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[popsofctown]

Are they refusing to disable the adventures in the meantime like Donald requested?  That's flipping a switch.  There's no excuse for not doing that.

[Voltaire]

I have no reason to believe they know how to flip the switch.

[SCSN]

Even if they did I expect their architecture to be such that disabling one piece affects every other. For all we know the problems with malfunctioning logs and games not starting are the side-effects of an attempt to improve Lord Bottington's Rats play.

[cactus]

Q: Did something good happen
A: Nope

[Holger]

Are they refusing to disable the adventures in the meantime like Donald requested?  That's flipping a switch.  There's no excuse for not doing that.

How would disabling the adventures make Goko any better? No-one is forced to play them, and they're not that bad currently. Donald requested to fix the starting hands for the adventures as a quick fix (which would improve them quite a bit), not to disable them completely.

[sudgy]

Are they refusing to disable the adventures in the meantime like Donald requested?  That's flipping a switch.  There's no excuse for not doing that.

How would disabling the adventures make Goko any better? No-one is forced to play them, and they're not that bad currently. Donald requested to fix the starting hands for the adventures as a quick fix (which would improve them quite a bit), not to disable them completely.

He said if they didn't do that, that he would rather them get rid of them for now.

[pst]

How would disabling the adventures make Goko any better? No-one is forced to play them, and they're not that bad currently.

It wouldn't make Goko better, but it would be better for the game. For most of us it's easier to think of all who come to Goko already knowing how to play Dominion, but Donald is thinking about those who are first exposed to the game through Goko. When Goko makes Dominion look bad, that hurts the reputation (and the sales) of the game.

[Witherweaver]

So also from the "making fun" forum, posted by Tanya:

Actually Emeric is correct, the real reason is in FAQ. On the backend, all games from the lobby go to the same servers, where they are handled together. So rooms don't make any difference on the backend. The same with javascript - rooms make no difference.
Now about a big lobby: imagine 500 people in the room and 200 games are open and games keep opening, thus other games are moving down. If you want to click on one game it can move down and it would be hard to catch a game you want. Also it is hard to find your friends amount 200 open games.
However, I agree that the current room layout is not convenient either and generates a lot of complaints, but a big lobby is not a good solution either. Changing the lobby is one of the items we are going to discuss and look for the best solution for. Thanks.

Does anyone else think this is poor reasoning?  Imagine going into a convention center where everyone is playing Dominion.  If I go into a huge hall with 500 games up (including those waiting for a partner, say), then I know there are 500 games to choose from.  If they were sectioned off by ranking (highest-ranked opponents all the way on the right, lowest on the left, say), I would know where to start looking for the game I want.  If I know there are 100 small rooms in the convention center with 50 players each, it is easier to scan through each room, yes, but I'm going to be left wondering what's in the rooms I'm not in.  I guess the rooms can be labeled by ranking, pro/casual, etc., but I hate having the available space partitioned up so that I have to open a door to see what's there.   

Wouldn't it be easier handled by simply having filters to order the display of available games?  And for games with friends, allow personal rooms that you can open to find specific people.  With new games moving your displayed games around, that seems like a trivial UI detail.. have new games open up at the bottom of the list, or only refresh the displayed list every 10 seconds, or something to that effect.

I'd prefer to have one big room with smart filtering, ordering and automatch capabilities.  Or... why not just exactly copy Isotropic, since it basically worked perfectly?

[popsofctown]

How would disabling the adventures make Goko any better? No-one is forced to play them, and they're not that bad currently.

It wouldn't make Goko better, but it would be better for the game. For most of us it's easier to think of all who come to Goko already knowing how to play Dominion, but Donald is thinking about those who are first exposed to the game through Goko. When Goko makes Dominion look bad, that hurts the reputation (and the sales) of the game.

But it possibly makes Goko a quick buck in the unlikely event they stick with it and buy some zaps.  Their refusal to flip the switch sends the unsurprising message that they are willing to demolish Dominion itself for a buck.

[popsofctown]

So also from the "making fun" forum, posted by Tanya:

Actually Emeric is correct, the real reason is in FAQ. On the backend, all games from the lobby go to the same servers, where they are handled together. So rooms don't make any difference on the backend. The same with javascript - rooms make no difference.
Now about a big lobby: imagine 500 people in the room and 200 games are open and games keep opening, thus other games are moving down. If you want to click on one game it can move down and it would be hard to catch a game you want. Also it is hard to find your friends amount 200 open games.
However, I agree that the current room layout is not convenient either and generates a lot of complaints, but a big lobby is not a good solution either. Changing the lobby is one of the items we are going to discuss and look for the best solution for. Thanks.

