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[LastFootnote]

To me, this feature isn't about making the better player win more often in cases of a significant skill disparity, it's more about cases where both players involved want to test their skill to the absolute greatest extent possible.  Donald X says this makes a less fun game, and across the entire player base he's probably right, but for many who frequent these boards, "test of skill" is sometimes our personal definition of fun. 

So I think if Salvager offers the option, then it will have to be something both players consent to, and perhaps it shouldn't be a thing on which to base automatching.  I hope that even if Salvager does offer it, it does not become any kind of de facto standard.  If Making Fun ever offers it natively, then I'd be happy with the restriction Donald X suggested: forcing the game to be unrated when it's enabled, because it really is something that gives you that "tournament feel." 

But here's the thing: The "tournament feel" game is what I come to online Dominion for.  When I want a more casual, just-for-fun game, I've got the physical cards on my shelf, and RL friends to invite over, and we'll socialize and drink some beers while we play.  Online, in pro mode, the fun is in testing myself.  It's fun for me to feel the achievement of beating someone like Stef or SheCantSayNo or WanderingWinder (or even just making it hard for them to beat me), but only if I think I really played somewhere near their level that day.  If I just pulled the 5/2 on a random board where Rebuild/Estate happens to dominate, then even though I won, I wasted my shot at those players, so to speak. 

I'm not sure if others have the same reasons as me, but that's why I proposed the feature, why I'll vote for it to be implemented, and why I hope it mainly sees use in tournaments and among above-average players when they play against each other.  (For the record, I'd guess that I'm an above-average player, but still a very far from players like the ones I mentioned in the previous paragraph.)

I think these are some well-made points, but you may have misunderstood me slightly. I am not just talking about when an above-average player plays a below-average player. I am talking about any game where the two players are not equal in skill (which is 100% of games). If you want to see how you stack up against Stef, for instance, you can see your relative positions on the leaderboard. Playing one game against him is not going to be nearly as indicative of your relative skill levels, win or lose. Like, what if he's having a really off day and you win? Is that somehow more satisfying than winning due partially to a favorable opening split?

I, too, am OK with having identical opening hands for unrated games. It's especially nice to have for single-elimination tournaments, although it's even better if you just play a series of games against each opponent instead.

I don't see how someone could be against identical starting hands but in favor of last loser goes first.

It's not that strange. As I mentioned earlier, identical opening hands more often lead to mirror games and further exacerbate first player advantage. On the other hand, somebody has to go last each game, so it's nice if the player who just won gets that handicap by default.

I don't think it's nice that the worse player gets to win sometimes due to luck. I mean it's also not that horrible, but I would rather not have it than have it. (And bad players will still win due to luck, it will just be a bit less frequent, if you implement identical starting hands.)

I don't like to make slippery slope arguments, but I'm going to make one here.

The distinction between the randomness of your starting hands and the randomness in the rest of the game is pretty artificial. If we're playing a variant where we remove the randomness of starting hands, why don't we remove some more randomness from the game? How about if we ensure that your first two buys are never at the bottom of your deck after the first shuffle? I'd say that shafts players far more than a suboptimal opening split.

One answer is perception. Somehow there's this perception that a better opening split just wins the game for you a lot of the time. I don't think it's really true, but it's certainly a fairly widespread belief. I admit that it can suck to play out an entire game where you constantly feel like you're behind due to a bad split and then you lose. I couldn't say how much of that is self-fulfilling prophecy, but there it is. As Donald has said in other threads, perception is important. So there are definitely reasons to have identical starting hands. I just think there are more and better reasons not to.

But yeah, slippery slope. Dominion has some luck. I don't really see the point of arbitrarily removing one aspect of that luck. I say if you want to get your non-luck game fix, play a game of chess or something. Don't try to warp Dominion to make it less luck-based; just accept that luck is part of the game. I really don't want to see this community turn into another Smogon, with its ridiculous, arbitrary set of metagame rules meant to "increase competitiveness".

