Ad-hoc Live Rengo: it's not a thing

OGS Development
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As we’ve bedded in the main Rengo functionality, and made sure we can have fun without dropouts spoiling it, the attention has been turning to “how come I can’t get an ad-hoc live rengo match?”

Various ideas for making it more likely have been put forward, and mostly implemented, but it doesn’t change one fact: this is simply an unlikely thing to happen.

In contrast to Correspondence, where you can hang a challenge out there and gradually collect interest, live challenges need a fairly immediate response.

Even with “normal” go it can take a little while to get a response - and this is with thousands of interested players out there. The number of people interested in live rengo is orders of magnitude less, so the chances of a group of ad-hoc people wanting to play at the same time, even with a perfect matching and availability system, are small at best.

I think that keen rengoers need to face the fact that

if you want to play live, you need to put some effort in to organise it in advance.

Methods to do this are there - specific chat, and here in the forum.

But no amount of tweaking the challenge system is going to change the fact that Rengo is a niche or novelty interest, so you’re not going to have luck trying to make ad-hoc live games.

IMO.

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I’m conflicted. Should I like your post or not? :frowning:

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Have you considered / are people interested in having a strength calibrated bot as a player? That reduces the need to wait around for 3 other interested humans to join.

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There should be automatic notification system. So those who interested in live rengo can turn it on. Each time someone creates live rengo, everyone interested will get notification.

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Organizing a regular event like @Gia suggested.
have preformated rengos with 2 bots included and autostart at 4 (or 6?)

Handicap?

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These suggestions pretty much deny my premise. They are saying “if only we had notifications” or “if only we had handicap”, then suddenly there would be casual people waiting around to fill the live ad hoc rengo games.

I think it manifestly not the case.

You have a manual form of signing up for notifications: join the Rengo chat. And a manual way of notifying: post in the rengo chat. Persons currently in rengo chat: 3. Chances of overlapping timezones and availability: zero.

If Rengo chat were filling up with people just wishing to connect with others for live games, but it was a bit inconvenient, then you’d persuade me a notification system is worthwhile.

In fact, that’s the way to vote for one: go hang out in the Rengo chat channel for a while, and we’ll see how many people would use it :wink:

I think the people who’ll have fun playing live rengo are those who organise in advance with like-minded people.

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you can’t expect normal people to organize regular event

but, as developer, you can create artificial event that organizes people automatically.

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:open_mouth:

Why on earth not?

I agree this is the case. I’m not convinced there are enough people to organize :slight_smile:

But - this is a slightly different proposition than “how to make ad-hoc live challenges work”

Instead, this is “can we have help to make organised live challenges”. This could be a better line of thinking…

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I dunno. There were enthusiasm around rengo which brought it to exist now. Each time i decided to create a live rengo, i used main chat and rengo chat and didn’t get one to start. So one can’t say it’s just because i don’t exhaust the possibilities of communication. In my opinion handicap is motivating, and for a bunch of people it would make it easier to start a rengo if some bots could be waiting around to fill the gaps.
Now i am fine if rengo on OGS will turn to be casual correspondence games without handicap. nvm.

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Note: if you were in chat right now, you’d know that we’re waiting to start a game :wink:

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I am always in the rengo chat, but you know how the forum is integrated in OGS.

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Curiously, I am in rengo chat and I don’t see you there.

If you were there, and you didn’t join the game I announced, this would make my point: the chances of even interested people all being available and ready at the same time ad-hoc is very low.

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Rengo chat is a chat always open by default in my browser. I mean i never close it. I from time to time check the blue icon from chats room (still need to go to the chat tab, as it seems that the blue indicator at the very top is only working for group/tournaments chats.)
I spend a lot of time in the forum, play sometimes too, and there is nothing to tell me someone is in the rengo room waiting.

So here is another problem that you don’t know that something happen in the rengo room if you are somewhere else on OGS. (Forum, watching or playing, …).
Let’s talk about KGS. You have a rengo room you can keep open. The top of the tab turns blue each time someone say something there, and stay until you go check. Ok they have no forum and it doesn’t include when you play or watch a game.

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Yeah seems like the chatrooms for rengo need to be lot better organised before they can work as places to ask for spontaneous games.

There is now global channel named “Rengo” and the old group channel “RENGO (Pair Go)”
Out of these the group channel is bigger, but i dont know how many people are actively looking at the chat.
The ‘official’ channel only has handful of users - 7 including myself currently - so getting a game there would require the majority of those users.

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I found it got a good response when I posted in the chat of the live rengo challenge I created “will start at 6-8 people”.

It looks like people actually check that, I’ll use to post my game preferences as well, it seems to work.

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Rengo group room, thanks for info. At least I’ll have a warning, gonna search for it.

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(Groin found it, posting here for others. I had previously announced it in the Status thread I think)

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I found it the day of its creation i think

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link for the group too

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One problem may be that few people know of the Rengo chat. I never heard of it till just now. Undoubtedly my fault because I gave up on the multiple rengo threads, which got too long too fast and were too tedious. Nevertheless, I bet that many people don’t know about that channel.

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