For #3, the solution is not to add a deck tracker; but to prevent people from accessing the full log during the game. Deck tracking is supposed to be a mental exercise in Dominion.
For #3, the solution is not to add a deck tracker; but to prevent people from accessing the full log during the game. Deck tracking is supposed to be a mental exercise in Dominion.
Then that's even worse.
7) Donald X. has been talking about each new expansion being diminishing returns because you only get to see the new cards so often when there are 300 other cards in the pool, and with the release of Nocturne, I think we finally passed some kind of a threshold for me where I feel like it actually didn't really contribute very much towards making the overall game more interesting. I still have a lot of Nocturne cards that I suck at playing, and I think that's mostly just because a lot of kingdoms just have the same old cards that I can already wrap my head around and the Nocturne stuff doesn't show up all that much. This is not really even a problem per say, but some kind of a standardized format (that you could automatch for) that leaves out some of the older expansions certainly wouldn't hurt.
I think that, perhaps, a lot of these issues stem from the fact that Dominion was not designed to be played at the level that top players are playing it. Which is not to say that top players are doing anything wrong. It's just a reality.
That’s the game of Dominion as it was designed. You may prefer to play a variant where deck tracking is allowed, but that is a variant.
I hope you come back.
okay bye
Well, if I'm complaining about the game having an undesirable quality, I don't think it's a very good counterargument to say that it's supposed to have that undesirable quality.If Dominion had been a computer game that later got implemented as card game (and, to pick out LFN's point, if in addition to that the game had not been designed as family game but as game for hardcore gamers) this would be valid criticism.
no card game that I know allows you to track decks with toolsA digression, but techniques for tracking decks in Pandemic have always been tacitly allowed, and then were explicitly encouraged in Pandemic Legacy Season Two.
That’s the game of Dominion as it was designed. You may prefer to play a variant where deck tracking is allowed, but that is a variant.
Well, if I'm complaining about the game having an undesirable quality, I don't think it's a very good counterargument to say that it's supposed to have that undesirable quality. As far as I'm concerned, the memory game element isn't necessarily difficult, it just requires multitasking which makes the game needlessly more stressful. For quite a while now, my focus in regards to trying to improve at Dominion (as well as the focus of a couple of articles that I wrote) hasn't been on trying to figure out how to make better decisions, it has been on trying to figure out how to make it easier and less taxing for my brain to make pretty decent decisions. Trying to improve like that has been fun, but the practical reality of still having a headache every time I play a 6-game match in one go hasn't been quite as fun.I hope you come back.okay bye
Oh, no, I didn't say I'm quitting f.ds (or the Discord for that matter). I haven't really been playing the game for the past three months anyway, didn't stop me from posting.
That’s the game of Dominion as it was designed. You may prefer to play a variant where deck tracking is allowed, but that is a variant.
Well, if I'm complaining about the game having an undesirable quality, I don't think it's a very good counterargument to say that it's supposed to have that undesirable quality. As far as I'm concerned, the memory game element isn't necessarily difficult, it just requires multitasking which makes the game needlessly more stressful.
If you had perfect info the game would just be mindlessly clicking buttons.
That’s the game of Dominion as it was designed. You may prefer to play a variant where deck tracking is allowed, but that is a variant.
Well, if I'm complaining about the game having an undesirable quality, I don't think it's a very good counterargument to say that it's supposed to have that undesirable quality. As far as I'm concerned, the memory game element isn't necessarily difficult, it just requires multitasking which makes the game needlessly more stressful.
I mean, maybe undesirable to you. I like that you have to remember what you put in your deck. It means you have to pay attention. Part of the fun of IRL is going "wait do I have enough points to win? Fuck it I'll buy the province anyway" and you lose that online even with just the VP tracker. If you had perfect info the game would just be mindlessly clicking buttons.
If you had perfect info the game would just be mindlessly clicking buttons.
If you had perfect info the game would just be mindlessly clicking buttons.
Chess and Go (and, well, Prismata) feel sad.
7) Donald X. has been talking about each new expansion being diminishing returns because you only get to see the new cards so often when there are 300 other cards in the pool,He hasn't! That is not a thing he says or has said.
7) Donald X. has been talking about each new expansion being diminishing returns because you only get to see the new cards so often when there are 300 other cards in the pool,He hasn't! That is not a thing he says or has said.
You get diminishing returns because the new expansions add variety, and you already have tons of variety.
It's easy to play with five new cards in each game, or whatever, if that's what you want.
IRL it’s easy, you mean? Or are there features for Dominion Online that I’m unaware of?I meant IRL - so far I have merely considered playing online - but online you can checkbox two expansions at a time if you want, the new one and whatever, and rotate the non-new one. Which is what I did when testing online Nocturne. Or of course you can use an app to generate a list and then manually enter it. More options would be nice but these games can be played.
I think that, perhaps, a lot of these issues stem from the fact that Dominion was not designed to be played at the level that top players are playing it. Which is not to say that top players are doing anything wrong. It's just a reality.
It would also be nice to have these concerns on your radar during playtesting.
It would also be nice to have these concerns on your radar during playtesting.
Concerns like, you want to be able to look at your discard pile? Sorry, that ship has sailed. Although in my IRL games, we allow each other to look through our discard piles on other people's turns (and our own if it's quick). The entire point of the rule forbidding looking through the discard is exactly so that players won't waste everybody else's time by constantly doing it. I guess it would be nice to have the ability to use that house rule in Dominion Online, but I think the people clamoring for it are the ones most likely to abuse it and slow games way down.
