A little feedback

[BryanM]

I think you have a splendid work in progress here. Here is some feedback I had for it:

Interface

The in-game chat pane needs to be aligned horizontally, not vertically. We read left to right, not up and down.

I'm just
saying
this isn't
how to live.

I believe below the cards in your hand is the proper place for it (since that's the area you have most of your clicking anyway). There isn't much benefit in being able to see many sentences back - those are old cat food words in the dark forgotten past.

This ties into the fact the default UI is built toward widescreen monitors - the color and stats columns in the deck editor should be less wide.

When the game asks you "do you want to mulligan", it would be nice if this wasn't a modal thing. On normal ratio monitors, the chat pane covers up the last card in your hand. And the game won't show you the zoomed-in version of the card. So you're never quite sure if you DO want to mulligan or not.

The window ought to be able to overlap the taskbar. It's a lot of pixels being neglected down there.

The step indicator during the game could be crammed to the side with smaller buttons or by using icons. If you could make it possible to set stops from there like MODO allows you to, that would be nice. For some reason, I also prefer a vertical alignment for this thing..

An auto-yield option, or being able to avoid all the combat steps with adjustable stops for them as well, would really cut down on the clicking and improve the overall quality of the product.

The deck editor needs a readout of how many cards of each color you've added. It'd speed up my ability to decide on my lands for the limited modes.

Added permanents, of the same type, laid ought to be set to the right of ones already set down, instead of into a random spot, shoving the existing cards over. It's some weird added confusion.

When choosing how your attacker will deal his damage to multiple blockers, there seems to be no indication of who the blockers are blocking?

I might be dumb, but I don't see how to untap lands if you make a mistake. I know you can try to cast a high mana spell and then cancel it, if you have an uncastable spell, but don't see any way to get that mana back otherwise...

You have some dark text on a dark bit of background on a lot of screens.

The magiccards.info images are a bit dark - if it's possible to add a gamma adjustment for the card displays, that would just be a nice quality of life deal, instead of having to batch file everything in photoshop.

I know they're not pretty, but a scroll bar for the lists in the deck editor would take into consideration those guys who don't have a scroll wheel (they exist, surely) or for really unsavvy users.

For the longest time I was obsessed with seeing if I could change my player avatar/face thingy. It seems that option is nyi...


Server

I had to set the server to use the loop back IP; "localhost" wouldn't even let the thing start. Is 127.0.0.1 not a universal thing?

Would it be possible to turn off the auto-logging feature? One day the thing just choked on me, stuttering over thinking about the same card like Rainman and filling up hundreds of MB's on my harddrive. If it were possible to just make that impossible altogether.. just seems safer, I guess.


Low Bandwidth Bastards

The download function right now gathers multiple images at once. This is a problem for me - if too many concurrent streams are coming in at once, some will time out and "complete" in a half finished state. Being able to specify max streams would be a plus.

The official server also does not love me. It'll just drop me while I'm glancing at the game list, because my internet isn't cool enough for the kewl kids. I remember a similar thing happening when I tried out multiplayer roguelikes over a decade ago - if I can connect to Guild Wars and stay connected, why do I get dropped while using a game much less latency dependant?


A Dab of Flexibility in the Limited Formats

It would be nice to be able to select "None" for say sealed, so you don't have to use 6 boosters every time.

Supporting other formats down the line is part of The Plan, no? Being able to specify rarity in game types would be keen: In a future far from now, it would be awesome to lord over others with my Pauper Commander deck lead by Legends Cat Dude. (You ever see that card? His hair is blowing in the opposite direction of the wheat in the background. It's trying to escape. Not even the wind wants to be in that card.)


The AI

Is.. abysmal. I wish I could craft a work of beauty for it that would make you weep, but I'm borderline homeless, and pouring the hundreds of hours to do that would be very silly and irresponsible of me.

But I feel strongly about this - to the extent that I'd rather have a decent AI opponent over new cards. I know it's not mutually exclusive, but that's just how strongly I feel about it.

What AI Level number is supposed to be the "smartest", anyway? It's not entirely clear. 1 is the default, but... 10 is higher than 1! It is a riddle wrapped in an enigma. (I was tempted to write "enema" there. I have extreme self control.)


Overall

Like I said, I think you all are doing alright.

If you could get together a competent AI and clean up the interface a bit, I think you'd have a commercial worthy product here. (You'd obviously have to wrap the server up inside the client and hide it away for the less savvy players you'd get. "Single player" mode with the server hidden, etc.)

One thing you should really talk about is changing the name. It is too mundane - I think the shortest path here is through a google result returning the Forge guy's blog that links to here. If it's intentional as some sneaky way to stay under the radar, please disregard.

[nantuko84]

The best feedback we had ever. Thanks.

[BetaSteward]

Hi Bryan,

Thanks for the great feedback. We will definitely take your suggestions into consideration. I'll address a few of them now.

We are looking into making adjustments to the UI to handle smaller screens and those with different orientations

You're right about the modal mulligan. It's not really necessary since no other actions can take place. We'll adjust that for version 0.8

Custom avatars are also in the pipeline

We have made several improvements to networking. The client was getting a lot of false drops. With the next version there should be much less dropped connections and hopefully higher stability.

Other formats are in the works including constructed, pauper, prismatic and singleton

The level 10 AI should be the "smartest". The level number indicates how long and how deep the AI will look for moves.

I am pondering a new AI that uses a minimax monte-carlo algorithm. From what I understand it should converge on the most correct play much faster. Look for it post version 0.8

Once again thanks and keep the suggestions coming. We may not be able to implement everything but we will consider it.

BetaSteward

[North]

Hi Brian,

first of all, thanks for the feedback.

If you don't like the color of the magiccards.info scans you can use the spoilers from the wizards source. They are not available for all sets though; the oldest set that has them is Shards of Alara. I am working on a module that would render the cards from crops. That will also have a good quality and will sport the oracle text.

Thank you again for the feedback.
North