OGS priorities

first let me say, that i understand the devs are working hard on OGS and i appreciate it! there have been changes to the site, the rating system was overhauled, servers were added… all good stuff.

as a consequence we are now (as far as i can tell) in a relatively stable phase. it is high time, in my opinion, that focus is directed from backend stuff to the “ever growing” to-do-list full of features and suggestions concerning gameplay, as some of the items on the list were promised years ago.
as a user, not a programmer, adding a rengosystem e.g. or incorporating some of the smaller suggestions is just far more tangible than any backend-betterment can ever be. give us some candy!

3 Likes

There’s a whole new learning centre just been added. Don’t really get much less back-end-systems than that… just happens to cater for people at the other end of the kyu scale :wink:

3 Likes

right :slightly_smiling_face:. credit where credit is due!

2 Likes

This is a difficult topic for me :smiley:

you know consciously I know (apart from some very generous and welcomed github “donations”) it is all basically done by one, quite underpaid guy, and I think it is actually very admirable and in fact “correct” that he is so focused on the core performance and stuff, without giving in to peer pressure and spending a lot of time on some, while flashy, not so important stuff that will never actually be used anywhere that much as the basic go (for which the site is built).

But in my heart I am with you <3 I never cared too much about rengo :smiley: but a proper one-color go implementation or a hidden move would be very tasty :smiley:

2 Likes

Indeed. Most of the features I’d like to see on OGS are rather useless. No one really cares about rengo, same for one color go. It should be considered very carefully, what OGS needs, and what’s cheap to implement.

If my opinion mattered at all, I’d advise focusing on community building features, like automatic chat notifications for strong games to get more people to watch and discuss. I keep hearing how good kibitzing on KGS was back then, on OGS kibitz is only strong when there’s a site-wide notification. Or maybe like a public bulletin board where everyone can post links to streams and stuff. Maybe some other stuff, like better support for relaying games.

But even these things that I consider important probably won’t change anything. Remember when glicko was introduced? It was a big change, but did it really change anything for 90% of the players?

Frankly, OGS is awesome as it is. It’s hard to improve when website is already that good. Most of further improvements to online go probably can only be done by players now, not by one dev.

Too bad I and a lot of other players are rather useless in improving online go environment. I can’t even get myself to play regularly. And making something even a little great isn’t easy. So sad.

8 Likes

There are some (I assume) simple tweaks that the community has been asking for for years, such as removing (or giving the option to remove) the maintime countdown. It’s been frustrating seeing this particular one go untouched for so long considering how it’s such a common complaint. Just today Korean twitch streamer hanayeol tried OGS for the first time in a long time, and went on a rant about this issue. Batts is also known to dislike it, in fact, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t find it annoying.

My other main concern is that back end problems such as this timeout issue: Game lost by timeout with 3 seconds left on the timer. · Issue #687 · online-go/online-go.com · GitHub aren’t being given priority. It’s the biggest reason I don’t play on this server more often. It happens to me regularly and always makes me so angry I vow never to play on OGS again. I usually stick to that vow for a few months at least. I know OGS takes a lot of inspiration from Lichess. Could you imagine this issue on their server? It simply wouldn’t be acceptable and the chess community would abandon them very quickly. I understand hyper blitz time settings aren’t as common with Go, but that’s just not a good enough excuse. Compare this to Asian servers like fox or tygem where you can have 300 ping and still play with 1 millisecond left on the clock, and it makes it hard to imagine OGS being taken seriously by players who didn’t start here.

This has made it harder for me to complain, I appreciate the work that’s been done for the community. OGS is a special server with some amazing features, but these are just my honest frustrations and the things that prevent me playing here more, so I think it’s important to voice them in the hopes that something can be done.

1 Like

The option to disable voice countdown has been present for some time, or do I misunderstand?

Not that the rest of the post does not have some truth in it, I just have nothing to say to that :smiley: as I personally do not understand the technical side…

1 Like

We can remove the voice countdown entirely, but we can’t remove just the maintime countdown.

Edit: The issue isn’t just the voice countdown for maintime, it’s the maintime countdown at all, whether a beep or just displayed on the stones.

The OGS kibitz situation is awful compared to KGS, for a number of simple design reasons.

  1. Visibility - When you log on (KGS), you immediately see the highest ranked players’ active games. OGS shows you… a large page with your own games. If you’re not playing any games, it shows you a lot of blank space.
  2. Overview - If you want to observe a game on KGS, you just pick from the names, ranks, board sizes, move # or observer count. Notice: observer count. If you want to chat, this game with 20 people observing might be your best bet. On OGS, you get too much information and with suboptimal emphasis (whole boards, player names are really small in comparison, no observer count). It’s also not entirely clear to me how the games are ordered. It doesn’t seem to be by rank alone… very unclear.
  3. Culture - On KGS, there’s (or was) a kibitz culture. Most people would just join the highest ranked games and chat away. On OGS, people only join a game if it’s on stream or if someone linked it in chat. I believe it’s because the game list isn’t the first thing you see.
  4. Chat - On KGS, everyone sees the chat window when they login. There’s a MOTD and some people might advertise interesting games to watch. There are always as many people passively looking at the chat as there are players in that room. On OGS, at most 100 people are in the English chat room.
15 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.