Improvement suggestions

[CraWleR]

We were having a fun game and chat with spressi. Seems like I'm not the only one who thinks some things could be improved on the UI/UX front.

Getting to the point:

1. Imagine a situation where I already have one of my Red cards marked as Red and someone else marks another card as Red - can we not highlight the card which I already knew was Red? I only really play this Real-time, but even then I don't always remember what or how my cards were marked. I imagine this is worse in Turn-based. I know I can dig through the log and try to figure it out, but that's just terrible user experience and I'd rather get less points than do it, because I don't find any joy in that.
2. So BGA marks cards as certain colors and numbers. However, can we mark them as not certain colors and numbers as well? Imagine I have 5 cards in my hand - 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. If other players mark my cards as 5, 4, 3 and 2, that should be able to definitively tell me that the last card is a 1, right? Same with colors. We can try and do this in our heads, but again - I personally prefer not to (seems like spressi agreed as well) and I would prefer the game to do it for me automatically. I know there can be people who don't like this, however there can be people who don't like storing information about the cards at all, because that's not how the real game is, unless you use something in addition to the original game. These sort of things could be put under User Preferences and user could change it to their preferences.
3. [For the developer only] Quickly looked at the information coming to and from the server. I find it funny that the only cards you don't know about are yours. The rest, including the entire deck is visible to you. I know there's no official ranking in this game and it is a co-op game and if you want to cheat, you can do it using the chat and/or Skype, Discord or whatever, but just thought it was funny and worth pointing out.
4. It would be nice if it showed how a card was marked in the history when it is discarded. I guess it wouldn't hurt to do the same when it was being played as well.

I wouldn't mind helping to implement some (or maybe all) of the changes, but I'm not in the mood to duplicate the project on studio, rename the files to the new project name, etc. just so I could test the changes.

Do you like the suggestions? Would you like any of them to be implemented? Let me know what you think.

[Ankeszu]

So BGA marks cards as certain colors and numbers. However, can we mark them as not certain colors and numbers as well? Imagine I have 5 cards in my hand - 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. If other players mark my cards as 5, 4, 3 and 2, that should be able to definitively tell me that the last card is a 1, right? Same with colors. We can try and do this in our heads, but again - I personally prefer not to (seems like spressi agreed as well) and I would prefer the game to do it for me automatically. I know there can be people who don't like this, however there can be people who don't like storing information about the cards at all, because that's not how the real game is, unless you use something in addition to the original game. These sort of things could be put under User Preferences and user could change it to their preferences.

I remember I had played once a card from my unmarked chop - because of all the negative info I had, it was a playable 5.

This point used to be covered by an extension (Hanabi Helper at Chrome) but it had stopped working recently, probably due to some BGA changes. Maybe it will work soon again, I guess someone is working on it. (That extension had some flaws also, like losing all info when trying to replay anything, and then your first suggestion looks VERY helpful.)

Personally I like that idea (suggestion 2) very much and can find suggestion 1 useful too. Not convinced the third thing is anyhow our concern.

[CraWleR]

So BGA marks cards as certain colors and numbers. However, can we mark them as not certain colors and numbers as well? Imagine I have 5 cards in my hand - 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. If other players mark my cards as 5, 4, 3 and 2, that should be able to definitively tell me that the last card is a 1, right? Same with colors. We can try and do this in our heads, but again - I personally prefer not to (seems like spressi agreed as well) and I would prefer the game to do it for me automatically. I know there can be people who don't like this, however there can be people who don't like storing information about the cards at all, because that's not how the real game is, unless you use something in addition to the original game. These sort of things could be put under User Preferences and user could change it to their preferences.

I remember I had played once a card from my unmarked chop - because of all the negative info I had, it was a playable 5.

This point used to be covered by an extension (Hanabi Helper at Chrome) but it had stopped working recently, probably due to some BGA changes. Maybe it will work soon again, I guess someone is working on it. (That extension had some flaws also, like losing all info when trying to replay anything, and then your first suggestion looks VERY helpful.)

Personally I like that idea (suggestion 2) very much and can find suggestion 1 useful too. Not convinced the third thing is anyhow our concern.

#3 is basically pointing it out to developers Not a big deal, but you could compare it to real life to something similar as - in the middle of the game you go to the bathroom. While you're gone, the people you play with have the possibility of going through the whole deck without you knowing about it. I guess that's also assuming those people have perfect memory, because in BGA they can go through the whole deck at any point They can't change it, but they can see all the upcoming cards and what order those cards will come in

[ollyfish2002]

if you know javascript, you can help to restore and update hanabihelper
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... njaemlhfmg

For point 1 : i think last marked cards are surrounded by purple colour, i have to check.
For point 2 : i agree, but we probably need to set it as an option as it simplifies the game (no need for memory, that is why i prefer IRL both logic and memory).
For point 3 : it has always be, just tell the player which card to play but that is not the aim of the game.
my2p

[CraWleR]

if you know javascript, you can help to restore and update hanabihelper
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... njaemlhfmg

For point 1 : i think last marked cards are surrounded by purple colour, i have to check.
For point 2 : i agree, but we probably need to set it as an option as it simplifies the game (no need for memory, that is why i prefer IRL both logic and memory).
For point 3 : it has always be, just tell the player which card to play but that is not the aim of the game.
my2p

It's funny that someone found it quicker to make a Chrome Extension to do what they wanted instead of trying to fix it on BGA I do know JavaScript, however I feel like that should just be added to BGA itself as an option, not as a Chrome extension which:

1. some people don't know about
2. some people don't use Chrome or prefer not to
3. it's an additional security risk that could be avoided

You seem to misunderstand point 3 as well. Anyway, if a developer is reading - just poke me, I'll explain.

Point 2 - that's what I mentioned. And to be honest, we can set it up as a two fold option. Both as a table configuration and as a user preference. Table configuration could override the user preference and you could even change it to how it would be in real life, if there are more people like you, who prefer it as a memory exercise as well.

[N_Faker]

[*] [For the developer only] Quickly looked at the information coming to and from the server. I find it funny that the only cards you don't know about are yours. The rest, including the entire deck is visible to you. I know there's no official ranking in this game and it is a co-op game and if you want to cheat, you can do it using the chat and/or Skype, Discord or whatever, but just thought it was funny and worth pointing out.[/list]

This makes me wonder how many games on BGA that can be exploited like this.

[ollyfish2002]

All games with hidden features...

[CraWleR]

All games with hidden features...

Not all. I assume when Hanabi was developed, that just wasn't a real concern.

[CraWleR]

Added

• It would be nice if it showed how a card was marked in the history when it is discarded. I guess it wouldn't hurt to do the same when it was being played as well.

[postmans]

I'm fan of your suggestions nr 1 and 2. I have been using the HanabiHelper extension last year until it stopped working last weekend. Likely due to updated translations which IMO are preferably reverted, for two reasons 1. don't change what ain't broken and 2. the extension (but I guess external tools shouldn't be the reason to revert them). If this would be core functionality in BGA it would indeed be better than some external javascript "hack".
as for 3: I've noticed this also and it has helped me to make a script to download hands of games we played to import them to another website. I would really love if we could somehow download all games + actions taken to use them for example to do some bot-building or move occurrence calculations with. In a perfect world 3 shouldn't be possible. However cheating that way is so cumbersome I don't think anybody will do it (compared to just using a chat tool).