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Messages - samath

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126
Dominion Videos and Streams / Re: SamE Old Dominion
« on: July 02, 2018, 11:21:58 am »
Judgment Match #2 featuring xyrix is up: Page versus Peasant!


127
Not sure that video is the best example to underline your point here. The main reason it works is that Ghost Ship is such a strong counter to BM that you almost always want to build the engine when it's on the board.
Dan didn’t actually win that game the first time he played it. His actual opponent played Rebuild with Scavenger support, and after a certain point, Ghost Ship is neutral to helpful to a Rebuild player. After seeing this video, we all agreed that Rebuild is still the way to go, but it was now not unthinkable that Dan’s Dominate engine could win, which was surprising.

128
Dominion League / Season 28 - End of Season Deadlines
« on: July 01, 2018, 09:30:54 pm »
Season 28 officially ends on Sunday, July 15. To account for the westernmost timezones, the deadline for reporting matches is Monday, July 16, at 15:00 UTC.

If you need extra time to finish, please contact your group moderator. There is a one-point penalty for finishing late two consecutive seasons, assessed to the player(s) responsible for the late finish. It is the group moderator's job to assess responsibility; if it is unclear, make sure to let them know.

The deadline for finishing matches late is one week later. All late finish matches must be reported by Monday, July 23, at 15:00 UTC.

If any matches remain unreported by the late finish deadline, the responsible player(s) will be considered to have dropped mid-season. This means that they are banned for the next two seasons, and automatically demoted when they return. If they played at least three matches to completion, those are kept for the other players' standings and their remaining matches are "simulated" (see the full rules for how), but if they played less than this, all of their previous results are removed.

In addition to finishing your matches, all players must fill out the returning form to tell us whether they will be back for next season. This form was sent to you in a private message; you can also find it in the pinned post in your Discord division channel. The deadline for filling out the returning form is Wednesday, July 25, at 19:00 UTC (the Season 29 signup deadline). Any players who have not told us whether they will be back by then will be assumed to be not returning.

129
Dominion Videos and Streams / Re: SamE Old Dominion
« on: June 28, 2018, 11:55:28 am »
Another video is up, this one a compilation of five of the most interesting games of Dominion I played recently. This will likely be a recurring series.


130
Dominion Articles / Re: Settlers/Bustling Village
« on: June 28, 2018, 11:42:13 am »
Also it doesn't work with 'put your deck in your discard pile'-cards, because both of them draw before pulling something from discard, so don't accidentally try that.
Exception: Scavenger helpfully topdecks one card. It’s true that you can only get one Settlers/BV to draw after a Scavenger play, though.

131
Dominion Videos and Streams / SamE Old Dominion
« on: June 26, 2018, 01:40:11 am »
Hey everyone!

I've started a YouTube channel!

For now, I expect it'll feature a lot of Judgment Matches, including this first one of Groundskeeper versus Minion with aku chi.


132
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Kingdom Designs
« on: June 20, 2018, 10:56:38 am »
Kingdom design used to be a bigger discussion topic here back when certain tournaments featured submitted kingdom designs. It’s a lot of work, but could lead to some really cool boards. I could see such a tournament making a comeback at some point.

I agree with LF that the reason it’s rare is that random kingdoms are often pretty interesting these days. Dark Ages in particular has quite a bit more trashing, which is often the key ingredient making eng8nes possible. Second editions of Base and Intrigue also removed some of the biggest duds, meaning you interact with more of the kingdom.

That said, random kingdoms are never going to be as good as designed kingdoms, and I’d hope that designing would come back into the mix at some point. Personally, I would love to see more kingdoms where there are multiple reasonable strategies rather than one clearly dominant strategy both players aim for.

I always think in terms of tournaments, but I guess designing also happens in the Puzzles thread, e.g. the quest to find kingdoms where the first player can win on their first turn.

I guess that actually illustrates a problem with designed kingdoms in a tournament context these days: They can be just ridiculously nuts with certain events and some newer cards like Villa. Like Donate boards in general, this has the potential to make every kingdom into a puzzle, which is fun in small doses, but might be tiring to play repeatedly. I suppose this is just something for designers to keep in mind, though.