[ragingduckd]

But…"a lot of people" is purely subjective. And if you only care about the raw number of "Often/Alway" votes instead of the ratio, the poll doesn't even need a "Rarely/Never" option.

No, a ratio is far more informative than a single number.  I know how many Salvager users there are (1240 in the last two weeks), but I don't know how many of them read this thread and vote in its polls. 

Am I wrong in thinking the poll is a bit of a sham? It seems like you already plan to implement this feature.

Yes, you are wrong to think that and rude to say it.  Hundreds of people use Salvager without ever visiting this forum.  I care what features they want and I rely on the people here to help me figure it out.  I'm asking the question that I think will best help me do that.  Neither I nor any other contributor needs to play politics with Salvager.

I'm deliberately not asking what you or anyone else thinks Salvager should be because I know where good software comes from and where it doesnt.  If you don't, go read a little about design-by-committee.

But whether you agree with my design philosophy or not doesn't actually matter.  If you want Salvager to be different, you only have four realistic options:
1. Uninstall it.  I will personally refund your payment!
2. Become a contributor.  You can implement whatever you want, and we'll all take your opinion a lot more seriously.
3. Complain to MF about how Salvager is ruining online Dominion for you.
4. Suck it up.

[LastFootnote]

But…"a lot of people" is purely subjective. And if you only care about the raw number of "Often/Alway" votes instead of the ratio, the poll doesn't even need a "Rarely/Never" option.

No, a ratio is far more informative than a single number.  I know how many Salvager users there are (1240 in the last two weeks), but I don't know how many of them read this thread and vote in its polls. 

Am I wrong in thinking the poll is a bit of a sham? It seems like you already plan to implement this feature.

Yes, you are wrong to think that and rude to say it.  Hundreds of people use Salvager without ever visiting this forum.  I care what features they want and I rely on the people here to help me figure it out.  I'm asking the question that I think will best help me do that.  Neither I nor any other contributor needs to play politics with Salvager.

I'm deliberately not asking what you or anyone else thinks Salvager should be because I know where good software comes from and where it doesnt.  If you don't, go read a little about design-by-committee.

But whether you agree with my design philosophy or not doesn't actually matter.  If you want Salvager to be different, you only have four realistic options:
1. Uninstall it.  I will personally refund your payment!
2. Become a contributor.  You can implement whatever you want, and we'll all take your opinion a lot more seriously.
3. Complain to MF about how Salvager is ruining online Dominion for you.
4. Suck it up.

Whoa, dude. Believe it or not, I wasn't trying to upset you. I'm only going off of what you said. You said:

I'm not interested in one person's opinion about what another person ought to be allowed to do.

I'll implement this if a lot of people want it for themselves.  And I'd probably fold if Donald or MF explicitly asked me to.  That's all.

I think it was reasonable to conclude that the "Rarely/Never" option was superfluous in this case, since you said outright that you only care about people who want it, not people who don't.

Now that you've described the data you're actually trying to extrapolate (based on the total number of installations), I understand. I think there are probably a bunch of biases in that method, but at least I get the gist of what you're trying to do.

Likewise, I assumed that you already had a desire to implement this feature based on your upvotes and your comments here:

This is a really cool idea.  I assume that by "ruin," you actually mean "shelters."  But yes, it should be entirely possible to skip 2 turns each until the desired starting hands arise.

So if you already like the idea and you don't care about people who don't want it implemented, then it only stands to reason that you'd implement it regardless of the results of a poll. I'm sorry for using a loaded word like "sham". It just seemed likely to me like the results of the poll will have little to no effect on your decision to implement this feature, based on your comments and your track record up to this point.

[ragingduckd]

Whoa, dude. Believe it or not, I wasn't trying to upset you.

LF, you have a long history of writing posts in this thread that it's hard not to take offense to.  It should be obvious that calling my poll a "sham" is going to upset me.  Do you think I work on Salvager, isotropish, and drunkensailor simply to impose my imperious will upon you?