Does anyone else think this is poor reasoning?  Imagine going into a convention center where everyone is playing Dominion.  If I go into a huge hall with 500 games up (including those waiting for a partner, say), then I know there are 500 games to choose from.  If they were sectioned off by ranking (highest-ranked opponents all the way on the right, lowest on the left, say), I would know where to start looking for the game I want.  If I know there are 100 small rooms in the convention center with 50 players each, it is easier to scan through each room, yes, but I'm going to be left wondering what's in the rooms I'm not in.  I guess the rooms can be labeled by ranking, pro/casual, etc., but I hate having the available space partitioned up so that I have to open a door to see what's there.   

Wouldn't it be easier handled by simply having filters to order the display of available games?  And for games with friends, allow personal rooms that you can open to find specific people.  With new games moving your displayed games around, that seems like a trivial UI detail.. have new games open up at the bottom of the list, or only refresh the displayed list every 10 seconds, or something to that effect.

I'd prefer to have one big room with smart filtering, ordering and automatch capabilities.  Or... why not just exactly copy Isotropic, since it basically worked perfectly?

Tanya is describing yahoo's game lobbies pretty closely.  Maybe that's what they based their stuff on.

[Witherweaver]

So also from the "making fun" forum, posted by Tanya:

Actually Emeric is correct, the real reason is in FAQ. On the backend, all games from the lobby go to the same servers, where they are handled together. So rooms don't make any difference on the backend. The same with javascript - rooms make no difference.
Now about a big lobby: imagine 500 people in the room and 200 games are open and games keep opening, thus other games are moving down. If you want to click on one game it can move down and it would be hard to catch a game you want. Also it is hard to find your friends amount 200 open games.
However, I agree that the current room layout is not convenient either and generates a lot of complaints, but a big lobby is not a good solution either. Changing the lobby is one of the items we are going to discuss and look for the best solution for. Thanks.

Does anyone else think this is poor reasoning?  Imagine going into a convention center where everyone is playing Dominion.  If I go into a huge hall with 500 games up (including those waiting for a partner, say), then I know there are 500 games to choose from.  If they were sectioned off by ranking (highest-ranked opponents all the way on the right, lowest on the left, say), I would know where to start looking for the game I want.  If I know there are 100 small rooms in the convention center with 50 players each, it is easier to scan through each room, yes, but I'm going to be left wondering what's in the rooms I'm not in.  I guess the rooms can be labeled by ranking, pro/casual, etc., but I hate having the available space partitioned up so that I have to open a door to see what's there.   

Wouldn't it be easier handled by simply having filters to order the display of available games?  And for games with friends, allow personal rooms that you can open to find specific people.  With new games moving your displayed games around, that seems like a trivial UI detail.. have new games open up at the bottom of the list, or only refresh the displayed list every 10 seconds, or something to that effect.

I'd prefer to have one big room with smart filtering, ordering and automatch capabilities.  Or... why not just exactly copy Isotropic, since it basically worked perfectly?

Tanya is describing yahoo's game lobbies pretty closely.  Maybe that's what they based their stuff on.

I don't know, maybe it's a personal thing, but I really dislike this idea of lobbies.  I hate looking through lists of games and trying to choose one.. how do you know which one to choose?  And having separate rooms with different sets of games just makes the decision process worse.  Okay so there are rankings and available sets, etc. to help you choose,  but the search process is annoying. And if there are two identical choices, how do you decide?  Okay it doesn't matter, but why should you decide?  If you can specify what features you're looking for in a game, why not have an automatch mechanism do it automatically?

When I played Isotropic, I never once tried to select a game with a particular player.  I just clicked the automatch field and, voila, a game pops up and I can actually play Dominion.  The worst thing that happens is some automatch repeatedly rejected the board that was generated, but, oh well, that would take like 10 seconds tops.

I think only one time I tried to play against real people in Goko.  It took forever to find a game and even longer to play it.  Since then I've only played bots.

[Polk5440]

What's sad is that they were working on automatch at some point when John was repsonding to querries 6 mos or go on getsatisfaction, if I remember correctly. Also, I was really under the impression the lobbies were a tech limitation of the original vision to use HTML5. Evidently I was mislead in this. I have no idea why they are sticking with it an not releasing their own automatch. Doing what Yahoo does is doing as good as what sites did 10 years ago -- not good enough.

