So I've been thinking about this for a while.
Between this thread and the Adventures previews, there's been a lot of activity on the forums recently, and an increase in Dominion-related posts. This is probably a good thing. But I don't think we've gotten any better at talking.
I started a thread a while ago, hoping to contribute to some good Dominion-related discussion. The intent of the thread was to highlight two-card interactions that had interesting and/or useful synergy, enough that you should probably look out for it when you're playing just about any game with those two cards. I gave a few examples, and some more people came in with good examples, and there was intelligent discussion on the examples given. This looked like a great start to a great thread.
Some people posted two cards that didn't quite have that great synergy, though it may look like it. Others chimed to constructively correct them. This is also awesome.
Some people gave interactions like [specific card]/[type or class of cards]. This wasn't exactly the spirit of the thread, since that kind of discussion probably belongs with the discussion on [specific card], but at least it was constructive and had some value.
But then the Chancellor jokes, and the Scout jokes, and the censored-redacted jokes, and the combos that are anti-synergies posted as jokes; even discussion on edge cases which starts out constructive quickly becomes pedantic and cumbersome. The thread got derailed so quickly, and so incredibly much that the two or three actual card combos posted afterward were buried in a sea of off-topic rambling. After a thread gets off-topic, it's so hard to get it back on that it usually requires direct intervention from theory or else the thread just goes off on its own little tangent in its own direction until it gets bored, falls asleep where it is, and in the best case is never seen again.
Best case? Never seen again? Yeah exactly, because if someone reads that thread and doesn't know much about Dominion, the best metric they have of telling the good ones from the bad ones are the +1 counts, and those aren't helpful. A thread like that, which started as a way for someone to quickly read through some card pairs and have their brain tickled, is now potentially destructive and misleading for a new player to read.
Sure, some people have some good laughs and press the +1 button, this only encourages people to keep making the same jokes so they can get more +1s, so these jokes keep coming up, and keep coming up, and keep coming up. Look, I don't mind the jokes -- go ahead and make them, but what I didn't realize until recently is that this is making it nearly impossible to actually talk about Dominion.
That's a real cost, and I don't think I'm alone in saying this:
reading the same joke for the thousandth time is not worth the cost of having a conversation about Dominion.The Adventures preview threads have even gotten derailed significantly, and even though I know there are relevant posts in there, I've stopped reading them because I don't want to look back 3 pages to before the giant argument on commas that I skipped over to get some context for what I'm reading. It's so frustrating because I want to read what people have to say about the cards, but the culture here is such that I can't do that.
So this post has been pretty much whining so far, but don't fear! I have an idea for something we might be able to do about it, and I think identifying the problem is important because I can see similar things that have happened in my IRL gaming group -- I was talking about this with one of my friends from there and she had an idea from somewhere on Reddit where this was also an issue.
What if we had some kind of
tag for certain threads to mark that they are for serious discussion? You could post
[serious] in the title of the thread as a signal for people to keep the discussion on topic. We can still have our talk about Dominion without a bunch of people coming in and yelling their same tired jokes so loud that we can't hear each other anymore. Please, go make those jokes in your own thread that I can tune it out without it ruining my discussion.
I'm using some harsh words here, it's because I'm really disappointed about all of this. I used to brag to people about the forums here, how the community was really good at exploring the strategic depths of Dominion and avoided the common problems most online communities have with trolls and such; it was a selling point for Dominion when people tried to tell me that Big Money was unbeatable and Dominion is multiplayer solitaire. I know many of the same people have been here for a while, so I would strongly hope that we're capable of implementing something like this and keeping ourselves to it.
Unless there are any objections, this weekend I'm going to start a new thread, basically the same thread I linked above only with the serious tag. I'll weed through the old thread and find all of the bits that were good and reference them, and maybe we can have some more discussion. I feel like that thread had lots of potential.