It's offensive to talk to Salvager's developers like we're your employees.  It's similarly absurd to pretend that you're part of a team that decides what we'll code for you or not.  This isn't a democracy voting on how to spend common resources.  It's a very small group of amateurs devoting their personal time to making Goko's Dominion software halfway usable.

I do appreciate that you tend to apologize for your most offensive posts, but why does someone who doesn't use automatch even care whether it has options for #vpon or equal starting hands?  Why does someone who plays a half-dozen Pro games a month care whether these variants might distort Goko's leaderboard?  It feels like you make drama in this thread for the sheer pleasure of making drama.

[theblankman]

If you want to see how you stack up against Stef, for instance, you can see your relative positions on the leaderboard. Playing one game against him is not going to be nearly as indicative of your relative skill levels, win or lose. Like, what if he's having a really off day and you win? Is that somehow more satisfying than winning due partially to a favorable opening split?

The problems with the leaderboard have been discussed at length, but assuming they'll eventually be fixed, that's a fair point. 

Re: Stef having an off day, other than him telling me, I have no way to know that happened, so that's less likely to blunt my satisfaction over a win than having clearly outdrawn him, whether it's on the opening or, say, watching him get multiple dead Potion turns while I buy up Familiars. 

What playing one game against Stef does get me, besides the challenge, is a chat with Stef who, just about every time I've played him, has been gracious enough to discuss the game afterward at least a little, if it was interesting enough to discuss.  And he is far from the only strong competitive player who's done this for me.  The fact that the competitive Dominion community is so friendly, and helps others to improve instead of just beating them and moving on, is another thing that keeps me coming back for more.  As I've improved at the game, sometimes players rated lower than me have started asking for a bit of game review just like I ask stronger players than myself, and I give it because I like that aspect of this community and want to perpetuate it.  But none of that discussion happens when the reason for the outcome is obvious. 

So another benefit of identical starting hands, for me personally, is that I think I'm just a little bit more likely to have a game worth thinking and talking about afterwards.  I've had a fair number of games where all the analysis needed was something like, "Well, there was nothing on this board to counter turn 1 Mountebank."  I've also had games where different splits dictated different but similarly good strategies, followed by nice long discussions of whether 3/4 or 5/2 was better on that board, but anecdotally the latter type of game seems much rarer.  It would be interesting to see if that anecdote could be backed up with real evidence, but I'm not sure how to measure "games where different splits dictated different but similarly good strategies." 

I say if you want to get your non-luck game fix, play a game of chess or something.

When I'm in the mood for total-information games, I prefer Go   That game also has a lot of the friendly, constructive competitive community like I mentioned above, probably more than anything else I've played.  I can't say how many times I've played a game of Go, then spent as long, or longer, reviewing the game with my opponent than we did actually playing it. 

I could say similar things about other games I've gotten into competitively; talk about hours spent discussing the finer points of deck building after Magic tournaments, or long debates over when to slow-play a certain poker hand.  I guess that's just a thing I like in my games, and their attendant communities, in general. 

Don't try to warp Dominion to make it less luck-based; just accept that luck is part of the game.

I'm not trying to do that.  In my last post I specifically admitted this is a niche feature with a niche audience: that segment of Dominion players who do things like review games after playing to learn from them, maintain online forums for extensive discussion of the game, and spend their free time writing tools to help play and analyze it.  If you don't want to play with identical starting hands, I don't think you should have to.  But just as you'd like your game to be a little more luck-based, I'd like mine to be a little more skill-based.  I don't think those viewpoints are incompatible. 

Likewise, I assumed that you already had a desire to implement this feature based on your upvotes and your comments here:

This is a really cool idea.  I assume that by "ruin," you actually mean "shelters."  But yes, it should be entirely possible to skip 2 turns each until the desired starting hands arise.

