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[Blueswan]

I'm in the peculiar position that I fairly consistently beat all the bots, but lose just about every time I play a human online. Even to people with way lower ratings than me. I feel that the main explanation for this is that I rush things when playing with real people because I don't want them to wait for me. For that same reason I've only played real people a dozen times or so. Ironically, I'm quite good at speed chess, where I've used the tactic of playing ridiculously fast to stress opponents into making mistakes, so you could say that karma is biting me in the ass here.

What I'm curious about is how fast you expect people to play. How long is a reasonable amount of time to look over the kingdom before making the first play? What about the turns afterwards?

[loppo]

on turn 1, i give the kingdom a good look, and if it needs some indepth thoughts i put a note an the chat, that i need a second to come up with a game plan. Usually thats ok, even it takes a minute or 2

and then i play at whatever speed is appropriate for me. The only complaints i ever had were complicated engines with lots of decissions. Then you get the occasional complaint. but thats ok.

[bedlam]

If you're taking a full minute every turn, i'm going to get pissed and rage quit. 15 or 20 seconds even to start your turn (not the first turn, of course) is a bit too long (try counting to 15 right now and you'll see that it's very long). But you have to play at your own pace. Don't rush yourself if it hurts your chances of playing your turn ideally.

[serakfalcon]

If you're taking a full minute every turn, i'm going to get pissed and rage quit. 15 or 20 seconds even to start your turn (not the first turn, of course) is a bit too long (try counting to 15 right now and you'll see that it's very long). But you have to play at your own pace. Don't rush yourself if it hurts your chances of playing your turn ideally.

My general guiding principle is if my opponent is takes more than 30 seconds to do anything I will start to rickroll him in the chatbox.

[D Bo]

I've found that playing the bots have spoiled me into getting used to extremely fast play. On Isotropic it didn't really bother me if people were a bit slower, but it feels a lot different now. If my opponent is taking an extreme amount of time I usually just check if they are there, but I don't complain about it because it's never going to help and getting in arguments over online Dominion has only ever made me more mad than I was initially.

[Polk5440]

I think most people play Dominion too fast. It's their problem if playing slower than bots is unacceptable.

Take whatever time you need with in reason. That means thinking for a couple minutes before opening and whenever there is a big decision during play. If the board is especially complicated, drop a note in the chat box (e.g. "thinking") so your opponent doesn't think the game froze. As long as you are speedy on the auto-plays and don't give the impression you are surfing between turns rather than thinking, you will almost never have a problem. It's when there's regularly a thirty second delay before playing 2 Coppers do nothing when people start getting annoyed.

Look at the videos posted on YouTube for the GokoDom tournament (links in this thread) -- there are almost always periods of "slow" play when the decisions get tough.

[lespeutere]

Exactly. Take the time you need. You'll probably not have played against -Stef-, who is regarded as the best player of the 'iso era' ;-). And he used to think quite a bit before he'd make his first move (unless it was an obvious choice). And he won a lot.
If you want more examples, here's the last game of our tournament match which turned out to last for almost 30 min. On iso, which was considerably faster then goko (the others are worth watching, as well, btw).

[Kirian]

If you're playing somewhat slowly because you're thinking, that's not a problem.

If you're not taking at least 30 seconds at the start of the game to look at the board, I'm going to be very happy because I'm more likely to beat you.

On the other hand, if you're playing slowly because you have animations set on slow or medium, I'm going to call you out on it.  (You can tell by examining the pace of play after a card is played.)  This is only a factor in an engine game though.

[Davio]

Take some time to form a game plan and go with it, making small changes (and thinking a little bit) throughout the game. In the end game it's ok to again take some time as you are weighing the option of breaking PPR and such.

When you think it's taking too long just acknowledge to the other person you're thinking instead of waiting to be timed out.

[Fabian]

I expect people to execute their moves competently, meaning they don't take 15 seconds to start their turn because they were busy making a sandwich, or they wait 8 seconds between every click on a Scrying Pool turn. Past that I'm certainly fine with thinking when it's necessary, and that probably describes my own playing speed pretty well too.

I've had a few complaints when playing on goko, which slightly surprises me as I used to be one of the fastest playing people on isotropic I think. That said, I guess it's not that surprising people are frustrated about games being slow, as that's been, like, one of the top complaints of goko going way back to the early beta. There are other possible explanations too, of course, but games on goko are just inherently pretty slow.

[treebeardtheent]

I only have a Kindle fire right now, so playing on goko is a little touch and go. The worst part is that the silk browser on the android 4 operating system does not recognize the chat window as a text field, so I cannot talk with people during the game. Also, because it is a "mobile device" I believe it runs the web app a little slow.

[Stealth Tomato]

If you're taking a full minute every turn, i'm going to get pissed and rage quit. 15 or 20 seconds even to start your turn (not the first turn, of course) is a bit too long (try counting to 15 right now and you'll see that it's very long). But you have to play at your own pace. Don't rush yourself if it hurts your chances of playing your turn ideally.

You must be awful in engine games and anything involving Prosperity. Or, y'know, any set that requires significant thoughtfulness when deckbuilding.

[WanderingWinder]

If you're taking a full minute every turn, i'm going to get pissed and rage quit. 15 or 20 seconds even to start your turn (not the first turn, of course) is a bit too long (try counting to 15 right now and you'll see that it's very long). But you have to play at your own pace. Don't rush yourself if it hurts your chances of playing your turn ideally.

You must be awful in engine games and anything involving Prosperity. Or, y'know, any set that requires significant thoughtfulness when deckbuilding.

I assume he means taking a minute to like, think. Every single turn. I mean, if someone take a minute just playing their cards every turn because you have a big engine, that' okay. And if you take a minute to think at 5 key moments in the game, well, that' rather a lot, but that's okay. But every turn in a typically 15-25 turn game, ugh.