After being a supporter for years, I am going to have to leave.

[knusbrick]

Might as well make Correspondence its own section as well, then. A notable portion of my games gets immediately cancelled, I can only assume because my opponent didn’t realize they were joining a correspondence game instead of a live game.

[sir_husky_potato]

I fully agree. Correspondence games deserve their section as they are played in a completely different mindset.

[MostlyNumbers]

@jlt

Perhaps if multiple (i.e. >1) board sizes are selected, then

• only 3 game speed options are presented (blitz, rapid, live) without explanation (i.e. without details like “10m+5s”)

Yup I think the above makes a lot of sense. Moreover I want to emphasize we should add a blitz, rapid, live label to the time settings by regardless. Already I’ve seen examples in the forums were people don’t know how to express what time settings they’re using (because “5m+5s or 5m+30s” is very clunky)

Not so sure about this one:

@sir_husky_potato

Correspondence games deserve their section as they are played in a completely different mindset

I worry we’re getting into tab bloat – I still advocate for a “computer” tab as there’s unresolved issues making (quite popular) custom bot games, while others have recommended a separate “game lobby” (for open custom games), etc.

Correspondence ‘costs’ one button on the quick match tab (and is the one time setting no one disagrees on fischer/byo-yomi), versus an entire new tab which would be 99% redundant to the existing custom or quick match tabs.

[knusbrick]

@MostlyNumbers

Correspondence ‘costs’ one button on the quick match tab (and is the one time setting no one disagrees on fischer/byo-yomi), versus an entire new tab which would be 99% redundant to the existing custom or quick match tabs.

I was thinking about custom games there - people seem to frequently accept them without realizing that they’re correspondence games, causing them to immediately cancel the games.

[Clossius1]

Side note: Dan players all (live games) go to Fox already. I know this is only 3% of the users, but as someone in that 3% I would still like to play xD.

I really like the new direction. I think there are always old dogs who will fight tooth and nail for the old ways to not be changed. Just grow for the future players. The hardcore players will always be around regardless.

[CosmicJoke]

Anyways, all this to say I understand folks would love to have their favorite option as the only option, and I too would love to have just one option, but I think we need to let things simmer a bit more.

I feel like on a smaller server like this, scrapping the whole concept of automatch and funneling everyone into custom games would be superior to having this middle ground of many disjoint automatch queues. At this point, we essentially have two different tabs doing the same thing.

The one problem with a custom game system that I can think of is that it forces the player creating a challenge to commit to a specific set of settings. Maybe he/she doesn’t really care whether its Fischer or byo-yomi, 19x19 or 13x13 etc., and committing to any one of these reduces the chance of someone taking the challenge. If limiting automatch to just one specific setting is not an option, a way to make it useful instead of a hindrance would be to go to the the complete opposite end of the spectrum and allow the player to specify the set of acceptable game settings in fine detail. If the settings acceptable to two queuing players overlap, match them. This is basically expanding the current concept of flexible time settings to the limit. Why stop at making byo-yomi or Fischer flexible? We could do that with board size, game speed and everything else, unify the disjoint queues as much as the players are willing to.

[shinuito]

@CosmicJoke

I feel like on a smaller server like this, scrapping the whole concept of automatch and funneling everyone into custom games would be superior to having this middle ground of many disjoint automatch queues.

I kind of disagree. If you just watch the custom challenge page for a few minutes, often while you’re reading a challenges details, the byo-yomi, whether there’s handicap, is it ranked, a lot of the time I find the challenge has jumped up or down a lot in the list before I’ve processed the settings, or in some case the challenge has disappeared.

I think with strict filters on what you want you can cut down on some reading, unless you’re happy to play both handicap or no, different board sizes etc.

This is of course, without the merging the steady flow of automatch games in this already quite dynamic custom game list.

It’ll only get worse the more games are there without something like

@Feijoa

I think it would look better if we sorted the oldest game offers to the top where they can be relatively stable and also attract needed attention, while the bottom of the list jumps around a lot but can be ignored.

