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Author Topic: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?  (Read 80481 times)

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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #100 on: December 31, 2012, 07:48:44 pm »
0

Hm, I thought the memory leak issues had been fixed. I certainly haven't noticed anything unusual recently.
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #101 on: January 03, 2013, 12:10:25 pm »
0

Surprised that "Broke/Cheapskate and not that into Base Set Only or Begging" isn't an option!  That is 95% my reason.

The other 5% is that I don't use Chrome or Firefox Betas, so it's laggy for me.

That is about my reason too. "I already bought every single Dominion expansion." Ok, I did not buy the promo cards.
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #102 on: January 03, 2013, 12:19:52 pm »
0

I'm not playing on Goko because I don't enjoy playing online synchronous games against real people. I was really hoping for an app that had an offline mode versus bots. As it is, I have to play Duels of the Planeswalkers instead. And having come to MTG way later than I came to dominion, I'm not a huge fan - mana screw, seeing 1 card at a time, etc. etc.
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #103 on: January 03, 2013, 03:23:25 pm »
+1

I'm not playing on Goko because I don't enjoy playing online synchronous games against real people. I was really hoping for an app that had an offline mode versus bots. As it is, I have to play Duels of the Planeswalkers instead. And having come to MTG way later than I came to dominion, I'm not a huge fan - mana screw, seeing 1 card at a time, etc. etc.

I guess you're not playing on iso, then, either.
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #104 on: January 04, 2013, 03:22:38 am »
+4

No. If this is a conversation of "why are you playing on Iso, but not on Goko", then my response was startlingly irrelevant.
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Brando Commando

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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #105 on: January 04, 2013, 02:17:25 pm »
0

I'd like to put my answer in the form of an analogy:

Let's say you've discovered a really great pizza place that makes pizza that maybe wasn't really fancy looking but that swerved this grease-loving, fairly hardcore pizza fan really well. The chef, god bless him, was handing out slices for free -- for free! -- but you liked it so much you stuck what would have been retail price in his tip jar.

Then Pizza (tm) comes to town, holding its license, saying that rando pizza chefs must shut their doors. Okay, well, that's the way it goes...but Pizza (tm) is serving blando, generic frozen grocery store pizza. No matter how much they solicit your opinion or lower the price or promise that future pizzas will be up to snuff, you don't want to buy their stuff. Not because the other thing was free, but because the other thing was great and really puts Pizza (tm) to shame.

That's why.
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #106 on: January 04, 2013, 05:00:40 pm »
+1

I played for a few hours, and the interface is something that I found I could not get around.  I won't try Goko again unless I hear about a significant UI update.

It's been discussed already, but the interface is...incredibly poorly thought out.  Especially given that many of these issues were already resolved on Isotropic.  And that's not to say that Isotropic has all of the perfect UI answers, just that there are a lot of things that were ironed out that the Goko developers appear to have ignored.

An example is creating/looking for a game.  Looking for a game on Isotropic is a little buggy (selected parameters seems to reset sometimes) and I really don't like that the chat window makes the checkboxes a moving target, but most of the options I want are there.  Goko needs to add at least some of these options, so people can play the kind of games they want, versus the type of opponents they want.

And even just setting the number of players for a game in Goko is kludgy.  There are 5 blank tiles, and you click on the tile before the last unselected tile to toggle it as available/unavailable?  I'm trying to be nice here but really, who's idea was that?

And then having the cards display graphically as a fan was poorly thought out.  It forces the player to click on a sliver of a card, especially in big draw engines, and then, even with the animations on the fastest speed, you have to be careful to wait until the anim has completed before attempting to select the next card, as it moves to a new location as the cards adjust to fit the new hand size after a card is played.  I've already trashed cards, passed cards, played cards I did not want to, and that is just not fun.

I could go on and list the details of numerous issues like this that I encountered in just a few hours, but I normally get paid to do that, so not today.  Anyway, I'm not playing on Goko due to the sheer number of UI annoyances that make the experience not worthwhile.
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #107 on: January 04, 2013, 05:07:07 pm »
0

I played for a few hours, and the interface is something that I found I could not get around.  I won't try Goko again unless I hear about a significant UI update.

It's been discussed already, but the interface is...incredibly poorly thought out.  Especially given that many of these issues were already resolved on Isotropic.  And that's not to say that Isotropic has all of the perfect UI answers, just that there are a lot of things that were ironed out that the Goko developers appear to have ignored.