133
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Mountain Pass
« on: June 15, 2018, 08:44:58 am »
Another strategy would be to amass enough Gold or Gold gainers with enough remodels to reap Provinces to get enough VP to win while still in debt. (Untested.) In this case, even a bid of $40 would not be too high.
The more common method I’ve seen after bidding 40 is to use your gainers to drain piles fast enough to pileout before the opponent can score more. Usually this means you just have one turn.

134
Dominion Articles / Re: Ghost Town
« on: June 10, 2018, 03:07:40 pm »
Should all Night card articles mention Haunted Woods and Tactician, or should none of them and it just goes without saying?
Depends on the comprehensiveness of the article. This one was fairly sparse with mentioning individual card interactions (only citing Cultist and King's Court), so it seems fine not to mention them here. But they'd definitely be a part of my "flowchart."

135
Dominion Articles / Re: Ghost Town
« on: June 09, 2018, 06:43:40 am »
Well-balanced take and well-written! I think since Nocturne came out, I’ve been blown away at how fast GT + strong terminal draw decks are. Pooka is the clear in-set example, but I’ve seen it most effective with Margrave and Council Room — those also give the +buy to pick up extra GT’s.

136
Dominion League / Re: Partial results
« on: June 05, 2018, 08:49:30 pm »
Since we have moved to posting all partial results using the regular results reporting forms, this thread is no longer operative. It was a good nearly four years!

137
Dominion League / Re: Rules & Regulations Changelog
« on: June 04, 2018, 07:04:52 pm »
I finally got around to updating the rules on dropping players mid-season as we voted on last week.

Quote from: Old Rules
IX. Dropping Players Mid-Season

Players dropping out during the season have a significant negative impact on their group. Unfortunately, some must drop out, or become inactive and have to be removed by the moderators. It is difficult to deal with matches that have been played by a player who has dropped because the matches they played and failed to play can have a significant impact on the group standings. The following rules are used for dropped players:
  • If the removed player has not played any matches, they are simply removed and the remaining players in the group will play one fewer game.
  • If the removed player has played exactly 1 match, the match result is voided, and the remaining players will play one fewer game.
  • If the removed player has played more than 1 match, the results will be retained in the standings unless there are other reasons to void those results (e.g. if there is evidence suggesting that the dropped player purposefully threw games prior to dropping). However, the players who are dropped are then ineligible and finish below all other players, which often means they would demote in any subsequent season in which they might return.
Players who drop mid-season will be banned from participation in the next 2 League Seasons. If a player drops out within the first week of the season or is in good standing with the League (i.e. has played in prior seasons without drops or late finishes) the ban period may be reduced or eliminated per the moderating team's discretion.

Quote from: New Rules
IX. Dropping Players Mid-Season

Players dropping out during the season have a significant negative impact on their group. Unfortunately, some must drop out, or become inactive and have to be removed by the moderators. It is difficult to deal with matches that have been played by a player who has dropped because the matches they played and failed to play can have a significant impact on the group standings. The following rules are used for dropped players:
  • If the removed player has not played any matches, they are simply removed and the remaining players in the group will play one fewer match. If possible, the moderators will seek to replace them with another player from the waiting list.
  • If the removed player has played fewer than 3 complete matches, any games they played are voided, and the remaining players will play one fewer match.
  • If the removed player has played at least 3 complete matches, the results will be retained in the standings. In addition, so as not to compare any players with different numbers of games played, any unplayed games with dropped players will be simulated by averaging the average winning percentage of the dropped player and the average losing percentage of their opponent in all games they did play. The dropped player is then considered ineligible and finishes below all other players, including possible demotion in any subsequent season in which they might return.
Players who drop mid-season will be banned from participation in the next 2 League Seasons. If a player drops out within the first week of the season or is in good standing with the League (i.e. has played in prior seasons without drops or late finishes) the ban period may be reduced or eliminated per the moderating team's discretion.

