Prevalence of Giant Teams

Why is it that giant teams (say, six or more players each) overwhelmingly dominate the game offers for correspondence rengo on the Play tab? What is the appeal of playing on a team with 50 players?

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The novelty.

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Because in this way it’s more likely that the game won’t end by timeout. I noticed that with 4 players it’s very rare to go beyond fuseki

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Yes, I thought of that, but you don’t need 20, 50, or 100+ players to avoid an end by timeout. Indeed, the larger teams can potentially incur massive delays if many people timeout, which is more likely since many have to wait forever to get their turn.

I’ve seen the reverse. Everyone signs up in those humongous rengos and it ends up being a slow stream of endless timeouts, until a handful players stay and finish the game.

It’s one thing to wait 3 months for 30 people to time out and no move on the board and to end a game in a week because it happened everyone of 6 players to timeout.

I think people have seen how these huge games go and are a bit discouraged, organized small rengos go smoothly but nobody signs up…

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During the Western Server challenge I tried to set up a lot of 4 players rengo games. I think the vast majority of them ended by timeout and a lot of them didn’t even reach 6 moves.

I think that if you want to play only with 4 players you should accept only players you trust (you know you are active I mean), but that’s not something I want to do.

I admit that some of the games I created maybe are too ambitious, but I don’t want to delete them now since a lot of players already joined. I’ll try to set lower autostarts after that they start.

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If it seems they’ll never start, maybe it’s better to clean up and start fresh. My guess is people will resign if a forgotten huge rengo starts 1 year later, and that would arguably be worse.

Btw, I’ve found the best results to be around 6-8 people. 4 everyone needs to be there and reliable, until about 12 there’s room for dropouts and still keep the game going.

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Nevertheless, there is a considerable gap between 4-, 6-, or 8-player games, and games with, say, 20 players. And most of the games in the list are a good deal larger than that.

Yes but not everyone. Active players will stay and play. In a big pool it’s very likely to find someone that will actually play

If that’s what almost everyone wants I’ll do it but I am against it.

True, a lot of spots are for bigger games. But I also set up a lot of games with 20-40 players that usually start (abd get removed from the list of course)

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And we end up in this scenario

Waiting months and months for everyone who isn’t interested to timeout.

I hadn’t realized it was mostly your games, I rarely check anymore because games are huge and never start, but I hadn’t seen you created most of them.

I enjoy the specific novelty of a very large rengo game. I think it is particularly interesting if the game has teams large enough that each player only makes one move. With each player only contributing a single move, it is like collaborating on a painting where each painter makes a single brush stroke. Somehow, with everyone contributing the minimal amount, a larger picture and strategy must emerge from some sort of shared understandings or misunderstandings.

In practice, these games are often affected by many players dropping out, and some large rengos that I played wound up only having a small group cycling through several times to play out the end game. Ideally, it would be nice have a really dedicated group with a low drop out rate, in order to ensure that it does not collapse into a smaller team game, but I guess the only practical way to ensure that is to over recruit by a large margin.

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I checked and they are not tho? I see half a dozen challenges maybe by @_Sofiam, which I don’t think it’s a big deal, the way this was going I was expecting 30 tbh :woman_shrugging:t2:

Anyway, I tried huge rengos with the idea ot would be like @yebellz 's painting, but reality wasn’t what I expected.

I still love rengo and I’ll bring in whoever I can.

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(unrelated, but I don’t think I’d noticed that before: why setup autostart with an odd player number? I’m not for or against it, I just took for granted it would take an even number).

A player can’t have more than 10 correspondence games open. I have a lot of spots blocked by bigger ones and use the other ones for smaller (but not small) ones, that usually start in a few days.

Maybe this thread wasn’t only about me, but I am one who does that :sweat_smile:

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As previously pointed out by @Gia and me, the giant teams appear to trigger more timeouts, with the added downside of huge delays, especially if the game doesn’t start for weeks or months.

I believe there is probably a balancing point to avoid timeout without inordinate delays, perhaps around a 10- or 12-player game (5 or 6 per team). Yet the game list is dominated by much larger games.

I think that’s because smaller ones start easily.

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That may be true, although I am unsure. I check the Play tab almost every day out of curiosity and rarely see any smaller games.

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I also check it daily or almost. My impression is that new games aren’t created very frequently (both small and larger) but smaller ones start soon, while larger ones tend to stay more. Would you say that large games are created more often than smaller games? I would say the opposite (and this is surely true with games I create)

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In any case Correspondance rengo is a very new feature online so it’s hard to guess how it will evoluate.
Live rengo is a different matter which existed already and mostly in the form of 4 players match (thinking of KGS)

Games with 12 players or less are of a completely different nature than the games with hundreds of players. I have played and enjoyed several rengo games with smaller teams (12 or less total players), but when I play the larger games, I’m looking for a very different sort of experience. So, I think these are two incomparable classes of games (at least from my perspective of personal preference). While there a lot of dropouts in large games, it maybe is not even too much of an issue, since the general nature of the game is about waiting for a long time to play just one move. I think of such games as more of a collaborative experiment that will finish eventually, rather than an interactive thing, and it’s still interesting to look back at the finished result, when such games do eventually end.

I think the perception of there being more large games in the list is at least partially due to those simply taking longer to fill up and start. Maybe for each one of those large games that sit on the list and eventually start, several more smaller games have filled up and started in the meantime.

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