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Author Topic: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)  (Read 37981 times)

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phonological loop

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #25 on: July 06, 2018, 10:28:19 pm »
+2

I think that, perhaps, a lot of these issues stem from the fact that Dominion was not designed to be played at the level that top players are playing it. Which is not to say that top players are doing anything wrong. It's just a reality.

Well, this is the crux of the issue, isn't it? For many of us, strategic depth is what makes games fun. A large part of that is that a game withstands repeated playings and attempts to find optimal strategies and plays -- in other words, that playing the game to win presents a deep and intellectually stimulating task. Compare chess and go, for instance. They've survived for so long and are revered precisely because they possess this quality.

It is clear that Dominion as played competitively -- 2 players, all expansions, random kingdoms -- has a lot of strategic depth. But I am becoming convinced that is mostly a happy accident. For instance, Nocturne wasn't even really playtested with 2 players, as we discussed in a previous thread.  Further, certain things seem to break down around the edges when you start to conceive of Dominion as a competitive game, from overly swingy cards to the totally arbitrary rule against checking the contents of your discard pile. And these introduce undesirable qualities from the perspective of someone who desires a deep, well-tuned game of skill. (I suppose I should expand on the log and discard pile issue. I, and I would guess Awaclus, would like games to be more about making good strategic decisions than memory. If I want to test my memory, I have various other ways of doing that. The "can't look at the discard rule" introduces what I perceive as an overly extreme and artificial barrier to making good decisions.)

So, one of the complaints is that Dominion does not play well as a game of skill at a high level, and your response is that of course that's true, because it wasn't designed that way. Then I think it is very fair for someone like Awalcus or myself to respond -- well, if that's the case, why should we keep playing it?

And I suppose the obvious response to this is to go elsewhere and play such games, if that's what we want. This seems to be Awalcus's conclusion, too. But I find the whole thing a little sad, because Dominion comes so, so close to being such a game -- so close that a healthy competitive community has sprung up nonetheless! -- that with a few small tweaks to the online client it could get it most of the way there (as Awalcus points out). It would also be nice to have these concerns on your radar during playtesting.


« Last Edit: July 06, 2018, 10:33:58 pm by phonological loop »
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LastFootnote

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #26 on: July 06, 2018, 11:04:31 pm »
+4

It would also be nice to have these concerns on your radar during playtesting.

Concerns like, you want to be able to look at your discard pile? Sorry, that ship has sailed. Although in my IRL games, we allow each other to look through our discard piles on other people's turns (and our own if it's quick). The entire point of the rule forbidding looking through the discard is exactly so that players won't waste everybody else's time by constantly doing it. I guess it would be nice to have the ability to use that house rule in Dominion Online, but I think the people clamoring for it are the ones most likely to abuse it and slow games way down.

I don't think the strategic depth is an accident, happy or otherwise. The entire game is built around interesting card interactions, and I think that's where most of the depth springs from. I guess you could hypothesize that some parts were an accident. I'll do that now, in fact. It seems to me that the relative ease of drawing and trashing in Dominion is a big part of what makes it more strategic (as opposed to just being a tactical sort of game). You can actually build a reliable deck pretty often. From my limited experience, most other copycat deckbuilders make drawing and trashing much more expensive, and those games tend to be much more luck-driven affairs. So you could call it an "accident" that Dominion is this way. But based on the secret histories, it seems like it was a conscious decision based on how these things played out in real games; what was fun.
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phonological loop

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #27 on: July 06, 2018, 11:44:56 pm »
0

It would also be nice to have these concerns on your radar during playtesting.

Concerns like, you want to be able to look at your discard pile? Sorry, that ship has sailed. Although in my IRL games, we allow each other to look through our discard piles on other people's turns (and our own if it's quick). The entire point of the rule forbidding looking through the discard is exactly so that players won't waste everybody else's time by constantly doing it. I guess it would be nice to have the ability to use that house rule in Dominion Online, but I think the people clamoring for it are the ones most likely to abuse it and slow games way down.

I didn't mean the discard pile rule when I wrote about playtesting. I was thinking more about keeping the concerns of "competitive" players in mind and considering how such cards would affect the standard "competitive" format I described above. For instance, are they too swingy or luck based? Do they lead to runaway leader scenarios? Are they stronger in 2-player games than in games with more players? (It's quite possible you do this already, but the whole "we didn't playtest Nocturne with 2 players" thing makes me wonder, you know?)