You could arbitrarily cut down on the noise by hiding offers that are less than x seconds old. A CSS fade-in might also help it look less jumpy.

@CosmicJoke

Why stop at making byo-yomi or Fischer flexible? We could do that with board size, game speed and everything else, unify the disjoint queues as much as the players are willing to.

See

@anoek

For what it’s worth the backend is now done for supporting multiple settings, and it is the plan to update the UI to support multiple selections of acceptable times, though I’m still trying to figure out the best way of presenting that in a way that’s not too complicated.

[Jon_Ko]

@CosmicJoke

go to the the complete opposite end of the spectrum and allow the player to specify the set of acceptable game settings in fine detail. If the settings acceptable to two queuing players overlap, match them.

This. Auto matching custom games is what I wish for. With saying something like: I want to have at least 7 seconds per move and the game shouldn’t take longer than an hour.

But for me personally, the auto-match options do cover my currently preferred time settings well enough.

[fuseki3]

@Gia

so all available games are in one place and you only need to change tabs if you want to create your own because nothing available is what you’re looking for

I think the interface would make much more sense this way too.

It’s much clearer, and/or if a custom game création button is available in a clear way, all the better.

As it is, there’s so much visual noise on the automatch page that the custom game création/option isn’t apparent (and making the text larger wouldn’t necessarily help make it more visible or obvious as a clickable second tab)

Also, following some comments on poll percentages in the thread, the forums are a small sample size of all total players – I haven’t been following the conversations and polls about this but have encountered players recently confused about how to set up a custom match and thinking it was impossible to do so, although custom game settings are a standard (for example on KGS) and possible in all of the Go servers I know of.

(And players who thought OGS didn’t offer custom games and thus were going to simply play elsewhere)

Personally, I prefer longer timesettings and it wasn’t apparent to me how to create/find a custom game either when I first saw this new interface, and I imagine this may be the case for other, even new users, – and placing the custom games “behind” a separate tab/non-apparent steps to take to access them, also needlessly reduces the possibility of someone seeing a custom game they may be interested in.

(And seeing all available game offer ranks/options to choose from is nice also, and potentially motivating to see the activity/range of players active)

So maybe a more obvious “button” for creating a custom game rather than the less obvious tab/text, and making both automatch and custom games visible easily, would avoid some of the confusion and still allow everyone to find what they might enjoy more easily ?

@Jon_Ko

This. Auto matching custom games is what I wish for. With saying something like: I want to have at least 7 seconds per move and the game shouldn’t take longer than an hour.

The idea of mixing custom games and automatch settings to be able to accept anything within a certain criteria is great, too.

It’d be interesting to see implemented and may actually help find pairings faster.

[square.defender]

yes
instead of Quick Match tab and Custom games tab:

Left tab should include only list of custom games to accept
and “play” button for Quick Match without any settings
by default it would accept any Quick Match from 9x9 to 19x19 and any blitz or live settings among those who already wait
if no one wait, by default it would enter the most popular queue

Right tab should include button to create custom game and settings for Quick Match
if not default for Quick Match selected, then “play” button from Left tab would accept only that

[calebjdastrup]

I think making automatch accept compatible custom games would be possible to implement entirely on the frontend (enter automatch queue, whenever a new custom game appears, check it).
I have thought about implementing this, but I don’t really use automatch

[yuki2006_kd]

In the new UI, I’d like to be able to directly choose a computer opponent at any difficulty level for custom matches.

Right now, it’s a bit cumbersome, and I think it might be confusing for beginners.

If you only play rated matches against human opponents, it might not be an issue, though.

[BHydden]

Yeah this is a bug and should be fixed soon, it was not intended to work this way.

[yuki2006_kd]

Thank you for the prompt updates.

I felt that removing the extra button and having the list of custom matches always visible might be better.

Alternatively, perhaps adding tabs for Ranked games and Custom games would be a good idea.

[spookyboy]

I think that your issues are related to a bug that has since been fixed.

See here:

Matchmaking results in 20 mins main time even if I chose 5 mins.