Fox: elegant ranking system with wins/losses and forced handicap. No caring about “freedom”, “choice” or any other abstract concept. The mentality is “people don’t know what they want, so we bring them what we think is the best for better gaming experience” with the goal to maximize the number of games.
Western servers: years of discussions on how to not make someone uncomfortable because there are 10 options to choose from and not 15, while the population of players is almost not growing and everyone is slowly migrating to Fox.
I think essentially the same mentality applies here – it’s just that "what we think is the best for better gaming experience” is to allow freedom. (That’s the impression I get, at least)
There are many possible reasons for why people are migrating to Fox (if that is really the case), the main of which is just that it’s the nature of the free market, especially for services that require being matched with strangers to work. There’s a natural tendency to monopoly, and the “rich” get “richer”.
It’s not necessarily the case that Fox is doing anything better that OGS, but the more people use their service, the better their service gets just by having a larger population, and the better their service gets the more people go there.
But you can’t compete with Skype by copying Skype, your only hope to compete is by offering something Skype doesn’t have. If you become “Skype but not many people use it”, even the few people who were interested in your service will not see any reason not to use Skype instead.
Now to be fair, there is one small thing that OGS intrinsically has that no Eastern server has: it’s a place where you’re more likely to stumble on other people from the West.
This might intrinsically make OGS more attractive to people who are wishing to meet learning partners in the West and maybe make friends, and less attractive to people who are looking to play with stronger people.
I’m not sure what are the market implications of this, I’m just brainstorming
Seems to me that OGS at reverse is doing great.
Not long ago we got recognition from EGF to hold EGF pro championship here for example.
We could talk about migration if we had some datas, do they just exist?
The only way I actually get games on OGS is through the ladders, so the rules used for the ladders are as good as forced for me.
I do enjoy having the option to create games with other settings, such as rengo or weird board sizes or unusual time settings, but the vast majority of the games I play are from the ladders, which means Japanese rules, no handicap, capped Fisher with 3 days + 1 day per move to a maximum of 3 days.
I would actually much prefer if the ladder games were played with handicaps, and with Chinese rules.
Which one do you think of, besides OGS? KGS has many differences (policies, development, inexistent forum, users, etc… ), the amalgam is a bit shortsighted
Absolutely. Where is the proof that they are master of gosite design? Who knows if they are much under of what they could get in quantity of players considering how many are in Eastern Asia?
In my opinion fox users are much more concerned by the betting system as by a forced handicap, if we want to copy from there
Well the main way I get correspondence games is through tournaments. But I think the quick match finder (see Tetraphenylbenzidin) and creating custom games also work well.
With the quick match finder you can require Chinese rules (it might be slow, I’m not sure, but you can have up to 20 requests), in custom games you can set it. In tournaments it depends, but you can create tournaments
Maximizing freedom for “gaming experience” doesn’t maximize the number of games. And convenience of getting games is a major or maybe the top-1 factor that decides why people prefer this or that servers. Democrazy doesn’t work in business, it takes one a strong decision-maker to push towards a specific direction. But yeah, let’s just continue discussing instead of actually doing something. The bucket of crabs.
