Somebody made a poll in the discussion that's closer in context to the one we're talking about here:
https://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/22697738#22697738
99% say yes you can shuffle one card there...
I replied to that post too! "The problem with your question is that it implies that it's the choice of shuffling that gives you a red cube."
Also, I think that the crowd who reads a discussion like that one and gets to page 5, is totally different from the crowd who just reads the poll question and responds. (Which is totally different from the crowd that hangs around in this forum.) I mean, less than 100 replied to that post, and that is plainly not a representative sample of the 800 who replied to my poll. Those 800 are the closest we'll get to regular gamers, without going around asking people in game stores and on cons. If we did that, we would get an even more useful result, because then we wouldn't just get gamers who use BGG, who are more hardcore. I would expect it to be even more people voting "no" then.
I don't think the question implies that at all. It says you have a choice, then an effect depending on what you actually did,
not depending on the choice itself. But if you want, you could rephrase that question to be clearer about that distinction.
And sure, the people who are that far into discussion are a different crowd. If that question had been the OP, I'd expect something closer to what we saw here on f.ds, with an 80/20 split instead of 99/1.
Sure, but you really should be pushing the "rules sense", not the "literal sense". The discussion really indicates that you failed in that. There are a large number of comments there saying, "I voted no because you can't physically do it, but I would count it as shuffled for rules purposes."
What does that have to do with the difference between the thread title and the poll question? Are you saying the problem is that people read the thread title and not the question?
In any case, I found three such posts, not a "large number". I did write on the first page (8th post) that a game effect would trigger when you shuffle. I concede that some responders made that distinction in the wrong way though.
But I also found posts saying this or similar: Context is super important here. In a vacuum though, I would so "yes."
And this post says something true. Many people who replied to that poll on page 5 probably just thought about whether an effect that triggers at a certain time in the game when you normally shuffle, should trigger.
The bottom line is that I don't know a better way to ask the question.
My point is that your methodology was no good. You asked a question and many of the people didn't understand the context. The title was completely devoid of context, which confuses things, but even the poll question itslf isn't very clear about it.
I think the question needs to make it clear that this is about the abstract, technical rules concept of "shuffling" rather than the physical aspect. Does it count as "shuffled" in the game, even if you only have 0 or 1 card in your deck?
What about checking for empty piles? The rules don't require you to count then either, but you if you have to count to 1, you have to count to 0.
Great point; I have no counter.
In a technical sense, "check that the pile is empty" is accomplished by counting the pile and returning true if the count is 0.