A reddit thread on this: http://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/34c9wh/gamers_beware_newest_printings_of_rio_grande/
Ah, reddit, where would we be without you?
Oh right, here in a real forum discussing things with (mostly) adults.
Well...I think it is more complicated than that. I agree with you that this forum is nothing short of amazing much of the time, not really because it is "(mostly) adults" but rather because it is a fairly closely knit community that, quite exceptionally, includes not only the creator of the game itself but many of the very best Dominion players on the planet. People who have played this game, in some cases, 5,000 or 10,000 times or more. I really do now subscribe to Mic Q's motto ("Don't buy into the myth of the genius Dominion player, remember we're all morons"), but there is a lot to be learned from people who have done this like 500 times more often than you have, and I am amazed that this knowledge is so freely shared. I have to say, it's much like the chess clubs of my youth, except that you can definitely bump into people here who are the current IMs or GMs of Dominion...even if they are morons at heart.
Clearly, reddit is not like that. Reddit is almost by definition the teaming masses, yearning to post memes. At many times and in many places, a bunch of undergraduates with too much time and Mountain Dew on their hands. The results can definitely be wince-worthy. And pretty destructive; this has happened before. I am old enough to remember the glory days of Usenet, its rise and its horrific fall. I clearly remember the exact moment when Alexander Stepanov disengaged from comp.lang.c++ (I think his last words were "You win") when confronted by a wall of sheer idiocy. I sometimes wonder whether a system of up- and down-votes would have saved Usenet, but I'm guessing...probably not. Reddit is obviously only safe for throwaway accounts, and, man, I should know.
So what is reddit good for, from this perspective? Well, I can say with confidence that, by the force of sheer numbers, it is not unlikely that the next top-rated Dominion moron will come from some place like reddit than from some vacuum or from anywhere else, frankly.
How could that happen? Well, this is likely somebody one third my age who will get the base set or the Big Box for a birthday or Christmas and who will play obsessively at first, winning more than anybody else in his or her IRL group can stand and then find out that there is an online version, sign up, and...get crushed. Like a bug. And the next thing that will happen is...u/Scout_rulz will log onto reddit and whine about it on r/dominion. Somebody else will point out that Mic Q or Wandering Winder or whoever streamed a board like one of theirs two weeks ago but won gloriously. Youtube is just a click away, it's just a click away...and the next thing you know, /u/Scout_rulz will have binge-watched the collected streams of everybody, bought the Ultrapack online, reinvented Bishop-Fortress independently, gained 35 ISO levels, and, oh yeah: found f.ds. Then, six to twelve months later, Scout_rulz will be dissing the morons on reddit.
It's the circle of life. :-)
