Well you can have a “want to know more?” Button for them that doesn’t intrude on the clean, simple experience for the majority that don’t care about understanding!
IMHO one of the aspects some new player maybe don’t enjoy the game is to play 45min without knowing what the hell to do
3 Likes
I think people are going to be more polarised than you’d expect. Many people are just never going to play go no matter how fun you make it appear, what gimmicks or time settings you come up with.
Some people that enjoy board games will have specific preferences, some people want multiplayer games with randomness, and you can’t make go be that game really, I mean the base game.
Some other people will just want to focus on getting good at one game like chess, and so won’t put time into more than one game.
I think this is just subjective.
I think the superko rule is one of the most unintuitive rules, Chinese rules or area scoring sure, but superko no. It sounds great in theory - you just can’t repeat a board position, but in practice it’s awful.
e.g. recently Life and Death under Chinese Rules - #21 by stone.defender
It’s not user friendly, it’s not even professional friendly, otherwise we wouldn’t have Chinese top pro games ending with no result because of quadruple ko.
I don’t think you need to do away with Japanese terms. It’s part of the game, and any game has terminology that comes with it. Chess has things like fork and Zugzwang and Zwischenzug.
Not only that if you go to read books and resources they have these terms, Korean resources will say Jungsuk or Dansu. We don’t have to use them in streams of course but
It’s because they are speaking another language.
I think there is a point where there are equally good English words, like using net instead of geta, ladder instead of shicho, so I don’t see the point of using those for English speakers talking to other English speakers necessarily.
But this is funny, I can’t get games quickly on OGS so I tell people not to play on OGS, therefore contributing to the problem.
It’s the same problem with Dan players find it hard to get a game so they don’t play, which means other players find it hard to get a game and so on.
8 Likes
Fox surely has its advantages when it comes to the amount of active players, but it has few huge disadvantages as well.
For me the main reason to not play on fox is the requirement to install a separate software, and they dont even provide the installation for macs. So basically, in order to play on fox, you need to start by installing windows operating system first xD
Also their lack of correspondence games is big turn-off for me, i know most beginners arent into corrs right from the start, and i’ve also recommended brand new players to play a lot of 9x9 games with fast timesettings as thats the fasted way to learn how to make life and seal territories. But for people who mainly prefer playing corrs there isnt much fox has to offer
About why go in general isnt very popular in the west, i think main issue is the lack of children in the community. Most western people are already adults, or at least in their teens, when they learn about go, so they already have plenty of other commitments in their life.
But with chess, many parents/relatives teach small children to play chess even before they enroll elementary. This makes it lot easier to just play a game of chess with some any random person you encounter, while with go you often need to actively search for people to play with.
10 Likes
Also (mentioned in another discussion):
“We should let go of terms like keima and instead use the equivalent English terms, like “knight’s move”.”
Because of course everyone is a chess player. 
4 Likes
It’s probably useful for talking to people that know chess, even at the go club we do get players that know chess.
However yeah, it would be quite weird for a non chess player, to try to explain how another piece moves in another game to just use the name of that kind of shape XD
That said, Go still has that with the Diagonal jump at Sensei's Library or elephants jump.
I suppose diagonal jump is ok, though I don’t think I’ve heard many people say that 
While I agree, this doesn’t means you have to put efforts on made discovering enjoyable. If you don’t like it, not a problem, but crushing players losing and losing and losing is not the way to go IMHO. Only those really interested in Go for any reason them can have, will accept this kind of learning. Idea is for those just curious, make it fun, and then, will consider if like it or not.
1 Like
The ease and availability of correspondence go is a large part of why I’m on OGS and not other servers.
Now that I think on it, are correspondence games available / popular on asian servers, or is it another point of difference between east and west go cultures?
3 Likes
This has been my never-ending battle. And we always end up to the community doesn’t really want to reach out to new players after all. Because they only want to reach out to certain people, who meet certain criteria, and no real effort is required to reach them.
So, enjoy the slow death of western go, I guess 
2 Likes
Why should we make one server look like another server?
I find kgs and fox wildly confusing and I like the clarity of OGS: “We have 25 features, we do our best to keep them sharp”. Adding features that ones likes here and there will make it like google play, where you can never ever find what you are looking for but you can find alot of cheap fast options.
5 Likes
Maybe I missed something, typical on a large post, but I defend the standard time settings change, and as community to promote faster and easier modes (9x9 13x13) for newbies, but not saying are “easy” mode. But I think in previous posts I readed something about lang issues and i don’t think it’s the problem. Game has it’s own glossary, not an issue at all.
I don’t see chess comunity complaining about “en passant”
6 Likes
In my personal opinion, which of course is one of many and not accurate of the whole player base, I find 9x9 not easy at all. I find it very hard and unforgiving because basically every single 9x9 is a tsumego. It can be very disheartening to lose all your games because you just can’t memorise as well as your opponent. I find 13x13 a much better option.
Just because it’s smaller doesn’t mean it’s easier for a newbie. Like swimming, a pool is not necessarily easier than the sea, just because the sea is vast. The sea also gradually deepens, while the pool regularly has only deep mode. Unless we introduce children pools or pools with gradual depth, same as go.
