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[DStu]

First, I don't see how playing online has anything to do with this.
Second, I think dondon's post might be a bit short, but I think it's more helpfu than the OP.  The OP might be mathematically correct, but I'm sure it does not calculate an interesting value.
Look at C(5,1)=3.5.   Of course it's true, playing that one Venture will give you $3 on average by Venture chaining.  But the 5th Venture is not worth $3.5,  because playing the 5th Venture will prevent playing (on average) 2.5 other Ventures.  So the value of the 5th Venture is probably C(5,1)-C(4,1), at  least in situations where you can reasonable expect to draw one Venture in hand.  In a cursed deck, that might be different. Then there is also the case when you draw 2 Ventures in hand, where the formula also does not apply because the remaining Ventures has to be shared by the 2 (or more) Ventures in hand.
After all, you end up by "the Venture increases the value of the remaining Treasures by $1 (and increases shuffling of non-Treasures I guess)"

[dondon151]

To be honest, alot of your posts have this sort of aloof and dismissive tone that vaguely annoys me, regardless of whether I agree with their actual content.

That's just a natural consequence of the way that I type, but thanks for being honest. I don't realize this and sometimes I'm typing up posts on my iPad where I don't put extra effort into making posts sound nice.

[Mic Qsenoch]

People should be rewarded for being concise and direct, not punished.

[SCSN]

People should be rewarded for being concise and direct, not punished.

Conciseness and a modicum of warmth and respect towards others are not mutually exclusive.

[greatexpectations]

Conciseness and a modicum of warmth and respect towards others are not mutually exclusive.

i agree. the scumbag meme was probably unnecessary in this thread.

[dondon151]

Also, one thing that I forgot to mention is that having a Venture is like having negative cards in the deck if all you care about are your Treasure cards. If you have a 16-card deck that includes 2 Ventures and 2 Golds, the Ventures will on average skip 3 cards and play the 4th card (EDIT: I think this is poor math; it's probably supposed to be skipping 4 cards and playing the 5th card), which triggers reshuffles twice as quickly compared to if you had 4 Golds instead. So it plays the other Treasures in your deck more often.

Intuitively, in this example, the Ventures are worth more than a 3rd or 4th Gold, since the Gold "density" in both decks is the same, but each Venture adds $1 of value. Whether this is a good approximation is up for debate because there are things like reshuffling and not always drawing hands with Ventures and stuff. But it's the way that I like to think about Venture: basically a copy of another random Treasure card in your deck that is worth an additional $1.

[Mic Qsenoch]

People should be rewarded for being concise and direct, not punished.

Conciseness and a modicum of warmth and respect towards others are not mutually exclusive.

Seriously read dondon's post again. He isn't being disrespectful, he is just being brief. If you remove the word "far" his original post is completely innocent, but he should be able to say "far" if that's how he feels about it. The main reason it looks out of place is that it is the first response to the OP, if it had come five posts down nobody would have said a thing. He is being attacked through social mechanisms for making a legitimate strategic comment.

[SCSN]

Conciseness and a modicum of warmth and respect towards others are not mutually exclusive.

i agree. the scumbag meme was probably unnecessary in this thread.

Yeah, it was quite the scumbag move!

[Witherweaver]

Conciseness and a modicum of warmth and respect towards others are not mutually exclusive.

i agree. the scumbag meme was probably unnecessary in this thread.

Yeah, it was quite the scumbag move!

Someone metascumbag meme the scumbag meme for many upvotes.

[achmed_sender]

Conciseness and a modicum of warmth and respect towards others are not mutually exclusive.

i agree. the scumbag meme was probably unnecessary in this thread.

Yeah, it was quite the scumbag move!

Someone metascumbag meme the scumbag meme for many upvotes.

No.

EDIT: Someone puts in the "How abut no"-bear for many upvotes 

[DStu]

Conciseness and a modicum of warmth and respect towards others are not mutually exclusive.

i agree. the scumbag meme was probably unnecessary in this thread.

Yeah, it was quite the scumbag move!

Someone metascumbag meme the scumbag meme for many upvotes.

Yo dawg,  I heard you like scumbag memes...

[ragingduckd]

Sorry for being a dick about this, dondon. I don't really think you're a scumbag and I do understand the ipad typing issue.

