I did say nothing about ranked and not ranked games
but this is nonsense
We are not here to measure our real life rank in serious tournaments, I never played on real board. We are here to play online and have fun. My rank will just be always outdated if I will not be able to play ranked on settings that I like. How I am supposed to talk to my opponents without ability to share variations in chat?
And I seriously doubt that analysis tool able to give significantly more power. It only fixes stupid simple errors like ladder. Bots have problems with ladder but they are very strong. There will be strong people with aphantasia who sometimes will lose their games for nonsensical reason and no one will be happy to win in such case.
Analysis may be useful to train yourself during games - it may be boring to do review after.
Your view is completely respectable , same as someone who wants to exclude this analysis tool.
So the main recurrent problem is going to fix standards which will never please everyone.
Debates about analysis mode can probably be discussed in another thread, so we could keep on point for ideas to make game matching quicker (custom, auto etc).
There was a lot of discussion and no consensus last time it came up. One reason in particular, because Correspondence, Live and Blitz are very different.
I use(d) my OGS rank to calibrate handicap when playing the local Go club (now Corona shut that down). But at any rate, I see your position and Iāll resignā¦ for now 
AFAIK, aphantasia would not incur a functional deficit in playing Go, but rather the mental imagery associated with reading a sequence would not be there like it is for some/most people. Do you have any source or such on this? Iāve read, for example, that aphantasia does not lead to worse performance on mental object rotation tasks.
When you think about it, two users searching for a game - one using automatch and the other one creating a custom game - almost want the same thing: They both want to play a game with specific settings. (And of course both want to find such a game as quickly as possible.)
The only difference between the two is that one player is more specific in the settings of the game than the other. And in case of the custom game the player is not necessarily more specific because he wants to but instead because he has to be more specific! The UI just doesnāt give him the possibility to create a more open game request.
The player creating the custom game might be very open to all kind of settings but currently he just canāt express that properly.
Actually, if creating a custom game would enable you to specify settings as āno preferenceā, āpreferā and ārequireā, you could already express the same kind of search as you can with the automatch option.
So consolidating the custom game options and the automatch options into one common place where you can specify your game settings and then throwing all the submitted game searches of all the players into one pool and match them against each other would be ideal it seems. Allowing a user to store some presets for game searches - like what is currently available via the automatch options āBlitzā, āNormalā and āCorrespondenceā - would certainly continue to make sense.
This would free the user from closely watching a constantly changing (and moving) list of custom game requests, understanding what all these time settings mean (ā4m+ 30s up to 5mā, ā15m+5x30sā, ā+ 1d/2ā, ā+2x12sā, ā¦ (actually to this day for some of them I have no clue what they mean!)) and try to hit the right (and very small!) āAcceptā button in time. Overall an experience that can be really painful for example if you are a beginner to the game and/or to the server or if you are in your 70s for example and consuming all that information and clicking a small button might take you a bit longer than a few seconds already.
I think there are many people who think that they have aphantasia when in fact they just have weak imagination.
I definitely have imagination, but its nowhere stable enough to read ladder. I was 5k when trained hard, but now I just want to have fun sometimes and donāt lose because stupid ladder.
https://idex.github.io/go-rank-survey/go-survey-results
Ranks are different on different servers and places anyway. Difference is bigger than what is possible to get with analysis.
And its not clear how to use your time. (Iām talking about limited time, 1minute/move for example) Its strategy in itself. I think on most moves its just less efficient to bruteforce something with analysis. Life and death rarely happens. Usually you need to feel fuseki flow instead - analysis will only distract you. You will play worse if you will use it on every move.
This I very much agree with! Beyond the discussion on what should count for ranked or not, I think it makes perfect sense to have broad categories of game settings (like blitz, slow, correspondance), and within those categories you can narrow or broaden the search range, with as you say, prefer/require/whatevz. Then itād be easy for the ranking algorithm to know what kind of rank category your game should be placed in, and you get the freedom to choose your settings. And all these games, IMO, should try to match with each other, and the custom games list should only be for particular kinds of games like teaching games or such. Then you make a custom game.
I donāt know if aphantasia, or weak visual imagination, would be a negative on your reading ability. Though you might not visualize your reading as for example I do, your brain is still very much able to do it though. AFAIK, aphantasia would mean that your brain do the reading task differently. For example, this study on mental rotation, show that while aphantastics use longer time on mental rotation, they are more accurate, than controls. Could be a speed accuracy tradoff at play here, meaning theyāre pretty much equal (if thatās the case): Mental rotation performance in aphantasia | JOV | ARVO Journals
In other words, donāt think of it as a handicap IMO, more that the strategy of visualizing moves on the board as an overlay, would perhaps be bad advice for you.
Indeed, there are huge variations, but when playing against someone whoās a 7 kyu on the real board, I can say, Iām a 14 kyu on OGS. āAh okā that person will say (if they play on OGS), Iāll give you 5 handicap because Iām 9 kyu on OGS." - then if I win this game, perhaps Iām 12-13 kyu on the real board. Maybe. But the OGS rank is useful in some cases.