I agree 19x19 can be chaotic for a newbie.
7 Likes
Yes but if you had a large number of opponents at just your level then you’d win about half the time right so it wouldn’t feel unforgiving so much
4 Likes
Basically I disagree. Some people need more room to breathe for their brain. 9x9 feels too small. It’s not a matter of rank, it feels completely different.
2 Likes
My point was not say 9x9 is easy, was some people advertise as an easy Go for newbies compared to 19x19, and because is not easy at all, and in some aspects is a different game with same ruleset, it’s a bad idea advertising as “easy”, overall, because new player can avoid it because don’t want to play the “easy” mode. Not sure if I explained
5 Likes
@GoInfluenchess Yes we agree
IMHO, OGS is ok as it is. Just time settings could be improved for faster games, the most work needed is in the community EDIT: community that average is so so friendly BTW
2 Likes
Better to market, maybe, but far easier to get bored with, since the board is so small.
I am one of those people, so I play correspondence games, what’s the issue with that solution? That younger people are addicted to “fast paced content” that even YouTube had to introduce “Shorts”? That’s a complex techno-social issue, good luck with that.
Someone else mentioned League of Legends. How come millions of kids find time for a LoL ranked game which takes 35 minutes and is most-probably a rage-filled unfun one-sided experience, but Go, somehow, needs to become “easy to consume or else”?
Maybe something else is a much more important problem here?
I’ve been playing Go for so much time, but I still do not understand the reasoning behind Chinese rules. Japanese rules are much clearer to me however and I’ve never had any issue with them. You cannot say which ruleset is easier to understand, just because you seem to get it. Have you tried explaining the chinese rules to beginners and compared if they understand those far better than the Japanese rules?
That is, again, the symptom of a different, bigger, problem.
Everything is “really hard to master” though. Even pen spinning. We can pretend otherwise for marketing reasons, but that’s the truth.
I haven’t noticed that, but that is a problem easily solved by adjusting the kyu ranks to ELO. For example, I was surprised to find out that if my ranking of 2k was in ELO terms, I’d have 1700 ELO and be at Class B. I didn’t ever think that my Go rank was anything to write home about, but “1700 ELO” hits differently in the West. I’ve played chess against someone with 1700 ELO. He won each time with an awe-inspiring ease (I am unranked in chess - don’t know even a single opening, I’ve just played thousand chess games).
Similarly. 10k is around 1100-1200 ELO which, if I am not mistaken, is quite respectable in chess. This is an easily solved problem in perspective.
Again, you are missing the point. That is like the fun idea Pratchett had in Diskworld, where they built a temple without any particular God in mind, thinking that once the temple was there, the Gods would line up to be worshiped 
We need marketing first. Someone needs to bring those new people in. We can make the game as easy and beginner-friendly as you like, the problem is, where will you FIND said beginners.
This is what you are missing:
Go might be a business for you, who is trying to be a professional Go teacher. As far as OGS is concerned, Go is a business for the one or two people that are the actual owners/developers. The rest are unpaid volunteers that are doing their hobby.
Here is the issue more analytically:
I won’t write all that again and I know that most people won’t click it, so I’ll only repeat this part:
" … Yes! We can all ignore all those things. Yes! We can pretend they are not there, but that won’t change them or make them go away. Thus, any promoting effort, just like any other problem that needs to be solved in the history of this world, needs to take into account the data, the facts and the reality that exists around the problem or simply fail to solve it."
We want to, but we do not have the time, money and skill for it. Case in point:
The only criteria we have for new recruits in the Greek Go Association is that they breathe air.
That doesn’t change the fact that they are still few and far between (if any). It is a problem of time, money and marketing skill on OUR end, but not a problem of elitism or anything of that sort.
On the topic, noone is barring entrance to anyone in OGS, as far as I know. The lack of promotion is the biggest issue.
4 Likes
I agree with all else, but
is not the real issue here. EGF is and they are 100% elitist and unwelcoming.
Personally, I miss interest in correspondence games. I don’t like to have to wait 2 or 3 days to get a move on a game, because there are people who likes to play 1000 simultaneos correspondence games. But, anyway, correspondence is there, will not go anywhere, same for long time games if a new option to matchmaking is added to play faster games.
Was me, and goog luck trying to fight against life. Is not only youtube adding shorts. People now has school, jobs, extraescolars and so on, a lot of hobbies, and so on… 50 years before there was not so many options for spare times, now it is, in our hands, a lot of things to do. Kids prefer to play LoL because is where their friends are, is hard to convince a kid to play a 2D game placing stones on a board, compared to spend their time on Starfield. If you give them the option to play a LoL match or a Go match, what do you think he will decide? Now, put in their hands, the option to play a 9x9 or 13x13 in the time he waits for bus.
If I take my kid and play a 5min game, he enjoys, if I play a 30min game, he gets bored. Is not his fault, has 9 years. On the other side is not difficult to understand that people have today less spare time than before, and try to optimize all they can, and for almost all Go community, this is just a hobby, to enjoy, some of us wants to impriove and study, others just want to play casually and enjoy. I prefer to play faster games, or 9x9/13x13 than not playing at all.
2 Likes