Hi all, firstly, thanks so much for this amazing site! It is such a beautiful resource for the Go community. Have met some really nice people, and the interface is just fantastic.
One aspect I really like with playing on here is the “conditional moves” feature.
I love the convenience of this, and the ability to progress the game through obvious sequences.
But one issue I’ve discussed with opponents is that the immediacy of moves can be jarring. To have an automatic response can feel like playing a computer and the tempo is off-putting.
I would LOVE the ability to add a delay here. So in a user’s settings, you can just specify “conditional move delay”. This value can be used on both sides (so if I set a 10 second delay, this will cause conditional moves I set to wait 10 seconds before playing; but it would also delay my opponent’s conditional moves so I get the same behavior).
Thanks for the consideration; I think there’s a strong use case here and would make this conditional move behavior smoother and less intrusive / robotic.
I can see the point of this, although I think the robotic part of it is useful in as much as there is no doubt that it was a conditional move rather than the opponent responding.
I think, though, that you would only get to specify the delay you experience: that is your choice. You don’t get to decide for the opponent how long your conditional moves would be delayed. This heads too far in the direction of “pretending that I’m actually there” IMO.
I definitely hear your point about not having setting impact your opponent’s delay. But as someone else mentioned, it’s not necessarily obvious what is going on with conditional moves if you’re not familiar. I had an opponent ask: “how are you moving so fast?”. Here I think it would be useful to have a small notification that one’s move triggered a conditional move.
My main concern is how rapidly it moves. It feels unnatural and computer-like and honestly kind of stressful (that has been my experience when playing someone who sets a long conditional string (which I often do as well)).
So perhaps the ideal solution would be to set the default to have a 5 second delay (and show a message that a conditional move was triggered). This would resolve my main issue with current setup, would be more clear for user encountering conditional moves, and it wouldn’t introduce any additional complexity within the game settings
Some people turn off auto switch to next game after a move to specifically wait to see if any conditional moves get played. If you add in a 5s delay, they’ll probably have clicked onto the next game by that point.
Just for the record, AFAIK conditional moves have priority over the auto-advance. You do not have to turn auto advance off to see conditional moves played out ← nope, talking nonsense
I do not mind having the option customizable, but that said, it seems too low a priority for our dev to care about it now, so it will only happen if one of the github contributors (or yourself @slackz ? - just noting that our frontend is opensource if you are good with codes ) finds it interesting enough to do it. Anyway if that happens 5s would be wayyy too much to be default in my opinion. The immediate response really can be jarring, but I think even a 1s delay would be enough to feel okay.
understandable. I do code so I’ll take a look, but might not have the time right now to dig in if it’s not a one-liner. Maybe the main dev knows off-hand where that would go, cause even throwing in a sleep on 1 second would I think be a nice compromise and a fairly small lift. Just so we don’t have mini bouts of panic when conditional moves come at us like rapid fire
GreenAsJade, I think the scenario is simple (even for live games).
conditional move triggered, delay a second before making move, flash message that cond move triggered, pause time while this is happening so nobody is deducted.
All I want is for conditional moves not to play like a computer.
I actually fully don’t have the time to investigate / implement this (or to respond to more comments actually). If site admins wanna close this, go ahead, otherwise I’d like to see this feature. I understand it’s low priority; it’s low priority for me too.
Have a good one all. Love this site. If there’s pushback here, no worries. really not a huge deal. It’s just overwhelming / obnoxious to be playing a chill game and have moves come at you like a machine gun. I’m playing a human, not alphaGo, shouldn’t feel so stressful
So does “for show” mean that both player’s clocks are paused during the delay? If so, would this not require something done on the server side to account for this?
If the clocks do pause during the delay, this feature could be used to insert more thinking time into a game, which. even if small, might not be desired for fast blitz games.
If the clocks do not pause, this delay would have to eat into one of the player’s time, which also might not be desired in blitz games.
I would find some sort of message flashing/popping up to be even more annoying/jarring.
I think it’s a good idea to consider how to make the conditional moves feature more pleasant. I don’t think this thread should be closed; it’s a productive discussion to work through various design considerations.
I meant that it would be a purely cosmetical delay. So say you have a 2 second delay configured, and you would have x time left when you play a move that triggers a conditional move, then for it will take 2 seconds before your opponent reacts, but his time will not go down, and instead your own timer will count down during what appears to be your opponent’s time, and you start your move with x-2 seconds.
Inserting more time or pausing the game is first of all confusing for the opponent who might not have the same delay set as you have, second of all requires a server-side fix and doesn’t seem fair especially in blitz games.
my appologies it indeed does not. And I was so sure… 