An example is creating/looking for a game.  Looking for a game on Isotropic is a little buggy (selected parameters seems to reset sometimes) and I really don't like that the chat window makes the checkboxes a moving target, but most of the options I want are there.  Goko needs to add at least some of these options, so people can play the kind of games they want, versus the type of opponents they want.

And even just setting the number of players for a game in Goko is kludgy.  There are 5 blank tiles, and you click on the tile before the last unselected tile to toggle it as available/unavailable?  I'm trying to be nice here but really, who's idea was that?

And then having the cards display graphically as a fan was poorly thought out.  It forces the player to click on a sliver of a card, especially in big draw engines, and then, even with the animations on the fastest speed, you have to be careful to wait until the anim has completed before attempting to select the next card, as it moves to a new location as the cards adjust to fit the new hand size after a card is played.  I've already trashed cards, passed cards, played cards I did not want to, and that is just not fun.

I could go on and list the details of numerous issues like this that I encountered in just a few hours, but I normally get paid to do that, so not today.  Anyway, I'm not playing on Goko due to the sheer number of UI annoyances that make the experience not worthwhile.

They're revamping the meeting room, and I think matches will be much easier to find.

As for the hand of cards, I think it's great as-is. When your hand gets large, it groups together identical cards. You're complaining that the cards move after you play one, but do you have a solution for that? The cards should move to fill in the gaps left by the cards you've played.

Sounds like your machine/browser can't really handle the game, which I agree is a problem. Have you tried using Chrome?
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #108 on: January 04, 2013, 05:07:58 pm »
+1

I must be one of the few players that does not play Dominion online at warp factor 7.  I'll admit that in the beginning I trashed a couple cards I didn't mean to, but Goko has worked on that with the red outlines and such.  But I take a little time with each of my Actions and whatnot and think about what I'm going to do before doing it.  Keeping the animations on normal is perfectly fast enough for me.

EDIT: I like to savor my Dominion games.  Sure, I could play a game in 5 minutes and play 30 in a day, but I'd rather take my time and enjoy each game thoroughly.
« Last Edit: January 04, 2013, 05:09:18 pm by werothegreat »
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #109 on: January 04, 2013, 05:24:19 pm »
+2

Just wanted to pop back in and say thanks to those who changed my mind.  Goko has improved since the days of the beta (particularly the way the prompt is now customized for the card action, rather than the cryptic "done" or whatever it used to say), and I'm happy with my purchase. 
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #110 on: January 04, 2013, 06:44:29 pm »
+1

As for the hand of cards, I think it's great as-is. When your hand gets large, it groups together identical cards. You're complaining that the cards move after you play one, but do you have a solution for that?

Yep, easy.  Isotropic solved that, by laying out the cards side by side, and then adding an interface for selecting a card that needs to be discarded, trashed, etc.

In addition, Goko needs to add an option to completely eliminate the animations, sounds, and play a stripped down version that only gives you what you need to play, much like the text version on Isotropic.

Although some people like the animations, without the option to get rid of them, many others aren't going to play.  And of those many others, my guess is that that group contains a disproportionate number of people who are the better players (that's not me btw ;P), who would be likely to play tournaments on Goko, and who you need in your user-base to keep the community going.

What's crazy, is I only listed a couple issues.  Goko has made so many UI missteps, it's borderline insane, given that most of the solutions have already been come up with, or are incredibly easy to figure out and implement.

It's also possible I'm a bit of a UI snob, so how bad the experience at Goko is for an average user is certainly not as bad as I make it out to be. That being said, the UI makes it not worth playing for me, and it seems like enough people are turned off by enough of these issues, that Goko Dominion is not getting nearly the traction it should for being such a great game.
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #111 on: January 04, 2013, 07:20:53 pm »
0

I never played MTGO because it -seemed- dumb to pay for cards twice.  I probably will never play Goko for the same reason. 
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #112 on: January 05, 2013, 08:07:28 am »
0

In addition, Goko needs to add an option to completely eliminate the animations, sounds, and play a stripped down version that only gives you what you need to play, much like the text version on Isotropic.

Has anybody had any luck scripting anything at all to do with Goko?  As a modest project I looked into getting the log to display permanently on-screen, but couldn't make any progress.  I hadn't worked with HTML5 before, and hoped I could just find the log in the DOM and copy it somewhere more easily available, but it doesn't seem to work like that (I couldn't view the generated DOM at all).
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #113 on: January 05, 2013, 04:00:12 pm »
+1

In addition, Goko needs to add an option to completely eliminate the animations, sounds, and play a stripped down version that only gives you what you need to play, much like the text version on Isotropic.