[greatexpectations]

What's sad is that they were working on automatch at some point when John was repsonding to querries 6 mos or go on getsatisfaction, if I remember correctly. Also, I was really under the impression the lobbies were a tech limitation of the original vision to use HTML5. Evidently I was mislead in this. I have no idea why they are sticking with it an not releasing their own automatch. Doing what Yahoo does is doing as good as what sites did 10 years ago -- not good enough.

as much as i like having a go at goko, i can sort of understand the reasoning behind this. in theory, goko was supposed to eventually have a ton of titles. while maybe not perfect for dominion, the general lobby system is something that might have been the best solution consistent across 20+ different games. and of course, there is something to be said for the familiarity of the lobby system. most people have seen it before and are comfortable with it, and imo goko has always seemed to target casual gamers far more than the competitive lot you would find on this forum.

of course, whatever the reasoning had been you'd hope they'd have noticed it has not been as smooth as hoped. even if they don't flat out copy isotropic's matchmaking you'd think they could have come up with an alternate option by now.

[Stealth Tomato]

Most of the problems Tanya describes would be fixed by simply sorting open games effectively and removing "in progress" games from the lobby.

[Emeric]

CEO of Making Fun just send a message here : http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?4256-Update-on-Dominion-Online-service-migration

I simply translate by : "Making Fun have just bought goko and we discover what was horrible production environnement, please let us try to put all in order"

[jaybeez]

CEO of Making Fun just send a message here : http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?4256-Update-on-Dominion-Online-service-migration

I simply translate by : "Making Fun have just bought goko and we discover what was horrible production environnement, please let us try to put all in order"

It sounds more like Goko is outsourcing work to Making Fun:

Hello, this is John Welch, the CEO of Making Fun, the folks working with Goko to manage and improve Dominion Online.

Also:

Once he knew what happened, our lead engineer cleared disk space and changed a setting to reduce logging.

Hmmm...

[DStu]

Also:

Once he knew what happened, our lead engineer cleared disk space and changed a setting to reduce logging.

Hmmm...
[/quote]

Hes probably speaking of system or http logging, the gokologs take some 100mb Per day, that sums up to quite a lot but should be possible to handle for a server

On the other hand, logs are missing, but that could as well be explained by prevuiously full hds.

[dsc]

They don't have basic monitoring (nagios/icinga/ganglia, etc) on their servers?! I am resentful both because I was unable to play Dominion for days due to a full disk of all things, and because computers keep waking me up in the middle of the night because of problems (tho only for problems worse than a full disk -- that's what the ops team is for). Boo! This is basic engineering best-practices! Unprofessional!

[dsc]

Also: game logs gzip by about 90% (12k -> 1.5k), making this disk thing even more ridiculous. 100M of logs/day? More like 10M. Not only is almost everything on the web is zipped before transit anyway, but if a client indicates it cannot handle a gzipped transfer, you just stream it through gunzip -- both zip and unzip are O(1), so it barely even costs anything in CPU. Again, this is why nearly everything is zipped by the webserver to ship it to you. Argh. Guys! Bad goko!

[Holger]

Are they refusing to disable the adventures in the meantime like Donald requested?  That's flipping a switch.  There's no excuse for not doing that.

How would disabling the adventures make Goko any better? No-one is forced to play them, and they're not that bad currently. Donald requested to fix the starting hands for the adventures as a quick fix (which would improve them quite a bit), not to disable them completely.

He said if they didn't do that, that he would rather them get rid of them for now.

Right, I missed that part. But I think it might have been a rhetoric suggestion to emphasize his actual (first) request of fixing the starting hands.

How would disabling the adventures make Goko any better? No-one is forced to play them, and they're not that bad currently.

It wouldn't make Goko better, but it would be better for the game. For most of us it's easier to think of all who come to Goko already knowing how to play Dominion, but Donald is thinking about those who are first exposed to the game through Goko. When Goko makes Dominion look bad, that hurts the reputation (and the sales) of the game.

Yes, but I don't see the current Adventures actually hurting Dominion. First-time players* will start by playing the free Base game adventures, which already have correct starting hands since half a year ago; so they're just a series of pre-determined standard Dominion bot games, with the added incentive of "advancing along the levels" with increasingly stronger bots. Anyone who actually buys sets to play other Adventures will likely know that changing the starting hands is not "real Dominion", so I don't see them hurting Dominion's reputation. And removing the only way to gain most promo cards would be seriously annoying.
IMO, even the current non-base adventures are a good way to learn a new expansion "card by card", which would be difficult and annoying to do without them with the existing deck editor; and many of the adventures have only slightly skewed starting hands and are winnable with no or very few zaps (all of Dark Ages, Corn., Alchemy, I think also Intrigue).


*Since the physical game seems to have sold ~100x more copies than Goko, I'd actually expect the vast majority of Goko users to have known the game beforehand.