At the risk of putting words in AI's mouth, that comment may not mean what you think it means.  The narcissist in me would like to think that by "really cool idea," he meant to say that regardless of whether the feature itself is worth having, he liked my proposed method for providing it.  But, well, obvious bias is obvious  

[Donald X.]

I don't see how someone could be against identical starting hands but in favor of last loser goes first. (Well, other than, the rules of Dominion call for one and not the other. And yeah, okay, I can accept that explanation.)

But otherwise, aren't all the arguments the same for both? Like, McQ says he enjoys winning from "unfavorable splits." I assume he also enjoys winning from second position, then?

They both have an effect on your chances for winning; but picking who goes first doesn't go any further than that, while varying the starting hands adds variety to the game (which it desperately needs, someone can say, go ahead, I don't mind).

Like, someone is going first. If we change that rule, okay, you are going first in a different set of circumstances now. You still go first sometimes and last sometimes; you have all the turn order experiences. But switching to identical starting hands removes experiences.

[Donald X.]

I don't think it's nice that the worse player gets to win sometimes due to luck.

I actually think it's essential, for any new game hoping for a wide audience.

I always say, it has to be fun to lose. If it's fun to lose, we can go ahead and let you lose; you still get to have fun. But despite that, having a chance to win is significant for many people, they would much rather win once in a while due to luck than never win at all.

[Donald X.]

The distinction between the randomness of your starting hands and the randomness in the rest of the game is pretty artificial. If we're playing a variant where we remove the randomness of starting hands, why don't we remove some more randomness from the game? How about if we ensure that your first two buys are never at the bottom of your deck after the first shuffle? I'd say that shafts players far more than a suboptimal opening split.

One answer is perception. Somehow there's this perception that a better opening split just wins the game for you a lot of the time. I don't think it's really true, but it's certainly a fairly widespread belief. I admit that it can suck to play out an entire game where you constantly feel like you're behind due to a bad split and then you lose. I couldn't say how much of that is self-fulfilling prophecy, but there it is. As Donald has said in other threads, perception is important. So there are definitely reasons to have identical starting hands. I just think there are more and better reasons not to.

I think I've pointed out the what-about-all-the-other-luck thing elsewhere on this site, some other time it came up. It's true that the opening split is especially visible (maybe the next most visible thing is final hands; casual players often completely blank on someone getting an extra turn). That's got a positive side though: you can blame it. It wasn't me officer, it was that first-turn Mine he got.

IIRC in the Richard Garfield podcast about deckbuilding games, he preferred having special powers at the start, each player starting with a different deck to some degree. The idea being that then the puzzle that the game gives you to solve is less likely to have the same solution for each player. Varying starting cards by player is of course the opposite direction from identical starting hands.

[hsiale]

I added it, then reconsidered and removed it.  You're trying to answer the question I'm deliberately trying not to ask.

What is the question you're trying to ask?

I guess, if you implement this feature, the settings to choose from would be "require", "prefer", "don't care", "prefer not" and "deny". (The difference between "require" and "prefer" being that require means Salvager takes care of not pairing you against "deny" people if you have "require" but if you have "prefer" you can be paired against them and their "deny" kills your "prefer".) Out of such choice, I would probably choose "don't care", maybe "prefer not", maybe "prefer", definitely neither of the extremes, so how often would I use it would depend mostly on what my opponents feel about this. I think the feature is definitely worth implementing (especially to use in tournament environment) but, contrary to VP counter, I personally am not strongly in favour of using or not using it, so I wouldn't force my opponent into either choice, being happy to play with whatever choice they want and being happy they have this choice.

[theblankman]

I guess, if you implement this feature, the settings to choose from would be "require", "prefer", "don't care", "prefer not" and "deny".