I agree it would be nice to able to see the discard pile in Dominion Online. The concern about slowing the game down could be solved by implementing an optional turn timer, as Awaclus suggested. If these options exist and are, well, optional, then everyone wins, right?


Quote
I don't think the strategic depth is an accident, happy or otherwise. The entire game is built around interesting card interactions, and I think that's where most of the depth springs from. I guess you could hypothesize that some parts were an accident. I'll do that now, in fact. It seems to me that the relative ease of drawing and trashing in Dominion is a big part of what makes it more strategic (as opposed to just being a tactical sort of game). You can actually build a reliable deck pretty often. From my limited experience, most other copycat deckbuilders make drawing and trashing much more expensive, and those games tend to be much more luck-driven affairs. So you could call it an "accident" that Dominion is this way. But based on the secret histories, it seems like it was a conscious decision based on how these things played out in real games; what was fun.

Perhaps depth in the sense of interesting card interactions is not an accident, but depth in the sense of holding up to scrutiny in the standard competitive 2-player format seems to be. The game designer and playtesters do not seem to have this format or audience in mind when designing cards and playtesting. To be specific, DVX saying he basically never plays 2 player games when playtesting makes me think his design goal is not at all to produce an optimally "competitive" game for 2 players. But this is what Awaclus and I are looking for, hence the complaining and the remark about "accidentally" (sort of) producing such a thing.
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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #28 on: July 06, 2018, 11:46:13 pm »
+3

An aside: when playing MTG (a highly competitive game), are you allowed to have a deck tracker?  When playing IRL, are you allowed to have a sheet of paper with your decklist on it?  Because I don't think I've ever seen a single MTG player do something like that.  Granted, I've seen Hearthstone streamers use them, but I think Hearthstone has been the butt of enough jokes about being "competitive".
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phonological loop

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #29 on: July 06, 2018, 11:47:59 pm »
0

No, but you can (if I recall correctly) look through your discard pile, which accomplishes much of the same purpose.
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popsofctown

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #30 on: July 07, 2018, 12:28:10 am »
+4

no card game that I know allows you to track decks with tools
A digression, but techniques for tracking decks in Pandemic have always been tacitly allowed, and then were explicitly encouraged in Pandemic Legacy Season Two.
Analagously, hand-tracking using a notepad and pen is allowed in MTG.  Of course, that is a "serious" game.  If Dominion simply isn't a "serious" game and should do work not to ever be one, then it makes sense that a veteran would quit it after playing it too much.  Generally the games you stick with even longer than Awaclus has stuck with Dominion are "serious".  Move notation is required in tournament chess, because it's the only way to track the 50 king move rule, even though chess is a "basic serious game" of sorts.

Sirlin encourages you to look through your discard pile and bag to figure out what's left when you play his Dominion, Puzzle Strike.  His viewpoints shouldn't be popular around here, but when you're insisting "nobody does this", then anybody works as a counterexample.

EDIT: Just saw wero's post.

Behavior reminiscent of note taking in MtG includes:

- You can look through either graveyard at any time
- When you use a card that happens to show your opponent's hand (Like Pillage), you can pause the game to jot down what cards are in your opponent's hand. 
- You can have notes that you wrote before the match began in your deckbox, and you can consult those notes between games.  You cannot consult those notes during games.  In tournament play you can change a few cards in your deck out for others, notes about that strategy are what will go in your deckbox.
- You can pause the game to ask a judge for the official rules text of any card.  You can do this even if the card hasn't been seen this game, you can do it just because you think someone MIGHT play that card this game.  (It'd be like, you could ask whether Relic is an attack or not just because Black Market and Peasant are in play)

The second happens even in relatively casual games and would be the most notable comparison.
Oh, so yeah, you cannot consult your decklist during a game.  Notes that were created before the match can only be viewed between games.  In tournament play you usually have your entire deck memorized, so it's not a big deal.  It's not as hard as it might seem, there's lots of duplicates, and if you have a card at all and you know it's a pretty good card, you know you brought 4 of it, the max that can be put in a deck.
« Last Edit: July 07, 2018, 12:36:51 am by popsofctown »
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Donald X.

