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President and Chancellor actions inconsistent - not exactly intuitive...

Open jeffmahnke opened this issue 4 years ago • 13 comments

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. The prompt to the President asks them to select the card to discard. Yes, this is the action that requires the fewest clicks by the user and, yes, the game provides clear instructions, but (1) is it not the most intuitive action, and (2) it is not consistent with the action of the Chancellor. It is not the most intuitive. As a new player, I assumed the requested action was to select the two cards to pass to the Chancellor and thus made a fatal error. I suspect others have made the same mistake. It is not consistent with the action of the Chancellor because the Chancellor is selecting the card to be played, whereas the President is selecting the card to be discarded. This is inconsistent play. Both should be prompted to select the cards to remain in play. That would be most intuitive. Yes, this is a minor consideration, but if you do want to make this user experience change, now would be the time. This is an awsome game and may grow to support 10X, 100X, or 1000X the number of current users. Thank you for giving this consideration. Nice job and best regards!

Describe the solution you'd like Change the President's actions and supporting prompts to instead select the two cards to pass to the Chancellor.

Additional context Provided above.

Awesome game! Nice job and best regards!

jeffmahnke avatar Apr 18 '20 17:04 jeffmahnke

Would it be worthwhile to add a setting to keep the existing behavior for users accustomed to it? Or perhaps instead flip the chancellor selection process to be 'click the discard as well'?

Hillshum avatar Apr 20 '20 15:04 Hillshum

I think any sort of breaking change to this mechanic will need significant community feedback prior to acceptance, as well as extremely clear user feedback for how the selection differs.

To be clear, I don't think it's a bad change to make regardless of which implementation is chosen - I just think there are many conditions as aforementioned that must be met for such a major breaking change.

Vigasaurus avatar Apr 20 '20 19:04 Vigasaurus

I believe the solution being described here is a setting to toggle your action between discard or save. (I'd assume nothing would change by default but you could edit your settings to change the effects as president/chancellor).

iounpaladin avatar Apr 20 '20 19:04 iounpaladin

as the main problem mentioned is for new players, making it a setting wouldn't really work. if a person is familiar with the game enough to toggle their settings to make it so they pick two cards to give to their chancellor, i'd expect them to already be used to "click to discard" way of playing :/ if you're saying "select two" should be the default setting, then vig's problem isn't solved anyways...

mooira avatar Apr 20 '20 19:04 mooira

That's a good point. I guess you could have a setting to use "old mechanics" but a tonne of people would still be confused.

iounpaladin avatar Apr 20 '20 19:04 iounpaladin

I think choose a discard should probably be default, but old accounts stay as is.

stevenruidigao avatar Apr 20 '20 19:04 stevenruidigao

I think having it be split by account date would be very very confusing, especially for people who make new accounts regularly (e.g. Manu).

iounpaladin avatar Apr 20 '20 19:04 iounpaladin

Maybe it would be safer to simply add a feature that alerts the user when they are discarding a blue as a liberal (except in certain situations, like RBB), and make them confirm. This would cut down the number of mistakes by a lot. Additionally, this could be expanded into neining a red veto as a liberal, etc.

Of course, this wouldn't prevent a fascist from accidentally making the wrong choice, but a fascist playing a blue isn't nearly as big of a throw as a liberal playing a red.

jeffreymeng avatar Apr 23 '20 05:04 jeffreymeng

https://github.com/cozuya/secret-hitler/issues/478 this has been discussed before but I don't know if we decided on a solution. I think consistency is a bigger issue and isn't a duplicate, but we've considered that idea afaik.

iounpaladin avatar Apr 23 '20 05:04 iounpaladin

Is there any way to have a prompt appear when it is your first game? Leave the mechanics, but if you are president or chancellor, you get a prompt each time that first game? The mechanic makes sense, just like in person, as pres I choose to DISCARD one. And as chancellor, I choose to PLAY one. Albeit, I told my wife this was the one aspect I felt was weird playing online.

AnthonyDabbs avatar Apr 26 '20 00:04 AnthonyDabbs

Just coming to cosign on feeling that consistency would be an improvement here; I played this weekend with several new players and every time some was choosing cards we had to talk through which was you were selecting because people were getting so confused. I think having both president and chancellor select cards to keep would be an improvement

kaylee42 avatar Apr 26 '20 20:04 kaylee42

I agree that consistency would be good - I personally think you should pick the ones you are selecting

stephkananth avatar May 11 '20 20:05 stephkananth

When hovering over a policy large red crosses ❌ and green ticks ✔could appear over the policies depending on weather they are kept or discarded just to make it clearer.

jac0b-w avatar Jul 17 '20 18:07 jac0b-w