138
Dominion League / Season 28 - Newsletter: Another Big One
« on: June 03, 2018, 08:08:48 pm »
Hello everyone!

We're excited to kick off Season 28, the second season of the League at this new scale. We have placed 252 players into 42 divisions, slightly fewer than the 45 divisions we had last year. You can still sign up for our waiting list until Wednesday in case spaces open up in the first week.

We unfortunately are losing four of the awesome moderators who made last season a success. We'd like to thank LaLight and IrrationalE (2.71828.....) for their service to the league, as they will be stepping away for the foreseeable future. assemble_me and drsteelhammer are taking a shorter break of a season or two; they will continue to stay on as advisors and hope to return to moderating in the near future.

To take their place, we successfully recruited four new moderators for the new season. Welcome to Anders, Seprix, tracer, and volfied! They are all active players in the League and the online Dominion community and we're lucky to have their help.

With a new season also comes the opportunity to make various changes to upgrade the league systems. Here's a list of what's new, some of which you might have already noticed:
  • Report your partial results like normal now. Instead of keeping them in a separate forum post, we're asking everyone to report their partial results this season using the same form they use to report full results. (If you're playing in the League this season, this form should have been PM'd to you.) After submitting, the form will provide a link which you can use to edit your results later, or, if you lose that link, you can also just make a new post. (Don't do this for every game of a match, though, unless you really do play them one at a time across six different days...)
  • A Comprehensive FAQ. Thanks to all of his tireless work welcoming new players to the League, gloures has gotten a lot of questions from you all. He's compiled them together in a forum post that you should all be sure to check out.
  • The new Dominion League Hotline. In going through the feedback from all of you, we realized that many of those with negative experiences didn't raise it with a moderator. We'd like to lower that barrier to entry by providing an easy tool for you to contact the moderator team: http://tinyurl.com/dominion-league-hotline. Just fill out that form any time you have any issues, whether your opponent stood you up for a match or you just forgot some link, and a moderator will get back to you as soon as possible.
  • Further and better timezone-based divisions. The return of timezone-based divisions in D, E and F was largely a success. This season, we are further subdividing North American timezones in E and F into Eastern/Central and Mountain/Pacific timezone-based divisions. We also no longer need a mixed division in D, with 5 North American and 3 European divisions.
  • More helpful metrics in the standings. You might notice a new column in the standings, +/-, which is simply your number of wins minus your number of losses. It's perhaps a better intermediate metric of how well you've been doing than the average score in a match, since that can be excessively high or low if you have fewer games played. We've also replaced average score with winning %, a more intuitive metric for those not used to 6-game matches.
  • A new Matches tab in the Standings. Back by a combination of popular demand and usefulness to the moderating team, this tab provides another snapshot at the progress of each division, a la the old Standings posts from Season 25 and before.
  • Individual Standings links. Some of you just wanted to see what's going on in your division without opening the whole Standings page (and it's gotten quite long by now!), so links to the standings posts for just your divisions have been distributed in the opening PMs to everyone. They're also in the opening Discord post in your division-specific channel.
Finally, I'd like to recognize markus's work which started at the beginning of last season to provide forecasts for the League. He'll be doing the same for this season; keep an eye on the Standings page for his post there soon.

Keep making the League awesome,

SamE

139
Dominion League / Season 28 - Standings
« on: June 03, 2018, 06:50:54 pm »

140
But in order to trash both Hovels on an Estate buy after playing Masquerade, you need to forego trashing one of them on the Masquerade play! You could choose to trash a Copper instead, but then we'd be talking about a Peddler + (whatever else you would have bought) versus a Lab. If there's really nothing you want to buy for $3 or $4, it could be better, but that's hardly the power play that Awaclus initially made it sound.

You're not passing the OGE so that you can do it on your turn, you're doing it so that your opponent who might not have Masquerade in hand can't do it on theirs.
I still think I'd prefer to have two one-shot Labs than an opportunity to buy a Lab for $3. Especially early, when the extra card can potentially help me hit a key price point.

