Your solution is to force everyone to eat what the opponent dishes.
Also if it is really a game of chicken for everyone due to strong preferences, I’m strongly against taking away this widely liked feature.
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Not really. Maybe there is some kind of misunderstanding here?
What I am saying is that it is a weak preference game of chicken. Like in my case. I do not really care if I play with handicap on or off. I very barely care. But my hope is that the other people in the queue care even less so that I can force my very slight preference on them.
I have come to the realization that my feature rework proposal is just too big and too breaking. This will not fly as of now. But it would be sad if all the comments in this thread would go to waste. So how about we just implement the points we can all agree on?
Small Change Idea 1: Let AF also find CG games if the parameters allow it.
I think this has been agreed on uniformly in this whole thread. Everyone liked this idea a lot and as far as I can see no one is against it.
One Use Case Example:
- Paul starts the AF queue without any preferences set for a live 9x9 game
- David already has an open 9x9 live CG challenge with Byo-Yomi time and he did not change the defaults
→ Outcome: Paul and David are matched against each other and the game starts.
I think this would be a great start. Now of course there is the issue that CGs allow even more customization than the AF. So that a CG player could choose a configuration that cannot be matched by an AF player such as “creating a 9x9 game with an absolute time of 4 hours”. Now here again I think I will get a lot of backlash but I’m offering several different approaches to handle this.
Small Change Idea 2 (Option A): Warn people creating CGs that they’ve made configurations that cannot match with AF anymore when playing ranked.
This would be my more CG friendly approach.
One Use Case Example:
- David clicks on “create” for a CG
- David chooses 19x19 and live as usual
- David now changes the time control to “absolute” (a setting thankfully not available for AF)
→ Now an alert icon appears next to the time control setting
→ On hover over the icon it reads “When using this setting you will not be able to match with AF folks to restore the AF-compatible parameters click on the “Restore compatible” button”
→ There is a “Restore compatible” button on the bottom somewhere next to the “Create challenge” button
Small Change Idea 2 (Option B): Deactivate rank option for people creating CGs when they’ve made configurations that cannot match with AF anymore when playing ranked.
This would be my less CG friendly approach.
One Use Case Example:
- David clicks on “create” for a CG
- David chooses 19x19 and live as usual
- David now changes the time control to “absolute” (a setting thankfully not available for AF)
→ Now an alert icon appears next to the time control setting
→ Also the Ranked checkbox is deactivated
→ On hover over the icon it reads “When using this setting you will not be able to play ranked to restore the rank-compatible parameters click on the “Restore compatible” button”
→ There is a “Restore compatible” button on the bottom somewhere next to the “Create challenge” button
1 Like
What you call a “small change” isn’t. Loads of people on OGS don’t want their correspondence games de-ranked, nor do they want to be dictated to regarding ordinary game specifications. Some people like Chinese scoring, some like Japanese scoring; some like byo-yomi, some like Fischer; some like 20 min main time, some like 10; some like 5 periods, some like 3; some like 9x9, some like 19x19—just to give a few examples. Stomping on people’s preferences just to achieve a questionable improvement in the automatch system has no good justification, aside from its inherent callousness.
The idea that online-ranking utopia can be achieved by tweaking the game specifications is sheer folly. Most players understand that differences in game specifications will likely affect one’s rank, and they sensibly take that into account. They know that a rank based only on 9x9 games, probably doesn’t translate very well to 19x19. They know that a correspondence rank is probably a stone or two weaker if they were playing live. They know that blitz players might not do as well as live players (and vice versa). And most don’t care. They also know that their go rank is not going to be inscribed on their tombstone (metaphorically speaking).
To put this in perspective, many IRL players regard all online games as “illegitimate” or even “not real go,” as if God or gods had decreed what “real go” is. They have a point due to the numerous opportunities to cheat in various ways in online games. They might well argue that all online games should be unranked, or that the specifications should follow those of typical IRL tournaments. Again, sensible people understand that online go is one thing and IRL go is something else, and that there is no need for one to dictate to the other. We can and do easily compartmentalize the two.
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If I understood correctly, small changes 1 and 2A don’t restrict anyone’s freedom.
3 Likes
No worry, I’ll be perfectly fine.
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It seems to be pretty small, consensual, changes though (apart from 2B, which is acknowledged as being the “less friendly” option).
I don’t think @Regenwasser ever proposed to restrict correspondence to unrank.
I think @Regenwasser doesn’t care either.
The point has never been to claim that some ranks are more legitimate than others, or that it is an issue that two players may have the same rank while playing under different ruleset.
Feel free to correct me on the above if I missed something in this (long) thread, but I feel like you really misrepresent his position.
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This proposal would effectively de-rank most correspondence games:
The OP is dismissive about numerous settings, which he calls “unimportant,” and proposes forcing people to use “a site wide setting.” This would affect blitz, live, and correspondence games, but I think it would have the worst effect on correspondence, where the time control is especially important.
