Blitz games categorized as live

OK, well here’s another complaint. This is really annoying! I have played loads of “blitz” games but my blitz rating is unset because they have all been counted as live. This is skewing my live rating as I play worse on blitz. So anyone wanting to see how well I play live or blitz will see misleading information in my rating breakdown by time settings, thus leading to a kind of unintentional sandbagging under live time settings.

It seems the fix for this is relatively simple - just move the threshold between live and blitz. But where to move to? The obvious place is the maximum time settings available under the blitz heading, which is about 5m+5x10s IIRC. This is still very fast, resulting in a 19x19 game that takes less than 25 mins. That way, all blitz games are counted as blitz games, most live games with usual (~30s/move ~ 1hr total) time settings will be counted as live and the only discrepancy will be very fast “live” games being counted as blitz. However, it seems easier to accept a very fast live game being counted as blitz, than it is to accept a game specifically set up as blitz being counted as live.

7 Likes

It got complaints, it got a fix, but apparently resurfaced. (Source: the thread I posted in my first comment and the PR linked in that thread)

I see there’s no issue open on GitHub, might be worth reporting there. (github issue here: Blitz games displaying live icon · Issue #1174 · online-go/online-go.com · GitHub). Or moving this topic into “bug reports” category.

Edit: clarify that the PR also has relevant info

Didn’t read any fix just a pull request on github.

Did you look at the comments on the pull request?

anoek commented on Nov 24, 2020

Ok I finally tracked this down on the backend I think, they should be in sync now. It’s not retro-active though unfortunately.

A no thanks I stayed in the forum threads

1 Like

it apparently wasn’t fixed

dragon-devourer has games:
February 28, 2021 “1 minute main time, followed by 5 10 seconds periods” - counted as live

March 6, 2021 “increments by 10 seconds per move up to a maximum of 1 minute” - counted as live

1 Like

PSA: it’s okay to read further back than the latest comment :slight_smile:

The ratings update made it a bigger issue I believe since it reclassified old games that were Blitz to live. So I’m sure that has had impacts on ratings.

I have played no ‘Blitz’ games since the update, even though I had before it.

Don’t forget this thread, if you’re merging threads.

Good to have all the threads if you want a timeline of the issue.

2 Likes

These 5 games were created by Blitz quick match finder. Why do they classified as live?

1 Like

Yeah, I never clearly looked at blitz classification, but I just had a 3x10s + 0s main classified as live. It is slightly itchy.

1 Like

I tried figuring out the threshold for blitz and live games in the bottom of that thread and came up with some ideas of time time settings that would be at the borderline

1 Like

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I’ve played a few 9x9 blitz games using automatch where the games count as live. The time controls were 1 min, 3x10 sec byo-yomi.

Given the comments above it seems the default for automatch exceeds the threshold for what would be considered blitz. Is this just the aforementioned bug reappearing? If not, should the threshold for what is considered a blitz match be raised, or should the default time controls for automatch be lowered?

2 Likes

There was a recent enough poll that I keep sharing here

I think somewhere it was said maybe the 10s threshold is hardcoded in a lot of places, so it’s more likely that the automatch can be updated to say 9s on average move times to count as blitz.

That seemed to be the most popular vote, but hasn’t been updated as far as I know

3 Likes

Yeah bumping it down to 9 seconds seems fairly reasonable to me. It’s a little annoying but not a major issue, so I guess it’s just not a high priority.

1 Like

I just finished participating in one of the system automatic-scheduled blitz tournaments, namely “Blitz 13x13 Swiss Tournament 2023-10-25 15:30” and all the games have been counted as live. I didn’t go calculate for all four of my humiliating losses, but the last one was definitely less than 9s/move, and is definitely down in my record as “live,” not blitz.

Just another data point.

It’s not about the actual game though, it’s just about the time settings of the game. So even if the game was 20m+3x30s and the players played the game on average with 2s per move, it would still be live, primarily because of the 30s byo-yomi.

I think the automatch and sitewide tournaments need to be changed to something with timesettings <10s per move on average in order to be classified as blitz

1 Like

The time settings were 5m+5x10s, and it was one of the site’s scheduled blitz tournaments that gets publicized with an icon in the site’s menu bar.

I guess that the automatic tournaments just haven’t been updated since blitz was redefined to <10s/move? I’m just saying that whatever the problems are with blitz games on OGS, the situation is still very confusing. After reading this thread a few days ago, I thought the problems had been fixed, otherwise I wouldn’t have tried out that tournament.

2 Likes

Just to clarify the point I was trying to make, which I didn’t actually make above: it would be great if the scheduled system blitz tournaments are actually blitz.

Would it be difficult to change the time-settings on these to whatever is needed to bring the time per move down to 9s, or whatever is the current definition of games that affect ones blitz rating?

1 Like

Opinion varies where is the limit.
Blitz is around 9 to me (including 8 and 10) as i would rather see live at 20-30s (or more)

I have no objection if default setting of AST blitz or other tournaments go down to 9s, but i feel bad if my 10s games are categorized as live.
Categorization has no consequence on ratings, maybe then it could be a personal setting afterall? (I’d put the boundary at 16s myself).

Or one category could not be enough as what you can think/read change a lot in 3s-5s 6s-9s 10s-15s ? Ultra blitz, blitz, semi-blitz., quite different experiences of the game.

I remember seeing Anoek say somewhere that it would be difficult to alter the cut-off for what’s considered a blitz game, so the best solution would be to just lower the time from 10s to something below it.