141
In the early game, buying an Estate to trash two Hovels is likely the best play you can make, to the extent that you certainly should pass Overgrown Estate and possibly Necropolis over Hovel if you can, only to prevent your opponent from doing that.
I'm pretty sure this is a joke. Masquerade alone gives you both the ability to trash OE for the +1 Card and a use for Necropolis.

It's not a joke. Getting rid of a dead card in your deck is stronger than Necropolis or a one-time +1 card.

Yeah, buying an Estate with 2 Hovels in hand is basically the same thing as buying a Laboratory. So there certainly might be better buys; but really depends on how much you have to spend on the turn that you drew both Hovels (which is very likely to be less than ).

But in order to trash both Hovels on an Estate buy after playing Masquerade, you need to forego trashing one of them on the Masquerade play! You could choose to trash a Copper instead, but then we'd be talking about a Peddler + (whatever else you would have bought) versus a Lab. If there's really nothing you want to buy for $3 or $4, it could be better, but that's hardly the power play that Awaclus initially made it sound.

142
In the early game, buying an Estate to trash two Hovels is likely the best play you can make, to the extent that you certainly should pass Overgrown Estate and possibly Necropolis over Hovel if you can, only to prevent your opponent from doing that.
I'm pretty sure this is a joke. Masquerade alone gives you both the ability to trash OE for the +1 Card and a use for Necropolis.

143
Dominion League / Re: Season 28 - Late Signups
« on: May 30, 2018, 03:04:29 pm »
Signups listed below. See Available Spots for how many openings there are, and the Waiting List for late signups. Confirmed players are also color-coded according to tentative divisions; these will be finalized after the rating cutoff on Sunday, June 3rd.

144
Dominion League / Season 28 - Late Signups
« on: May 30, 2018, 03:00:18 pm »
Season 28 will run from Monday, June 4th until Sunday, July 15th. Signups have officially closed, but if you are new to the league, you can still sign up late in this thread until Wednesday, June 6th at 19:00 UTC.

Late signups are now closed. Please go here if you would like to sign up for season 29.

To do so, please post a message with your dominion.games username, timezone* and, if you have joined the Dominion Discord, your Discord username (formatted like @___#___). Please make sure to state the exact spelling of your username (upper/lower case, special characters, and so on). You will be placed in an appropriate division according to your timezone and rating on dominion.games as seen in the client or here.

Please check the welcome thread first and read the rules to make sure you're comfortable with the format and the time it takes to play a season. If you have any questions be sure to check out the FAQ. You can also ask questions about the League at the dominionleague channel on the Dominion Discord. If you join, we highly recommend, but do not require, using Discord to communicate with your opponents.

If there is space for you this season, you will receive a personal message from a league moderator to confirm your signup. You must reply to this message within 24 hours or your signup will be removed.

If there is no space appropriate for you (given your level and timezone), we will instead invite you to sign up for next season! You should hear back either way by Sunday, June 10th.

*When specifying a timezone, please use one of these common examples or use the same format and look yours up in the complete list.
Code: [Select]
America/Chicago
America/Denver
America/Los_Angeles
America/New_York
Australia/Sydney
Europe/Berlin
Europe/London

145
Dominion League / Re: Season 27 - Same League, Grander Scale
« on: May 30, 2018, 01:26:18 am »
Hi everyone,

As we wrap up the loose ends of Season 27 and gear up for Season 28, I'd like to provide a bit of a retrospective from my perspective on the largest league season ever.

When we first decided to advertise directly on the client, we had no idea how successful it would be. We had advertised previously on Reddit and the Shuffle IT forums, but had only picked up a handful of players that way. Expectations were a bit higher for going directly to the place where people actually play Dominion online; I initially hoped we could get 30 new players, which would bring us to around the totals from Seasons 1 and 8, the biggest we'd ever had.

We got 333 new signups.

Immediately we knew we needed to filter. There was a lot of skepticism in the existing community -- are these players actually planning on playing a full League season? Or are they just going to sign up and forget about it?

