You said "And if the board is manually created, that game is never rated." Manually created to me includes saying "I want 3 cards from Seaside, 3 from Prosperity, 4 from Dark Ages." I want to allow that game to be rated. Probably you agree and we are now just being ultra-clear.
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. So by that qualifier, your example would have to be unrated because you had to host a table to make it happen, rather than choosing one of the three "random" game styles. If I understand you, what you want is more flexible. Your "manually created" games can still be rated, but only if the number of actually selected cards is at or below the opponent's threshold AND you didn't see the randomly-chosen cards before the game started. Or maybe just that second part and you just don't get matched with players who have a low enough threshold. I don't see that as ideal, especially if the threshold is 1, because then you maybe create a board with 2 or more specific cards and wait and wonder why nobody is being matched to your game.
Again, I'm pushing for simplicity here and your proposed method seems complex to me.
Part of my bias is also that I don't see unrated games as being such a penalty. "Oh, I created this custom set and why can't I play a rated game with it?" Man, cry me a river. It's not like being unrated magically sucks all the fun you would have had out of the game. People buy physical Dominion sets and manage to have plenty of fun playing those despite the fact that they aren't climbing up or down a leaderboard.
I am not so worried about trying to game the system by buying small/half-sets and then requiring them. I mean I picked those cards, not them. If you can ban 3 cards from Cornucopia and force all-Cornucopia then yes you did pick the 10 cards. At first it sounds bad but then it's like, what am I even doing there that's offensive? It's a loophole but I don't see what to be scared of.
I wouldn't have "this slot is from this half of Seaside" etc., just "Seaside." Obv. you may have only bought half but I am so not worried about people only buying half of Prosperity in order to trick people into playing Goons games or whatever. And in the end there (hypothetically) are blocked player lists.
Sure, I wasn't suggesting dividing the sets into their different Goko pieces. We are in agreement there.
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 that's what I would have thought "simplicity" meant, but I didn't see how what you were saying cut options. You have a baby to take care of, you pick unrated, it's exclusive of any other concerns and (to maximally please such a person) should be an option separate from other things. For sure I shouldn't have to to finagle it - force a card so that I get my unrated game.
Yes, there was a misunderstanding there. You should obviously be able to make any game unrated.
Anyway I was thinking you were talking about not needing the "unrated" button rather than the "number of cards" thing. The point to "max selected cards" is that I may not want to play games where the host picked the cards. To be friendly to people who want to do fun things and aren't hurting anyone, I put the default at 1 rather than 0.
Right, but again, that means that players who pick more than 1 are just waiting around, wondering why nobody is joining their game.
Again I am trying to be friendly. Maybe the game is promoted and there is an influx of non-hardcore-players and none of them have sets. They sit there not getting matched because they didn't change the default. A pro logs on, sits there unmatched because the other people don't have a high enough rating, then another pro logs on and they get matched. The defaults matter the most for people with no experience, right? People who are used to the system just change the default to what they want.
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. If two people have bought cards and one set of cards is not a subset of the other, maybe randomize who hosts weighted by who has more cards. That way even if you have, say, 6 of the expansions, you will occasionally be matched with someone who has the one you don't have, but not everything.
I think the default maximum number of players should be well 4-6 (though we technically support 6 I don't play with 6 personally, and you can then argue, how great is 5, especially if you aren't in person, chatting and stuff). Serious players will immediately change it to 2 and that's fine; I'm not stopping them. Again let's be friendly to the people who are like oh I want to play multiplayer.
I agree that 4 is a better default maximum than 6.
Maximum rating difference means you can't just say "man I want to play someone good even though I don't have that rating yet." It gets you out of "now I have to update my settings because my rating went up" but I prefer the flexibility of specifying a value rather than a difference.
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.
You have "manually created table." I'm never picking that without actually hosting; "someone out there, pick some cards, I'm here!" Instead it would need to be like, mark the ones you are okay with. Then, "Manually created table" does not specify enough; I am okay with "you picked the expansions, this time one from each expansion plus two random;" I just don't want you to have picked out the specific cards. They are different things.
Sure, sure. The idea was that you click on "Manually created table" and it brings you to the table-creation window and you make your table and then you are hosting. You say tomato, I say tomato. If that option shouldn't even be on this screen, cool.
You say "up to" two available sets. I would just make it two. It's the one special mode that says "here's something that's not pure random but which we think has special merit, try it out." That thing, for me, is 5 cards from each of two sets (then making an exception for promos because people will have them and not want to never see them). It's fun playing with 10 cards from one set and well the system allows that, you host a game and pick that. It doesn't need to be part of this.
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.
Say all you have access to is Base Set and Cornucopia. It is mathematically impossible to see your Base Set cards as often as your Cornucopia cards if you insist that your games are half Base and half Cornucopia. If you add Alchemy, then you can do it by having half your games Base/Cornucopia and half Base/Alchemy. You will never play an Alchemy/Cornucopia set, though.
Even when the number of sets you own gets larger, the math for choosing exactly two expansions and still seeing your cards with about equal frequency is nontrivial. Like seriously, take out a pencil and paper and try to generalize it. I gave up and I have a B.A. in Mathematics.
Conversely, if you allow occasional games of 10 cards from one normal-sized or large set, the math is trivially easy. See my slips-of-paper-in-a-hat method from earlier in this thread.
You didn't list the hate-list stuff. Maybe you are thinking it's automatically one way or another depending on pro/casual, dunno.
I don't care how the hate-list stuff turns out. Or rather, if the hate-list is limited to 3 cards as you initially proposed, I can live with that.
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.
The system was set up specifically to make freeloading possible, specifically to let you pick what games to join, to not buy expansions, to play with the expansions of the host. It may be that as things have played out it's less kind to freeloaders than expected - specifically, people saying things like "4000+" rather than playing with anyone. It may be that Making Fun has a different philosophy here than Goko. But as set up, the idea was that you could buy zilch, go into the lobby, and get into a game with someone who had expansions. It's a feature, not a bug.
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.