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[werothegreat]

Tournaments were mentioned - I think an excellent prize would be a month or two of free subscription.

I spent a while trying to figure out tournaments online, how to set up a system where you could try to generate revenue primarily through tournament entry fees. The problem is prizes, and awarding free subscriptions for winning might be too close to straight up money for money, which would be a mess legally.

Ew no fuck that.  Fuck entry fees.  Anyone who wants to play should be able to.  We'll all already be paying for the game anyway.

[Infthitbox]

Tournaments were mentioned - I think an excellent prize would be a month or two of free subscription.

I spent a while trying to figure out tournaments online, how to set up a system where you could try to generate revenue primarily through tournament entry fees. The problem is prizes, and awarding free subscriptions for winning might be too close to straight up money for money, which would be a mess legally.

Ew no fuck that.  Fuck entry fees.  Anyone who wants to play should be able to.  We'll all already be paying for the game anyway.

Well, this was a totally different system, wherein the game was itself largely free. I was thinking something like Magic Online model, except without packs and new cards and all that jazz. Spoiler alert: I couldn't figure out a model that made sense.

[Seprix]

$3/month ($36 a year, probably cheaper if you buy in bulk) online doesn't sound that bad to me. Why are so many people complaining?

Some of us are unemployed. 

If I'm unemployed, I'll probably be losing a lot more than just Dominion. Best of luck to you, man.

[A Ladder]

$3/month ($36 a year, probably cheaper if you buy in bulk) online doesn't sound that bad to me. Why are so many people complaining?

Some of us are unemployed. 

Not to be a dick or anything...but go mow your neighbor's lawn for $9. You have three months right there. Scraping $3 together in 28 days sounds trivially easy to me. Even my broke-ass, no job, high schooler memories had a change jar that had more than $3 in it.

Tournaments were mentioned - I think an excellent prize would be a month or two of free subscription.

I spent a while trying to figure out tournaments online, how to set up a system where you could try to generate revenue primarily through tournament entry fees. The problem is prizes, and awarding free subscriptions for winning might be too close to straight up money for money, which would be a mess legally.

Ew no fuck that.  Fuck entry fees.  Anyone who wants to play should be able to.  We'll all already be paying for the game anyway.

Yeah fuck entry fees for tournaments. That's a great way to make sure casual people never even bother with tournament formats.

[Kirian]

$3/month ($36 a year, probably cheaper if you buy in bulk) online doesn't sound that bad to me. Why are so many people complaining?

Some of us are unemployed. 

Christmas present from parents?

[amoffett11]

As someone who was initially hesitant (and still am), after thinking about it a bit I'm personally going to put the brakes on questions about the pricing model or really any other concerns.  This announcement right now isn't about much more than "hey Stef and SCSN are doing online Dominion in 2017".  Great, sounds good to me.  They know what they're doing. 

January 2017 is a long way away, so they have a lot of time to get this right, so it's seeming a little premature to get into lengthy discussions about how it's all going to work.  This is only Step 1, and while I would have been ok with Step 0:  stick with MF, but if Steps are going to be made, Step 1 at least was the correct one, so I'm optimistic.  I will be looking forward to the developments as they happen.   

[Seprix]

Steps are going to be made

No, Stef is going to be paid.

At least I hope he is.

[GendoIkari]

Excited about:

-People who are passionate about Dominion making the new client.
-Already lots of thought being put into features and general things around what people want.
-New pricing model that actually makes a lot of sense for an online game, and is really cheap.

Nervous about:

-As Wero pointed out, the size of the "company" that's making this. Now I consider this both a positive and a negative; I have enough experience with software development to know that a smaller team is often capable of getting things done better, and even sometimes faster. However, it does still bring concern about turnaround time for things like bug fixes, new features, and responses to inquiries.

Congrats and good luck!

[Deadlock39]

Maybe a "pay for X number of games" for those who don't play often?  Think prepaid or pay-as-you-go phones.

What constitutes a game, though? If your opponent immediately quits because they didn't like their opening split, is that a game?

This is certainly a problem with a pay-per-game option, but I hardly think it is unsolvable. Something as simple as "if your opponent resigns in less than X turns or Y seconds, the game doesn't count" would probably keep people who chose that option happy.

