Adam, I think you are taking a lot of things personally that are not meant personally. I also think you, I, and the majority of the rest of the forums want the same thing - good online Dominion. I also think you are committing the (understandable) internet mistake of assuming the (worst) few are representative of the many.
The one thing I took personally: being asked to stop posting in SCSN's thread. Countless posts are critical of MF developers in a way that is insensitive enough to be taken personally by them if they read them, and as a developer myself I empathize with them. Whether or not these things were meant personally doesn't excuse how insensitive they are.
As an example, pst's poll is excellent and I see nothing negative directed at him in that thread. I see some comments that the poll could have been set up differently, but that's a normal discussion about the topic at hand and not an attack on him as the OP.
If I was him, I'd be annoyed at the way that discussion has gone. But I tried to be careful not to speak for him on that matter. Sorry if I was unclear.
Anyway, post in the MF forums! Link them to pst's thread! I think the best way to improve Dominion Online is to lead by example (as opposed to long threads like this, but I know your heart's in the right place). I shall endeavor to do so as well.
I have PMs and E-mails with various members of the MF staff. Things have been improved as a direct result of these things. I've been trying my best to get some feedback from this community to give to them, but it's so difficult and frustrating to do. I'm going to continue doing what I'm doing, this thread has little to do with that.
I want a deckbuilder to be a big deal someday, top 10 twitch thing someday. I don't really care whether it's Dominion, but at the current trajectory, that deckbuilder will never be Dominion. So I'm partial to the idea of online Dominion dying, that one day the deckbuilding flames may be reborn with a Big Deckbuilder, whether or not it's DXV that makes it, and he very well may, he's a great designer.
Such a death has a minor personal cost to me, as I do enjoy a little online Dominion from time to time, even in the current rough state. But it's not a big deal to me to go play my second favorite game while I wait for the Second Coming.
Perhaps AdamH will be less frustrated with the unconstructive nature of my posting in light of this knowledge. Honesty is better than the alternative, right?
I want a deckbuilder to be the same thing. I've spent countless hours making Dominion on Twitch a thing; providing resources for people to get streaming, trying to grow the audience in every single way I can imagine for my stream but also for everyone who wants to stream Dominion. I think I can safely say that I've done more on this front than anyone else in the world, by a lot. Dominion is certainly the closest thing we have that could get there: I'm not ready to give up, I'm not even close. It's true that the quality of MF's client will influence Dominion Online's success as a game that's streamed: this is one of the reasons I'm trying so hard to improve it (and have already done far more than anyone else on F.DS with the exception of DXV himself in terms of results).
You have done nothing but whine and say incredibly insensitive, hateful, and just plain incorrect things about MF. Why do you want Dominion to fail? Do you think some other deckbuilder can't succeed as long as anyone is playing Dominion on a computer? I'm trying to build something up here by being productive: you have done the exact opposite. So while I appreciate your honesty, I will still ask you to change.
What confuses me about your complaints is that this hardly seems different than the original Salvager in terms of its scope, and you didn't seem to have any problems with that fan-made extension to the original software. You're entitled to your opinion, but I don't see any difference, nor any real way in which it is more harmful.
I dont understand your argument. How does any of this get in the way of makingOnline Dominion a better experience?
Thank you for asking this, I will try to elaborate on this so it makes more sense, because I can see how it wouldn't. If I get details wrong, I'm sorry, but I've heard directly from the developers that this is the case so I can assure you that if there's a hole in my argument, it's because I screwed up talking about it.
Salvager came about (for the most part) after Goko was done making changes on its software, though there was some overlap. Most of the features of Salvager didn't involve changing the way Goko's client functioned, but rather reading certain bits of information and using the browser to present them in a way that was more pleasing. There was pretty much no risk of messing up the way Goko ran because you were running Salvager.
This is not entirely true, some of the features added later on did this, but if I remember correctly (some details are admittedly a little fuzzy, so if I'm wrong please someone correct me) that was done after it was clear Goko wasn't ever going to get better without being scrapped and turned into what we have now with MF. The important distinction is that we weren't getting in the way of Goko improving their product the right way.
The dll patch doesn't do any of these things in that same way. It modifies the binaries that are running MF's app, so it's plausible that problems could be introduced this way. This actually makes it harder for MF to track down issues because now you have to verify that it's not because of the dll patch. Effectively, your feedback isn't valuable to MF if you are using the dll patch while collecting it.
It's implementing features that MF is planning to implement anyways, which seems a little strange to me, but that particular part isn't hurting anything other than our reputation. I also realize I'm not going to win people over trying to argue that: someone made a button you can press that makes things prettier right now, OK some people want to press the button.
There are ways to accomplish what the dll patch does that don't have these issues. They require (or would be greatly aided by) MF's support, but nobody bothered to ask them for it. Maybe it's not possible, but man, did we have to just do this thing without even asking?