Quick match settings poll

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42

I prefer longer games in general, probably it wouldn’t be as popular – for example 30-45 minutes main time + 5x0:30 byo-yomi (or anywhere from 5x0:40-5x1:00) for a full 19x19, sometimes games with 1 hour main time if I can find them.

Or Fischer with something like at least 15-20m +15-20s, perhaps

On 9x9, I like at least 2 min + 30s Fischer and often play 3m+30s with a 3-5 minute cap, though I do enjoy experimenting with different timesettings and will sometimes play faster custom games posted if I am feeling up for it, like 2m + 10s Fischer, even the occasional 1m + 10-12s Fischer with friends, even though I typically enjoy slower games.

I’ve also tried something like a timesetting closer to 2m + 7-8s, unranked 9x9 with other dan players (which was fun), or the very odd blitz game with 1m + 2-3s etc on 9x9 before (super, super fast, though :dizzy_face: :grin:) out of curiosity, but as I don’t really blitz and I prefer to take my time to think to some extent, I prefer to be able to play faster games unranked or see who I am playing with when doing such things.

+7-8s or +10s may not be quite so fast for a 9x9 for me, I’ve realised, so I’m actually interested in trying it in automatch sometimes + as practice with faster timesettings and time pressure, if I can find an opponent in my rank range (at 5d it seems to be harder, even if I set to -7 rankrange and choose multiple Rapid+Medium settings)

For 19x19, I just prefer to have at least 30 minutes main time to reflect properly and have found that even a bit quick, thoughI really enjoy slow games, especially for serious training as they allow me to read in depth – I think it’s often easiest to find players around my strength for something l ike 40 min + 5x30s or 45 min + 5x30s on 19x19 if I just post the game as custom, as it seems less commmon to enjoy such slowly-paced games, and if somebody is interested and around my rank range, they will likely see and accept it.

(and I haven’t played much 19x19 with less than around 15-20s Fischer increment and 20m cap/initial – usually I play serious, official games with 40m+20s, though these are often long 2hr+ games, and would be interested to try Fischer if something like 20m+15-20s were automatch (but I’m not sure if it would be popular enough)

, I just find faster Fischer (like around 10s or less) for 19x19 a bit too fast for my specific preference, and it doesn’t allow me to play games which are as deep, especially when I don’t often have the time to play many.)

Another useful thing is that sometimes I’ll happily play something like 30m+5x40s or even 20-25m+5x40s depending on the circumstances and player – unfortunately there is sometimes a fair bit of AI use or rudeness (mostly from AI users trolling dan players with stuff like “7d ? you must be 11k stop wasting my time…” which I just find a bit of a time waste and not pleasant :sweat_smile:, sometimes for other reasons) — around players whose rank shows 2-8d, so I like to sometimes quickly check that the player who posts a challenge seems polite/decent and not using AI, before accepting too – it makes the game more pleasant for me.

1 Like
43

polls ask “is it too fast?”
but “too fast” for which purpose?

something may be slow enough to not timeout, but still too fast for relaxing game

I think attempt to make pairs of “equal” Fischer and byo-yomi timers is bad idea
instead it may be useful to have 6 different clocks for every taste and purpose
like 20s+5s , 5m+10s and 10m+15s Fischer
and 40s+2x10s , 7m+3x20s and 15m+4x30s byo-yomi for example
and remove unnecessary “Flexible” option, Multiple and Exact are more than enough

4 Likes
44

Exact also seems useless. Just select one option in Multiple.

4 Likes
45

Kind of a strange reason to me. Automatch will give you ranked games with analysis disabled. Handicap is a setting.

46

I like this proposal, because the Fischer increments stay fairly small, but not insanely so (I think 10-15 seconds is the sweet spot for Fischer increment, but 5s is perhaps still reasonable for fast blitz), and the byo-yomi periods are short enough that the main time actually means something

47

I suspect these game duration statistics are heavily skewed by games that finish early. When I’m deciding how much time I need for a game, I want to know the expected length of a game that is played to counting or at least until the lategame, not a game where somebody implodes in the opening and resigns.

48

We’d need to look at the 90th percentile.

1 Like
49

The 90th percentile doesn’t really get skewed too badly by short games I don’t think.

If we had a tonne of games where players intentionally filled in their own territory like stone scoring, like a lot, hundreds and hundreds of games and users, that might skew it a bit in the other direction.

50

For the 90th calculations I also filtered out games that ended unusually early, fwiw. I don’t remember the exact cutoffs I used for the different sizes, but it was taken into account.

51

I guess I must be some kind of 1th percentile player because my games with those time settings take about 2x those averages :thinking:

1 Like
52

I think most people, whether in Byo-yomi or Fischer, do not use their time very well, often having plenty of unused time left by the end. I suspect inadequately accounting for this led to shorter Fischer time controls than intended, which in turn led to the recent observation of players still playing on average too fast for the time controls

1 Like
53

I think you overestimate how well seconds left at the of the game correlates to time well spent

54

I think it was more that my wording was sloppy. More precise would be that a certain type of poor management results in significant amounts of time remaining on one’s clock more often than it ought given the game lengths

55

I had an idea after trying to play more custom games – right now, it is a lot to scroll past also, the automatch options – one can’t easily view Custom games without scrolling past the entire page each time.

And if one is only interested in Custom games then, it’s probably not relevant to see Automatch options — we had some other posters mention it being a lot of stuff in one page too, so what about a “show/hide Automatch options” button in addition (just like the show/hide custom games button) ?

(It would be nice to be able to click the Play page and view available custom matches immediately if that is what one is interested in accepting or seeing – right now that requires a lot of scrolling each time.

Personally, i was looking for them as automatch queue times are very slow when I tested at my rank (5d, -7/+9 rank range, no matches for 10+ minutes with all 4 Rapid+Medium 9x9 options selected), and I’d also just like to be able to browse them easily and accept something interesting if it appears when I have free time.)

1 Like
56

It’s kind of unusual for pages to reconfigure themselves permanently like that, and it doesn’t help people who want different types of games at different times. I still think we should just have two links for the two places:

Wouldn’t that work for everyone?

1 Like
57

Maybe ! Though I think there were some users wanting to be able to easily see/browse/accept Custom Matches whilst waiting for an automatch (I’ve done that myself often as queue times tend to be long for me) – I imagine it’s not too uncommon to do.

Would that make it harder (or less obviously possible when queued for automatch…?) to do and keep active/cancel automatch in progress if there were two separate pages ?

(or maybe it’s better anyway to have 2 pages somehow)

1 Like
58

I’m not insisting on two pages, I just want links directly to the two features, wherever they happen to be.

2 Likes
59

Ohh, I see, that’s a nice idea.

60

I would love to see fischer take over but not with the current time settings chosen. In my opinion all the fischer increments are way too small. Yes you have some base time but if you ever get low on time the game is turned into mindless low quality blitz. 3s fischer increment is about as fast as i can put down a stone, so its a hole you can almost never crawl out of and the game quality takes a nosedive.

I don’t know how the math was done but to me there is massive difference in the byo-yomi vs. Fischer experience in the same category (blitz, live etc).

I would really urge to drastically up the fischer increments to 7s, 12s and 15 / 20s.

7 Likes
61

100% agree; those look about right