I recall having various oddities trying to use OGS puzzles on my phone. But to be fair I’ve not even looked for ages so might be better now and I’ve just not noticed.
I generally like the puzzles section and there’s some great stuff in there that I link to friends I have tried to teach Go. (Mark’s beginner stuff is )
I’ve tried to use it to make my own private collection from interesting things I’ve seen in books, but I find it’s a bit cumbersome to use, hard to say exactly why. So my answer for the last question is not an option in the poll, like easier management of creating puzzles, exporting, uploading SGFs (Go Grinder style?) etc
It’d be nice to have a more sophisticated tagging system, eg. a tag to indicate classical problems, a tag for 20th C. problems like the chomego, a tag for explicitly original compositions, a tag for problems derived from game positions, etc.
I didn’t look into much detail, but from what I’ve seen, I think it needs more curation. It’s a mishmash of different levels and different qualities of puzzles.
I realize ofcourse that good curation of puzzle annotations would take a huge amount of time, so it is what it is.
I like how Black to play did it. But that’s a 1 person project and i think he spends a lot of time on the curation of that collection, so it’s easier to have more consistency.
I gave some weird answers because my usage is weird too.
In the last weeks I did puzzles daily thanks to @Atorrante’s thread, but it wasn’t my habit to solve puzzles.
My main issue is that I can’t find a habit that suits me: ideally I would solve a couple puzzles a day, but I can’t do it by myself because I forget about it and also because when I start solving puzzles I can’t stop: if there’s a series of tenths of puzzles I can’t just try two and leave the rest… I continue the series until I am too bored or too tired, and it’s bad!
I enjoyed Atorrante’s thread when it was suggesting few puzzles a day. When they became more than a handful I fell in my bad habit: try to solve them all and get tired of it.
My ideal OGS feature would be one puzzle a day in the notification box. Or maybe a custom setting to choose how frequently to get one (number per day, week or so…)
I think there should be some way to give feedback, like goproblems.com has. Too often I see mistakes in the problem design that would need to be addressed by the author, but there is no obvious way to start a conversation.
Of course there’s no guarantee that the user would still be active on the site anymore, or that they would respond to the message or actively update their puzzles after getting feedback, but still.
Also I suppose the chat isn’t a great place to share variations, demo board might be better. Better still would be to be able to copy and paste variations to and from puzzles ( I don’t think that’s a thing)
I like the puzzles that play out mistakes, instead of just saying “Incorrect”. Sometimes I’m not convinced that my answer was wrong and end up unsatisfied.
Of course it’s extremely hard to plan for all possible mistakes. Are there any good puzzle sites/apps that use AI to demonstrate failure? Seems like for most tsumego it shouldn’t take a very deep search.
OGS don’t has list of all problems not separated by collection, and problems don’t have automatically generated difficulty level. (creators place kyu levels too randomly)
I already solved all problems that are not too hard for me on these two sites.
OGS needs sort at least inside collections.
I’m afraid to start solve these lists of puzzles with RANDOM difficulty.
I think the main thing would be be implement a “gamification” of the puzzles, like lichess has.
In lichess, you have a puzzle rating, just like your rating in any other chess variant. And you get that rating up by solving more puzzles, which lichess gives them to you based on your current ranking.
As soon as you solve one, another one pops up, so they’re quite addicting.
Having that sort user experience (instead of a page full of puzzle collections grouped by level), would be a massive improvement. Also, the system keeps track of which ones you solved, so you don’t have to remember/bookmark which puzzles have you done, and which ones are new.
goproblems.com does this too and I agree that it is very addictive. And it forces you to solve properly because if you are lazy and just guess, then you get it wrong and your rating goes down and you get stupid easy puzzles again, which is super annoying!!
Another thing that lichess does, is that they have something called puzzle storm. It’s basically where you get three minutes to go through as many problems as you can, within the time limit.
Yes, that one is interesting too.
But I think it’s better to focus on the regular puzzles first (maybe it’s my biased opinion, since I don’t play blitz).
The coolest feature that they have is that the puzzles are automatically generated from games that people played on the site. And you can see the actual game, and how it ended.
The Puzzle feature on Lichess and Chess.com are often one of my favorites.
It’s not always something to improve your gaming skills, but it gives you a certain view of the game, that I like.
The only exception to this I have found in the Go World is https://blacktoplay.com/
a similar feature in OGS, would be a nice addition to this platform
OGS Puzzles contains almost 30.000 puzzles. A lot of them are really worth your time, but they are often hard to find.
Compared to other go puzzle server OGS Puzzles is not very user friendly.
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