Are the automatic sitewide tournaments losing their popularity?

Tournaments
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There used to be a time (not so long ago) when I was able to play three or four 9x9 DE automatic sitewide tournaments (AST) a day.
Nowadays I am glad if one of these AST’s gains enough participants and the tournament is not annulled.

Are the 9x9 DE AST losing their popularity? Is maybe the format outdated and needs to be updated? Should we start thinking about a AST 2.0?

These are some of my thoughts, Care to share your thoughts with the forums?
I limited this little intro to 9x9 DE only, because that is what I almost always play. However feel free to say your thing also if it concerns other board size AST’s.

Thanks for sharing.

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I used to join those often, but for a year or two the yellow indicator has been hidden on the mobile website, and that makes it much harder to know that they are coming up.

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Thats a setting under General preferences, you can turn that on and off for PC and mobile device.

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I like the 9x9 tournaments too and they are by far the most popular ones.
Other tournaments can last too long once they started for my taste.

I agree that there are less participants, at least compared to ~1 year ago when I started. But also back then not every tournament was able to start.

When I feel like 9x9, usually I just miss the timing.
Another annoying thing is that you dont get any acustic sign when a new round starts. When you do other stuff in between the rounds or when its still 15 minutes left to start, you may just miss your match.

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Thanks, that’s great to know about! So maybe I’ll start doing them again. But since it apparently defaults to off, we’re still excluding half of the player pool. It should default to on! (With a link to the setting in the notification for people who want to hide it.)

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Correct. Actually most of the daily AST’s don’t take place at all. From the 24 possible daily AST (excluding a few monthly correspondence tournaments somewhere in the week) on average only 6 or maybe 7 do take place, and the rest fades into a digital oblivion.

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In the past, there were a lot of players who liked this method because they had time to play Go. It could be outdated because tournaments don’t bring anything else like money or a prize, like learning with a professional or assigning a week to work in their AL. Maybe in a year there would be more players.

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Yeah I wouldn’t give actual prizes for online tournaments like this, especially ones so regular since it just incentivises cheating.

If you look at chess, cheating in titled Tuesday is a big issue and concern and that was a few thousand dollars maybe. They had to random spot checks and video calls with players and went as far as developing a browser that you have to use to play for prize money events.

People cheat for less, including for rating and just for fun.

It’d be much better to just switch up the format of the tournaments to make them more fun if you want more engagement.

You could

  • change the settings to be more in line with the automatch settings, matching popular settings
  • make them shorter so it’s not so much of a time commitment
  • make them more visible rather than a tiny icon. For instance make a tournament section to watch live tournament games on the games page
  • Have a tournament like lichess’ Arena where you can drop in and out and pause participation
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