. Though nowadays that seems pretty impossible. I've never really understood why after the switch to the MF set of games, the levels of the highest players were suddenly 10-15 higher than we'd seen with the Goko isotropish leaderboard. There was a thread once where this was discussed and yed said the implementation was identical.

If someone made another leaderboard with another rating system I bet people would look at it, and then time would tell whether they kept looking at it in the future.

I had contemplated building a whole new goko salvager infrastructure that would offer ranking history and perhaps multiple ranking/leaderboard displays (I think we've reverse engineered the MF rating model? not quite sure) and some other features I was kicking around. But it seems pointless with the new Dominion online in 2017; it could be still relevant but I don't know what they will offer in the way of the features salvager currently provides.

15

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Iso index

« on: August 11, 2016, 10:00:40 am »

Not sure if your question was totally sated by the link to the leaderboard, but I've been wanting to post some of these comments for a while now, so I'll just run them out here.

The isotropish rating is an implementation of the TrueSkill rating system by Microsoft. The parameters used are:

μ: 25
σ: 25
β: 25
τ: 0.25
draw probability: 0.05


What I don't actually understand is why we use TrueSkill at all. The purpose of TrueSkill is to provide a rating method for multiplayer (>2) games, which is all well and good because you can play 3 and 4 player rated games online. The thing is, we don't rate multiplayer games. The only games that are used to generate the ratings are 2 player, non-bot games. It would make much more sense to use the Glicko or Glicko2 systems, which TrueSkill is based on, if we're just doing 2-player ratings. Why? Because its simpler to calculate and to understand, and, its not patented by Microsoft.

16

Dominion League / Re: Season 16 - Results

« on: August 09, 2016, 09:06:40 pm »

D2: Infthitbox 4 - 2 Petrovic

I will not be back for next season; I'll be spending a significant chunk of it on vacation and unable to play.

17

Dominion League / Re: Season 16 - Results

« on: August 04, 2016, 08:14:27 pm »

D2: Infthitbox 4 - 2 zporiri

18

Dominion General Discussion / Re: jamfamsam's art ranking by committee

« on: August 02, 2016, 09:06:48 am »

Did you know that in the Wizard of Oz, the book, Dorothy's slippers are made of silver and not rubies?

Sure. Red shoes were better equipped to show off the new-fangled colour movie technology.

Yeah, but the silver shoes were pretty central to the whole economic point the book was trying to make.

19

Goko Dominion Online / Re: gokosalvager?

« on: July 29, 2016, 10:32:05 am »

Is there an alternative way to look up logs for specific games besides GokoSalvager?

Not really. The logs are available at urls like: http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/20160728/index.html (this is yesterday's list, date is in YYYY-MM-DD format) but there isn't a way to find your own logs without downloading them all and using grep, etc.

20

Rules Questions / Re: Either (Triumphal Arch)

« on: July 28, 2016, 11:35:58 am »

English not explicitly differentiating between OR and XOR is a problem. Most uses of 'or' indicate XOR but that's not always true, particularly when used as part of a conditional. This problem extends to other words (like 'either') that have meanings similar to or include 'or'.

21

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Royal carriage masquerade pin

« on: July 26, 2016, 04:16:01 pm »

If somebody pins me I don't think "dumb game, pins are stupid." More like, "wow that's a pretty cool combo my opponent pulled off, well done."

There most certainly are differing sentiments here.

I think it would feel different if the game ACTUALLY ended on a pin, instead of just continuing as a game that you can't play. It could be something as simple as a rule that's just part of Dominion that says "if you start 2 turns in a row with 0 cards in hand and no Duration cards in play, you lose the game". If that were a general rule, a pin wouldn't "feel" like a pin. It would just feel like your opponent managed to pull of the alternate victory condition of the game.

You can always concede, particularly in 2p.

22

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Turn 1 (1.5 Win)

« on: July 11, 2016, 02:16:06 pm »

You can cut Alms out of the equation by stipulating that your starting hand is 4C + Necro. In that case, you don't Alms for Villa, but have 6 coins total, allowing you to TFair + Advance/Fortress + Mission directly. This leaves an extra Villa in the supply for the Mission turn, which means you get to "the end" with 7 coins and 8 buys, which... doesn't help you to cut anything else out I don't think.

EDIT: You can also gain a BV on turn 1 with your Fortress, which means there's one less to get in the last step. Not sure if that's helpful at all either.

23

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Inheritance with Vineyards

« on: July 05, 2016, 01:03:28 pm »

I've created a pull request for yed to review with a fix for the Inheritance interaction with Vineyard. While researching this, it led me to discover that the inherited card is added to your deck for scoring; I wasn't aware of that. Because of that, I've added a line in the sidebar deck tracker that reads something like:

1 inherited Saboteur

right after it totals up the cards in your deck.

24

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: "Features" threads

« on: July 05, 2016, 10:02:42 am »

Fantastic! I spent a long time thinking about the best possible way to do the interface.

I actually quite like the MF interface. Not too much crap, but also not too little.

it's mainly visual stuff i (and seemingly others) have a problem with.  events not being distinct enough from cards, the animations, the new garish blue circles around the numbers...

That's interesting, out of everything the MF client does/has, I find the Event display to be perfectly fine. They're visually distinct enough for me.

25

Dominion Articles / Re: How to play Lost Arts.

« on: July 01, 2016, 02:46:37 pm »

This actually seems like a good spot to mention a bit of an unusual LA usage I did in one of my league games against infthitbox this season.

We probably both did tons wrong, but it was an interesting kingdom: who'd have thought LA on Apothecary would ever make sense?

Kingdom:

Code: [Select]

Lost Arts, Inheritance, Vineyard, Apothecary, Ambassador, Oracle, Alchemist, Talisman, Apprentice, Bandit Camp, Ill-Gotten Gains, Lost City

Log: http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160614/log.0.1465943411131.txt

I never want to see this game log again in my life.