The vast majority of my games on OGS are private correspondence bot games. It appears the new matchmaking UI makes these impossible.
Currently the bots are not accepting correspondence games at all, with the error “The max time is out of the acceptable range allowed by this bot”. Previously there was no issue with correspondence. (Edit: it appears that all Fischer games are rejected, not just correspondence)
It’s also important to me that I can play unranked, as I don’t want my rank to be polluted with results from bot games.
Update: Someone else reported that the handicap setting is broken for bot games. I confirmed that handicap is still applied even when set as disabled, which is a bug.
Regarding custom unranked bot games, I’ll ponder on that a bit more - in the mean time a work around would be to directly challenge the bot, that’ll have all of the options you are used to, including the unranked option.
I was the one that reported the handicap issue. There is another wrinkle I just found. It isn’t just that handicap is forced on the game but that even after you place the handicap stones the bot will not play and let the time run out. Something is broken there.
Do you have the same problem with no-handicap games? Does it happen on all bots? I think there is a new issue with some of the bots (perhaps the entire series of flower-named bots) where they never play a move. This happens even when I send a custom challenge, so it’s maybe not related to the new matchmaking UI.
Seems that the site is just generally broken after the recent changes, which most people don’t seem to like anyway. Don’t fix what’s not broken - lesson there!!
I responded here before I realized that they were down on OGS as well. I had assumed an API call was the issue but after learning it was on OGS I decided to wait and see what happens.
Any updates on the bot issues? I think I saw a couple of them working now.
Towards this goal, it seems we can just look at the bot game histories for large numbers of annulled timeouts, rather than actually starting dozens of games. For some (example) virtually all games are failing, though for others (example) some games work and others don’t, and I can’t see a clear pattern (both “rapid” and “live” games have examples of working or not, and I can’t inspect annulled games in more detail), so not sure what to make of that. Really can’t see the pattern in these, there’s even variance among bots with the same admin (flower bots). Sense_Robot seems to give some debug messages in the game chat, which might be of interest.
So anyway, based on that methodology it seems like the following (I skipped most of the high rank bots because I do have a life):
Ok I think I finally figured out what was going on, bots should be working a lot better now. Bot operators might need to restart their bot services once before they recover though.
