I think we mostly agree. I was aiming for "if you manually create the board, it's automatically an unrated game" because that's very easy to remember and understand.
Part of my bias is also that I don't see unrated games as being such a penalty.
Well that may be so, it's hard for me to evaluate personally. Okay let's take the case of, you just bought Guilds, you want to play with Guilds. Everyone was like that when Guilds came out. So they all force 4 Guilds and none of the games are rated and I would think plenty of people wouldn't like that. Whereas if today I feel like playing with Develop and that's automatically unrated that doesn't seem so bad.
So, maybe "pick a card" forces you to be unrated, but "pick an expansion for this slot," I bet people would prefer to be able to play rated games of that.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree that repeatedly playing the same (perfectly valid, non-trap) board a hundred times [is/is not] OK to rate. If you don't see a problem with it, I don't think I'm going to convince you.
Well it gives you an edge, no question. Doing it by forcing 10 cards from a small set seems just so unlikely to be an issue. No-one is thinking, "I want to cheat. I know, I will play all-Cornucopia games with 3 cards banned and get great at those 10 cards." I might force it to be unrated anyway just to close a loophole, but the special-case seems weird/complex. A game is rated unless you pick a card, or want at least N cards from one small set. The non-special-case - if you force an expansion, it's unrated - puts me back to, I just bought Guilds, my games are all unrated, this sucks.
I didn't think of a button for "repeat that last set of 10," I bet some people would like that enough to want to make it not as much trouble as it would otherwise be.
Right, but again, that means that players who pick more than 1 are just waiting around, wondering why nobody is joining their game.
Let's say the option is more like you have it - on the list of possible ways to generate the card lists there's "pick 'em," and it's never what happens for two normal matched players (you have to host to make it happen), but checking it means you are okay with it.
Let me be more clear. What I'm suggesting is the abolishment of "minimum # of sets" setting and that players are matched without taking that variable into consideration at all. If you bought all the sets, well then all the games you play will have access to all the cards because the player with more cards hosts. If you bought nothing, sometimes you get matched to someone with bought cards, sometimes not.
I have to be able to play with my friends. So, I can host a game, call it "all cards," invite someone (who is not actually my friend it turns out), play a game with my cards. They have no cards, I've got everything, hooray for them. This works regardless of how matchmaking works. So... why not be friendly with the matchmaking?
Maybe if the matchmaking is unfriendly, people with expansions still use it, because it's easy and hey they have the expansions. Making Fun might like the idea, like I said, I dunno.
Is that what most people will prefer? I think it's probably a huge pain in the neck to manually modify your settings as your rating goes up/down. Having it automatically slide so that you're playing opponents about at your skill level is arguably the most of the point of having a rating, and I'm not sure why anybody would prefer the manual system.
I have never done any ratings-related stuff so I don't know how it goes, but I would imagine your rating doesn't endlessly change giant amounts? You build it up and then it's actually telling us about how good you are.
The question is, do you want to enforce seeing cards with approximately equal frequency? If not, great. You can just pick two expansions randomly and you'll see each Hinterlands card about half as often as each Alchemy card, and each Dark Ages card with even less frequency, etc.
Uh, whatever, it would be some good way. Maybe we pick Alchemy less often because it's smaller but still take 5 cards from it when we pick it. You don't need to see all cards with precisely equal frequency. This is a particular special mode for a particular experience where set themes are reinforced via having multiple cards from a set; you can get flat random from the pure random option.
EDIT: Sorry, misunderstood. You meant how I took it off of the list of options. Yeah, either the hate list should apply to Pro or it shouldn't. Period. I don't care which way it goes. Obviously it should apply to Casual games or what's the point? Having a setting of "Union of hated cards/Intersection of hated cards" is just another needless option that complicates the automatch interface and makes it harder to find games.
But, whatever modes it applies to, "intersection of hated cards" offends no-one except with regards to leaderboard accuracy; union of hated cards also may mean not getting to play with cards you like that lots of people don't. In casual, I may be willing to let my opponent veto cards that I don't veto myself; I may not.
I understand that it's a feature. I had assumed that the feature was primarily there for groups of people who knew each other in real life to jump online and play with the cards without everybody needing to buy them. If it was actually intended to (also) enable about half the random-match players to not buy into the system, well color me surprised.
Well I can't ask Ted what he intended. To me it's mimicking the situation IRL where only one player needs to buy a game. You can bring Dominion to a public game night and play against random people who don't own it. The online game can be greedier but I can let Making Fun worry about that.
