For fox, having the settings in Chinese in some clients is also not beginner friendly - so we can probably remove Fox as a comparison for beginners, unless we’re talking about beginners that want to find a tutorial video on how to get registered and installed etc.
Generally the Fox interface looks like a mess, and I think people just learn to click some button and it puts them in a game and they don’t worry about the rest.
But we’re also not necessarily trying to be KGS or fox. There’s a good chance someone happy playing on fox stays playing on fox, either because of the number of players or level of the players. For KGS, I wonder does our automatch already cover their settings more or less anyway:
Medium: 25m +5x30s ~ 20m +5x30s
Fast: 10m+5x20s ~ 5m 5x30s
Blitz: 1m +3x10s ~ 30s +5x10s
For me those are already so close it wouldn’t make sense to add an additional KGS setting clone right beside one that seems fundamentally the same.
Again we can probably be sure about those kinds of statements with data rather than based on feeling, so I’m looking forward to more data like
Except everytime something isn’t explained, someone wants a tooltip for it, which doesn’t really work on mobile.
Seems like a valid option, given that that’s how the automatch was kind of working, where it had a delay with matching users that weren’t close in rank.
Main problem is that some people will never play or queue up for a handicap match, and so either they’ll stop using automatch which is counter productive, or they’ll cancel all the handicap matches and requeue, which is a waste of time.
We could be bold and simplify and say the only game and time setting is 5m+5x30s on 19x19, send everything else to custom, but I don’t think custom is fit for purpose for a large scale number of challenges and settings. That’s my feeling anyway.