I don't think the strategic depth is an accident, happy or otherwise. The entire game is built around interesting card interactions, and I think that's where most of the depth springs from. I guess you could hypothesize that some parts were an accident. I'll do that now, in fact. It seems to me that the relative ease of drawing and trashing in Dominion is a big part of what makes it more strategic (as opposed to just being a tactical sort of game). You can actually build a reliable deck pretty often. From my limited experience, most other copycat deckbuilders make drawing and trashing much more expensive, and those games tend to be much more luck-driven affairs. So you could call it an "accident" that Dominion is this way. But based on the secret histories, it seems like it was a conscious decision based on how these things played out in real games; what was fun.
Analagously, hand-tracking using a notepad and pen is allowed in MTG. Of course, that is a "serious" game. If Dominion simply isn't a "serious" game and should do work not to ever be one, then it makes sense that a veteran would quit it after playing it too much. Generally the games you stick with even longer than Awaclus has stuck with Dominion are "serious". Move notation is required in tournament chess, because it's the only way to track the 50 king move rule, even though chess is a "basic serious game" of sorts.no card game that I know allows you to track decks with toolsA digression, but techniques for tracking decks in Pandemic have always been tacitly allowed, and then were explicitly encouraged in Pandemic Legacy Season Two.
Perhaps depth in the sense of interesting card interactions is not an accident, but depth in the sense of holding up to scrutiny in the standard competitive 2-player format seems to be.The correct way to put down my work on Dominion's strategic depth is to note that strategic depth is in fact easy to come by. It's easy! Like, Go has it. It's like Godel's Incompleteness Theorem; any sufficiently complex game will have strategic depth. I didn't lay down on the job, thank you very much, but, it wasn't a struggle either. You have a nice amount of agency as a player; the cards interact so that power levels vary; enough is sufficiently obscured that there's stuff to figure out. Even when a card is very strong, there's enough to what you're doing that there's still a game.
The game designer and playtesters do not seem to have this format or audience in mind when designing cards and playtesting.Your face doesn't seem to have this format or audience in mind.
An aside: when playing MTG (a highly competitive game), are you allowed to have a deck tracker? When playing IRL, are you allowed to have a sheet of paper with your decklist on it? Because I don't think I've ever seen a single MTG player do something like that. Granted, I've seen Hearthstone streamers use them, but I think Hearthstone has been the butt of enough jokes about being "competitive".
Perhaps depth in the sense of interesting card interactions is not an accident, but depth in the sense of holding up to scrutiny in the standard competitive 2-player format seems to be.The correct way to put down my work on Dominion's strategic depth is to note that strategic depth is in fact easy to come by. It's easy! Like, Go has it. It's like Godel's Incompleteness Theorem; any sufficiently complex game will have strategic depth. I didn't lay down on the job, thank you very much, but, it wasn't a struggle either. You have a nice amount of agency as a player; the cards interact so that power levels vary; enough is sufficiently obscured that there's stuff to figure out. Even when a card is very strong, there's enough to what you're doing that there's still a game.
For some cards, the 2-player game is specifically an issue; somehow in those cases I don't just laugh at how those players will suck it up. Would you believe. And the feedback isn't that oops I just always blow it there. I mean like, it's *checks* season 28 of the league. Some people are having fun with 2-player Dominion (yes, or we'll be seeing a lot of these threads, oh man, 28 seasons was the breaking point). And I mean if no-one was I would be bummed out, but I can deal with any given individual being dissatisfied. Like I always say, it didn't win game of the year in Austria.
An aside: when playing MTG (a highly competitive game), are you allowed to have a deck tracker? When playing IRL, are you allowed to have a sheet of paper with your decklist on it? Because I don't think I've ever seen a single MTG player do something like that. Granted, I've seen Hearthstone streamers use them, but I think Hearthstone has been the butt of enough jokes about being "competitive".
I never felt like I needed a reference of my decklist when playing MTG. It's the same deck every time, and by the time you're good enough at playing it, you'll definitely have the entire decklist memorized because most likely it's just 4 copies of 15 different cards anyway, all of which you deliberately chose to include in your deck to serve a purpose. It's not like in Dominion where you have a different deck every turn and it usually has all sorts of stuff that you only put into your deck because you couldn't get what you wanted under the circumstances, and a lot of the time you even draw a very large percentage of your deck every turn, making it especially important to know what's in it.
Really, if you wanted to make a fair comparison with MTG in this regard, you should ask "when playing MTG, are you allowed to see the entire battlefield, or do you have to turn most of it face down and just try to remember what cards you have in play".
...and I found WanderingWinder's videos on YouTube. I think I watched all of them! Yes there are hundreds and I watched them all.
jsh, what are your matchmaking parameters set at? If you play worse players, there tends to be much lesss downtime.
I'm not trying to put down your game!I didn't say you were putting down Dominion. You were putting down my work on Dominion. And that's what I said.
The point I am trying to make is that (correct me if I'm wrong!) you don't go out of your way to tailor things to to the "hardcore" or "competitive" crowd, and your modal Dominion experience is in fact more casual 3-4 players games.You're wrong; that isn't the point you were trying to make. Hey, it's an Awaclus thread.
I am confused by what this thread is becoming.
