bug?
Itās also something I mentioned here
The 2m+5s fischer rapid setting for some reason has pauses on weekends for a live game.
I didnāt realise it was causing errors to set up games though.
I agree that if these little dots exist, they should have tooltip explaining them. OGS does seem to take a UI design style that itās OK to add UI complexity if thereās a forum post explaining it, but the vast majority of users of the main site never even visit the forums. But these dots are more visual clutter and cognitive load on someone visiting that page who just wants a game quickly. Adding them was done because queue times were too long with the fragmented pools. But rather than solving that by making the pools less fragmented with fewer and simpler options as Iāve advocated before, another unintuitive UI element was added and the OGS cockpit grows with extra blinking lights.
3 Likes
choosing āMultipleā and selecting every time and every board probably solving it and making dots not necessary
that board picture probably only causing problems to mobile users
especially to those who likes custom
and its unable to work with Multiple mode
when only 9x9 selected, it looks like bug
when 2 boards are selected, its not clear what it should be
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Obviously if you select 3 board sizes you should have a picture of all 3 sizes stacked on top of each other, so you have to scroll down several screens to find the button you want. /s
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Or
No but seriously though, the dots do combat a specific problem, which is the inertia to using automatch.
If people already have this feeling they wonāt get a with automatch theyāll just make a custom match with the same or nearly the same settings.
If they see an indication some is looking for a game or has recently looked for a game with such a setting they in principle could be more likely to queue up for it.
Iāve only used the new automatch a couple of times, one time it was near instant, one time it took a couple of minutes.
Thereās going to be natural time of day fluctuations of the speed of automatch timing anyway.
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Iām going to insist that 
is much harder than 
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Yeah for me also. Fischer with a low increment is quite difficult. Iāll probably try practice it though.
Still 5m +5s is harder than 5m + 5x30s for me on 19x19.
Probably if you donāt intentionally aim to keep a bank of like 30s to 1m on your Fischer clock, you end up in a increment death spiral or playing a game with effectively 5-10s byo-yomi for the rest of the game.
Much harder I donāt know, people tend not to use all their byo-yomi period so if they use half of it, 5m+5s should be approximately equivalent to 30s+5x10s.
But 5m+5s is definitely much harder than 5m+5x30s.
1 Like
when hard tsumego spawns, they will.
with 10s byo-yomi they always would have 10s to solve it
with 5s Fischer they may have only 5s to solve it
strategically farming time in Fischer is separate task at which its possible to be worse than at Go
while you donāt need to think about it in byo-yomi or in Simple
Yes, time management is a bit different with Fischer time, we need to keep remaining time above 1 minute, except in difficult positions where we need to think longer. So if you are facing a difficult tsumego and you spend like 30 seconds for the first move, followed by 10s per move for 4 moves, you still have 15s on your clock. Then you have to play faster for 10-20 moves to recover some time.
4 Likes
I do think there is a tendency when converting Byo-yomi or Canadian times to Fischer to make the increment too small and the main time too big. I recall the 2019 London Open used Fischer for the first time and rather than the previous 90 mins main and 20 stones in 5 minutes overtime it was 70 main and 10 seconds Fischer which turned it into a blitz mistake fest rather than the slow and serious tournament it was supposed to be (I often lost on time / resign after blunder hours before the next round started, so there was time in the schedule to not be so blitzy). Iāve not played in it since then, but I see itās now 50 mins main and 20s increment which seems much more sane.
8 Likes
Hello ! A few thoughts in no particular order ā
It looks much cleaner than the multi-tab option now.
Although, we are still haviing reports in other threads of the interface being confusing, & of automatch not functioning as labelled ā
ā and I wonder whether to some extent the new interface is still cluttered/confusing, especially if one hadnāt followed the development or doesnāt know what X is intended for.
Perhaps I should have posted these thoughts from another thread here, but hereās a link to them :
Essentially, I think labelling the time categories and buttons more clearly, with words in addition to the numbers, maybe something like what I proposed in that post, would make them easier to process and understand quickly ā right now, that area feels cluttered with a lot of numbers which the brain doesnāt naturally parse quickly immediately, especially for new or confused players.
The 3 timesetting flexibility specifications do also somehow feel more cluttered to me and contributing to the feeling of āoption/info overloadā ā I imagine it may be more so for new or confused players, though on a separate note, if āMultipleā is meant to allow multiple board size selection, perhaps it should be explicit in the description ?
e.g.
