Green dots not as expected

[benjito]

I thought these meant someone is waiting for me. Why do i have to wait many seconds or minutes sometimes? Does anyone else experience this?

[GreenAsJade]

Could be a bug, but also could be that the one game that made it green was taken as you went to get it.

I wonder if there should be two such to have a green dot?

I’m not aware of what the actual implementation is…

[benjito]

@GreenAsJade

could be that the one game that made it green was taken as you went to get it.

Shouldnt the dot turn to grey as I wait for the next though?

[GreenAsJade]

Yeah, I guess so eh?

I wonder how often they are updated?

@anoek ?

[jlt]

The same happened to me a while ago

Automatch updates 2024-12-10

Despite the green dot, I had to wait about 1 minute to get a game. [a]

and anoek answered

@anoek

If there is a large rank difference I do defer accepting a match until a certain amount of time has passed to give a chance of a more even match coming along. I’ll have to ponder whether that makes sense anymore, and/or if there’s a way to communicate that better.

[Atorrante]

@benjito

Does anyone else experience this?

Yes.

(Maybe rank restriction prevents a game from being accepted?)

[PRHG]

Will the green dot still appear if someone of a similar rank is also searching for a game, but one of you has blocked the other?

[Eugene]

It’s a good thought.

The “Help” for this says

The highlighted dot indicates that there are players currently online who are looking for a game with compatible settings

You would expect “compatible settings” to include “rank restrictions”, but I could see how it might not.

[benjito]

I was curious about this too. Seems like another case where it should not be green, but unclear whether that’s considered in practice.

[benjito]

I want to add a little color to the feedback:

First, I think the green dot is great. It’s awesome to have this binary signal which can get me a game much faster. I’d say this is like 75-85% of the time.

I am the type of player who is not super picky about my game settings. If I could select “give me any live 9x9 game as fast as you can, I don’t care about time settings”, I would select that. However, since I do need to select a single time setting, there is an opportunity cost in selecting one. This means that a green indicator which will always* get me a game immediately is super valuable.

* I realize we will never fully eliminate race conditions, but I don’t think these are the norm.

On top of that, we don’t have much visibility into why the green indicator might not mean an immediate game. But I will try to address the cases discussed in this thread.

• race condition: this will never be fully resolved, but at least the indicator should turn off if the game has been taken in a race.
• rank restrictions: indicator should not be green
• blocked user: indicator should not be green
• waiting for a better match:
  • IMO we shouldn’t wait longer than 10-30s for a better match. A minute is excessive if I’ve already agreed to some variability.
  • If we do keep this behavior, maybe a yellow dot would convey that it’s not exactly “ready to go”?

[shinuito]

@jlt

and anoek answered

@anoek

If there is a large rank difference I do defer accepting a match until a certain amount of time has passed to give a chance of a more even match coming along. I’ll have to ponder whether that makes sense anymore, and/or if there’s a way to communicate that better.

@benjito

waiting for a better match:

• IMO we shouldn’t wait longer than 10-30s for a better match. A minute is excessive if I’ve already agreed to some variability.

Yeah I think it’s worth considering if this is really worthwhile and what’s the reasoning for and against it. Is the server trying to say it knows better than the user on who they should play?

Basically do you trust a players judgement that when they say they’re ok to play ± 2 ranks, and you give them a +2 or -2 rank match quickly, then they’ll be content?

Some considerations

Level dependent: like if around 25, 24, 23kyu etc there was matching issues, where playing a 25kyu might lead to large variablility (with the way it’s currently grouped) then sure maybe add in a slight wait if you don’t want to discourage them from playing with bad matches. If they’re low kyu or dan, maybe they’ve played go enough to let them decide?

A game vs no game: If we’re not at a critical mass whereby the delay for a better match is like +10s, then it’ll probably simply annoy people. Maybe they’ll refresh or cancel and requeue, or just stop queueing with the automatch. Maybe just offering a game quickly is better than no game at all in some cases?

Pointless parameters?: Lets suppose you’re already at a rank and/or time of day where it’s difficult to get an even game. If you allow someone to adjust the search to find more matches like ± x ranks, but that only kicks in after a delay, is this really a useful parameter? It’s not necessarily speeding up your game search like you’d expect, it’s just creating a fallback case where maybe after a certain time you might be more likely get a game.

[Groin]

Maybe the delay could vary according to the quantity of offers (shorter when there are many/ let’s say 5s and getting gradually to 10s)?

[mikhail.trusfus]

Maybe an ignore list prevents a game from being accepted?

[PRHG]

@benjito

If I could select “give me any live 9x9 game as fast as you can, I don’t care about time settings”, I would select that.

This is currently a feature (unless I’ve misunderstood what you meant):

In the top right of the image, you can set it to “Exact”, “Flexible”, or “Multiple”. I often have multiple 9x9 time settings selected.

[benjito]

What how did I miss that!

Okay, I think this is all I need. Accurate green dot is a “nice to have”, but I don’t think it is as big of an issue if I can just select multiple settings.