I'm not trying to put down your game!I didn't say you were putting down Dominion. You were putting down my work on Dominion. And that's what I said.
The point I am trying to make is that (correct me if I'm wrong!) you don't go out of your way to tailor things to to the "hardcore" or "competitive" crowd, and your modal Dominion experience is in fact more casual 3-4 players games.You're wrong; that isn't the point you were trying to make. Hey, it's an Awaclus thread.
Kieran's post is the one I agree with most here. The culture of thinking it's okay to spend several minutes thinking through actions at the top level has significantly hurt my own online experience, especially since having a kid. It gets harder to justify playing by the day.
For the record, if I had my choice of timer, no joke, i'd probably set it to 1 minute total down time pet turn for each player. I agree very much with the sentiment, "if someone makes a suboptimal play, so be it."
I will say that Dominion taking too long online has become an issue for me. I don't play in League and am not all that bothered by rating, but like to play rated games so I can play against people of roughly the same skill. But sometimes games just drag on and take forever and I play less now as a result.I played on BSW when it was just base game and 5 cards from Intrigue. An opponent bought out most of the Laboratories, and many other +Card effects. My turns were only 5s. His were about 1.5 to 3 minutes. That was a sucky game for me, not much I could do about that. But then he complained when I told him I'm going to be doing dishes or chores around the house since my turns were short. If I get back just when it's my turn, then I'll move quickly. Otherwise, I'm not going to sit around on the edge of my seat just for his whims.
Dominion's original appeal to me was speed and simplicity on the surface but deep strategy underneath. But sitting staring at a screen of cards with nothing happening is dull. I think Dominion would be better online if there was a clock. Sometimes it would mean people were forced to rush and make suboptimal plays, well that's fine. Intuition is a skill too. Long turns and overthinking might be fun for some, but it is not fun to play against, and also very dull to watch.I do know a few people who will only play IRL Dom. if the games are quick. Some cases of "quick" are a bit extreme, but I was in a different room when I was shocked to hear a 3p games with the newly released Dark Ages exp. took 1.5 hours to play! The newcomers took A LONG time to read through and reread many of the cards. In that time in a different room, we played two games of Ticket To Ride! (Nordic Countries, and can't remember the other exp.). For reference, it should be the other way around :p
I'm 100% with GendoIkari; the full log shouldn't be visible. If you think it's necessary to know the full contents of your deck and discard pile at all times, you're taking this game too seriously.Although I agree with not having the full log visible at all times, "too seriously" is still something that's in the eye of the beholder.
Kieran's post is the one I agree with most here. The culture of thinking it's okay to spend several minutes thinking through actions at the top level has significantly hurt my own online experience, especially since having a kid. It gets harder to justify playing by the day.
For the record, if I had my choice of timer, no joke, i'd probably set it to 1 minute total down time pet turn for each player. I agree very much with the sentiment, "if someone makes a suboptimal play, so be it."
The point I am trying to make is that (correct me if I'm wrong!) you don't go out of your way to tailor things to to the "hardcore" or "competitive" crowd, and your modal Dominion experience is in fact more casual 3-4 players games.You're wrong; that isn't the point you were trying to make. Hey, it's an Awaclus thread.
What point do you think I am trying to make?
I'm not putting down your work on Dominion!
Perhaps depth in the sense of interesting card interactions is not an accident, but depth in the sense of holding up to scrutiny in the standard competitive 2-player format seems to be.It turns out that when you say that something that someone accomplished seems to be an accident, that's putting down their work.
I still have a lot of Nocturne cards that I suck at playing, and I think that's mostly just because a lot of kingdoms just have the same old cards that I can already wrap my head around and the Nocturne stuff doesn't show up all that much. This is not really even a problem per say, but some kind of a standardized format (that you could automatch for) that leaves out some of the older expansions certainly wouldn't hurt.
IRL it’s easy, you mean? Or are there features for Dominion Online that I’m unaware of?I meant IRL - so far I have merely considered playing online - but online you can checkbox two expansions at a time if you want, the new one and whatever, and rotate the non-new one. Which is what I did when testing online Nocturne. Or of course you can use an app to generate a list and then manually enter it. More options would be nice but these games can be played.
I'm not putting down your work on Dominion!Perhaps depth in the sense of interesting card interactions is not an accident, but depth in the sense of holding up to scrutiny in the standard competitive 2-player format seems to be.It turns out that when you say that something that someone accomplished seems to be an accident, that's putting down their work.
Let me try to rephrase things. It seems agreed that you do not attempt to hyper-optimize the game for "competitive" play (2-player, random kingdom, etc.), or for the tastes of a certain brand of "competitive" player (as opposed to say, the way Blizzard and Wizards try to optimize Starcraft 2 and Magic, respectively, with an absurd amount of 2-player testing under competition rules.)I don't know about Blizzard, but Wizards both puts tons of effort into making the game good for non-Spike players, and also endlessly reminds people that they can't figure out the formats the way that the serious players will the day a new set comes out. You are underrating the work they put into not-Spike, and overrating their ability (and thus attempt) to hyper-optimize. In fact right now, Standard (the "play with the most recent 2 years of cards" format) has 7 banned cards - mistakes only caught once they saw what happened in tournaments with real players.
But nonetheless, your goal is not solely to optimize the game for competitive play. So someone looking for a such a game is never going to be 100% satisfied. There will always things about the game and the client that could be tweaked to optimize things for "Spike," but were not in order to serve another element of your design philosophy. And this explains the OP of the thread (echoing LastFootnote).No.