We decided to invoke a rule that we had listed in the signup page as a possibility, requiring everyone to reply promptly to a PM from one of our moderators. gloures stepped up to send those mass PMs and receive all of the replies and I built the backend infrastructure to give him handy links to do so. We all owe him a huge thank you; somehow he wasn't completely burned out and he agreed to do it again for Season 28!

In the end, 217 of the new signups, or 65.1%, replied to his message and confirmed their signup. (That percentage might be a bit low, because we allowed players who didn't reply in time to re-signup before the deadline, so they'd count twice.) The vast majority were brand new League players, but with the excitement of the larger league, we also saw a swell of interest from former players. Thirteen of those 217 players had previously played in the League, which was more than double the number of such returners we had the previous season. That swell of interest led us to standardize the rules regarding returning players, introducing a one-year expiration date for returning to a particular tier.

With the 53 players continuing from the previous season, we had a total of 270 at the start of the season, filling 45 6-player divisions. Of course, there were still questions about how many would actually finish the season. Over the course of the season, we would unfortunately have to remove 41 players, 23 before they could play two matches and 18 after having done so. One such player let us know early enough to be replaced, so in the end, we had 230 players in all who completed the season.

So of those 217 players we added, 179, or 82%, were able to complete the season. On average, that means a division consisting of 6 new players (as most of the divisions in E and F were) would see just one player drop. Of course, this was just an average; some divisions remained completely intact, while the poor E6, E15 and F6 divisions lost three players each. While the dropouts were uneven, a 5-player division still resembles typical League play, so I'd count this whole grand experiment as successful.

Here's another perspective given that players dropped out with a wide range of numbers of matches completed: With a total of 45 divisions of six players each, we should have seen 675 matches played. Of those, 545 matches were played, or 80%. This number is a bit lower because the first player dropping from a division erases not a sixth but a third of the matches that would have been played in that division. Still, by any of these various metrics, this was not only the largest season ever, but more than double the size of any previous season.

From the moderators' perspective, this scale actually makes some things easier for us. We can fill C up to 4 divisions, D up to 8 divisions, and E up to 16 divisions, fulfilling the original vision that Stef laid out when starting the League.

It also gives us the flexibility to balance two of the considerations that were long held in tension. Do we group players by time zone or by level? Originally, all groupings were by time zone, until imbalances started to accrue, most notably with the European divisions in B and C being stronger than their American counterparts. A few seasons ago, the decision was made to switch the ranking to level-based, using a snake sorting designed to balance the average level within each division at the same tier.

Another problem with the time-zone based system is that the divisions rarely divided up evenly between time zones. With fewer than 20 players, there's actually no guarantee that you will be able to split the players into divisions of 5 or 6. These sort of discretization problems -- for instance, when we only had one E division, we couldn't reasonably add 2-3 E-level players -- have now completely vanished with the influx of new players in the League.

In fact, the massive influx of players meant that we could divide up D, E and F according to time zone "region" (most regions being primarily either North American or European) and still have enough players to form divisions. We continue to pool everyone in A, B and C together, but as these are now the upper 20% of the League or so, we can say that if you make it up that high, you're among the best, and you need to play the best, wherever they live in the world.

What does this mean for the future of the League? Well, of the 230 players who finished Season 27, 179 of them, or 78%, will be returning for Season 28. While this is lower than in previous seasons, it's only natural given how many players were trying it out for the first time. In addition, advertising the Champion Match on the client has brought in another 60-80 players, depending on how many of the latest signups confirm. It looks like we'll be starting a little bit smaller than Season 27, but we do hope that we won't have to drop nearly as many and will finish with about the same number of matches / players.

In other words, the big League appears to be here to stay. The number of F divisions will fluctuate, but we hope to keep A, B, C, D, and E completely full as long as we can. Get used to this scale!

On an even more personal note, I've relished this opportunity to scale the League up. I absolutely love systematizing; it's a weird personality quirk that has been incredibly useful here. With a League this size, we've needed to build automated systems to assist gloures with onboarding, to place everyone into zones and divisions, to assist moderators with keeping track of their divisions, to handle user dropouts, and to make all of the scheduling forum posts, Discord channel opening messages, and division-based PMs that go out at the beginning of every season, and I've thoroughly enjoyed the process of building and testing those new systems.

