yes / no
why
It works so slowly on my poor old laptop, that i actually thought it was still under construction >___>
Guess its made for people with powerful gaming pc’s?
If you measure by “is anyone playing there?” the answer would seem to be “it is not a success”.
I think the presentation is gorgeous - though as Koba says, it’s choice of engine does rule out some people.
I think the reason why there’s no-one there is not because of the engine though.
I think it’s because of marketting and inertia.
A Go server is more than just a website and an application. It’s a community.
Go players need there to be other Go players on their server.
[ This is a challenge OGS faces as well… why are there so few Dans here? Because there are so few Dans here. 
]
“Hey everyone come here, we made this pretty thing” would appear to be not enough to create a new community with.
I really wish they’d reach out and integrate with us somehow.
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My personal take is that CGS’s main “selling point” is optional, and sometimes hinderance (like lagging for some), and not really necessary. And the coloring potential territory features essentially turned on “estimate territory” at all times, and it would make beginners distracted from the real games readings. And if you played on there, after a few games you would want to turn the theme off, and just played normally on a normal background, hence making them no different than other Go servers, but lacking other features (communities, tsumego, etc.) While those find them lagging, didn’t spread the words to bring more.
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I’d put it down to the engine. I would’ve played a few games there only it nearly melted my old mac to try to open it.
I think whatever momentum it could’ve gotten from being new and pretty was cancelled out by how heavy going it was to open.
But this is only true for the small subset of users for whom it won’t run.
We’ve had two in this thread saying “my old machine”.
I don’t think a site’s success lives or dies by whether people with “old machines” can use it?
More significant might be the fact that it’s not designed for mobile. That’s an astonishing oversight for a new site.
Interestingly it does run on my phone.
Maybe people with old pcs could try it out on the phone to see what it looks like.
What you will find is that everything woks, but it’s too small to really see because it is not a mobile-friendly design.
It’s stated goal is:
Its main purpose is to facilitate Go discovery and learning, by updating its design and by adding some tools making the rules easier to understand.
I think we could say this goal is achieved!
It’s a beautifully updated design, and it does have good tools to make the rules easier to understand.
OGS could do with a mode like this - our recent member NEWOLDPLAYER likely would have benefitted a lot.
It’s a go server, and we’re not talking about trying to run it on a Commodore 64 , it was a decent enough MacBook Pro. I just got a newer one sometime later.
I’ve seen people try to run OGS on an e-reader.
Basically it seems like a death sentence when the people that want to play on the server can’t play on it. I never went back to play a game there because I couldn’t load it the few times I tried.
I imagine a number of people would have had similar experiences.
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When we are talking about network effects, which compound exponentially, usability and accessibility are king. This is one of OGS’s superpowers (web client is accessible on almost any device).
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