Do you think this is a reasonable take?
Any given individual may not be satisfied, for whatever personal reasons. If you have perfect information some ultra-competitive people will hate that; if you don't some ultra-competitive people will hate that. Also non-ultra-competitive people will hate both things. You can't please everyone on every point.
It's nuts to think that all Spikes want the same things, and it's nuts to think that you have go all out for Spike or Spike won't be happy.
QuoteIt's nuts to think that all Spikes want the same things, and it's nuts to think that you have go all out for Spike or Spike won't be happy.
I don't agree with this. The players I'm talking about -- let's call them "Sirlins," since you think "Spikes" is too broad -- do want mostly the same things and share a certain broad game design philosophy. For instance, when I read Awaclus posts I understand immediately the place he is coming from (though I also enjoy my casual multiplayer games, thank you very much). I've met several people in real life with basically the same gaming philosophy.
(As an aside, I would be very interested in a description of the psychology of "Spikes" who are not "Sirlins." Perhaps I would better understand the distinction you're drawing.)
It is my impression that such people are generally very detail-oriented and find any deviation from certain Platonic competitive ideals off-putting, and have played enough games that they're quick to find and call out such deviations. (The lack of a turn timer in Dominion Online is possibly one example; it's often thought that competitive chess is a better game in virtue having a time limit, and the ability to select different time limits from "blitz" to G90 or beyond. I don't want to necessarily defend this idea, but I do want to point out that a "competitive" person of the kind I'm thinking of will find the idea of unlimited turn time a little weird.)
The situation is somewhat different there in that a "Timmy" or "Johnny" card can exist parallel to the competitive scene in a way a "swingy" or otherwise competitively undesirable card can't exist outside of all expansions, full random, Fox only, etc., but the solution here is probably to come up with a better competitive Dominion format that excludes such cards. Then everyone's happy.When people bring up banning whatever cards, Mic Qsenoch speaks up to say, you guys want to ban all the fun cards. It's like all competitive players aren't identical in what they like!
Okay. I continue to be confident in my position but do not need to convince you.QuoteIt's nuts to think that all Spikes want the same things, and it's nuts to think that you have go all out for Spike or Spike won't be happy.I don't agree with this.
The situation is somewhat different there in that a "Timmy" or "Johnny" card can exist parallel to the competitive scene in a way a "swingy" or otherwise competitively undesirable card can't exist outside of all expansions, full random, Fox only, etc., but the solution here is probably to come up with a better competitive Dominion format that excludes such cards. Then everyone's happy.When people bring up banning whatever cards, Mic Qsenoch speaks up to say, you guys want to ban all the fun cards. It's like all competitive players aren't identical in what they like!
Normally, I would expect either games or tournament formats to address first-player advantage.
The question of whether you whine about the guy who digs through his discard pile or inspects his deck then re-randomizes it to make perfect decisions,
For the online implementation, being able to look through your deck and shuffle it back to how it was and reading through the full log carefully are the same.
Variance is not necessarily anticompetitive. Poker gets taken very seriously and yet there is lots of variance.
Like, for all the issues Awaclus brought up, he has nevertheless played over 1000 games of Dominion Online according to the Dominion Scavenger leaderboard, though I don't know how many games of Prismata he has played.
Indeed, and this is one of those canonical things that the players I am attempting (poorly) to describe look for. And DVX is on record saying that first player advantage doesn't exist in Dominion (albeit in a forum post from 2008: http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Turn_advantage).It would be great if you could confine the garbage you say to stuff that doesn't involve me!
4) Shuffle iT's implementation is sometimes very slow, which is probably at least partially because it's a browser client, not a standalone.
[...]
Honestly if Stef gets his ShiT together and does something about points 2, 3, and 4 [...]
Every once in a while I still get annoyed that Dominion got a worse online client than before for double the prize. But what can you do.
RNG
RNG
Random number generator?
Now that is quite remarkable. You know, all that stuff about shuffle luck, opening splits, and the chances of a particular three-card combo coming up in a full-random game... and you're saying that there's this railway station that is somehow determining all of that, for every game of Dominion ever?RNG
Random number generator?
No, the Raniganj railway station.
Well it makes sense you know. When I'm at a railway station, I always feel that the actual departure times of the trains are highly random.Now that is quite remarkable. You know, all that stuff about shuffle luck, opening splits, and the chances of a particular three-card combo coming up in a full-random game... and you're saying that there's this railway station that is somehow determining all of that, for every game of Dominion ever?RNG
Random number generator?
No, the Raniganj railway station.
Who was it who said 'you make your own shuffle luck'? Did he build that railway station or something?
... and you're saying that there's this railway station that is somehow determining all of that...
Indeed, and this is one of those canonical things that the players I am attempting (poorly) to describe look for. And DVX is on record saying that first player advantage doesn't exist in Dominion (albeit in a forum post from 2008: http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Turn_advantage).It would be great if you could confine the garbage you say to stuff that doesn't involve me!
What you are linking to is in fact me saying, in 2008, that the advantage of going first is the possibility of getting an extra turn. That isn't me saying that there's no advantage. It's not the tiniest bit that.
If it's important to you to keep saying garbage about me, I will ask theory to have you banned. No joke, find something else to be wrong about, or find some other place on the internet to make up stuff about me.