When I first proposed the feature, I would've agreed, but enough reasons have been given in this thread to convince me that if this is implemented, "require" should be left off.  I like the feature for tournaments, and cases where both players want it, but I don't think it should fragment automatching, and it necessitates consent from both players because both potentially need to skip turns.  So in a hypothetical game between a "deny" and a "require," the "deny" automatically wins.  Such a game could happen even if automatching did respect the "require" option, cause there's always non-automatch games.  It would be like me having "always request #vpon" in my preferences, then joining a "#vpoff" game manually.  I guess doing that implicitly downgrades my "require #vpon" to a prefer, but the point is that for this feature, "require" is unenforceable.  If "require" was implemented with automatching influence, someone could theoretically fork Salvager and make a version that always advertises "don't care," but never participates in the process once the game starts.  I don't think the maintainers of the main fork could do much to stop that.  So while I like the option of identical starting hands, I think "require" is a nonstarter from a technical standpoint, and not all that desirable anyway. 

[silverspawn]

all i can say about identical starting hands is that I don't like it, despite the fact that I usually like everything that makes the game more skill dependend. Identical starting hands just seems like such an arbitrary way to go about this. you can still lose the game by having your first 2 buys cards on place #11 and #12. So, should you also make the first reshuffle identical? I don't think many people would like that.

A much more effective way to decrease luck is to add a hatelist, so you can put rebuillds and stuff on there.

[Kirian]

I don't think it's nice that the worse player gets to win sometimes due to luck.

I actually think it's essential, for any new game hoping for a wide audience.

I always say, it has to be fun to lose. If it's fun to lose, we can go ahead and let you lose; you still get to have fun. But despite that, having a chance to win is significant for many people, they would much rather win once in a while due to luck than never win at all.

I think that's an excellent point, though I do think it applies to casual games much more than to competitive games.  One thing a lot of us tend to forget here is that Dominion wasn't really intended, so far as I understand from Donald, to be a competitive game.  (Donald, am I recalling correctly that you've said you really didn't think about tournaments etc. when you were designing?)

I think you guys might actually be convincing me to change my mind about the equal starting hands though.  Not because I dislike being in the minority, but because a lot of really good points are coming out that I hadn't really considered previously.

1. Uninstall it.  I will personally refund your payment!

Brilliant.

I've said in other contexts that we're all entitled to two things:  expressing our opinion (ideally framing it as constructive criticism), and not using something you don't like.  Always getting what we want isn't on that list.  Neither is being a jerk, especially to volunteers.

[pg]

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before (46 pages of comments is a bit daunting), but I figured I'd explain my opposition to an identical starting hands option.  I think it would, if widely adopted by the competitive community, potentially limit some of the more skill-testing situations in dominion.  Yes, there are games where a player opens 5-2 and gets a turn 1 Mountebank and is already a 75% favorite to win. But if the other player is clever enough to trash coppers before curses, and so decreases this advantage from 3:1 to 2:1, then in the long run they will win significantly more. On the flip side, even if some player gets lucky and can open T1 Mountebank, a mediocre player might be able to beat a fantastic one only 60% of the time. But, if the strong player wins 90% of the time in the reverse position, I want to see THAT discrepancy in skill represented in the rankings.  It's NOT just that I expect unlucky opens to even out in the long run --- it's that I expect players with skill in particular sorts of situations to be rewarded for that skill in the long run, when otherwise skill in those situations would not play (as significant) a role.

Being able to play to your outs, shut out your opponent when ahead, and adapt to asymmetry, are just as strategically difficult as being able to out-plan your opponent from an identical starting point.  I'd hate to see dominion get to the point where these skills are not required of top players.

In contrast, alternating first-player doesn't have this problem: I expect the same number of games going first/second either way, and if people would rather see their first player advantage evenly distributed rather than randomly clustered, I don't see any problem with that. Then again, I don't see it as a particularly important feature, since I generally feel that the first player advantage is somewhat overblown (though I'd be easily convinced by evidence to the contrary).

[LastFootnote]

Whoa, dude. Believe it or not, I wasn't trying to upset you.