Yeah, that's true. I still prefer that format as "you get X free games per day/week/month", rather than "you may pay X$ for Y games".
But maybe other people would like to buy their games that way, idk.

I would think this is the type of thing that would be offered as an alternative to a subscription.  Maybe if you don't play very often, it is more cost effective to buy 50 games for $10 than pay monthly.  It's really just a possible answer to the player who says, "I just don't play often enough to justify a subscription".

[timchen]

The easy solution to the subscription model would be that people can register a free account and say get 1 game free a day up to 30 games. Should be plenty for casuals.

If being stricter one can even limit their right to join games, not creating games. 

[Psyduck]

Sounds interesting.

I have some questions, though:

It's actually happening! Philip (SCSN) and I are building the new version of Dominion Online that will go online on the first of January 2017.

How can you be so sure about that, more than eight months in advance? What makes you sure that you'll have a working client by January that includes the intended features?

* We will never be late on releasing new expansions.

What does that mean? Will there be no new expansions? Will your platform be used for playtesting of new expansions?


I wish you the best of luck, yet it feels a bit awkward to make these kind of promises now.

[eHalcyon]

allow free players to play with subscribed players with the subscribed player's sets

I'm not sure how well that system worked for Goko/MF, or if it could feasibly transfer over to the new plan.  There is a difference in that, with previous Dominion Online implementations, there were plenty of players with only some of the expansions.  With the new plan, it seems likely that pretty much everyone playing will be paying for all sets anyway (will there really be people who pay $2 for half of the sets but aren't willing to put up the extra $1 for the other half?).

[LastFootnote]

I liked it when players could buy expansions to use online, at their own pace. I'm not a fan of throwing folks into the deep end of full-random (or even half-random). I worry that will turn players off.

Not that I'm optimistic about new players joining without some free trial period, or the ability to play with other people's subscription, or something.

[Seprix]

Anyways, when that testing thing comes around, I volunteer as tribune.

[Deadlock39]

I liked it when players could buy expansions to use online, at their own pace. I'm not a fan of throwing folks into the deep end of full-random (or even half-random). I worry that will turn players off.

Not that I'm optimistic about new players joining without some free trial period, or the ability to play with other people's subscription, or something.

I agree here. It is hard to say if Stef not mentioning a free tier for online means it doesn't exist, or that it is assumed.

I wonder if $2 for half the expansions actually means that it will be something like ~$0.50 per/month/expansion, or get them all for $3/month.  Maybe they haven't even really hashed out the specifics.

[Donald X.]

Back on Goko, you could buy all expansions for all eternity for about the same price.

That eternity was always an illusion; Goko could not actually offer service past when their contract ran out. It was always a subscription; now it's up-front about it.

There's also the issue of dissuading possible new users to play Dominion online.

Obv. we won't know how the subscription will work out until we've tried it. Good luck, subscription model!

Edit: Oh, and if I want to play with Empires online, I will need to pay $3/month from the start, I presume...

We will let people upgrade from whatever they bought to everything by paying the difference.

[Donald X.]

The only downside I can think of is that now even more people will say that the league is rigged.  Good luck to both of you!

You are just being hilarious, but obv. if there's an official league then staff will not be allowed to participate.

[Roadrunner7671]

$3/month ($36 a year, probably cheaper if you buy in bulk) online doesn't sound that bad to me. Why are so many people complaining?

Some of us are unemployed. 

Not to be a dick or anything...but go mow your neighbor's lawn for $9. You have three months right there. Scraping $3 together in 28 days sounds trivially easy to me. Even my broke-ass, no job, high schooler memories had a change jar that had more than $3 in it.

Tournaments were mentioned - I think an excellent prize would be a month or two of free subscription.

I spent a while trying to figure out tournaments online, how to set up a system where you could try to generate revenue primarily through tournament entry fees. The problem is prizes, and awarding free subscriptions for winning might be too close to straight up money for money, which would be a mess legally.

Ew no fuck that.  Fuck entry fees.  Anyone who wants to play should be able to.  We'll all already be paying for the game anyway.

Yeah fuck entry fees for tournaments. That's a great way to make sure casual people never even bother with tournament formats.

Photo of me (not really):

[Donald X.]