The "pure competitive" aspects of the game are seen through a lens heavily emphasizing 2p, and it's hard to rationalize things like the existence of Black Market and the advantage first player has, whereas they make more sense with more players because increased player count creates a more casual environment.
This is from sample of 2.5 M iso games.
The measure is how hard a time trueskill had at predicting the winner, measured in conditional entropy given a card was in the supply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_entropy
Goons 0.689 ± 0.002
Colony 0.694 ± 0.001
Platinum 0.694 ± 0.001
Bishop 0.695 ± 0.002
Ambassador 0.695 ± 0.002
Grand Market 0.696 ± 0.002
Black Market 0.696 ± 0.002
...
Cache 0.714 ± 0.003
Jack of All Trades 0.714 ± 0.003
Embassy 0.714 ± 0.003
The "pure competitive" aspects of the game are seen through a lens heavily emphasizing 2p, and it's hard to rationalize things like the existence of Black Market and the advantage first player has, whereas they make more sense with more players because increased player count creates a more casual environment.
Black Market favors the more skilled player far more than most cards!This is from sample of 2.5 M iso games.
The measure is how hard a time trueskill had at predicting the winner, measured in conditional entropy given a card was in the supply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_entropy
Goons 0.689 ± 0.002
Colony 0.694 ± 0.001
Platinum 0.694 ± 0.001
Bishop 0.695 ± 0.002
Ambassador 0.695 ± 0.002
Grand Market 0.696 ± 0.002
Black Market 0.696 ± 0.002
...
Cache 0.714 ± 0.003
Jack of All Trades 0.714 ± 0.003
Embassy 0.714 ± 0.003
Every once in a while I still get annoyed that Dominion got a worse online client than before for double the prize. But what can you do.
I don't agree with this. The players I'm talking about -- let's call them "Sirlins," since you think "Spikes" is too broad -- do want mostly the same things and share a certain broad game design philosophy. For instance, when I read Awaclus posts I understand immediately the place he is coming from (though I also enjoy my casual multiplayer games, thank you very much). I've met several people in real life with basically the same gaming philosophy.
(As an aside, I would be very interested in a description of the psychology of "Spikes" who are not "Sirlins." Perhaps I would better understand the distinction you're drawing.)
It is my impression that such people are generally very detail-oriented and find any deviation from certain Platonic competitive ideals off-putting, and have played enough games that they're quick to find and call out such deviations. (The lack of a turn timer in Dominion Online is possibly one example; it's often thought that competitive chess is a better game in virtue having a time limit, and the ability to select different time limits from "blitz" to G90 or beyond. I don't want to necessarily defend this idea, but I do want to point out that a "competitive" person of the kind I'm thinking of will find the idea of unlimited turn time a little weird.)
tenant
if only less people would make these mistakestenant
*tenet
(sorry)
tenant
*tenet
(sorry)
If you want to play the equivalent of "no items, Fox only, Final Destination" in Dominion—and I'm not saying you do, but if you did—I think the closest analogue you could get is to find the set of 10 Kingdom cards that most rewards skill, and only ever play that board. Just play the crap out of it. That way you never have to experience the endless variety that makes Dominion so much fun. It's not a perfect analogy, of course, but you can't get a perfect analogy between a fighting game and a turn-based card game.Incidentally, when I introduced my partner to Super Smash Brothers, we had the problem where I was significantly better than him. And I thought, based on stereotypes, that we could make it more luck-based by turning up items. It turns out that items tipped the scales even more in my favor, because I actually knew what all the items did, and he didn't. This is an excellent illustration of how luck and skill are orthogonal characteristics of a game.
I agree with your conclusion but your reasoning seems rather flawed. The additional advantage didn't come from him being accustomed to the random way the items were distributed, but from knowing the mechanics of the items themselves, which isn't inherently random (except for a small subset of them, like pokeballs)If you want to play the equivalent of "no items, Fox only, Final Destination" in Dominion—and I'm not saying you do, but if you did—I think the closest analogue you could get is to find the set of 10 Kingdom cards that most rewards skill, and only ever play that board. Just play the crap out of it. That way you never have to experience the endless variety that makes Dominion so much fun. It's not a perfect analogy, of course, but you can't get a perfect analogy between a fighting game and a turn-based card game.Incidentally, when I introduced my partner to Super Smash Brothers, we had the problem where I was significantly better than him. And I thought, based on stereotypes, that we could make it more luck-based by turning up items. It turns out that items tipped the scales even more in my favor, because I actually knew what all the items did, and he didn't. This is an excellent illustration of how luck and skill are orthogonal characteristics of a game.
if only less people would make these mistakestenant
*tenet
(sorry)
I don't see how that conflicts with what I said. I meant to say that adding items increased both the amount of luck and skill, which contradicts the viewpoint that increased luck comes at the cost of skill and vice versa. I didn't claim that the skill arose specifically from the randomness of the items.I agree with your conclusion but your reasoning seems rather flawed. The additional advantage didn't come from him being accustomed to the random way the items were distributed, but from knowing the mechanics of the items themselves, which isn't inherently random (except for a small subset of them, like pokeballs)If you want to play the equivalent of "no items, Fox only, Final Destination" in Dominion—and I'm not saying you do, but if you did—I think the closest analogue you could get is to find the set of 10 Kingdom cards that most rewards skill, and only ever play that board. Just play the crap out of it. That way you never have to experience the endless variety that makes Dominion so much fun. It's not a perfect analogy, of course, but you can't get a perfect analogy between a fighting game and a turn-based card game.Incidentally, when I introduced my partner to Super Smash Brothers, we had the problem where I was significantly better than him. And I thought, based on stereotypes, that we could make it more luck-based by turning up items. It turns out that items tipped the scales even more in my favor, because I actually knew what all the items did, and he didn't. This is an excellent illustration of how luck and skill are orthogonal characteristics of a game.
