Why is goko so slow? Contrary what I initially thought and what I've seen suggested several times on this board, the issue isn't animations. The unofficial iOS has animations and it isn't too difficult to play a game in 4 minutes. The problem is with how goko has written their app. Testing with wireshark and a stopwatch both confirm that taking any action requiring server side interaction on goko requires about 3 or 4 seconds before the UI will be ready for the next action.
I have not seen it be as slow as 3 seconds, but yes that's the problem.
I also play on an even-more-private beta, testing the cards before the private beta gets them. On this program, on fast, everything is extremely fast. I can play my Goons and buy 20 Coppers and it's just click click click. I could potentially click faster but whatever. And there's very fast, even faster. I use very fast when the bot buys Spies, because man I don't need to sit through that, and in multiplayer games, because then the status line message shows up saying what the other players bought/gained. I use fast otherwise and it feels faster than it has to be.
But go to the public beta and now every click has a delay. It's not animations. It's communication.
Ideally when you're playing against the bot, you could have entire turns sent in one chunk. If your turn contains an "oops I hacked the system to make Platinum free" then it would reject it then. In multiplayer you want to see visible things, but certain things could still be faster, like the already-pointed-out picking-cards-to-Chapel. And what, if you aren't doing things that can be reacted to, you can group actions.