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Re: Why Awaclus is quitting Dominion (you can edit the text up here)
« Reply #31 on: July 07, 2018, 02:06:07 am »
+19

Perhaps depth in the sense of interesting card interactions is not an accident, but depth in the sense of holding up to scrutiny in the standard competitive 2-player format seems to be.
The correct way to put down my work on Dominion's strategic depth is to note that strategic depth is in fact easy to come by. It's easy! Like, Go has it. It's like Godel's Incompleteness Theorem; any sufficiently complex game will have strategic depth. I didn't lay down on the job, thank you very much, but, it wasn't a struggle either. You have a nice amount of agency as a player; the cards interact so that power levels vary; enough is sufficiently obscured that there's stuff to figure out. Even when a card is very strong, there's enough to what you're doing that there's still a game.

The game designer and playtesters do not seem to have this format or audience in mind when designing cards and playtesting.
Your face doesn't seem to have this format or audience in mind.

Day one of any game, I don't know how many players it will handle, but typically aim for 3-5, because odds are on any given evening I'll have 3-5 players and well I want to be able to play the game and not kick someone out. If it then turns out to only work with 4, or whatever, well, that's how it went. In Dominion's case it works with 2-5 (and then the publisher supports 6 because that's how it goes); cards vary in power level as the player count varies, but you can aim for 3 and do pretty well on 2-4, and the people who play with 5 know what they're getting into. The game isn't horribly warped with 2 players, as you can tell by say the existence of these forums.

For some cards, the 2-player game is specifically an issue; somehow in those cases I don't just laugh at how those players will suck it up. Would you believe. And the feedback isn't that oops I just always blow it there. I mean like, it's *checks* season 28 of the league. Some people are having fun with 2-player Dominion (yes, or we'll be seeing a lot of these threads, oh man, 28 seasons was the breaking point). And I mean if no-one was I would be bummed out, but I can deal with any given individual being dissatisfied. Like I always say, it didn't win game of the year in Austria.
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kieranmillar

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #32 on: July 07, 2018, 03:56:27 am »
+8

I will say that Dominion taking too long online has become an issue for me. I don't play in League and am not all that bothered by rating, but like to play rated games so I can play against people of roughly the same skill. But sometimes games just drag on and take forever and I play less now as a result.

I got into Dominion in a big way after playing it IRL (where only a single game would be played and take 40 mins but that's fine because it's IRL and you're socialising) and I found WanderingWinder's videos on YouTube. I think I watched all of them! Yes there are hundreds and I watched them all. Games were often pretty fast and it was great. I also used to watch League matches. But for a while now League match sets of 6 can have videos that are close to 3 hours, and I'm sure there was a final that was almost 4 hours! Who has time for this? Watching it is boring now. Long periods of time in the middle of games where nothing happens.

Dominion's original appeal to me was speed and simplicity on the surface but deep strategy underneath. But sitting staring at a screen of cards with nothing happening is dull. I think Dominion would be better online if there was a clock. Sometimes it would mean people were forced to rush and make suboptimal plays, well that's fine. Intuition is a skill too. Long turns and overthinking might be fun for some, but it is not fun to play against, and also very dull to watch.
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Awaclus

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #33 on: July 07, 2018, 04:07:33 am »
0

An aside: when playing MTG (a highly competitive game), are you allowed to have a deck tracker?  When playing IRL, are you allowed to have a sheet of paper with your decklist on it?  Because I don't think I've ever seen a single MTG player do something like that.  Granted, I've seen Hearthstone streamers use them, but I think Hearthstone has been the butt of enough jokes about being "competitive".

I never felt like I needed a reference of my decklist when playing MTG. It's the same deck every time, and by the time you're good enough at playing it, you'll definitely have the entire decklist memorized because most likely it's just 4 copies of 15 different cards anyway, all of which you deliberately chose to include in your deck to serve a purpose. It's not like in Dominion where you have a different deck every turn and it usually has all sorts of stuff that you only put into your deck because you couldn't get what you wanted under the circumstances, and a lot of the time you even draw a very large percentage of your deck every turn, making it especially important to know what's in it.

