Yesterday I did help a new user (new to the game and new to OGS) to find a correspondence game. (I want to add that I also don’t know OGS very well yet myself.)
I selected 9x9 and just hit the “Correspondence” button in the “Quick match finder” (using default settings) and thought, this would actually get us a new game rather quickly.
After quite a longer wait, a new game was created but the opponent canceled the game right away - apologizing for mis-clicking on “Correspondence” in the quick match finder.
So I just initiated a new auto-match request as I did before (as the server unfortunately lacks a feature to automatically re-post the original auto-match request in such a case).
Then the same scenario (just without the apology) happened again!
And then again!
And again.
And again.
No kidding!
And then, after searching for a simple 9x9 beginner game for almost a day (!) with lots of manual fiddling and notification mails and stuff, I got really frustrated!
Then I realized that the auto-match request didn’t show up in the list of available game requests. Which triggered the idea to post a custom game request myself. And - surprise! - I had a new game pretty quickly.
I guess my question is this: Is the auto-match feature broken or am I missing something here?
Isn’t it the very purpose of a “Quick match finder” to easily and quickly find you a new game?
As I said, this experience was really frustrating and is probably very detrimental to attracting new users.
Thanks for any insights you might share!