I really love OGS and wish everyone would play here. I’m not sure how to get more people to migrate over.
I read the recent news about KGS being supported by AGA, and how their member base has been declining in recent years, and it occurs to me that:
The most po1. pular servers are Asian, of course (Tygem, Fox, IGS).
But the Western Go world is mostly split between KGS, OGS and the Asian servers.
If we could combine KGS & OGS into the main place for Western Go players to play, it would be huge.
So is there any way that could happen? Talk to AGA and get them to merge with us? Maybe have OGS be a 2nd interface for KGS so that you could play with players from both userbases?
I’m just speculating, I’m sure it’s been discussed here before but I couldn’t find a thread on it.
The reason the player base is split between OGS and KGS is because there are some important differences between the two, leading players to prefer one over the other. There is no way to combine the two without one of the servers coming out second best.
What are the biggest differences to most players? Are they cosmetic differences like how the site looks, or things like ranking systems or how games are matched?
It feels like some differences could be resolved by altering interfaces. Others not so much.
Also, I think having KGS come out second best is not a terrible outcome for the AGA and KGS users if the result is one great server with more combined players.
Coca Cola – Pepsi
Apple – Microsoft
Star Trek – Star Wars
Age of Empires – Civilization
…
Who of them should be the one to ask the other to pass over the keys? Has to do with humility also, no?
Or … is it to be expected that one of them would hand over the keys by themselves, without having been asked?
But then again … (and @yebellz beat me to it their comment appeared while I was writing this):
I remember the old OGS (this is an old revision of the page, version 66 from December 19, 2006, scroll down for info on the original admins),
I also remember nova.gs, which was created by our all @anoek and @matburt,
and then—BOOM!—came this:
Apparently the original owners of OGS couldn’t keep up with maintaining and developing the server, and so they passed the keys to our developer demigods, and thus we now have the new OGS
So … I’d think it’s highly improbable that one side would ask the other to hand over their site (cf. “humility” above), and thus, for a merger to happen, one side would have to walk up to the other and tell them that they like the other’s better …
If it could happen with OGS and Nova, it could happen with KGS. Especially as the KGS developers seem to be having a really hard time keeping up, for the last decade, it seems.
I’ve talked with the AGF and I’m on the board of the AGA. I DESPERATELY want KGS to merge with OGS, but the old men who call the shots are nostalgic and they fundamentally don’t understand what they are doing.
I have literally sat down with the guy making the call about everything and shown him how OGS has every feature that he likes on KGS and how it has many more that he wasn’t aware of that are even more useful. And the result… Nothing. That was a few months ago at Go Congress.
I’m still going to keep pushing, gently, and respectfully of course, but I doubt a merger will be possible. Instead the AGF and AGA will waste time and money trying to revive the good old days. Instead of working together with OGS to find a common ground and develop a centralized western Go community.
The situation in Vietnam is a bit different. People used to play in KGS because of the “Vietnam room” kind of community.
Now that KGS is too much of a trouble to play, they move away pretty quickly, but choose wbaduk instead because most of the pros who teach us here are Korean, and advocate wbaduk.
I try to introduce OGS to people but people are, well, attracted to their friends & idol. I don’t need to ask why they choose to follow our pro teacher instead of joining some 3k like me…
(totally unrelated trivia: in Vietnamese 3k is pronounced “baka” - which mean “idiot” in Japanese T_T)
The editor is horrendous. Keyboard hotkeys? My browser listens to some of the function keys. ctrl-, shift- alt- modifiers? Right mouse button? If LMB is the only input method then doing reviews on OGS is torture.
Horrendous seems like a strong word. It seems more likely that you might be comfortable and familiar with how to review on KGS than on OGS and it’s frustrating for this reason.
That being said, even if these are your worries. The OGS developers are highly responsive to helpful feedback for how to make OGS better. Tweaking OGS seems like a better route than entirely rewriting the backend of KGS to bring it into the modern era, no?
their comment appeared while I was writing this):
