The ladders on OGS are only for correspondence games.
I think those of us who only play live games would appreciate ladders for live games.
One way to do this would be to let the creator of a ladder specify a standard time limit for that ladder’s games.
There’s one problem: a challenge should only be accepted if the players can agree a time to play. Maybe a player could state times available to play in the player profile, then possible challengers could check that before challenging.
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The problem is that a fundamental of a ladder is that you have to accept a challenge - otherwise people camp in the high spots, as you said.
But you can’t force someone to accept a live game - they may be asleep.
How would you police this? What minimum availability? etc…
Instead of trying to “police” anything, rely on the basic goodwill of ladder participants. But a simple mechanism to keep the games flowing could be something like this:
When a challenge is issued, the challenger and the person challenged have some time (e.g. 5 days) in which to agree a time to play. When they’ve agreed a time, one of them posts that time and the other confirms it.
If they can’t or won’t agree a mutually acceptable time within the time limit, then they both go down one rank in the ladder if that is possible (i.e. if not already at the bottom).
The time allowed to negotiate a playing time could be extended if one player already has unscheduled challenges.
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If you don’t play any live ladder game for 24 hours your position decreases - automatically. So only active player will be able to be king of the hill.
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I think this is tending toward just a live arena like they have at lichess. Win as many games as you can in a timeframe and top the table, you get paired with the active people near your position.
I think there is another thread about live ladders
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This seems to have some legs, but I’m still not clear on how the mechanics works so that a person can’t camp at the top and avoid serious contenders?
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You can’t challenge someone too high from you - so all challengers are serious enough.
Everyone have to turn on “live ladder” mode manually - only then someone will be able to challenge you. There is list of available at the moment players. “live ladder” mode disables automatically when game started or you go offline. So it works like custom games. But you can’t cancel after game started.
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I think the ‘live ladder’ mode makes sense, it’d be useful to just auto-reject challenges rather than manually cancelling them.
If it’s to be like the current ladder system, one could have it that if you’re online and someone challenges you but you cancel or have live-ladder off, then they automatically move ahead of you. (That could end up being a bit chaotic though.)
That also seems to make sense, maybe it can bump you down a good few places, so that inactive players drop down fast, rather than only a handful of places at a time.
Another option could be to make it like a daily/few-days/weekly ladder, which auto-clears everyone after a certain point so that inactive players get dropped out, and players interested rejoin.
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Maybe in the ladder show amount of games that player played (in the ladder)? Numbers on the right of player are not clear.
This could be awesome, maybe. For those who don’t know, an arena is a tournament that lasts 30m, 1h, or 2h. You get points for wins (and half points for draws in chess). Automatch pairs you with new opponents quickly and automatically. Because you get points for winning and can be paired as soon as you win, there’s incentive to play fast and finish games quickly, as well as resign lost games to get on to the next attempt quickly. All arena tournaments have blitz or speedy time controls. Some marathon arenas can last more than four hours, I think.
Here’s what the schedule looks like on lichess:
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I was thinking about how we could organize a live arena-style tournament ourselves and had this idea.
Participants join a group and send out challenges to each other during a designated time. The organizer tracks games and awards each participant:
- 1/2 point for each game played (awarded just once for each distinct opponent)
- 1 point for each win
So that encourages everyone to challenge everyone else, with a bias toward playing even games and wrapping up quickly. Stronger players could even take on multiple games at once for an extra challenge.
Has anyone tried something like this before? I guess it’s kind of like the Western Dan Challenge but on a shorter timescale.
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Is this still being explored? I just thought that having a ladder for live games would be good, though I’m not sure what’s the best way to implement it. My idea is that people can just go into the ladder and request game at anytime, and if other people are also doing the same they can just play. This way it makes it easy for people to find games. If having a separate ladder is difficult, maybe we can combine both ladders and the players in the ladder can choose to play live or correspondence.
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I’ve been thinking about this recently.
One idea I have is to somehow create a tournament-like view of live/blitz automatch games. I.e., rather than create another competing environment for finding games, make the current one (automatch) more engaging.
Another idea is that for a live/blitz ladder, maybe it’d be okay if “logging off” means you drop out and start from scratch when you start playing again. A live ladder could be more ephemeral than a correspondence ladder.
Combining these two ideas could be interesting too.
EDIT: this thread is new to me though. There are other good ideas in here too.
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Instead of ranking the ladder simply by win/lose, can we rank by points instead? And maybe we can create different leagues like they do in starcraft ladders. This way you will be matched with a player of similar strength and there wouldn’t be sandbagging. It would be fun for the viewers too.
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Can you explain how StarCraft leagues work?
I’ve never played it myself but I’ve seen others play. Here are the details: Battle.net Leagues - Liquipedia - The StarCraft II Encyclopedia
Below is the summary:
Skill Rating: Your performance is tracked by a hidden number called MMR (Matchmaking Rating). Winning increases your MMR, losing decreases it.
Leagues and Divisions: You’re placed into a League (Bronze, Silver, Gold, etc.) based on your MMR. Leagues are further broken down into smaller divisions.
Matchmaking: The game tries to pair you with other players who have a similar MMR for balanced matches.
Moving Up and Down: Winning consistently and being at the top of your division can get you promoted to a higher league. Losing a lot can lead to demotion.
Grandmaster: The top 200 players in a region make up the Grandmaster league, and their MMR is visible.
Playstrategy https://playstrategy.org/, which is a lichess fork, has the possibility for an arena for go games. It’s the main form of tournament there, and there’s weekly, monthly ones etc.
You can read about the arenas
The thing is we have a rating system, and we have “divisions” which are go ranks.
If you want you can view the divisions as TPK, DDK, SDK, Dan etc
The further split of those division is just the normal go ranking.
It doesn’t seem like it would offer anything new really unless you just split ladders by ranks and not let people freely challenge each other as you can now.
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It would probably make it more difficult to go up the ladder and reduce the “luck” component. Now you can go up just by winning a single game. For live games, it would allow players of similar ranks to be matched rather than the player at the bottom of the ladder matched with the player at the top.
Anyway, league is just one of the methods. The whole point is still to have ladders for live games and not just correspondence games.
But people can just use an automatch or custom challenge to match with similar ranked players. It’s not super clear what the ladder component of it is helping in this case. What is its function?
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