Really, if you wanted to make a fair comparison with MTG in this regard, you should ask "when playing MTG, are you allowed to see the entire battlefield, or do you have to turn most of it face down and just try to remember what cards you have in play".
« Last Edit: July 07, 2018, 04:08:34 am by Awaclus »
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phonological loop

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Re: Why Awaclus is quitting Dominion (you can edit the text up here)
« Reply #34 on: July 07, 2018, 04:13:14 am »
0

Perhaps depth in the sense of interesting card interactions is not an accident, but depth in the sense of holding up to scrutiny in the standard competitive 2-player format seems to be.
The correct way to put down my work on Dominion's strategic depth is to note that strategic depth is in fact easy to come by. It's easy! Like, Go has it. It's like Godel's Incompleteness Theorem; any sufficiently complex game will have strategic depth. I didn't lay down on the job, thank you very much, but, it wasn't a struggle either. You have a nice amount of agency as a player; the cards interact so that power levels vary; enough is sufficiently obscured that there's stuff to figure out. Even when a card is very strong, there's enough to what you're doing that there's still a game.

I'm not trying to put down your game! It's a good game! I play it regularly, have nearly all the expansions, and care enough to argue about it on an online message board. The point I am trying to make is that (correct me if I'm wrong!) you don't go out of your way to tailor things to to the "hardcore" or "competitive" crowd, and your modal Dominion experience is in fact more casual 3-4 players games. (And don't get me wrong, I like those kinds of games too!) And consequently, you make certain decisions that might not be optimal from the perspective of someone wanting the card game equivalent of no items, Fox only, Final Destination.

Quote
For some cards, the 2-player game is specifically an issue; somehow in those cases I don't just laugh at how those players will suck it up. Would you believe. And the feedback isn't that oops I just always blow it there. I mean like, it's *checks* season 28 of the league. Some people are having fun with 2-player Dominion (yes, or we'll be seeing a lot of these threads, oh man, 28 seasons was the breaking point). And I mean if no-one was I would be bummed out, but I can deal with any given individual being dissatisfied. Like I always say, it didn't win game of the year in Austria.

Well, I have fun at least. Awaclus's point is that we'd probably have more fun if an optional turn timer was included and the client was made faster. This seems reasonable to me.
« Last Edit: July 07, 2018, 04:14:50 am by phonological loop »
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popsofctown

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #35 on: July 07, 2018, 04:53:08 am »
+1

An aside: when playing MTG (a highly competitive game), are you allowed to have a deck tracker?  When playing IRL, are you allowed to have a sheet of paper with your decklist on it?  Because I don't think I've ever seen a single MTG player do something like that.  Granted, I've seen Hearthstone streamers use them, but I think Hearthstone has been the butt of enough jokes about being "competitive".

I never felt like I needed a reference of my decklist when playing MTG. It's the same deck every time, and by the time you're good enough at playing it, you'll definitely have the entire decklist memorized because most likely it's just 4 copies of 15 different cards anyway, all of which you deliberately chose to include in your deck to serve a purpose. It's not like in Dominion where you have a different deck every turn and it usually has all sorts of stuff that you only put into your deck because you couldn't get what you wanted under the circumstances, and a lot of the time you even draw a very large percentage of your deck every turn, making it especially important to know what's in it.

Really, if you wanted to make a fair comparison with MTG in this regard, you should ask "when playing MTG, are you allowed to see the entire battlefield, or do you have to turn most of it face down and just try to remember what cards you have in play".

If you expose a facedown morph card temporarily, you're not allowed to late explain that the card's identity is derivable information, and ask to look at it again.

Buuuut nothing stops you from jotting down the name of the card on a piece of paper, just like the thing with peeking at someone's hand.

So, yeah.  Mtg very much does not require you to use memory as a mechanic.
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jsh357

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #36 on: July 07, 2018, 07:55:33 am »
+8

Kieran's post is the one I agree with most here. The culture of thinking it's okay to spend several minutes thinking through actions at the top level has significantly hurt my own online experience, especially since having a kid. It gets harder to justify playing by the day.

For the record, if I had my choice of timer, no joke, i'd probably set it to 1 minute total down time pet turn for each player. I agree very much with the sentiment, "if someone makes a suboptimal play, so be it."
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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #37 on: July 07, 2018, 08:53:19 am »
+2

...and I found WanderingWinder's videos on YouTube. I think I watched all of them! Yes there are hundreds and I watched them all.

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #38 on: July 07, 2018, 09:07:09 am »
0

jsh, what are your matchmaking parameters set at? If you play worse players, there tends to be much lesss downtime.
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jsh357

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #39 on: July 07, 2018, 09:59:32 am »
+2

jsh, what are your matchmaking parameters set at? If you play worse players, there tends to be much lesss downtime.

