Gaming Pet Peeves: Early Shuffling

Everyone has pet peeves while gaming.  These can range from game components not being lined up right (see #4), other players not following the rules exactly, game phases being skipped, discard piles not being face up, people not paying attention, people not strategizing during other player's turns so their turns take much longer than they should, or any other number of issues.  I've noticed each of those pet peeves in enough other people to realize it's not just me, but one pet peeve of mine that I seem to always get odd looks for is that I hate people shuffling a discard pile back into the deck before the game tells us to or the draw deck is empty.

I understand that in most cases, people are trying to save time by shuffling the discard deck into the draw deck when there are only a few cards left, but I don't think people realize how that affects the probability of getting cards and how much that can affect the game.  With a full deck, each card has a completely even chance of being drawn.  When the deck is empty, each card will have been drawn once.  When you shuffle the discard pile to form a new draw deck, all cards have either been used or are in someone's hand waiting to be used.  If you shuffle that discard deck early, the cards that were in the draw deck had no chance to be used, which means they will show up less frequently.  This means that the more powerful or popular cards will show up much more frequently since they will go into this discard pile and back into the deck much more frequently.  This sounds good, but there is a reason the game came with more cards than just the popular/powerful ones.  The balance of the game is being destroyed with this early shuffle.

Let's take it to the extreme and say that every time a card gets used, instead of putting it in a discard pile, we randomly place it somewhere in the draw deck.  If we place it above any other card in that deck, we will see the used card more often than those cards below it.  If we place it at the bottom of the deck (and repeat this every time to make sure all cards can potentially appear the same number of times) then once we hit the end of the deck, we will be playing the same game we were at the beginning since all the cards will be in the same order.  The whole purpose of the discard deck is to have a separate place to store cards that have been used from those that haven't had a chance to be used yet.  So give every card an equal chance at serving its purpose.  Don't shuffle early.