Hello!
My name is Kip Coleman. I was recently hired as the Esports Head Coach for Centralia College in Centralia, Washington. I would love to build a team of go players and include them in our esports organization. I wonder if OGS would be willing to be an official esports platform?
I’m not sure who to reach out to, but I figured I’d post here and see. If you have any recommendations of other ways I should reach out, I’d appreciate that, too.
Thank you!
I am not officially affiliated with OGS, just another forum poster and occasional code contributor, but my question is what makes for an “official” esports platform? I think this is a neat idea, but I don’t yet understand what OGS would actually need to do other than say “sure, have fun”.
What would this mean, in practice?
Some competitive events use OGS as a server to play, or to share a game played in person (by replicating the moves on an OGS board as it goes), but as far as I know this never required any specific involvement or organization on OGS’ side.
Not sure if I’m misunderstanding that dude but to me it seems that he wants OGS to officially declare that OGS is an esports platform.
I’d assume he needs OGS to be an official esports platform for it to be considered for his program.
I would reach out to @anoek either on the forums, on the main site anoek or potentially you can email contact@online-go.com
Or with the tag, maybe he swings by and sees it also 
I hope you’re aware of this and are strategically stretching the definition, but go is not an esport. Esports are video games like League of Legends, Counter strike, etc.
I doubt there’s just one definition.
mental activity which, through … competitions … facilitates mental development
What about online go?
There was
Yeah, I guess they also stretched the definition strategically, in their attempt at sportswashing.
Coleki, I will put my vote on record as officially being in favor of this proposal.
Also, I want to note that we have fallen a tad behind schedule in our ongoing 100 games match, as our last one was 9 years ago and we still have 93 more to complete. Hopefully we can schedule the next one soon.
@coleki you should get in touch with the custodians of the OGS, @anoek and @GreenAsJade
(P.S. I realized that anoek was already tagged, my apologies)
Thanks everyone for your feedback! I don’t have a specific definition of “official esports platform” in mind, but in general I wonder if OGS architecture is robust enough to support reliable, realtime, and accurate results (which I believe it is), and also if the admins / devs would be open to the idea of hosting esports events.
Also, chess is an esport, so why not go?
Absolutely - OGS has been the server of choice for the AGA-EGF transatlantic tournaments for a number of years.
I can’t speak to what their appetite is, but could you clarify what this entails? Big difference between “can we hold an event using your website?” and “can you build new infrastructure to support this type of event?”
Also +1 to @shinuito 's suggestion to reach out directly if it’s closer to the latter.
You may also want to look at the tournament infrastructure that is already in place. There are already third-party organizations that use OGS to host tournaments including with e.g. cash prizes.
Yeah absolutely! There has been many events held on ogs in the past, for example, european go federation has used ogs for years now to host numerous of professional tournaments, leagues, and championships ^^
So if you plan on hosting an event, you can use ogs as a platform for those games or game relays ^^
Go would have the same answer as Chess, but whether Chess is an esport is debatable.
Esport refers to competitive video games. You could say that, when played on a computer, Chess is technically a video game and thus qualifies as an esport. It certainly has already been called one on this basis several times.
But you could also hold the view that Chess is the same game whether it’s played on a board or on a screen, and that it is therefore rather artificial to call one an “esport” and the other a board game when it is exactly the same game (by opposition to standard esport games, which have no physical equivalent). Such a broad definition of esport could jeopardize the distinctive nature, and ultimately the usefulness, of this notion.
Although that event moved from KGS to OGS due a particularly bad case of lag affecting the game outcome (and poor sportsmanship about it), I recall there were also technical difficulties in some of the OGS-hosted matches.
Not to say OP shouldn’t organise his event on OGS. The whole thread seems pretty weird to me anyway with this meaningless pursuit of “official” moniker.
More and less. Very fast blitz may be only possible online?
Even bullet OTB is quite possible (and fun).
