5 Suggestions to improve the TappedOut Experience
TappedOut forum
Posted on Feb. 21, 2014, 3:06 p.m. by Triforce-Finder
During my time on tappedout, I've had the occasional Idea for features or improvements that might be handy. Didn't ever get around to post them, though. Until now.
- Visual spoiler deckview. This might be a great thing to do, just display all cards directly as readably sized image in the chosen ordering. Multiple exemplars of the same card could be shown as stack with a small overlap. It could be placed in the export dropdown as the visual counterpart of the printable view. Could also solve the rollover problem for mobile users easily.
- "Add to deck" button on card pages, opens a list of your decks and adds the card to the maybeboard of the deck of your choice. Maybe even to the other boards via dropdown. Currently, you have to select the name, copy it, go to your deck, go to the edit page, paste the text and save. That's kinda annoying if you have to repeat it all the time.
- Use the sideboard in the playtester. That can really be an issue. It's possible to test every aspect of the mainboard, but it's not possible to test if the deck still runs smoothly after making certain sideboard changes.
- Count number of cards and copys in the deck for legality check. It's funny to see EDH-legal decks with 60 cards and breaking the singleton rule.
- Restart the playtester without downloading the deck data every time, all the files are in the cache anyway. The playtester doesn't work if the data loads too slow. That can be annoying when you've surpassed the daily bandwidth limit of your plan and are surfing with reduced bandwith or are on a mobile with poor connection.
Phew... That's what I recall and deem worthy of mentioning at the moment. What do you think, yeaGO!? Is any/some/all of this possible/feasible someday? What does the rest of the tappedout community think? Would you like this on the page?
Uhh, the sideboard can be done by choosing 'edit board' on the deck page, then updating the board how you want, then save, then playtest again. I don't know how they could make it easier, besides bringing that edit board to the playtester page. But it exists.
February 21, 2014 3:42 p.m.
I really love these suggestions and am all for them.
February 21, 2014 4:08 p.m.
#2 and #4 are very nice ideas... well thought.
About the playtester... is there any chance that the randomizer could be fixed? When I first came to T/O things ran smoothly in that area, but one day, a change was done and then when the tester shuffled the cards, they'd be AWFULLY shuffled :C
It's very annoying to draw 7 lands in the first hand... or 3 of the 4 Arbor Elf
and so on.
Cheers, people!
February 21, 2014 4:50 p.m.
Triforce-Finder says... #6
@ gufymike
The edit board feature doesn't preserve the initial configuration. Changes are permanently applied to the decklist. Or did I miss something there?
February 21, 2014 5:46 p.m.
nope permanent, but there is nothing stopping you from changing it back.
February 21, 2014 5:52 p.m.
Triforce-Finder says... #8
Yes there is something stopping me. Memory. I'm using the decklist so I don't have to remember it, Having to remember the changes to restore it is nonsensical, prone to mistakes and annoying as hell.
February 21, 2014 5:58 p.m.
Well, don't you make changes like this during a tournament? What are your memory tools to change it back after you finish a round and why can't they work here?
But I'm just saying there is a tool to do this already and if it's not good enough for you, it's not. I never once did say your suggestion was invalid, just that there is something there you can use in the meantime.
February 21, 2014 6:04 p.m.
Triforce-Finder says... #10
In a tournament, I'm using one decklist that I know very well. In the building/testing phase, I'm experimenting with several similar versions of the same deck in succession, or sometimes ssimultaneously when a concept branches out. They have just been built and change rapidly if I'm busy. That's the difference between playtest decklists and final decklists. There's no way one could keep track of all that.
Anyway, thanks for trying to help me bridge the gap. Appreciated.
February 21, 2014 6:14 p.m.
Well thought thanks.
I'm back in the states so I can do this stuff.
February 21, 2014 6:34 p.m.
Triforce-Finder says... #12
Actually, that inspired me to a solution for sideboard testing: Adding a "playtest these changes" function in the edit board screen that doesn't apply the changes to the deck, but to a temporary deck copy would solve the problem.
February 21, 2014 6:39 p.m.
Triforce-Finder says... #13
Ninja'd...
That's cool, I'm looking forward to it!
February 21, 2014 6:40 p.m.
Can someone suggest a user flow for swapping sideboard options other than one in the play tester itself? I don't have any control over that.
February 21, 2014 6:41 p.m.
What if someone besides the owner wanted to make swaps..
February 21, 2014 6:44 p.m.