[Hks]

I feel so sorry for Donald. He's never deserved this mess

[WanderingWinder]

They don't have basic monitoring (nagios/icinga/ganglia, etc) on their servers?! I am resentful both because I was unable to play Dominion for days due to a full disk of all things, and because computers keep waking me up in the middle of the night because of problems (tho only for problems worse than a full disk -- that's what the ops team is for). Boo! This is basic engineering best-practices! Unprofessional!

Also: game logs gzip by about 90% (12k -> 1.5k), making this disk thing even more ridiculous. 100M of logs/day? More like 10M. Not only is almost everything on the web is zipped before transit anyway, but if a client indicates it cannot handle a gzipped transfer, you just stream it through gunzip -- both zip and unzip are O(1), so it barely even costs anything in CPU. Again, this is why nearly everything is zipped by the webserver to ship it to you. Argh. Guys! Bad goko!

You're only now figuring this out?

[tolenmar]

They don't have basic monitoring (nagios/icinga/ganglia, etc) on their servers?! I am resentful both because I was unable to play Dominion for days due to a full disk of all things, and because computers keep waking me up in the middle of the night because of problems (tho only for problems worse than a full disk -- that's what the ops team is for). Boo! This is basic engineering best-practices! Unprofessional!

Also: game logs gzip by about 90% (12k -> 1.5k), making this disk thing even more ridiculous. 100M of logs/day? More like 10M. Not only is almost everything on the web is zipped before transit anyway, but if a client indicates it cannot handle a gzipped transfer, you just stream it through gunzip -- both zip and unzip are O(1), so it barely even costs anything in CPU. Again, this is why nearly everything is zipped by the webserver to ship it to you. Argh. Guys! Bad goko!

You're only now figuring this out?

While it seems unlikely, sometimes that problem crops up.  It happened about a month ago to my laptop, and that was because the logging system had one switch set incorrectly. I didn't know what was going on until I researched the problem. Problem solved, lesson learned. I can give them a break for that one, but only because I've been there.

[DylanAM]

I just wanted to reply to this thread to give my perspective.

I just wanted to share my progress.  I have been playing the Adventures for about four months now, since joining Goko, in an effort to beat them all, claim all the promos, and finish each level of each "territory".  I'm a bit of a completist, I guess you could say.

In the last four months I have advanced through the adventures in:

Base Set 1, 2, 3
Intrigue 1, 2, 3
Seaside 1, 2, 3
Alchemy 1
Prosperity 1 (working on 2)

I have managed this solely by spending the coins I collect from playing and winning games on zaps.  I do not spend zaps to raise my hand above what a normal Dominion hand should be, nor do I zap my opponents below what a normal Dominion hand is supposed to be.  Although, in annoying cases where I get stuck with four Estates, which has become more and more common in Acts 2 and 3 of each territory, since I cannot zap the fourth Estate into a Copper and get rid of the disadvantage that places me in, I do zap two of my remaining six Coppers to Silvers.

I typically buy the zaps 10 at a time, for 70 coins, because the rewards for buying Zaps in higher bulk amounts are negligible (something like three extra zaps for waiting five times as long).  When I do not have 70 coins to buy 10 Zaps, I go to play Multiplayer or Play Bots until I earn 70 coins, which I promptly spend on 10 zaps and return to Adventures.  Aside from these games, I do not Venture away from Adventures. (pun intended)

In four months I have played 1,082 games of Dominion and amassed a record of 592-466-24 (.558), I have earned exactly one promo card, and am about to earn a second one.

My response to this is that I'm aggravated that it has taken this much effort to make progress this slowly, but not so aggravated that I refuse to stop in my mission.  However, while I am willing to grind this out, day by day, and eventually earn the promos, I can imagine that a vast majority of players would not be up for this task.

One last thing.  The completist that I am, I am also really peeved, after the amount of effort I've put in and plan on putting in, that I'm not going to be able to get Walled Village without paying for it, since I did not link this account to Google upon starting it.

I'm not trying to make any arguments with this post, only give some perspective to the community. 

[Kirian]

After four months of this, and over a thousand games of Dominion played, I have earned exactly one promo card, and am about to earn a second one.

The completist that I am, I am also really peeved that I'm not going to be able to get Walled Village without paying for it, since I did not link this account to Google upon starting it.

I'm not trying to make any arguments with this post, only give some perspective to the community.  While I am willing to grind this out, day by day, and eventually earn the promos, I can imagine that a vast majority of players would not be.

So... why not spend more of your time playing multiplayer, earn a ton of coins from that, then get the huge discount on zaps and run through the adventures really, really fast?

The adventures are currently so unbalanced that you might as well just overdo it.  But playing against real people, which is more fun, gets you more coins.  Actually, I'm pretty sure playing against bots gets you more coins too.