I'm a top level player, and I'm not a baby. I'd like to play people around my level. But it would be cool if I could play them faster.
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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #40 on: July 07, 2018, 10:12:57 am »
+2

Hive is an awesome game. Simple rules, zero luck, no hidden state, quick setup, lovely pieces, incredibly deep strategy and tactics, 100% bulletproof rules, optimised for two players. The best such game to be released in the past five centuries.

I love it to bits, and wholeheartedly recommend it.

I especially recommend it to the people who seem to want Dominion to be that. Dominion supports more than two players and adds a bit of luck and a bit of memorisation to the mix. Dominion is not Hive; Dominion is a different game I also love to bits, in a different way, for different reasons.
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Donald X.

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #41 on: July 07, 2018, 12:46:46 pm »
+3

I'm not trying to put down your game!
I didn't say you were putting down Dominion. You were putting down my work on Dominion. And that's what I said.

The point I am trying to make is that (correct me if I'm wrong!) you don't go out of your way to tailor things to to the "hardcore" or "competitive" crowd, and your modal Dominion experience is in fact more casual 3-4 players games.
You're wrong; that isn't the point you were trying to make. Hey, it's an Awaclus thread.
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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #42 on: July 07, 2018, 12:57:26 pm »
0

I am confused by what this thread is becoming.
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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #43 on: July 07, 2018, 01:15:44 pm »
+3

I am confused by what this thread is becoming.

Why? Are you new here?
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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #44 on: July 07, 2018, 01:33:41 pm »
0

Getting tired of Dominion after (tens of?) thousands of games of Dominion is a testament to how good a game it is and how well the game can hold up over time.

I have definitely taken breaks from Dominion because of the lackluster (to put it mildly) online implementations of the past several years, so I sympathize with some of your points. But the existence of even a bad online implementation is also why I’ve played so many games myself when many of my friends have given up the game for good.
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phonological loop

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #45 on: July 07, 2018, 02:31:29 pm »
+2

I'm not trying to put down your game!
I didn't say you were putting down Dominion. You were putting down my work on Dominion. And that's what I said.

I'm not putting down your work on Dominion! I'm saying, as LastFootnote said on the last page, that it (and the online client?) was "not designed to be played at the level that top players are playing it." This is why my first post in this thread quotes his. Further, I'm not making any value judgment about whether this is a good or bad thing. I'm just noting that LastFootnote hit the nail on the head, and this is why Awaclus appears to be unhappy.


The point I am trying to make is that (correct me if I'm wrong!) you don't go out of your way to tailor things to to the "hardcore" or "competitive" crowd, and your modal Dominion experience is in fact more casual 3-4 players games.
You're wrong; that isn't the point you were trying to make. Hey, it's an Awaclus thread.

What point do you think I am trying to make?
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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #46 on: July 07, 2018, 02:35:06 pm »
+7

Kieran's post is the one I agree with most here. The culture of thinking it's okay to spend several minutes thinking through actions at the top level has significantly hurt my own online experience, especially since having a kid. It gets harder to justify playing by the day.

For the record, if I had my choice of timer, no joke, i'd probably set it to 1 minute total down time pet turn for each player. I agree very much with the sentiment, "if someone makes a suboptimal play, so be it."

I don't think this is just a culture shift.  In Hinterlands and before, you could mostly autoplay your turns and then think about your buys.  It's a rare board where this is the case in modern full-random Dominion.  Adventures, Empires, and Nocturne significantly increased the number of meaningful decisions you can make on any particular turn.  Events (especially those that give +buy) and cards that have an immediate impact when bought (e.g. Villa, Night cards that are gained to hand) are the most noteworthy here.  Also, alternative VP (tons in Empires) generally increase game length.
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ackmondual

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #47 on: July 07, 2018, 04:15:13 pm »
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I will say that Dominion taking too long online has become an issue for me. I don't play in League and am not all that bothered by rating, but like to play rated games so I can play against people of roughly the same skill. But sometimes games just drag on and take forever and I play less now as a result.
I played on BSW when it was just base game and 5 cards from Intrigue.  An opponent bought out most of the Laboratories, and many other +Card effects.  My turns were only 5s.  His were about 1.5 to 3 minutes.  That was a sucky game for me, not much I could do about that.  But then he complained when I told him I'm going to be doing dishes or chores around the house since my turns were short.  If I get back just when it's my turn, then I'll move quickly.  Otherwise, I'm not going to sit around on the edge of my seat just for his whims.