In Brawl, a side effect of using the "Contra Code" to play Zero Suit Samus put her suit parts onto the floor, which could be thrown like a pitcher's fastball and dealt lots of damage. It was incredibly easy for defending player to pick up some of them to use for themselves, you just tap A when the part is thrown towards you and you catch it. There were infinite examples of players with a few dozen games against ZSS trying to deal damage with the suit parts as well as 3,000 game veterans of ZSS did, but the ZSS players always got far more mileage out of them, even though they were very nonrandom. If you chucked 3 suit parts at your partner and he doesn't steal any of them, and then your partner randomly gets a green shell on his side, he throws it at you, and catch it, that illustration wouldn't solve for me the mystery of whether luck and skill are intertwined in game design.
Smash's history of controversy over stage legality would definitely stand on the same side of the fence as DXV's assertion that "not all Spikes want the same thing". Stages with random occurrences have an uphill climb staying legal, but those that inject varying degrees of variety into gameplay get passionate groups both for and against.
My favorite experience with it was when I got to pick the stage against a large-stagelist-leaning player who is more competitive than I am. I picked a stage with a super low ceiling, because his character was particularly susceptible to ceiling-kills, then I picked the best ceiling kill character, even though I had almost no experience using that character. You could definitely say I am "unskilled" at that character, and my opponent stuck with his main. And I beat him, and asked if losing that way made him reconsider his position on the stage. He said no. At the time I thought his opinion was weak in some sort of objective way, but nowadays I have a different view on it, people have their own definitions of what feels competitive to them.
tenant
*tenet
(sorry)
I was wondering if anyone was gonna go for that.
if only less people would make these mistakes
fewer
Couldn't resist.
if only less people would make these mistakestenant
*tenet
(sorry)
fewer
Couldn't resist.
if only less people would make these mistakestenant
*tenet
(sorry)
fewer
Couldn't resist.
In retrospect, Donald's post making a grammar mistake works well as a joke about people making grammar mistakes. However, because we know he doesn't playtest his posts as jokes, it's funny only due to happy accident. If only you'd known what you were doing, Donald.
if only less people would make these mistakestenant
*tenet
(sorry)
fewer
Couldn't resist.
In retrospect, Donald's post making a grammar mistake works well as a joke about people making grammar mistakes. However, because we know he doesn't playtest his posts as jokes, it's funny only due to happy accident. If only you'd known what you were doing, Donald.
ACTUALLY, these are diction mistakes, not grammar mistakes.
I don't think it makes any sense to say that luck and skill are correlated. Of course, we're all just arguing about definitions, so let me offer mind: I consider skill the component of variance that correlates with the players and luck the component that does not. In other words, if a competition tends to have the same players winning in head-to-head matches, then it is mostly skill, while if a competition leads to more random outcomes,That's the correct way to think of it, if you think of luck and skill as two competing explanatory factors for who wins games. But this has little to do with whether a game "feels" luck-based or skill-based. I did an analysis a while back of Dominion League games among top players, and I concluded that those games were 80% determined by chance. It seems counterintuitive, but it's actually about right, because when players are of very similar skill level, obviously the differences in their skill are not the primary explanatory factor in who wins. (At least, not individual games. In a 6-game match, skill differences add up.) But does that mean that Dominion is a low-skill game, especially among the most highly skilled players? I would say not.
The difference here is this always depends on which skill gaps you're comparing. Between a moderately experienced player and a new player, random elements can add variance that will correlated with that skill gap, because the moderately experience player knows how to deal with that uncertainty. But between, say, a top player and a moderately experienced player who have both mastered that aspect, the random elements can instead decide the outcome in a way that does not correlate with their differing abilities. Hence why top players will see random elements as contributing to luck, while new players will see them as contributing to skill.
if only less people would make these mistakestenant
*tenet
(sorry)
fewer
Couldn't resist.
In retrospect, Donald's post making a grammar mistake works well as a joke about people making grammar mistakes. However, because we know he doesn't playtest his posts as jokes, it's funny only due to happy accident. If only you'd known what you were doing, Donald.
ACTUALLY, these are diction mistakes, not grammar mistakes.
if only less people would make these mistakestenant
*tenet
(sorry)
fewer
Couldn't resist.
In retrospect, Donald's post making a grammar mistake works well as a joke about people making grammar mistakes. However, because we know he doesn't playtest his posts as jokes, it's funny only due to happy accident. If only you'd known what you were doing, Donald.
ACTUALLY, these are diction mistakes, not grammar mistakes.
As far as I know, a diction error is a vocabulary error, and Google backs me up. What do you think it means?
To mix up "tenant and "tenent" seems to be in the area of "axe" and "ask" rather than "question" versus "bacon" - spelling errors seems tangent to mispronunciation, at least to me. Vote: Diction, rather than vocabulary error..
I hope Awaclus enjoys what his thread has become.
