Simuls Idea

So some individuals on my Discord tried a simul round robin tournament. It seems there was a ton of confusion with new tabs opening and correspondence games getting called ect…

I’m wondering how difficult it would be to implement 1 of 2 features. (Or both)

1: Make the lowest time left to move game appear first when you click the number in the top right.

2: Have 2 numbers top right instead of 1. One represent only Corr games and the other represent other games.

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I support your idea (especially 1, it’s useful even if you play only correspondence), but simuls can be easily managed with several tabs.

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Not on a phone… (from bitter experience)

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#1 is a great idea

don’t play many simuls but with tabs even on a computer it can be quite confusing when multiple games are in byo yomi and counting down

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If voices are enabled, do they all count down simultaneously over each other?

Maybe the voice could even give hints, like “no, wait, check the other tab, it’s more urgent!”

Oh, is that what the Go proverb means about “urgent moves before big”?

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Have you tried Chrome/Brave tab groups? I have not (intentionally) tried simul, but the bottom of my phone always looks like this:

Correspondence move indicators should simply not show when you’re in a live game, in my opinion. And the (1) for the game you are already on is confusing and pointless.

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Especially with spotty connection, having to load so many different tabs is worse.

Also, Chrome on my phone is always a collection of tabs :woman_shrugging:t2:

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I’m grappling with how to help both people who want to click to “the game with the lowest time remaining” and people who want to circulate through their (presumably correspondence) games.

I can imagine that if you have more than one live game, you always want to click to the lowest remaining.

Unless maybe you are on that already? In which case “the next lowest” (so you would cycle between lowest and next lowest, if you don’t play a move).

But if you are looking at list of correspondence games, it seems hard to “get it right”.

If you have “many” correspondence games, then sorting them by time-remaining doesn’t really help: it’s a long way “around” to the lowest one, if you want to go back to that.

Shift-click could be a mechanism - but yuk really. Not very discoverable, not mobile friendly.

A “settings preference”? Not really - sometimes you want one, sometimes the other.

Thoughts?

Here’s what I’m thinking:

  • If you are anywhere on OGS where it is not a game that is your turn: go to the most urgent game.
  • If you are on a game where it is your turn: keep circulating from where it left off, starting from most urgent and moving to less urgent games in order.

This means if you played a turn, then by definition you are not on a board where it is your turn, so you go to the next most urgent. On the other hand, if you are looking at a game where it is your turn to play and you click the circle, it means you want to circulate through your list of games.

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To reduce distractions, could we please add:

  • Do not ever include any correspondence games in the cycle when you have ongoing live games, whether or not it’s your turn.
  • If you just have 1 game where it’s your turn and you’re on it already, don’t show the highlighted (1) since it doesn’t take you anywhere. Maybe it should be a gray (1)?
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I really like #2.

#1: I’m not sure, maybe people who have live games that are too slow for them might like to look at their corre games while their opponent takes their jolly time… ?

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Isn’t the real problem that auto advance doesn’t work with live games? Just make the auto advance option “correspondence only” (default) “correspondence and live” (two separate lists - i.e. it either auto advances through all the live games you are playing or so the correspondence games but doesn’t auto advance from one to the other)

It’s not that “it doesn’t work”. Rather it is “it is not enabled on purpse” (AIUI).

However, this doesn’t really matter, since all these considerations apply to explicitly clicking the notification circle as well.

Separately, if we think auto-advance should work for live, we could do that. Probs it’d be another settings option :smiley:

And I meant to say that your points on the circle clicking are all good. I won’t ask what order they go in at the moment!

Well I think just one more switch in the existing option (on, off)(correspondence, live) Or a three way slider (off, correspondence, both)

The challenge would be the text/ labels I suppose…

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They currently go by game-id (IE circle through the games in the order you commenced them).

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I arrive a little late, but I try to add something

I didn’t understand what you meant here, sorry.
Do you mean that calculating the remaining time and sorting the games by time would take too long?

I confirm that it can happen :grimacing:

In my opinion going to the game with less time is almost always positive, even if in some cases it can mean playing less in the slower games.

Now the live games cycle by clicking on the button and sometimes it’s a little annoying because by reaching one of those the next game opens in another tab.
I like the idea to enable auto advance in live games. Staying on that tab (like correspondence rengo) would be already an improvement.

I think it’s that if you start on the game with the shortest time and don’t move but click the circle to look at other games, then at some point decide you want to go to the game with the shortest time again. You will then need to click the circle “many” times to go round the whole cycle of games with longer and longer remaining time in order to get to the end of the list and back round to the shortest time game again.

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Ah, ok. I interpreted it differently, in the sense that if it is your turn again in a game with little (less than the others) time, that game appears again.

No, I meant that if the only change is “make it so that we loop through the games in order of decreasing urgency”, then if you have 100 games and you’re on your second one, it’s 99 clicks to get to the most urgent.

That’s why I’ve suggested making it so that it “resets” back to “go to the most urgent” if you are not looking at one of your games-to-play.

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Why not have it reset every time instead of creating a fixed order at the beginning? I think it should not be too annoying as a game only appears several times if the opponent is playing while you are playing in the other games.

(of course, I speak without knowing what is really feasible)

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