For now, consider me... wary.  When this was first announced, I guess I was expecting an actual company with infrastructure and a team of programmers, rather than... two guys.

When Stef asked for the job, I said no, we wanted a real company. He decided his best shot was writing a program and showing what he could accomplish in two months. That sounded good to us so we waited to see what they managed.

As you can see we were sufficiently impressed.

-Will the Online implementation also include all the features you're advertising on the Offline (campaigns, etc)?

You say "etc." but it looks like it says "random boards, selfmade boards or campaigns against AI." Of course you should be able to play random boards and selfmade boards online. Campaigns, I don't know, maybe. We're not trying to sell the offline product on the strength of campaigns; really it's just there because some people may prefer it.

-Will you have any support for trial users?  In both previous implementations, I could get online friends to try Dominion without them having to pay anything.  Once they saw how good a game it was, they were often encouraged to buy expansions on their own.  However, I think a monthly subscription fee, even $2-3, would be sufficient deterrent for a lot of them to not bother.  If you look at other successful digital card games (Hearthstone, Duelyst), they all have some form of free to play option.

For sure we understand that there has to be a way to try the system for free. For offline play there will be levels you can try, like a campaign. I'm not sure what we do for online play but obv. we have to have some way to try it for free.

-Will you have some sort of pass-and-play feature for Offline (or Online, even)?

If there's demand for it then I hope so. I have no picture of what the demand is there.

[Donald X.]

But what happens if after a year or two, it's decided that this implementation isn't right either, and it gets switched *again* to another developer.  And the new guys say "hey, here's our new pricing model, y'all got to pay for all the expansions *again*.  And the cycle continues.

From my perspective we are in a much better position in that hypothetical situation than we are now.

- People who subscribe won't be able to buy a subscription for a time when they won't have the contract. So if we decide we hate the new guys, we won't owe anyone any subscriptions; everyone got just what they paid for.
- People who buy the offline version will still have it and be able to play it, for as long as their hardware and OS support it. It's just some program they bought; it doesn't require further interaction with the company.

[Haddock]

-Will you have some sort of pass-and-play feature for Offline (or Online, even)?

If there's demand for it then I hope so. I have no picture of what the demand is there.

I just don't see pass-and-play as being remotely feasible as a dominion option.  Reaction cards are going to be logistically almost unmanageable.

[Donald X.]

I feel extremely mislead in being told that my purchases would transfer over when in fact they basically won't. I understand the need to generate income but this feels like I'm being ripped off. I bought the expansions with the intention of being able to play with my more casual (maybe a few games a year) kind of people and I won't be able to do that anymore. And I have to choose between the "offline" version whatever that means and the online version.

I was also misled! I can't say "to the best of my knowledge" on every post but that is how it went.

Jay and I were prepared to give up the money we made from online Dominion, even convert the profit to an equivalent loss, to keep people customers happy who already bought in. It wasn't much money; no great loss. But, unknown to us somehow, our income from online Dominion was a tiny fraction of the revenue actually taken in. We don't have the money people spent. I can't give you these numbers but that is what happened. We were confident we would just give everyone the new system and then found out where we really stood.

If there is demand for a method of subscribing that accounts for only playing a few times a year, then uh I hope we look into it? I don't want to burn you with promises I can't keep; I just make the expansions. If there are people who only play occasionally then I would be happy to support that, where supporting that means, someone else is actually doing all of that work because I have a different job.

What exactly the offline version "means" will be clearer before people have to make that call. To the best of my knowledge!

[Donald X.]

Also, would both players need to own all the expansions online, or only the person that creates the game?

I suspect "both," as it makes the game cheaper for the actual customers.

[Witherweaver]

Is it (financially) unreasonable to have previous purchases from Goko/MF carryover to both the offline version and a year of subscription, instead of requiring the choice?

[Donald X.]

Question 1: Will there be a "base game only" free online version like the current MF model? I probably wouldn't have even tried Dominion Online if that wasn't free.

I don't know yet what the free way to try the online version will look like.

Question 2: Will those with half expansions still get to experience all the expansions if paired up with someone who bought the whole package? If so, that is great!

I am guessing no.

"Half the expansions" is just a guess also. We could sell subscriptions by individual expansion; probably so few people want that that it makes more sense to just have a few tiers. No-one has picked out tiers.