I think that partly this thread has become yet another thread about how bad everything is, and with some bad feelings, which we have enought of anyway, and certainly wasn't my intention. I thought it would be interesting to see what the
main obstacles are for people using Playdominion now, partly to see if I my own feelings about this were substantiated by others, and partly because the results could be interesting nevertheless, maybe to set priorities.
This is of course only priorities from
us, and not from players at large. I think it might be too easy to forget that people here aren't typical players, and that Makingfun now probably have their hands full with customer support for more typical customers, now that Goko is no more. (There were
lots of players there the last days.)
Looking at the poll after 80 has answered it we can see that some have problems using it at all, but that is not the case for most respondents. Most of us
can use it, and the main complaint is not anything in the gameplay as such, but in what kind of games we are getting into.
Most votes are for not getting "suitable" opponents with the matchmaking, and in the comments (and in other threads) it is seen that this is about good players who think it is beneath them to have to play with beginners, and there have been several examples of exactly how stupid moves their opponents have made. I feel more for the beginners who have had to play against condescending experts, but they are mostly not on this forum. What can be done? The rating system can get better; there can be better settings about who you want to play; ratings can be more visible so experts who haven't reached their true rating yet can see that and how it changes.
Second most votes is about my problem, which I hoped would be number one, in a nice poll which I could then show to Making Fun, "see, it's actually very easy to fix that which bugs most of those forum people". Now it's not really so, but still I'm certainly now alone.
Please make it possible for me to play only with point counter! My main complaint with Goko Salvager was that I couldn't activate automatch together with setting up my own #vpon table, because then I could be transported off from my nice table to a dreaded #vpoff table. With Playdominion it's much worse. Now I actually have to play vpoff fairly often, often probably against people who don't care about the setting, but there is no way to say that. OK, so it's not the number one on the poll, but it is still high up and
easy to do something about.
The common theme of these top complaints is that we are forced to play games we don't want to play (or resign). That is actually a general problem, and I think it's unfortunate that Playdominion just starts an automatch game instead of asking searchers if that's what they want to play. I don't think the system has to know
why I want to play some people and not some. Just
note my wishes and don't immediately make me play the same person again. This now happens on Makingfun a lot. After a game someone proposes a rematch. You answer No for whatever reason and then try to get a new game, and get paired with the very person you just said No to.
I can certainly think of other things I would prefer differently, but I think that top priority should be to not "force" us into games we don't want to play with changes as suggested above, of which one of the most important and the easiest one to implement is to extend point counter settings to on/off/don't-care with the last one being the default.