Some members in our go club say that they have to wait for 30 minutes to get matched up with someone on OGS, so they don’t really use online-go.com . What times of the day (please include timezone) are the busiest on OGS? And how long do you usually wait? Is there anything we can do other than adjust the opponent rank?
select everything
automatch will try to pair you with even opponent anyway
so game with different rank would be rare anyway
and also that’s why it slow sometimes
never wait for 30 minutes, you can try different method every 2 minutes
cancel and try to create custom game
users with different rank accept not often
if still no game for 2 minutes, cancel and try to accept game of someone else
I never wait for more than 5 minutes, and I use only 19x19 and no handicap
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I use this
and usually don’t wait more than 2-3 minutes, whatever the time of the day (European time).
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I even use exact time (5m + byoyomi), and usually find within 2min, 5 min at most.
European time as well, but it also depends on one’s level. There’s a deeper pool at high sdk than Dan level.
It might be better to just have the automatch expire after a certain amount of time.
Either have it expire and restart or just expire and you click to search again.
I would imagine that if you’re waiting 5-10 mins you will likely either forget that the automatch was running and do something else, maybe even accept an open challenge, or there’s a chance the connection just dropped or something and then maybe it’s not even matching anymore but the timer is still counting away.
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You can go search in the customs games proposals if you don’t get quickly an automatch, as an alternative
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I actually DID wait (in vain) for 30 minutes to get a game last month. It was in the evening, mid-week-ish around 8:30 pm European time and I only saw offers of like 5 minutes base time (maybe 10 at most) + byoyomi and this is simply too fast for my taste. So I created a custom game with 30 minutes base time + byoyomi in the rank range of 2-4 kyu (I was playing with another account which is ranked 3 kyu) to get an even game and… nothing. No one wanted to play. That was pretty frustating. Maybe my timing was bad, that no one wanted to start such a “long” game this “late”. Waiting for so long was an extreme case, but I did notice that whenever I looked in the evening, there were mostly games with short time settings offered and hardly any with a base time of more than 20 minutes maximum. At least for the level range I was looking at. Maybe I was unlucky, but it’s a something I noticed several times now, that faster time settings - unfortunately - seem to be en vogue at the moment. Would be happy to read some data that proves my perception to be wrong.
You might find the opposite, data that shows it is true.
I think recently when creating the new automatch the options were picked with data in mind on what the most popular options were.
there is a risk that game will continue for 350 moves
even if you make all moves instantly, opponent may use time 100%
so, 30s * 175 = 5 250 seconds
its 87 mins
so such game may take 1.5 hours without main time
with 30 minutes main time it becomes 2 hours
if you need time to think, it may be 3 hours+
so, accepting anything with main time more than 20 mins and byo-yomi more than 30s is dangerous
its not surprising that people prefer faster.
30s without main time may already be too much sometimes.
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This never happens in practice. When I play 20m+5x30s, games last about 45 minutes. So I assume games 30m+byo would almost always last less than 70 minutes.
yes, but what if? Would you just resign game where you are ahead?
(I prefer to make such situation impossible. Rank is not the reason)
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I sometimes have to do that. Quite rarely but it happens. It barely affects my rank at all since it’s so rare.
Another option is to pause the game and tell the opponent that he may unpause and claim victory, or resume the game later, as he prefers.
I’m happy to be proven wrong if it’s true. As I said, I might have had bad luck then and I do realise that 8.30 pm might be too late for many people to start such a probably long game. From experience, these games take like 70 minutes and I never had anything near that 3 hour mark that was posted above. I’d guess this might happen t the dan levels, but I’m still kinds far away from that and most people tend to play faster than me.
Yes, I’m also not surprised by this - everyone’s attention span is getting shorter every year, at least it seems so to me (and I do observe that in me as well…). It’s no wonder that this leads to people prefering shorter time settings. But short time settings are not helpful if you want to apply what you studied. Under time pressure, you’re bound to fall back to old mistakes that you wanted to actually unlearn.
EDIT: Sure, a game of 30 minutes with a byo of 3x30 seconds can lead to a very long game. But as I said before, below dan level it is EXTREMELY unlikely, I wouldn’t want to worry about such a small risk. Maybe I should try Fischer timing, this has probably a better image since the actual end of the game is easier to tell.
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I think having ability to play both 5s/move and 30s/move is better than only being able to play 30s/move
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Well attention span could be one aspect, but the other is probably that some people might prefer to fit two or three games into an hour rather than one long game.
It could be for improvement reasons or just for fun.
I think fun is partly the reason people like fast chess for instance. There’s an added adrenaline factor I would say to short clock settings, and probably the higher chance of mistakes when playing quickly makes the games dynamic.
But I do prefer a bit longer games, because I’m unhappy with myself for playing badly, especially on low time 
I think it’s definitely getting more popular in European, American and international go scenes both in amateur and pro tournaments.
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Compared to face to face games, internet go games tend to be in shorter time for various reasons but I think mostly because players fear more to engage in the same length. IMHO my own interpretation is that people trust each other less and so prefer faster settings as that they would accept otherwise. Most will then consider more the fun aspect as the serious and study one.
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True, that’s another valid explanation. AI unfortunately had that effect as well. I wouldn’t want to miss the good pointers I get after most games to improve my game (ever so slightly 
), but it can’t be denied that it probably influences the game in this way as well.
Probably one thing that would help to regularly and easily get more games with longer time settings is to find a group of like-minded people who want to improve by playing games with longer settings and start something like an online club meeting on a regular basis.
You may register with some league like OSR or explore the OGS groups.
Besides there is always the option to start a bunch of correspondence games.
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Sure, I can check out the groups. Correspondence, though, isn’t for me. But thanks for the suggestion!