Example of a written diction error: Let me axe you a question. <Clearly intended "ask"
Example of a written diction error: Let me axe you a question. <Clearly intended "ask"
That's more likely a spelling error, not a "diction" error. That is, the most likely reason somebody would write "axe you a question" is because they pronounce the word ask as "axe" and don't realize that the word is spelled "ask", not because they used the word axe instead of the word ask.
"Over" refers to physical location, not quantity.
"Nauseous" means it makes people sick. If you're sick, you're nauseated.
"Steep learning curve" means the OPPOSITE of how people use it. A learning curve shows mastery over time, if it's steep, then mastery spikes in a very short time. What most people mean is a gradual learning curve when they say steep.
"That" never refers to humans, "who" and "whom" do.
If you're ever thinking about using a semicolon, don't. Just don't. I promise you you don't need it.
"Since" refers to the passage of time, it does not mean the same thing as "because."
A special mention to the fact that, as of 2017, it's technically correct to use "they" and "their" to refer to a single person.
I get it, "his" and "her" aren't perfect, inclusiveness, empathy, post-modernism yay!
Still, it was technically incorrect for so long that it trips me up every time I see it.
A special mention to the fact that, as of 2017, it's technically correct to use "they" and "their" to refer to a single person.It's been "correct" for hundreds of years.
A special mention to the fact that, as of 2017, it's technically correct to use "they" and "their" to refer to a single person.It's been "correct" for hundreds of years.
You just posted a big list of language prescriptivism garbage that I am utterly against. The language is what the people say; no-one gets to make up rules for it and have them be right. When people start saying "who" instead of "whom," it becomes correct, just like when they started saying "you" instead of "ye" and "thou."
Man. As usual, this belongs in RSP, no joke. Take it there.
Take it to RSP, we try to keep poison out of the forums visible to guests.A special mention to the fact that, as of 2017, it's technically correct to use "they" and "their" to refer to a single person.It's been "correct" for hundreds of years.
You just posted a big list of language prescriptivism garbage that I am utterly against. The language is what the people say; no-one gets to make up rules for it and have them be right. When people start saying "who" instead of "whom," it becomes correct, just like when they started saying "you" instead of "ye" and "thou."
Man. As usual, this belongs in RSP, no joke. Take it there.
THE WHOLE JOKE WAS THAT WE WERE TALKING ABOUT THINGS THAT DON'T MATTER!!!!!!
I am not a prescriptivist when it comes to language (at least not for free I'm not).If that was all supposed to be hilarious, I have bad news for you.
Someone made a meaningless correction to tenet vs tenant, Donald made a joke intentionally misusing "less" to showcase the triviality of it, and LastFootnote kept the joke going by talking about Diction.
I just ran with it!
A special mention to the fact that, as of 2017, it's technically correct to use "they" and "their" to refer to a single person.Wikipedia has examples in English going back to 1382 (the Wycliffe Bible) and the equivalent construct has been used for a lot longer than that in other, more ancient, languages.
I hope "Sirlins" do find Dominion off-putting. If they're put off enough, I'll never have to deal with them or their bullshit. For people who are supposed to be subscribing to the tenet "play the game that everybody else is playing (http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub)", they sure seem to whine a lot about making games more "competitive". I dunno, sounds like scrub talk to me.
If you want to play the equivalent of "no items, Fox only, Final Destination" in Dominion—and I'm not saying you do, but if you did—I think the closest analogue you could get is to find the set of 10 Kingdom cards that most rewards skill, and only ever play that board. Just play the crap out of it. That way you never have to experience the endless variety that makes Dominion so much fun. It's not a perfect analogy, of course, but you can't get a perfect analogy between a fighting game and a turn-based card game.
So yeah, for those who are looking to remove luck or whatever from Dominion, I say, go play Chess. Better yet, go play Chess 2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_2:_The_Sequel)! It's what Sirlin would do.
If you're ever thinking about using a semicolon, don't. Just don't. I promise you you don't need it.Here is an interesting podcast about how a problematic semicolon in the US-American constitution could cause a constitutional crisis:
I have literally no idea what you mean by "technically" here."Literally" is in-and-of-itself another abomination of modern English.
If you're ever thinking about using a semicolon, don't. Just don't. I promise you you don't need it.- said no programming language ever.
Python doesn't really need them.If you're ever thinking about using a semicolon, don't. Just don't. I promise you you don't need it.- said no programming language ever.
If you're ever thinking about using a semicolon, don't. Just don't. I promise you you don't need it.Here is an interesting podcast about how a problematic semicolon in the US-American constitution could cause a constitutional crisis:
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/21-divide-and-conquer
That said, semicola are cool. But they are also the most subtle of punctuation marks. You should really know what you're doing when using it. Unlike the people who wrote the US-American constitution.
That distinction, by the way, is a factoid that has been relevant to my life exactly one time.
That distinction, by the way, is a factoid that has been relevant to my life exactly one time.
You all totally missed this one, guys. A "factoid" is not a little fact, it's something that seems like a fact but isn't.
semicola*twitch*
semicola*twitch*
I have literally no idea what you mean by "technically" here."Literally" is in-and-of-itself another abomination of modern English.
Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
That distinction, by the way, is a factoid that has been relevant to my life exactly one time.
You all totally missed this one, guys. A "factoid" is not a little fact, it's something that seems like a fact but isn't.
I have literally no idea what you mean by "technically" here."Literally" is in-and-of-itself another abomination of modern English.