Dominion's original appeal to me was speed and simplicity on the surface but deep strategy underneath. But sitting staring at a screen of cards with nothing happening is dull. I think Dominion would be better online if there was a clock. Sometimes it would mean people were forced to rush and make suboptimal plays, well that's fine. Intuition is a skill too. Long turns and overthinking might be fun for some, but it is not fun to play against, and also very dull to watch.
I do know a few people who will only play IRL Dom. if the games are quick.  Some cases of "quick" are a bit extreme, but I was in a different room when I was shocked to hear a 3p games with the newly released Dark Ages exp. took 1.5 hours to play!  The newcomers took A LONG time to read through and reread many of the cards.  In that time in a different room, we played two games of Ticket To Ride!  (Nordic Countries, and can't remember the other exp.).  For reference, it should be the other way around :p
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Village, +2 Actions.  Village, +3 Actions.  Village, +4 Actions.  Village, +5 Actions.  Village, +6 Actions.  Village, +7 Actions.  Workers Village, +2 Buys, +8 Actions.  End Action Phase.  No Treasures to play.  No buy.  No Night cards to play

ackmondual

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #48 on: July 07, 2018, 04:18:22 pm »
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I'm 100% with GendoIkari; the full log shouldn't be visible. If you think it's necessary to know the full contents of your deck and discard pile at all times, you're taking this game too seriously.
Although I agree with not having the full log visible at all times, "too seriously" is still something that's in the eye of the beholder. 
For some, rankings of all the cards could constitute that.
Or visiting ANY online forums to find out more about Dominion could constitute that (let alone this site).

Or insisting that someone NOT buy a Woodcutter, or that extra Copper (no, not a Gardens game).  This happened in an actual game where one Dom. vet explained why that was a bad idea.  The group he was in was so casual, they just wanted to go through the motions for themselves, and not even be bogged down by such minutia.  The group will likely never ascend to any sort of decent players, but they have fun, treating Dom. more like a party/social game than a euro/engine/optimization game.


Kieran's post is the one I agree with most here. The culture of thinking it's okay to spend several minutes thinking through actions at the top level has significantly hurt my own online experience, especially since having a kid. It gets harder to justify playing by the day.

For the record, if I had my choice of timer, no joke, i'd probably set it to 1 minute total down time pet turn for each player. I agree very much with the sentiment, "if someone makes a suboptimal play, so be it."

I'd be more inclined to use a chess clock.  It's all relative.  Towards midgame is when things tend to slow down.  I had one 4p game where one strong player who played quick otherwise took a few minutes in a midgame turn, apologizing profusely.  I didn't blame him, nor did anybody else.  He had around $26, multiple Buys, and no Coppers in play to enable buying Grand Markets, so it was crucial to work out how much he should "green", "engine", or in what combo (e.g. more GM, get a Platinum, Colony vs. Province and use the remainder towards a better card, etc.)
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Village, +2 Actions.  Village, +3 Actions.  Village, +4 Actions.  Village, +5 Actions.  Village, +6 Actions.  Village, +7 Actions.  Workers Village, +2 Buys, +8 Actions.  End Action Phase.  No Treasures to play.  No buy.  No Night cards to play

Awaclus

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Re: Why I'm quitting Dominion for the foreseeable future (not satire)
« Reply #49 on: July 07, 2018, 04:22:58 pm »
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The point I am trying to make is that (correct me if I'm wrong!) you don't go out of your way to tailor things to to the "hardcore" or "competitive" crowd, and your modal Dominion experience is in fact more casual 3-4 players games.
You're wrong; that isn't the point you were trying to make. Hey, it's an Awaclus thread.

What point do you think I am trying to make?

Let me explain the joke to make it funnier. You said "The point I am trying to make is that (correct me if I'm wrong!)...", which Donald X. jokingly interpreted as meaning "Correct me if I'm wrong, but the point I am trying to make is that..." i.e. as though the part about correcting you was referring to you stating that you were trying to make that point, as opposed to referring to the actual point that you were trying to make. One of the reasons why the joke is particularly funny in this context is that it's the kind of a joke that I like to make, and Donald X. made it in my thread.
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