Has anybody had any luck scripting anything at all to do with Goko?  As a modest project I looked into getting the log to display permanently on-screen, but couldn't make any progress.  I hadn't worked with HTML5 before, and hoped I could just find the log in the DOM and copy it somewhere more easily available, but it doesn't seem to work like that (I couldn't view the generated DOM at all).
Last time I worked with it (months ago), there were two methods that both worked to get data out of the Goko client:
  • Poke through the internal data structures of the client. This can get you access to the log. drheld was developing a point counter using this method. It was nearly finished, but I don't know whether he ever released it.
  • Intercept the websocket traffic. The transmitted data structures are simple enough that this tells you pretty much everything you want, provided you track it. Also, you can send fake messages through the websocket to insert messages into chat. I was experimenting with this method but didn't develop any useful plug-in because of lack of interest in Goko. :P
Last time I experimented with the client, the client knew some information the player shouldn't (e.g. the contents of your opponent's hand). I vaguely recall some Goko interview suggesting that might not be true anymore, but I haven't checked.
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #114 on: January 05, 2013, 04:11:25 pm »
+6

Each of the following would have to be fixed before I'd try it:

1. Security. A coworker who I introduced to Dominion did some basic cyber-security snooping (all legal) on Goko, needless to say I shan't be giving them a real email account nor access to any credit card or other personal information until they get serious about being a serious web business.
2. The UI is garbage. Yeah, I'm the weird guy who has been known to run major stuff through cmd rather than deal with a crap-ton clickety-click; but still the last time I saw Goko's interface it was still buggy and beta. Most of the animations are useless if turns are short, if they are long I'm rarely able to get the information I want, so yes assuming your customers are literate and having a primary log explaining things would be much better. Couple this with few internal checks and a lot of stuff I want to auto-play not working ... it just seems like an ass-backwards implementation I don't want to waste time learning.
3. I don't own a smartphone (most days I'm not allowed to carry a phone anyways), so it is fiendishly annoying to play on a system designed for a microscopic display. Yeah, I would like a monitor based UI (again they might have implemented this, but who knows).
4. Your own private currency. I'm sorry, whatever in hell makes you think that is a good idea? I understand that having this sort of thing can pad your profits by allowing you to overcharge without the customers getting wise ... and it makes it easier to hand out freebies instead of just giving us "$2 off" or whatever ... but seriously? You expect me to think you are a reliable company with whom I should trust my information and purchase things on the promise that you won't be gone next month?
5. Pricing. Not so much for me, but let's be honest once this get this stuff coded, and assuming they did a good job of it, there is very little additional per unit cost and right now they are pricing this for gamers like me ... not to get a decent population of players where I can get a quick game without too much trouble.

In all, I just don't trust Goko. They behave like amateurs and I don't buy from amateurs.
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #115 on: January 05, 2013, 04:55:33 pm »
+2

inb4 someone comments how a small detail of one of your points has been addressed already and ignores the rest.
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #116 on: January 05, 2013, 07:27:47 pm »
+2

I never played MTGO because it -seemed- dumb to pay for cards twice.  I probably will never play Goko for the same reason.

You know, I still don't understand this reasoning.  Not paying because it's still a beta, or for other reasons--I get that, because I'm one of those people.  But the final cost, when everything's included (about $45), will be the same as the cost of the original game, and somewhat less than a video game, for potentially hundreds of hours of entertainment.  I mean, I've easily spent 500 hours on Isotropic.  I can't say that I've gotten 500 hours of entertainment from any single game in my collection other than World of Warcraft, and that only because I've been playing WOW for 8+ years.

1. Security. A coworker who I introduced to Dominion did some basic cyber-security snooping (all legal) on Goko, needless to say I shan't be giving them a real email account nor access to any credit card or other personal information until they get serious about being a serious web business.