That said, this has taken a lot of time. It's been a labor of love, but I won't be able to spend nearly the same amount of time in the coming months as I wrap up my PhD and find a job. Thankfully, everything should be built and working now, with a full season at this scale under our belts, and we've gotten some new moderators to come on board and shoulder some of that administrative load. In particular, I've been documenting everything and have been passing along everything I know to new moderator volfied, so I'd encourage you to reach out to him if anything goes wrong.

In the end, it's not really about me; it's about you all having fun playing Dominion in a friendly yet competitive environment. The more players who can participate and enjoy that experience, the better!

SamE

146
Dominion FAQ / Re: Counterfeit Clarification
« on: May 29, 2018, 09:33:06 pm »
But just so I'm clear (because I think what I'm about to say is right): +X Cards are the first thing you do.

Right?
You always execute the actions on a card in order in the order written on the card. Often this means that you draw cards first, but some cards (e.g. Cellar) have you do something else first. What you wrote for Wandering Minstrel is correct.

147
Dominion Videos and Streams / Re: JSH's Dominion Tier List Series
« on: May 29, 2018, 01:33:10 pm »
It looks like you're getting the images from cropping pictures of the cards, which are picking up some of the borders. I'd just recommend using the art by itself, which you can see in every wiki article. It saves you the time of cropping and doesn't pick up any of those border artifacts.

148
Dominion League / Re: Rules & Regulations Changelog
« on: May 27, 2018, 04:22:20 pm »
volfied caught a part of the rules that was under the old "F is the new E" thinking... there is still demotion and promotion between E and F like any other pair. (We might want to consider creating a beginners G division at some point...)

Quote from: Old Rules
III. Standings

During the season, the standings for each group will be automatically updated as players complete matches. The players in each group will be ranked based on the average number of points they have received in each match. Ties are broken in the following order.
  • Number of total points from matches between the tied players
  • The sum of the number of points received in each match multiplied by the total score of the opponent from that match.
  • Coin Flip
At the end of the season, players who place 1st in their groups will promote to the next higher division, and players who place 5th and 6th will demote to the next lower division. (e.g. the players who place 5th and 6th in the A group will demote to the B division, and the players who place first in B1 and B2 groups will promote to the A division to take their places.) Players in the F division, are not required to promote to the E division unless they wish to; similarly, Players in the E division will not demote to F unless they wish to. (However, the League may require a player to promote from F or remain in the E group if the player's ability is not in line with the F division.)

Quote from: New Rules
III. Standings

During the season, the standings for each group will be automatically updated as players complete matches. The players in each group will be ranked based on the average number of points they have received in each match. Ties are broken in the following order.
  • Number of total points from matches between the tied players
  • The sum of the number of points received in each match multiplied by the total score of the opponent from that match.
  • Coin Flip
At the end of the season, players who place 1st in their groups will promote to the next higher division, and players who place 5th and 6th will demote to the next lower division. For instance, the players who place 5th and 6th in the A group will demote to the B division, and the players who place first in B1 and B2 groups will promote to the A division to take their places. We might possibly be more lenient in the lower divisions depending on overall numbers.

150
The Season 27 Champion Match, featuring a rematch of last season's between markus and Mic Qsenoch, will take place tomorrow, Friday, May 25th, at 16:00 UTC. The match will be streamed on Twitch with commentary from jonts and E.Honda. You are also welcome to watch and comment in the client.

The match consists of six games, which by tradition will be played all the way out regardless of the outcome. Both competitors did extremely well in the regular season, winning at least 21 of 30 games against their (very strong) opponents. markus enters the championship with a 0.5-point lead on Mic Qsenoch, so he just needs to win 3 games, while Mic Qsenoch needs to win 3.5.

My apologies for the late forum announcement; hopefully you saw the announcement in-client a few days ago!

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