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