Any chance you can give us more details on this?  No sarcasm, I'd very much like to know.
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #117 on: January 05, 2013, 07:34:03 pm »
0

"Security. A coworker who I introduced to Dominion did some basic cyber-security snooping (all legal) on Goko, needless to say I shan't be giving them a real email account nor access to any credit card or other personal information until they get serious about being a serious web business. "

Is this recent or from many, many months ago? Please enlighten us.
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #118 on: January 05, 2013, 07:41:00 pm »
+1

"Security. A coworker who I introduced to Dominion did some basic cyber-security snooping (all legal) on Goko, needless to say I shan't be giving them a real email account nor access to any credit card or other personal information until they get serious about being a serious web business. "

Is this recent or from many, many months ago? Please enlighten us.
See, I don't think this really matters, because the big point is that security is not on their priority list. It's not something they're thinking about when they are designing their stuff. And that's very very bad.

I mean, some pretty serious issues were pointed out with their system, and they fixed them, that's true, BUT what they said about it was 'oh, that was minor, and it's fixed now, so you don't have to worry about it. You can trust us'. Well, gee, that makes me really really feel like I can't.

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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #120 on: January 05, 2013, 10:53:17 pm »
0

"Security. A coworker who I introduced to Dominion did some basic cyber-security snooping (all legal) on Goko, needless to say I shan't be giving them a real email account nor access to any credit card or other personal information until they get serious about being a serious web business. "

Is this recent or from many, many months ago? Please enlighten us.

This was a few months back, but after they had started charging. No, I don't know the details - not my area of expertise, but I trust a professional to tell me when a web business is safe and legit and more importantly if they give off the vibe that "Hey we're professionals who know how to do security and if things go south WE will take care of it." It is a LOT easier to build a good security conscious platform from the ground up than to kludge security in on top ... and the latter ain't exactly good practice for dealing with an ever evolving security threat space.

My security needs are a bit more stringent than the normal person, so take it for what you will. I am one of the guys who has to use Ironkeys, air-gapped computers, and the like - so I'm payed to be paranoid and I don't want to give financial information nor run software from someone who still looks like their security is fly-by-night.
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #121 on: January 06, 2013, 03:26:33 pm »
0

On the security issue:  is there anything other than financial information that anyone is really worried about here?  I know there were problems with transmission of, well, the other player's deck state, which makes tournaments problematic, but that can't harm anyone personally/directly.  And as far as payments, they accept PayPal, which should be secure enough, right?

As far as giving them a real email... I'm not certain that, say, this forum is any more secure than Goko is.

Can't believe I'm defending them, but I really want to know what the security issues are and so far all the complaints are nebulous, and the financial information complaint is circumvented by PayPal.
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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #122 on: January 06, 2013, 04:00:06 pm »
0

On the security issue:  is there anything other than financial information that anyone is really worried about here?  I know there were problems with transmission of, well, the other player's deck state, which makes tournaments problematic, but that can't harm anyone personally/directly.  And as far as payments, they accept PayPal, which should be secure enough, right?

As far as giving them a real email... I'm not certain that, say, this forum is any more secure than Goko is.

Can't believe I'm defending them, but I really want to know what the security issues are and so far all the complaints are nebulous, and the financial information complaint is circumvented by PayPal.
Sure.
One thing is personal information - they ask for some of it (name anyway) - and I don't trust them with it. I am protective of my identity.

But more than that, I am not confident that other people can't run code on my machine via their site. Viruses, worms, what have you. I am not a computer security guy, but they do not inspire confidence here.

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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #123 on: January 07, 2013, 12:45:52 am »
0

On the security issue:  is there anything other than financial information that anyone is really worried about here?  I know there were problems with transmission of, well, the other player's deck state, which makes tournaments problematic, but that can't harm anyone personally/directly.  And as far as payments, they accept PayPal, which should be secure enough, right?

As far as giving them a real email... I'm not certain that, say, this forum is any more secure than Goko is.

Can't believe I'm defending them, but I really want to know what the security issues are and so far all the complaints are nebulous, and the financial information complaint is circumvented by PayPal.

I agree with this. You won't find too many folks more critical of Goko so far than me but.... the security issues as described here are too nebulous to serve as the basis for action (or inaction for that matter).

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Re: Why aren't *you* playing on Goko?
« Reply #124 on: January 11, 2013, 11:14:26 pm »
+19

Hi everyone,

There's some really good feedback in here for us so, first of all, thanks for everyone chipping in regardless of whether the feedback is "no way" or "maybe" or "hey, it's getting better!"  From our perspective it looks like the discussion you guys are having has been pretty fair.

