I am also quite fond of the simplicity of settings in GoQuest. There, you go to the site and get a game within seconds, with somewhat reasonable settings (a bit on the fast side for me, but usable on 9×9 and 13×13). This is a big contrast to OGS, KGS, IGS where you have to actively seek out an opponent.
I also think that it is quite convenient to decide on
one time format. I’d use Fischer time throughout, but people might be partial to japanese byoyomi.
one rule set. They are mostly equivalent anyway, so use whatever is most convenient. I’d prefer NZ plus button, but whatever.
one blitz, one live, one correspondence setting for the three standard board sizes (a 3×3 grid)
automatch with close ranks and full handicap (maybe a bit randomized)
Then the experience for a user is:
click »new game«
click on the preferred speed and size
be matched and playing
And this is not the same as the current state at all.
Maybe not misplaced if the default board size is 19x19 and it’s your first game…
[I don’t actually know what the defaults are but as a beginner I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want the “standard” default, I’ll be looking for beginner or easy mode]
flovo, you’re thinking like a computer. For a person, it’s perfectly natural to try and read these sliders since the website is showing you them. If website is showing you something, then it’s considered important enough to be shown it to you. Of course, a person eventually will just accept them, but it’s kinda taxing on your brain. And some settings are suspicious, like I found presence of six different rulesets suspicious.
Ideally you do hide all unnecessary stuff under advanced button. To make it perfectly clear that you don’t need to read any of it. So a person just clicks on it, sees a wall of text and closes.
One problem is that OGS overrides defaults, and sometimes it doesn’t. And in the end you have to check settings anyway. I imagine a button “save as default” in advanced settings would help.
And like this, maybe we don’t need two separate systems. If everything is just shown in a list to players, and you can accept games, create games, and games also match automatically between each other. But this can be a little difficult.
Another proposal on defaults. Remember how we made preset chat phrases so you can fake politeness without putting in any efforts? That but for games.
You have presets for different games. “Fast 9x9”, “Correspondence 19x19” in a list. You start with N most popular OGS options. You click on them and seek that game. But you can edit, add and delete these presets. So once you made a preset you like, you can reuse it without seeing dreadful custom game menu. And this way we can make custom game menu even a little more complicated (with min and max possible main time etc.) since it will be rarely seen.
And here’s a nice part: you can share presets. You can code it in a string and sent to someone and they can add preset from a string. This way when you make a tournament you just have a preset that can be declared somewhere so you don’t have to worry about entering settings correctly, you just copy it. And opponent can check that you entered correct preset but they don’t have to compare all the values manually, because we’ll show hashes of each preset. You just need to compare hash to see that the settings are correct. And it’s not just hash, it’s human readable hash. So each preset will have a hash name like “Flying Red Bull”. There will be less mistakes.