LF, you have a long history of writing posts in this thread that it's hard not to take offense to.  It should be obvious that calling my poll a "sham" is going to upset me.  Do you think I work on Salvager, isotropish, and drunkensailor simply to impose my imperious will upon you?

It's offensive to talk to Salvager's developers like we're your employees.  It's similarly absurd to pretend that you're part of a team that decides what we'll code for you or not.  This isn't a democracy voting on how to spend common resources.  It's a very small group of amateurs devoting their personal time to making Goko's Dominion software halfway usable.

I do appreciate that you tend to apologize for your most offensive posts, but why does someone who doesn't use automatch even care whether it has options for #vpon or equal starting hands?  Why does someone who plays a half-dozen Pro games a month care whether these variants might distort Goko's leaderboard?  It feels like you make drama in this thread for the sheer pleasure of making drama.

I assure you that I do not post simply to create drama. I do not enjoy having heated arguments on the internet. It lowers my quality of life. If I'm taking the time to argue about something, it's because I feel strongly about it. Whether or not I should feel strongly about it is debatable, but I am not trolling you.

Believe me, I understand that I'm flying off the handle more than is necessary here. Me apologizing, while preferable to not apologizing, does not erase the things I've said, and I readily admit that I shouldn't have said many of the things I've said. Please believe that when I apologize, I am genuinely regretful and not just playing a, "Say a mean, thing; oops I'm sorry but not really" game.

Please do not lump yourself together with the other volunteers. I find the Kingdom Generator and the sidebar log indispensable. The "Quick Create Game" was also an amazing, timely contribution. I will always be grateful to nutki, michaeljb, yed, and others for these features, and will gladly donate some cash to them if you point my to the right PayPal account, etc. My beef is with you alone. I find your cavalier, Werner Von Braun attitude toward feature implementation maddening. As long as you think a thing would be fun to code and there's somebody who would use it, who cares if it makes the game worse for everyone in the long run? Even Donald has spoken up and said that it might be better if Salvager didn't implement identical starting hands.

I'm sorry that I've come across as "feeling entitled" or that you feel I'm talking to you "like my employee". I find that genuinely surprising. I definitely do not feel that I am owed anything by you or any of the other volunteers, nor that I have any sort of ownership over Salvager. I am simply lobbying for what I honestly feel is best for the extension and for Dominion in general. Others lobby for certain features. Right now I'm lobbying against a feature. If that makes me "entitled", then I apologize.

As for contributing, there's nothing I want to add to Salvager right now. I like it fine as-is. I guess I could "contribute" by going to GitHub and ripping out the code for identical starting hands, but that's obviously nonproductive and pointless. Come to think of it, there is one feature I would like. It would be cool to be able to control the contents of the Black Market deck in Casual/Unrated matches. But you'll notice that even though I asked about that a few times, I have NEVER complained that it wasn't getting done. In this case, "Do it yourself if you want it" is a TOTALLY acceptable response. If I really want that feature enough, I will code it myself, and I'll immediately share it with everyone who wants it because why not? Like the Kingdom Generator, that feature isn't really hurting anyone. But your response of "You didn't contribute, so I'm going to ignore you" is nonsensical when you're making changes that can negatively impact people who don't use the extension.

The reason I personally care about automatch is that eventually I will have no choice but to use it (short of inviting specific players to a table). Once MakingFun finally overhauls the game-finding system, there likely won't be a lobby at all and I will be using automatch. I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that the extension will still be going at that point and will simply adapt to be some kind of wrapper to the native automatch, implementing any "features" that MakingFun hasn't.

Finally, if you want some insight into why I'm getting so upset over these features being added, here it is. Before Dominion, I used to play Pokémon (the video games) competitively. Over on smogon.com, I have seen the competitive branch of a fanbase totally bastardize a game by widely accepting and mandating the usage of several superfluous extra rules in order to make the game "more competitive" a.k.a. less luck-based. When this happens, when the most competitive players are playing a completely different game than the one mandated by the game's rules, it's bad for the game. It throws up barriers to entry for new players, fractures the player base, and leads to heated, never-ending arguments like this one.