People's resistance to literally used as an intensifier is one of the tics of language prescriptivists that most bothers me. I get especially irritated when people try to correct it by saying "you mean figuratively." No, I don't; figuratively is not used as an intensifier. Furthermore, "literally" has been used in this way for ages (the OED's entries start in 1769) and this is now the most common use of the word.
every one of these garbage tangents ends up there anyway
at this point we really should just rename RSP to Religion Sex Politics and Grammar because I’m sure I’m not the only person off put by 20+ posts of descriptivism vs prescriptivism, and every one of these garbage tangents ends up there anyway
every one of these garbage tangents ends up there anyway
Pro Tip: Never make an insightful post in a thread like this one because your respect will just disappear* when it gets moved to RSP[G].
* Or maybe just turn invisible.
On a (now) unrelated note, I found it much easier to quit previous addictions if I cut myself out of all related communities/forums as well. I recognize that this is hard to do, especially if one has friends there.
On a (now) unrelated note, I found it much easier to quit previous addictions if I cut myself out of all related communities/forums as well. I recognize that this is hard to do, especially if one has friends there.
On a (now) unrelated note, I found it much easier to quit previous addictions if I cut myself out of all related communities/forums as well. I recognize that this is hard to do, especially if one has friends there.
I know what you mean to say here. But I paid for that membership on coughsyrupfriends.org and I'm not going to just throw 6,42€ away.
Well, I'm not trying to quit an addiction here, I'm just quitting something that I never really feel like doing, anyway.You're also making sure to tell us all.
On a (now) unrelated note, I found it much easier to quit previous addictions if I cut myself out of all related communities/forums as well. I recognize that this is hard to do, especially if one has friends there.
I know what you mean to say here. But I paid for that membership on coughsyrupfriends.org and I'm not going to just throw 6,42€ away.
There are all kinds of reasons quitting something might be difficult! The argument is still the same. If you don't want to play a game anymore, the amount you spent doesn't actually matter.
Well, I'm not trying to quit an addiction here, I'm just quitting something that I never really feel like doing, anyway.You're also making sure to tell us all.
I interpret "why I'm quitting" announcements as a valiant attempt to combat the inherent response bias in a community almost exclusively consisting of feedback from the people who have remained within it.Well, I'm not trying to quit an addiction here, I'm just quitting something that I never really feel like doing, anyway.You're also making sure to tell us all.
For #3, the solution is not to add a deck tracker; but to prevent people from accessing the full log during the game. Deck tracking is supposed to be a mental exercise in Dominion.
Then that's even worse.
The entire point of the rule forbidding looking through the discard is exactly so that players won't waste everybody else's time by constantly doing it. I guess it would be nice to have the ability to use that house rule in Dominion Online, but I think the people clamoring for it are the ones most likely to abuse it and slow games way down.
If you're ever thinking about using a semicolon, don't. Just don't. I promise you you don't need it.
Why did you revive this
1) Prismata doesn't have any of the following problems and it's just a really good game in general so I'd rather spend my time playing Prismata.
2) My opponent can take a really long time to think while I have nothing to do. Slowrolling on purpose is a rare problem, but people who just take a long time to think are pretty common and just as frustrating to play against.
3) There's no deck tracker. This means I have to choose between spending a long time digging the log for information all the time and making uninformed decisions all the time.
4) Shuffle iT's implementation is sometimes very slow, which is probably at least partially because it's a browser client, not a standalone.
5) There are many reasons why the game can be a serious uphill battle for one player for reasons nobody had any control over. The most notable reason is first player advantage, but games where that happens because of shuffle luck are also common enough that they actually happen. While alternating the starting player can make it a fair match in a tournament or the League, that doesn't make it any more enjoyable to play the games where a player can only really lose if they make an enormous mistake.
6) If I play ladder actively, I mostly have to get matched against people who are significantly worse than me. This might not be true at the moment, but it was when I stopped playing ladder three months ago, hoping that the other problems wouldn't bother me so much in the more competitive and more evenly matched League setting (but as it turns out, they still did).
7) Donald X. has been talking about each new expansion being diminishing returns because you only get to see the new cards so often when there are 300 other cards in the pool, and with the release of Nocturne, I think we finally passed some kind of a threshold for me where I feel like it actually didn't really contribute very much towards making the overall game more interesting. I still have a lot of Nocturne cards that I suck at playing, and I think that's mostly just because a lot of kingdoms just have the same old cards that I can already wrap my head around and the Nocturne stuff doesn't show up all that much. This is not really even a problem per say, but some kind of a standardized format (that you could automatch for) that leaves out some of the older expansions certainly wouldn't hurt.
1) Prismata doesn't have any of the following problems and it's just a really good game in general so I'd rather spend my time playing Prismata.
1) Prismata has long queue times nowadays, so it has gotten a bit less attractive in comparison, although it is still a really good game. On ShiT, I can easily find a match in no time.
1) Prismata doesn't have any of the following problems and it's just a really good game in general so I'd rather spend my time playing Prismata.
1) Prismata has long queue times nowadays, so it has gotten a bit less attractive in comparison, although it is still a really good game. On ShiT, I can easily find a match in no time.
It's a shame isn't it. I'm still secretly hoping for a revival, but it's a feedback loop (long queue times scare people away, leading to longer queuetimes). I'm not sure but I heard the devs gave up on promoting the game at all.