Multiple
*Pick multiple acceptable time settings or board sizes *
And, in the interest of being clearer for all of the users seeing the interface in future, maybe it would help to :
- explain this with some sort of legend on the side :
- Two new indicators have been added, a green dot which indicates there is someone within your rank range that is ready to play now, and a gray dot which indicates a popular setting in the past 30 minutes by players within your selected rank range.
e.g. ā(picture of button with green dot) = the green dot indicates someone in your rank range ready to play nowā
ā(picture of button with grey dot) = the grey dot indicates popular settings in your rank range in the past 30 minutesā
When I adjusted the rank range, I saw different green/grey dots, and If I hadnāt first read this thread I wouldnāt necessarily understand that and may be confused or not know itās tied to rank range ā in my case, no-one was active for -4 to +7 (ranked 5d) but adjusting to -7 or more on the lower end showed a lot more grey or green dots.
(I havenāt yet played an automatch match, though ā the only match I received was against a 2d on 9x9 on the slower byo-yomi settings, but it was cancelled by them straight away ā I waited a little while, a minute to some minutes, on other attempts but didnāt find a match with -7/+9 settings)
And :
- Possibly be clearer, with some sort of āAutomatchā or āQuick Matchā header at the top of thte current Play page, that these are automatch/quick match ā maybe itās redundant, though also makes it clearer as one of 2 or 3 options ?
1 Like
Better would be to design the interface so that there is no need for this toggle, and delete it.
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āFlexibleā looks the most useless. These pairs of time settings are not really similar anyway. If you ok with more than 1 setting, you can just use multiple.
With āExactā its hard to catch the opponent, its like whac a mole, but more hard than accepting
custom game challenge
so, maybe just give multiple for everyone and select everything as default?
1 Like
Oh yes, also definitely feel the Fischer time increments are too low, and not beginner-friendly/inexperienced-with-Fischer-friendly (and probably even difficult to manage for semi-experienced players.
I can manage 5m+5s but have avoided all of the Fischer options due to the low increment and potential issues with it turning very āblitzyā even on the slowest option available in automatch Fischer, and agree that adjusting it to have a higher increment should work much better.
3 Likes
Something like this would be simpler.
Multiple board sizes can be selected.
By default, the ārapid-flexibleā time setting would be selected, currently:
- 5m+5s or 5m+5x30s for 19x19
- 3m+5s or 3m+5x30s for 13x13
- 2m+5s or 2m+5x30s for 9x9.
If the user presses āoptionsā, a menu with multi-selectable buttons (or with checkboxes) appears.
4 Likes
I agree on simplifying it, but would go the opposite route:
-
Hiding handicap and rank range settings behind an option button.
-
Keep time selection visible (blitz, rapid, standard). Just three buttons, no Fischer/Byo-Yomi choice.
5 Likes
I like that too, was thinking of something of that type too,
āHandicap/rank range optionsā + a simplified Play page with 3 main buttons + board sizes
And maybe, if wanted, if itās important or helpful for finding matches & not too complicated, multi-select by default, putting in a written prompt above the buttons to avoid confusion, like :
āSelect or de-select the time options and board sizes you wish to be automatched for.ā
(with obvious visual indications of whatās selected or not & nothing selected by default until one clicks on the specfic button)
Was automatch always byo yomi before, or were there some sort of other Fischer timesettings, by the way ? (I rarely used it)
At the moment itās true that the Fischer timesettings are so dissimilar (and difficult to manage/too low increment), so it may be worth scrapping them to simplify the overload of buttons/options, and just let that be made as a custom game if somebody prefers Fischer.
Or perhaps put a checkbox for 
Fischer Byo Yomi into the Options hidden menu.
(or radio button : ā¢ Fischer, ā¢ Byo Yomi, ā¢ Accept Either Fischer or Byo Yomi)
And put in more reasonable Fischer increments.
I suppose in a way, the current automatch/play page is trying to do both automatch + a bit too much customisation, and being confusing and suffering for it when custom games can already be made (seems like the extra options are possibly complicating the matching process too).
It should also be more simple to find or create custom games if one wants/doesnāt find the automatch settings to match their preferences, if there is less button/option visual overload on the play page.