I've wanted to buy an official Dominion online game for a while now, and since I began playing Dominion over two years ago, I've filled that want with various Dominion-like products, including the iPhone Gundabad game that is a direct rip-off, the rough fan version with only the Base set, and Ascension. I participated in the beta, and enjoyed it as much as the substitutes I'd been sampling, but I'm not willing to pay the amount being asked for the product being delivered. Here are my fundamental problems:
1. Too Expensive: This is an arbitrary issue - one person's expensive is another's good bargain - but I just can't justify paying so much to play Dominion. I logged on for the first time in months yesterday, and noted that there's now a bundle that includes all of the coded expansions, the released expansions that have not been implemented online, and Dark Ages for a not completely unreasonable price (~$40, IIRC). I came close to buying that, but ultimately didn't pull the trigger. In large part, that decision was because getting $40 worth of owl coins required spending $50 in cash. I realize there are a lot of virtual markets in which you can't purchase products for cash, and instead need to purchase an intermediate currency (e.g., Xbox live), but if I have to play games with exchange rates, and discounts for purchasing intermediate currency in bulk, I'm more likely to not bother and walk away.
2. Inability to Sculpt the Board: The largest value of Goko to me has been the ability to play single player games. It's not as competitive as playing against a human, but the computer also doesn't mind if you put the game down for 10 minutes to deal with feuding children. Sometimes, I want to play with a particlar set to get a feel for it, or a particular handful of cards to test a combo. For whatever reason, I can't make that choice. Similarly, I can't even put constraints on the random card selection as is the case in Isotropic. This is an important feature for me, and not having it makes me less excited about the game generally.
Neither of these is an insurmountable problem, but my current view is that the cost of the product is well in excess of similar products and that it fails to offer an experience of sufficient quality to justify that price. If Goko had been released a year ago, being a graphics based, official Dominion game might've been sufficient for me to buy it. But these days, the bar is set higher (particularly when the price charged is so high), and the ability to play a graphics based, official Dominion game, without much else and at a fairly high price, just isn't enough to justify the purchase. On top of that, the high price plus the lack of a sophisticated ranking/data system as is available in Isotropic means that the player base is thin and significantly diminishes the value of the multiplayer online.
I really want to like Goko, I really want to play Dominion online, but I think I'm going to have to pass for now. My expectations have moved since I started playing, and a product that I would've embraced a year ago is no longer in the ballpark of what I will purchase.