Yeah possibly. I think it’s at least worth trying the update first and if it’s still not popular we can consider removing it then 
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I think people don’t use it because it hasn’t been well explained or user friendly. (as @BHydden said, and I have heard for people calling for it to be removed)
That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be improved right?
I think the main problem it suffers from is that it’s not intuitive at all.
I probably wouldn’t have figured that out to be honest.
It’s a reasonable point, in that is the info you want to present on the axes Rank and Time control?
I mean I guess so, you want people around your rank (probably) and you don’t want a correspondence game when looking for a live game.
Ultimately though, you’d hope it should be a quicker way to pick a game than looking down through a long list right?
As in if you want an even game you’re suppose to look alone that rank line, and into the time control you’re interested in, and then pick a point close to the line.
I guess I don’t associate squares triangles, purple and green with ranked unranked or different board sizes.
I’ll stare at it for a few minutes and see if I can think of anything
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Maybe a setting (or collapsible section) rather than removing it entirely? I actually think the graph is a great idea to quickly find challenges matching certain criteria – much better than scanning the list, but just in my opinion.
Again open to suggestions for improvement.
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Another option for the OGS cockpit. As it is currently if I had the toggle available I’d probably hide the graph.
But given some changes I could see myself using it?
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Any specific changes other than the ones already discussed?
I’m thinking the biggest distinction in the graph should be to show games that you can actually accept.
Those ones should stand out the most - at present I think that’s what the color is about right? Grey you can’t accept, everything else is something else that’s unclear (actually colour might be board size at the moment)
So Challenges you can accept should be something bright, some shape that’s easy to make sense of.
Then all the other ones you can’t accept are another shape and colour that you should just ignore, except maybe to get a feel for how many games are on offer.
Then apply whatever colour +shape + shading scheme to the ones you can accept
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@shinuito If I’m understanding correctly, the only difference between these suggestions and the current remake of the graph is that the ineligible challenges should have their own shape (rather than being shaped according to the same characteristics as eligible challenges). Please correct me if I’m wrong.
For reference, here’s the revamped graph:
Any challenge that isn’t gray is one you can accept, and you can remove the gray challenges by unchecking “ineligible”.
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Maybe we can hide ineligible by default then to reduce clutter?
I don’t particularly think ranked being a square and unranked being a triangle is intuitive.
But having the filter options high on the page and near the graph might help
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Certainly an option, though it’s worth noting that once you uncheck it that choice is remembered. I lean towards leaving everything visible by default for discoverability, then users can filter out what they like.
As you mentioned, I think having the legend right below will help. Squares/triangles are certainly not set in stone – any ideas for an alternative that’s more intuitive?
I don’t use the seek graph on any sites. I just don’t find that a rough visualization of rating and game length (according to a hidden formula which may or may not agree with one’s opinion on which time controls are longer than others and by how much, especially when multiple board sizes are in view) to be sufficient information to decide to accept a challenge. I voted triangle because I think it looks cleaner; the circles looked a bit blurry on my screen, but the sharp-angled triangles felt unified with the sharp-angled squares while still being visually distinct, perhaps even more-so than squares and circles: but I’ll continue using the list of challenges to accept games.
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That’s actually another change I’d like to make: consider the board size so that the estimated time per move is more accurate.
Does it still appear blurry if you download the image? Just checking that it’s the canvas rendering and not any forum image display issues that you’re seeing.
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I opened up each image, and close-up the triangles look blurrier. I think it’s just a limitation of showing curves on a screen which is inherently orthogonal. Maybe blurry isn’t so much the right word as fuzzy or not-as-crisp.
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That’s definitely it. I’ve actually reduced the aliasing effect compared to the original play graph, but there’s only so much you can do at such a small size.
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For anyone interested: the new seek graph is available for testing at beta.online-go.com. I tried to accommodate most requests, and the graph can be hidden entirely from Settings → General Preferences → “Show seek graph”. Let me know if there are any issues or further suggestions!
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It definitely seems like a big improvement, especially with the placement of the legends/filters and legends themselves.
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I use the seek graph. I find it summarises all the available challenges very efficiently and allows me to quickly find the challenges I’m currently interested in, by visually arranging the challenges along two dimensions, speed and rank. This is a lot more efficient than a long list that can only be arranged along one dimension.
Exactly. I can locate the challenges I’m interested in much more quickly in the scatter plot than in the long list.
That being said, I agree that all the information presented with colours or shape is not intuitive. Personally I completely ignore it. If I want more information about a challenge, then I click on its dot and read the info that pops up. I have no idea what the colours mean and I would have no idea what the squares and triangles would mean either.
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Even with the new legend?
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Oh there was one other thing I meant to point out.
It’s very counter-intuitive to me to know how to accept the challenges from the seek graph.
Is there any way this can be improved do you think?
Maybe other people find it intuitive, but I think the only reason I remember that that functionality actually exists was because I saw someone do it on a stream before - I’d say one reason the graph isn’t used could be that people probably don’t know you can accept games there (or maybe they do? 
)
I found it again in the old docs Finding games and challenging players (yes I had to look it up)
You already know how to do it right?
Green dots on the graph are games that you can accept. Moving your mouse over a green dot will show you a popup dialog box giving you some more information about that challenge. Clicking the green dot will lock the popup dialog in place so that you can click the green check mark to accept the game and start playing. Alternatively you can see a list of open challenges below the seek graph.
while I think that information got lost in the new github docs Create new page · online-go/online-go.com Wiki · GitHub
and the meaning of the colors is as follows:
- blue for live games.
- green ranked 19x19 games one can accept.
- magenta ranked 13x13 games one can accept.
- cyan ranked 9x9 games one can accept.
- orange unranked games one can accept (any board size).
- red own challenges.
- gray not acceptable challenges.
Edit: Actually, that doesn’t seem to work anymore, at least for correspondence games, on the beta site - I wonder when that stopped working? It’s not accepting the games or if it is, I can’t tell that I’ve joined
Agreed. I didn’t actually know you could do this until I started working with the seek graph code…
Did you accidentally accept a correspondence rengo challenge? It’s not immediately clear in that case – a popup says “joining” briefly and then disappears, with the new state only becoming clear if you scroll down to find that a rengo entry now has the option to withdraw. None of this is new behavior related to my changes, but I agree it is highly unclear and can be improved.
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Oh you’re probably right actually - I should’ve checked that. (Yes that seems to have been it, and on the main site too 
)
That would make a lot of sense, since those won’t start even when you join.
Maybe something should happen when correspondence rengo is joined in case people do what I probably just did 