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[Tiger]

Shouldn't the top card of the discard pile be visible to all players at all times? You can't see it on isotropic.

Is this to avoid having everyone have to choose in which order they discard their hands and such all the time?

[guided]

In answer to both your questions: Yes.

Basically, isotropic deliberately uses a variant rule so that you don't have to decide which card to put on top every time you discard multiple cards.

[Personman]

While ^ is Doug's stated reasoning, it doesn't really make any sense to me. Having your default discard order be the order you drew the cards in would add 0 complexity, and allowing you to reorder your discards with the existing drag-and-drop interface would allow you to do so when it matters.

I wrote a long email to Doug about this in the very earliest days of Isotropic, and he never replied beyond the initial 'it would be too annoying to always order your discards'. It honestly confuses me that he would go to such lengths to get the who-goes-first rule 'right' but totally ignore this one.

[Donald X.]

Seeing what the top card is after they discard at end of turn would be zero information in almost all cases. If it's the tiniest amount of trouble it's not worth it.

Seeing what they discard when they discard to an action might interest you. I could see isotropic indicating what's discarded when a single card is discarded, e.g. Cellar-for-one, since you would always know that card irl and there's no extra decision required to show it.

[Personman]

I have to strongly disagree with you here. Any time their hand is two important terminals and 3 treasure, (or KC and 4 treasure, etc) I'm going to be *very* interested in knowing the last card that they didn't play, especially in the mid to late game when decks are large and knowing how much of their power they have coming up this shuffle is vitally important.

[Donald X.]

I have to strongly disagree with you here. Any time their hand is two important terminals and 3 treasure, (or KC and 4 treasure, etc) I'm going to be *very* interested in knowing the last card that they didn't play, especially in the mid to late game when decks are large and knowing how much of their power they have coming up this shuffle is vitally important.

You will never get to know it though - they will choose to put the cards from play on top when they discard everything.

[theory]

If you like, Personman, just pick a random card they played or bought and imagine that they put that on top.  The only time this information is valuable is therefore a turn where they literally played nothing at all and bought nothing at all.

[Personman]

Wait, I totally misunderstand the rules of Dominion then!

My group has always played that during cleanup, cards from play get discarded first, and then the remainder of your hand in any order, so you always have to reveal at least one unplayed card.

EDIT: Just checked the rulebook, and while it's ambiguous, and I can see why we read it how we did. The salient sections are

"The player places any cards that are in his play area (Action cards that have been played in the Action phase as well as Treasure cards that have been played in the Buy phase) and any cards remaining in his hand onto his Discard pile. Although the player need not show the cards remaining in his hand to his opponents, since he places the cards in the Discard pile face-up, his opponents will always be able to see the top-most card of his Discard pile."

and

"The player places all cards in his play area onto his Discard pile. This will include all Action cards and Treasure cards he played during this turn. He also places all cards left in his hand onto his Discard pile."

Especially in the second description, where the two actions are described in separate sentences and it says "He also" to talk about discarding your hand, it seems really reasonable to read it as specifying the order. But clearly it doesn't actually say that, and I guess that isn't what was intended. Which I think is a little said, because it kind of needlessly removes a source of information (but only if you are crafty enough to pick up your cards in play and put them in front of your cards in hand, which is kind of unnatural).

[hughes]

This sounds like something to put on the 'info' page so that players can look at it if they want but is generally out of the way.

[caesuric]

When I play with physical Dominion at home, I typically put a card that I played on top of the rest of my discards to obscure the rest of my hand.  However, it's really silly, so when I play with the one friend who insists that all cards should be visible as they move from other locations to the discard pile, I readily acquiesce.

[drg]

If you like, Personman, just pick a random card they played or bought and imagine that they put that on top.  The only time this information is valuable is therefore a turn where they literally played nothing at all and bought nothing at all.

Not quite, it can be somewhat relevant to cellars, hamlets, young witches, horse traders, militia, minion, etc.  Especially with the latter cards that aren't giving actions you may see if they are discarding dead actions they couldn't play otherwise. 

It's definitely not worth making people order their discards over, but if the top card was available in the info box and the first thing clicked (or played that turn if it's a cleanup) always went on top whenever some number of cards was entering the pile it at the least would not slow the game down.