A couple of specific points, because I didn't see any specific responses to these:

  • Memory Leak -- we use a lot of 2d canvases in HTML5 and version 23 of Chrome had a memory leak bug (Google acknowledged this) where they weren't cleaning these up properly. We were not the only company effected, nor even the company yelling the loudest. Google fixed this issue in Chrome 24 beta, which is why we were recommending it. As of a few days ago Chrome 24 is now out of beta and is the standard release, so that 's good. In a future release we're also modifying the way we handle canvases to use less memory in any event.
  • Firefox 17 slowness -- same deal here. Mozilla released Firefox 17 and we saw performance take a big hit (again, not only us). Firefox 18 is now released and it's really fast, so we're happy to be past Firefox 17.
  • Card bugs -- we fix these as fast as we hear about them. We test fairly extensively with Donald X., then with the AI's, then on beta.goko.com, then we release. Sorry for not catching them all first time around but we're definitely trying to!
  • Expansions -- Hinterlands: Faraway Lands is out to the people that pre-purchased. I expect we'll release in general in a day or two. We're testing Alchemy right now (but we still have a little work to do on Possession).
  • Reconnect -- Also in a few days we'll be releasing a reconnect feature so that if someone loses their connection, it will reconnect seamlessly (note: this isn't re-join.... just reconnect). Obviously, there are *lots* of edge cases around this and some of them won't be covered but the majority cases will. As with any new feature like this there will be some hiccups but we'll be working to get those smoothed out asap.
  • UI -- well, we even have disagreements internally about different pieces but overall the response has been positive. I get where the detractors are coming from but this tends to be a subjective topic. The UI of the game won't change much until the mobile version... the tablet version will be relatively the same.


On a larger topic -- Security. There were two major items we saw at launch back in August that we addressed shortly thereafter. In addition there were also a few of the "the client knows something it shouldn't about the other player's cards" that we addressed as well. These were definitely "Oh, s***" moments for us, we pulled back into closed beta, and we deservedly fell on our swords several times for not spotting these before launch. If you know of any security issues that weren't addressed since we opened up again, we would absolutely want to hear about them so email us directly at help@goko.com. As for "what's different than before" in this regard, the responsible parties were let go about a week after launch and we refocused our efforts after that.

As many of you know, to enable us to let players play cross-platform we needed to build our own platform (think Apple's GameCenter). In addition, we have built several games (including Dominion) and we built some developer modules to make creating a game easier (like the meeting room and a few other common items). The platform is the thing that handles transactions like buying stuff, who owns what cards, logging in, achievements, ratings, leaderboards, etc. The security issues that we saw on launch day in August were generally in the developer modules (which send information from the client to our servers) as opposed to our platform (which lives on our servers). The developer modules were created by a 3rd party under our direct supervision, so ultimately our responsibility no doubt and we've addressed this.

One item the platform did have an issue with on launch day was some lower level networking stuff that didn't show up in the type of load tests we were doing leading up to launch. That caused the unavailability on launch day and we addressed that and developed other types of load tests since then. Not to say we won't get overloaded again at some point but we're trying to ramp up in a manageable way.

To answer one person directly, the platform was definitely built from the ground up with security in mind, including security penetration tests by 3rd parties, and so far so good but email us directly if you have any questions or doubts about this and I'll answer the best I can. I also think I saw one person post about IE9 complaining about insecure content. We force IE9 over into HTTPS mode and if any links we include are not in HTTPS mode (like "http://www.goko.com/go-get-a-file") then IE9 complains that the overall page is not secure because that one link being included is not in HTTPS mode. To be honest, I personally have made that mistake a few times when patching something but generally it's just IE9 just trying to make sure everything matches.

As for payments, we don't see or save any credit card or paypal info... never have, never will. That all happens via 3rd party payment providers and we're not in the path at all (as is the case with most internet sites). Again, we've had security penetration testing on the interactions we do have with that 3rd party but we don't see any of that personal/credit card info.

For personal info, we do save the email addresses you give us when you register using an email address... and we use those both for login (obviously) and to send you information about the games, like I did the other day when telling people who had pre-bought Hinterlands: Faraway Lands that it was available to them early.

Ok, that was longer than I intended it to be but I hope I addressed most of the questions out there.

August was a very difficult time for us and there wasn't a lot of sleep to be found but the last few months are starting to see things come around, as people have pointed out. As we launch on Facebook and then iOS/Android we'll probably have some more long nights but we're very committed to deliver on the original vision and give everyone a great online game.

Thanks,
John Q.
« Last Edit: January 12, 2013, 12:10:31 am by jqs »
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