That is why I get so up in arms about rules like identical starting hands, veto mode, equal turns, and phantom Provinces. Variants like this are fine for unrated games. And they're great in general as long as either player can always veto them. But once you start adding the ability to require these rules when picking opponents for rated games, that I cannot abide. It discriminates against players who just want to play the game according to the rules.

[Robz888]

I am shocked that so many people prefer non-identical starting hands.

Is there any way to see the data on what percentage of Iso users were regularly clicking identical starting hands? I thought it was most, but I guess it was just me!

[jsh357]

I am shocked that so many people prefer non-identical starting hands.

Is there any way to see the data on what percentage of Iso users were regularly clicking identical starting hands? I thought it was most, but I guess it was just me!

I wasn't at the time, but probably would nowadays.  I understand the arguments against it, but I prefer starting on the same page myself.

[LastFootnote]

I'm going to take a little break from the f.DS, I think. Again, apologies for any hurtful things I've said. If there's one lesson I should have learned by now, it's not to post when I'm hungry/angry/stressed/sleep-deprived. Right now my 8-month-old son is on day 3 of his first cold and I've been operating on a stupid small amount of sleep. Again, it doesn't excuse my being a jerk, but I think most of my jerk posts have been made when I was not at my best.

So, time for me to finally learn my lesson and sign off until I can be a civil human being again.

[Awaclus]

Identical starting hands make the game less luck-dependent, but also less skill-dependent. I don't want to make it less skill-dependent, and I don't mind it being luck-dependent. Tournament and Familiar are some of my favorite cards.

[theblankman]

I am shocked that so many people prefer non-identical starting hands.

Is there any way to see the data on what percentage of Iso users were regularly clicking identical starting hands? I thought it was most, but I guess it was just me!

I would've been if I'd been playing Dominion competitively when IsoDom existed, but I'm a relative newcomer to this scene (with some apparently controversial ideas, woops).  That said, I too would be curious to see Iso data if it's available.  It would give a much larger sample size than we have in the current poll, but we'd have to be careful reading too much into it either way, cause "users of an unofficial implementation" carries a bit of sampling bias.

[soulnet]

If I just pulled the 5/2 on a random board where Rebuild/Estate happens to dominate, then even though I won, I wasted my shot at those players, so to speak. 

I think that's an extreme edge case. Maybe Rebuild+Shelters so you trash your Hovel when buying the Estate, but still, I don't think that's really a lot better than Silver/Silver, and may very well be worse. It hurts your ability to hit $5 on turns 3 and 4 dramatically.

[theblankman]

If I just pulled the 5/2 on a random board where Rebuild/Estate happens to dominate, then even though I won, I wasted my shot at those players, so to speak. 

I think that's an extreme edge case. Maybe Rebuild+Shelters so you trash your Hovel when buying the Estate, but still, I don't think that's really a lot better than Silver/Silver, and may very well be worse. It hurts your ability to hit $5 on turns 3 and 4 dramatically.

Shelters would indeed be the case where Rebuild/Estate happens to be a lot better than otherwise   Anyway that was just an example from a game I'd recently played when making that post.  I'm sure we could come up with plenty of kingdoms where 5/2 vs 3/4 makes a huge difference if we tried, but I doubt that's necessary for folks to get the point I was making.

[soulnet]

Shelters would indeed be the case where Rebuild/Estate happens to be a lot better than otherwise   Anyway that was just an example from a game I'd recently played when making that post.  I'm sure we could come up with plenty of kingdoms where 5/2 vs 3/4 makes a huge difference if we tried, but I doubt that's necessary for folks to get the point I was making.