Many people play correspondence in order to tailor the game to the time they have available (also taking into account how many games they want to play simultaneously). Consequently, the time controls, including whether or not to have pause on weekends, vary quite a lot. Many players would be disenfranchised from their preferred settings under the foregoing proposal.
A few years ago, “fast correspondence” became popular; I find the idea appealing but could never participate due to 10 hours working and commuting, 8 hours sleeping, exercising, eating, washing and shaving, property maintenance, and, far from the least, substantial reading. At the other extreme, some people who play lots of games have very long time-controls.
The idea of dictating all these settings repels me. I say, live and let live.
2 Likes
As someone who also works a lot I appreciate that you still find the time to engage in the Baduk community.
I do not want to touch correspondence. Not even in my initial proposal.
The OP has acknowledged that the initial proposal is too breaking. The OP has instead proposed some smaller changes. You responded to those smaller changes by complaining about things that are not included in the small proposal (some not even in the initial one). Another user told you as much. You now again respond to that user by again bringing up points that are not included in the small proposal.
You’re still pushing the de-ranking of various games, including correspondence:
So after nine months I’ve come back to OGS and I’m suprised to see that this hasn’t been changed. I’m definitely not the greatest Go player but I’ve been an avid gamer for decades and work in software. It’s all about the queue time. The AF still has way too many options and it seems that ranked AF and CG games are still not matched with each other.
Other things have improved though. One thing is, that beginners with new accounts can now play ranked games against beginners with established ranks, without the need to be crushed by 12 kyus first.
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Yes - I think it’s fair to say that this is a “high potential area for improvement” but not at the top of the list of “we really have to fix this”, yet. We’re fixing other things first.
(Which is different to “there is no argument to fix this, that’s why nothing happened”. That is not the case).
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They were many nice improvements these last months (maybe a kind of resume would be welcome?).
One I like most is that ability to fade or make disappear the last move indicator which btw i never requested 
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+100
I think this is the way to improve automatch. I am already doing this as a human anyway - I run automatch but if I see a challenge I like I cancel the automatch search and accept the challenge. This is very much something the computer can and should do on my behalf.
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Very much appreciate your reply. Just to give an idea of what I had envisioned, I think lichess (second biggest chess web app) did a great job here. They’ve divided “Quick pairing” (live matches) and “Correspondence” into two different areas which makes total sense.
And inside the Quick pairing menu they have 11 standard modes of play and then the 12th tile is for custom matches. Again this makes total sense the option to make custom games exists but it is shown as a side note (as it should) so that most people make standard games. Then you’ve got 11 modes for a player base of continuously more than 100k concurrent active players. I think their record was over 4 million daily active users. I again want to point out that the OGS AF has 324 modes for maybe 3k concurrent active players.
OGS is great. It’s the only popular Go Web App and the API is the cherry on the cake. But each time I’ve seen people move to Fox or Tygem from here it’s been because of queueing times.
That would be a great improvement but not the direction I would suggest. I think it is better to orient the matchmaking on the solutions that similar popular board game web apps have established such as chess.com or lichess.org or even the other popular Go client apps such as Fox or Tygem.
I would guess that it’s going to be easier and more immediately useful to display automatch requests in the custom challenges area. Since that doesn’t require any definition of “reasonable” or any deep unification of the two pools; they could remain separate as far as the server is concerned but just be displayed together.
Visibility would also help us discover whether there are a bunch of people waiting for matches with incompatible settings.
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Well here we are again so let me give my opinion again
What is wrong is to ask players to change their habits and taste. If they like custom rated games , let them chose like this.
What is right is to make automatch working better. Howto? Seems an interesting idea that automatch pick up games in custom offers. Why not afterall? Then Let’s give a wider choice as the default settings (these can be kept for automatch vs automatch) so that it can pick up more choices. Just warn automatch users, or even ask if they agree on the wider range.
I dunno exactly what is default automatch settings but let say it’s Japanese rules 10+3x20s
Automatch find a Chinese rules 15+30s
Hop pop up from Automatch
"A custom game Chinese rules 15+30s is at stake. Are you interested? Yes/no "
There is more to do. For example the automatch offer should be listed on the same page as custom games offer list each time someone click Automatch.
But please don’t move custom in some isolated place and don’t propose to restrict them to unranked only as you suggested at first, that would really not fit how a lot of players use this site.
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I’d like it, if I could set the following:
- My preferred time setting (e.g. Fischer, 5 min plus 12 s per move)
- A minimum time per move (e.g. 3 s)
- A maximum time per move (e.g. 22.5 min)
- A range for the approximate average time per move (e.g. 15 s to 40 s)
And an auto-match algorithm finds me a game satisfying those settings.
2 Likes
Well it’s all about balance between auto and custom. Need a bit of compromise at both ends.
For example, if you get a game in your range but with another time setting as fisher, would you be interested?