That's okay maybe I'll make a form for anyone to make any changes and then either save or save as a copy
February 21, 2014 6:59 p.m.
Triforce-Finder says... #18
Hm. Let's see. This is c++ inspired, i have no idea if it translates well to the ways of website design. I tried not to use pseudocode, but describe things verbally, and left out some things like card count display for simplicity.
- Button: altered playtest. click calls form1
- form1: Contents: mainboard list widget, sideboard list widget, start button.
a) clicking an item in either list: moves one of the clicked cards to the other list
b) clicking startButton checks if sideboard list widget has the same card count as the deck's sideboard. If yes, closes popup and calls script1, handing over the values of the list widgets. - script1 creates a deckname-altN deck from the two received lists, initiates playtester for temporary deck.
- playtester tab is closed: erase temporary deck.
*the temporary deck is not related to any user profile and not searchable for any user. if someone attempts to access it (maybe through the playtester link), they are redirected to the original deck.
February 21, 2014 8:03 p.m.
1 is done.
5 might be better now. try it out. it should be grabbing a cached version upon reload (should be quicker).
February 22, 2014 4:13 p.m.
clockworkcactus says... #20
I would personally like to see improvements to the trade system. Most notably, fixing the bugs first, such as binders not highlighting cards from your have and want lists and the individual card viewer showing tons of people as having a card that isn't listed in their binder.
Beyond that it functions just fine. Adding more features would be nice (especially removing the requirement that you be upgraded to vouch for others after trades) but it's perfectly usable as it is now. The only simple feature I could thing that would be helpful is if when you're in binder view the card viewer that shows on mouse over also had the TCGPlayer price data.
February 22, 2014 8:49 p.m.
Triforce-Finder says... #21
Yay! Spoiler View! Thanks!
...Hm, It shows Mutiple cards multiple times. Is there a way to ignore doubles?
I'll try 5 out as soon as I'll exceed my limit again.
February 22, 2014 9:37 p.m.
Triforce-Finder says... #22
And maybe somehow maintain the ordering, the current state is alphabetical sorting, what means the card types get mixed up.
Damn, I'm a picky bastard...
February 22, 2014 10:18 p.m.
Trade system improvements hit tonight. :). They will be pleasing.
But don't you want indication of quantity in spoilerview?
February 22, 2014 11:13 p.m.
Triforce-Finder says... #24
Sure. It's just taking up more space than necessary.
I've got no idea if it's possible, but maybe this is a solution: Display the second card with the same name image on top of the previous with a small offset. Looks like the same cards have been stacked.
I previously had the idea to cut the image of every second card with the same name so that only the right 1/6 are left can be seen, what would also look like a stack. A short recherche showed that it wouldn't be supported in html and requires a new image object made from the original, though.
But it's a very useful tool already, yeaGO!. I don't want to appear like I'm not appreciating it, because I certainly do.
February 23, 2014 5:41 a.m.
Epochalyptik says... #25
On the topic of trade improvements, I noticed something on the card pages. There's a section that lists users who have or want a certain card, but the lists don't filter out "dead" accounts. Could we add a way to remove a user from these lists if he or she hasn't been active in at least three weeks or a month?
February 23, 2014 5:59 a.m.
Triforce-Finder says... #26
Almost there, cool. Only the positioning is a bit off. Maybe something's wrong with the array index?
February 23, 2014 7:15 p.m.
Triforce-Finder says... #29
Um, lets see...
Device: Samsung Galaxy tab 2 10.1"
OS: Android 4.1.2
Browser: Firefox mobile (latest update) for android , running in desktop mode (pretends to be a normal computer and shows the page as a normal computer would). I just double-checked, and it's the same in mobile mode.
Does it work on PC? Can't access the net with my normal computer at the moment because i'm moving soon and had to cancel the cable contract in time.
February 24, 2014 9:42 a.m.
Triforce-Finder says... #30
Just checked with a different browser (dolphin hd for android) and it works fine there. Only the left screen border is a bit weird, the card border of the cards on the left are off-screen, as on the firefox screenshot.
So the stacking is a browser problem, the left border cut is caused by the device or server.
The header and that stuff is displayed normally, btw. I just scrolled a bit to get differently colored cards on the picture.
I'm using both browsers anyway, could have checked that earlier... Oh, well.
Matsi883 says... #2
YES!!! to 2,3,4. I'm not sure if yeaGO! can pull off 5, and I don't really care for 1, but I want the other ones.
February 21, 2014 3:17 p.m.