I am with you. I was just amazed that you were the only one not using Mountebank (or even Mountebank/Chapel, which is likely the best pre-Baker opening in Dominion) and also, in need to talk about Dominion to interrupt the too-heated discussion that arose around the identical starting hands.

[Donald X.]

The reason I personally care about automatch is that eventually I will have no choice but to use it (short of inviting specific players to a table). Once MakingFun finally overhauls the game-finding system, there likely won't be a lobby at all and I will be using automatch. I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that the extension will still be going at that point and will simply adapt to be some kind of wrapper to the native automatch, implementing any "features" that MakingFun hasn't.

Incidentally Jeff replied to that email and said yes, this stuff all sounds good. He is on board with getting rid of tables/rooms and having matchmaking more or less as I proposed. The plan naturally being to work out the details when it's time to actually do it.

Currently I base my sense of progress entirely on the fixed adventures: at the point at which they do the adventures, I will feel like things are moving forward, rather than them just fixing bugs in what they've got now.

Incidentally the fact that you can hack javascript to pick the kingdom cards is viewed as a bug, and you should expect them to fix it. So I wouldn't base any new features on that.

[amalloy]

Identical starting hands make the game less luck-dependent, but also less skill-dependent. I don't want to make it less skill-dependent, and I don't mind it being luck-dependent. Tournament and Familiar are some of my favorite cards.

This is an important point that doesn't get enough attention in these discussions, I think. Yes, getting a 5/2 when that's good is lucky, and sometimes decreases the amount of skill that goes into deciding who wins. But having identical starting hands also removes some very important skills from the game: specifically, that of building a plan that works best across the variety of plans your opponent might be capable of.

For example, suppose I'm first player with 4/3, on a board with Trader and Mountebank, and that for whatever reason I decide a defensive Trader is worth opening if my opponent can open Mountebank, but if he can't I should do something more aggressive. If I'm guaranteed equal starting hands, then I don't have to worry about it at all: he has a 4/3 too, so I can go for the more aggressive strategy. If my opponent might have 4/3 or 5/2, then I have to decide: is it worth buying a Trader for "insurance", and trust that I can outplay him later on to counter my "error" if he turns out to have a 4/3 after all? This is a skill that good players are using, today, to increase their win% against weaker players, I'm sure; and it's obviated by identical starting hands.

Or perhaps I have a 4/3 as first player, and want to know whether my opponent plans to buy Sea Hag before I decide on my second buy (choosing between Lookout and Silver, say). If his first buy is Silver, I'm still not sure: was that his $4 or his $3 buy? If identical starting hands were guaranteed, I already know: my first hand is $4, so his is too; so his Silver opening means he's definitely not getting Sea Hag, and I can plan accordingly.

I think this kind of "outside the game" knowledge about my opponent's starting hand makes the game less interesting, and less skillful, because there's fewer things to consider while making a plan.

[Donald X.]

I think that's an excellent point, though I do think it applies to casual games much more than to competitive games.  One thing a lot of us tend to forget here is that Dominion wasn't really intended, so far as I understand from Donald, to be a competitive game.  (Donald, am I recalling correctly that you've said you really didn't think about tournaments etc. when you were designing?)

I wasn't thinking about tournaments, and man never would be, but it's not that it was designed to be noncompetitive or anything. It was designed to pursue "you build a deck while playing" to its logical extreme, and then after that to work and be balanced (it is obv. a game where you want balanced cards, as opposed to say a bidding game, where you might intentionally want a particular level of imbalance). It isn't say a party game; as usual with my games, it's aiming to have both skill and luck, since that's what most people like, both me and anyone I might randomly be playing with. Skill and luck are built into the premise so it was all down to card balance and deciding how swingy cards could get.

Dominion's actual audience is large. Just the fact that the audience is large means odds are it's more casual than competitive. There are more people interested in games than there are people interested in games that are heavily skill-based (similarly, the tallest mountain in the USA is at least as tall as the tallest mountain in California).