To be fair, I was really responding more to your past one-liners than to this particular one. Whether intentional or not, many of your posts come across with an abrupt and dismissive tone of authority. Mic Q can get away with that because he's a total badass, but those one-liners feel weirdly disrespectful coming from someone who hasn't played actively since before Dark Ages.

WalrusMcFishSr really went above and beyond here, presenting analysis that insightful, precise, and very novel. I believe this was also his first strategy post. He's a pretty chill guy and not apt to take offense here, but I felt his efforts deserved a more considered response.

[Witherweaver]

Sorry for being a dick about this, dondon. I don't really think you're a scumbag and I do understand the ipad typing issue.

To be fair, I was really responding more to your past one-liners than to this particular one. Whether intentional or not, many of your posts come across with an abrupt and dismissive tone of authority. Mic Q can get away with that because he's a total badass, but those one-liners feel weirdly disrespectful coming from someone who hasn't played actively since before Dark Ages.

WalrusMcFishSr really went above and beyond here, presenting analysis that insightful, precise, and very novel. I believe this was also his first strategy post. He's a pretty chill guy and not apt to take offense here, but I felt his efforts deserved a more considered response.

Though WalrusMcFishSr did actually ask in his post whether this was useful or simply an academic interest.

[SCSN]

People should be rewarded for being concise and direct, not punished.

Conciseness and a modicum of warmth and respect towards others are not mutually exclusive.

Seriously read dondon's post again. He isn't being disrespectful, he is just being brief. If you remove the word "far" his original post is completely innocent, but he should be able to say "far" if that's how he feels about it. The main reason it looks out of place is that it is the first response to the OP, if it had come five posts down nobody would have said a thing. He is being attacked through social mechanisms for making a legitimate strategic comment.

It's not that one post in isolation that inspired the "attack", it just happened to be the trigger for the expression of a growing sentiment that's apparently shared by several people. And I don't see it as an attack, really, but rather as a correction through social mechanisms for repeatedly disregarding (unwittingly, as it turned out) certain implicit social norms.

Such social mechanisms have several important functions, one of them is to bring it to someone's attention that others find a certain kind of behavior undesirable--something of which people are often unaware--so that they actually have the conscious choice of either correcting it or living with the consequences of not doing so.

[Mic Qsenoch]

Mic Q can get away with that because he's a total badass

I wish the dudes stealing my lunch money believed this.

[WalrusMcFishSr]

Ok. I think as long as there is one other treasure card in the draw pile, you just take "N" and "v" for the cards in your draw pile.

Yes, you should modify the value of N and v based on known information. This is just the "purest" form of the formula, such as if you are playing right at the end of a shuffle.

Neat stuff! However, we all know that Dominion is a game of big turns and small turns, not one of averages. I'd be interested to see a probability distribution over the Venture values instead of just the average value of a Venture.

Quite true! Here's some distributions from two of the situations I discussed:

C(5,4):

$1: 44.5146%
$2: 27.7906%
$3: 15.8062%
$4: 7.9334%
$5: 3.1512%
$6: 0.804%

C(3,2):

$1: 40.1802%
$2: 29.8668%
$3: 19.9584%
$4: 9.9946%

...you can interpret that as you will. It's hard to directly compare against a Gold or something because it depends on the way the rest of your deck looks.

Second, I think dondon's post might be a bit short, but I think it's more helpfu than the OP.  The OP might be mathematically correct, but I'm sure it does not calculate an interesting value.
Look at C(5,1)=3.5.   Of course it's true, playing that one Venture will give you $3 on average by Venture chaining.  But the 5th Venture is not worth $3.5,  because playing the 5th Venture will prevent playing (on average) 2.5 other Ventures.

Man you're right. This is not the most strategically helpful article in the world. It's not as if when I'm playing Dominion I'm (consciously) performing advanced combinatorics in my head. Mostly I thought it was an interesting mathematical result, and I wanted to share with you guys.

(lots of squabbling about scumbags and whatnot)

Can't we all just get along???  Who knew this would be such a polarizing topic.

[popsofctown]

I really think your one line post was unconstructive and dismissive.