On then on this real board you can ask if you can use the analysis tool 
I think ladders donāt get given enough credit for how tricky they are to imagine on the board. I think people say theyāre simple because 90+% of the reading is simple/basic, itās all ataris. Itās not hard to see where the ladder goes, following a diagonal line trick say.
I do find it very hard though to visualize what happens when it gets near another stone near the end of the ladder
- which is the atari that moved the chain of stones this way
- which laddering stones exist and donāt exist now that Iām trying to patch the ladder together with other existing stones
- how many liberties does each laddering stone have at the moment
- if you need to atari an extra time to shift the ladder over a step or two and then continue the ladder
etc
Iām not sure I believe in the whole ādonāt use tricks, just read itā approach of Kageyama. (much like a lot of other things Kageyama says at the start of the book)
Just so Iām clear- does Auto-match currently pull games from the custom list, oderā¦?
In other words, if I click automatch, and someone creates a custom game that falls within certain constraints (rank_difference: +/- 3 stones, handicap: on, time_settings: not insane), will we get matched?
My understanding from this discussion is that the answer is no and this is the whole problem.
Thanks for clarifying. Yeah I feel like there are two debates happening here-
- āMore people should use automatchā vs. āMore people should use customā
- āCustom and automatch should be the same poolā vs. āThey shouldnāt (current behavior)ā
I sense there is more agreement on the second topic. What do yāall think?
- Auto and Custom matches should be compatible
- Auto and Custom should be completely separate pools
0 voters
- More people should use Automatch
- More people should use Custom match
- The ratio of Automatch/Custom is perfect the way it is
0 voters
The assumption for the second poll being that the total number of matches created remains the same. (Obviously I think more people should use both custom and automatches 
)
I answered āseparatedā on the second question, though I do think itās a step in the right direction to pool them 
My ideal scenario would be:
- Custom matches do not count for ranked
- Automatch counts for rank
- Automatch has āpresetsā (use the prefer/require/whatever, rank range, timing range) to your liking, within certain categories (e.g. everything below 1m +10s(5) is blitz, 1 - 20m is normal, 20m+ is long, 3d+ is correspondence)
- Automatch āpresetsā may not allow score estimation and analysis tools, but may allow automatic handicap. Komi is automatic
- Automatch āpresetsā can be used for tournaments/ladders/etc.
- Custom matches are veritable free for all when it comes to settings, including go variants (if they can be implemented)
My reasoning is twofold: itās easier for beginners and it streamlines match finding.
But, since several of these points are contested in the discussion above, I think pooling custom and auto is a step in the right direction.
It would be nice if we could come up with a realistic system that would work both with custom challenges and automatch. So you could make specific challenge, and could hit one button to get āstandardā game. And you could see all the players waiting for games, including custom and automatch, and accept them.
I donāt see that much problem with matchmaking algorithm pairing everyone according to the rules they chose. But I see difficulties with user interface.
Make customs games unranked: I donāt think thatās what OGS players wants, well at least a big part of them. They even may in consequence dislike OGS so I am strongly against, whatever the reason that could be based on.
This thread is to get more players (by getting more games), not to lose them.
Just remind that unranked are not so popular and not only on OGS, even for newbies who quickly opt to play ranked.
Chosing how to play is an important feature which should not be penalized against automatic pairing.
For the pro or anti this or that there is still enough work to fix the standards of the automatch, then the logical idea is to be able to have the automatch offers in the customs, and fitting customs in the automatch. Easy.
And a perfect adƩquation will be if most of customs can fit in automatch but this is not a necessity. Just an interesting goal to care about. Afterall if someone want a blitz with analyse tool, let him do.
When fixing the automatch categories itās not just to offer a large and attractive panel of options, the more you create the less will fit together, so yeah you need quite a standardisation. Talking about that dividing matter of analysis tool, you canāt avoid to take the most popular instead of wanting to push people in a way they appreciate less ( which I dunno which one is) but I donāt think it really matters that much as itās not a so convenient tool in a live game time setting, more a question of saving his face. And there are some other features you lose when disabling the tool (in-game communication, Score estimatorā¦) as side effects too.
But ok it makes your games look cleaner. I let other fight on this and take part in a poll if any.
Myself I donāt use that automatch much because live games are too blitzy for my taste and my connection too.
Thereās a bit of a network effect here. I prefer automatch, but I often play custom because waiting minutes for a game is a bit depressing. I imagine there are many people who feel the way I do, even if we are in the minority.
What if clicking auto-match, on top of whatever it does in the background looking for pairings, also created a custom game request of the same settings, so that all people looking for a game could be seen. And then whichever resolves first cancels the other.
If it got games quicker, Iād like that.
If this were a much bigger server, Iād prefer the two not mix (just as @sevenius.nilsen said), but pragmatically, it is a good idea for now.
The goal of a website designer should be to figure out what people need and what will help them meet their goals. What people want is a bit irrelevant and can often lead to bad website design and way too many features.
Iām not sure the best solution, but Iād recommend anoek figure out what the best end result for players would be in relation to their desires for visiting OGS and make design decisions along those lines (with a bias toward simplicity and assuming people will take the path of least resistance).