I'm sure that posts about Dominion strategy have a reputation for being constructive. No surprise that when I post something that I feel is mildly insightful, I get called out for being a Goko detractor. How is that even relevant, anyway?

Aren't you the guy who only played solitaire games on iso?  I don't think I have you confused with someone else, you have only about 300 games played on isotropic. I've played 5k, Mic has played 4k (oof, right in the egoz). No one brought up goko but you.

Unless your RL playgroup is straight up unemployed, you have less experience using Venture with curses in the mix, which is one of its key use cases, so yeah, your lack of online play is relevant, goko or not.  If OP wants to throw away all the work he's done and play using a one line motto from an expert, then that person needs to definitely be an expert.

[dondon151]

Aren't you the guy who only played solitaire games on iso?  I don't think I have you confused with someone else, you have only about 300 games played on isotropic. I've played 5k, Mic has played 4k (oof, right in the egoz).

If you want to go there, after 5000 games on Iso, you were level 29. After ~250 games on Iso (on an alt account), I was level 43.

No one brought up goko but you.

Pray tell, how do I play Dominion online?

If OP wants to throw away all the work he's done and play using a one line motto from an expert, then that person needs to definitely be an expert.

I wasn't suggesting that. However, I do recall this exact topic being discussed before.

I'm sorry if this sounded nasty, but despite having only logged 5% as many games as you had on Iso (10% if you count both of my accounts), the leaderboard doesn't suggest that I lacked expertise at this game.

[sudgy]

I play my Ventures, giving me 6 + i coins.  I buy a Possession.

Actually, if you were to have potions be imaginary numbers in the equation, would it work well?

[Witherweaver]

I play my Ventures, giving me 6 + i coins.  I buy a Possession.

Actually, if you were to have potions be imaginary numbers in the equation, would it work well?

My gut reaction without thinking about it would be "no", because the geometry of complex numbers is not the same as the geometry of the (coin,potion) construct (of which there isn't really any geometry).

[Mic Qsenoch]

People should be rewarded for being concise and direct, not punished.

Conciseness and a modicum of warmth and respect towards others are not mutually exclusive.

Seriously read dondon's post again. He isn't being disrespectful, he is just being brief. If you remove the word "far" his original post is completely innocent, but he should be able to say "far" if that's how he feels about it. The main reason it looks out of place is that it is the first response to the OP, if it had come five posts down nobody would have said a thing. He is being attacked through social mechanisms for making a legitimate strategic comment.

It's not that one post in isolation that inspired the "attack", it just happened to be the trigger for the expression of a growing sentiment that's apparently shared by several people. And I don't see it as an attack, really, but rather as a correction through social mechanisms for repeatedly disregarding (unwittingly, as it turned out) certain implicit social norms.

Such social mechanisms have several important functions, one of them is to bring it to someone's attention that others find a certain kind of behavior undesirable--something of which people are often unaware--so that they actually have the conscious choice of either correcting it or living with the consequences of not doing so.

I'm probably going to really mess up the whole "concise is good" image with this one.

Social pressures have the effect of making everybody talk the same way, think the same things, accept the opinions of people who have certain social skills. This is probably a good thing in a lot of contexts, but I don't think it helps a discussion of Dominion strategy (or a discussion of any techinal/scientific subject). The problem with the social mechanisms is that people start sounding reasonable/correct based largely on social cues. So if you're a charmer and you're really good at Dominion (i.e. ragingduckd) its works out swell for everyone. But if you aren't a charmer and you're really good at Dominion (dondon in this case) you get the shaft and people ignore you for the wrong reasons. Fortunately, I don't think we have any community members who are charmers but suck at Dominion. But what do we do if, hypothetically, these two disagree on a point of Dominion strategy? A community which relies heavily on social cues will tend to side with ragingduckd, regardless of the strategic value of their positions. I don't want that to happen. The discussion should center around whether the strategic arguments are valid, and not depend on how funny/nice/good looking (avatars of course) the people involved are.

Which is to say, I think the argument "dondon hasn't played with Dark Ages/Guilds much" is a legitimate criticism of his posts about strategy, but "you were kind of mean" is absolutely not.

edit: The other reason the stuff in this thread doesn't sit well with me is that dondon is one of the most prolific advice givers in the Game Reports/Help subforum. He and DG have blown everybody else out of the water in terms of the amount and quality of their help in those threads. He is exactly the kind of poster this community should respect.

[WalrusMcFishSr]

[ragingduckd]

Social pressures have the effect of making everybody talk the same way, think the same things, accept the opinions of people who have certain social skills. This is probably a good thing in a lot of contexts, but I don't think it helps a discussion of Dominion strategy (or a discussion of any techinal/scientific subject). The problem with the social mechanisms is that people start sounding reasonable/correct based largely on social cues. So if you're a charmer and you're really good at Dominion (i.e. ragingduckd) its works out swell for everyone. But if you aren't a charmer and you're really good at Dominion (dondon in this case) you get the shaft and people ignore you for the wrong reasons. Fortunately, I don't think we have any community members who are charmers but suck at Dominion. But what do we do if, hypothetically, these two disagree on a point of Dominion strategy? A community which relies heavily on social cues will tend to side with ragingduckd, regardless of the strategic value of their positions.

What crap. Being charming has nothing to do with whether your ideas about Dominion get accepted. If charm was required, who would ever listen to Wandering Winder? Maybe this is a valid criticism of politics or academia, but here we have the acid test of whether or not your ideas actually win games.

There's also a huge difference between what we like and what we think is correct. WalrusMcFishSr is a nice and funny guy, but nobody is saying that his analysis is therefore better than dondon151's. He's definitely making the forums a more pleasant place to visit though.

As for post length, there's certainly  value in concision, but there's far more value in substance. I value your posts because you have something to say and you say it concisely; WW's irritate me because he has something to say but he takes a whole forum page to say it; and dondon151's are nearly useless because he rarely actually says anything more than "I disagree."

[Watno]

He is exactly the kind of poster this community should respect.

How can one expect to be respected if he doesn't show respect towards others?

[Mic Qsenoch]

Social pressures have the effect of making everybody talk the same way, think the same things, accept the opinions of people who have certain social skills. This is probably a good thing in a lot of contexts, but I don't think it helps a discussion of Dominion strategy (or a discussion of any techinal/scientific subject). The problem with the social mechanisms is that people start sounding reasonable/correct based largely on social cues. So if you're a charmer and you're really good at Dominion (i.e. ragingduckd) its works out swell for everyone. But if you aren't a charmer and you're really good at Dominion (dondon in this case) you get the shaft and people ignore you for the wrong reasons. Fortunately, I don't think we have any community members who are charmers but suck at Dominion. But what do we do if, hypothetically, these two disagree on a point of Dominion strategy? A community which relies heavily on social cues will tend to side with ragingduckd, regardless of the strategic value of their positions.

What crap. Being a charmer nothing to do with getting your ideas about Dominion get accepted. If charm was required, who would ever listen to WW? Maybe this is a valid criticism of politics or academia, but here we have the acid test of whether or not your ideas actually win games.

All communities are somewhat vulnerable to social stuff being too important, but you're definitely right that f.DS isn't suffering from it too much. I'd like it to stay that way. Donald X used to get a lot of community support in discussions just because he created Dominion (which was appropriate for some topics, but not all of them). And even though we do have a great acid test, not everyone relies on it so heavily as the people playing competitively at a high level.

There's also a huge difference between what's polite and what's correct. I don't say that WalrusMcFishSr's opinion was right or that dondon151's was wrong, but certain behaviors makes f.ds a place that people like to visit and others do not.

As for post length, there's certainly  value in concision, but there's even more value in substance. I value your posts because you have something to say and you say it concisely; WW's irritate me because he has something to say but he takes a whole forum page to say it; and dondon151's are nearly useless because he rarely actually says anything more than "I disagree."

Dondon made a couple of worthless "I disagree" posts in the WW ranking thread, people challenged him on it, and in at least one case he responded with a more substantial argument. That is perfect, that is the way it should work. Respond to the posts which are worthless, don't cast him as a "scumbag" in a thread where his post actually has some content. Most of his posts have genuinely useful content, just by skimming his recent post history I can see that most are brief, but make a clear point.

I don't think you committed some great crime, or whatever. None of this is a huge deal, the meme is funny, I just think it discourages posts from a good poster.