tl;dr - OGS is slow outside of the United States. We want to make it faster, but it’s going to cost money. We want your opinion on placing an optional ad on the game page to improve better serve those regions. (And like all ads on the site, it would not be present for site supporters)
Hello OGS!
Depending on where you live in the world, OGS can feel pretty fast and responsive, or rather slow and sluggish. Here’s a map showing the average latency our players experienced around the world over the past 24 hours
Generally speaking, if you live in country with a green dot, OGS is generally pretty responsive and you don’t have too many problems with lag and that sort of thing. If you live in a country with a yellow dot, it’s still not too bad, but the latency is definitely noticeable, the site generally feels a little sluggish. In countries with an orange dot, there’s no question that the site feels a bit sluggish, though depending on what type of game you’re playing, it can still be tolerable. If you live in a country with a red dot, then I am truly sorry and I have no idea how anyone from there can stand to play here.
Ideally, what we want to see is something more like this:
And although a true “green everywhere” goal might be somewhat unrealistic, we can certainly do a lot to get significantly closer than we are right now.
The problem is that right now all of the servers that run OGS are located in the eastern United States. If we want to have better service in more places, we need to have servers closer to those places.
About 6 months ago we released a large update to the server and client. Part of this update included some pretty cool capabilities on the server side that allow us to place servers in different parts of the world while still keeping OGS “whole” in the sense that everyone would still be in the same pool of players and we wouldn’t have lame “select a server to play on” things like some other services. Everything would operate as it does today, only faster for the majority of our user base. The primary reason why we haven’t deployed it yet is because it’s going to more than double our operational costs to do so and so right now we can’t afford to deploy it.
Currently the site is supported in large part by site supporters, and supplemented by ad revenue by displaying ads to non site-supporters. We display one ad on most pages, except our most popular page, the game page. We believe that by adding an ad on the game page, and possibly an additional block ad on the overview and/or the game match page, that the extra revenue generated will be enough to cover the costs of adding the necessary servers in at least one if not two or more other regions. This will improve service in those regions by making everything faster for players closer to those servers. Because ads on the game page can be rather distracting, we are also considering making those ads enabled by default, but allow users to optionally disable them, even without becoming site supporters.
And to be clear, all site supporters would continue to not see any ads on the site.
In exchange for being able to provide better service around the world, should we place one ad on the game page?
NOTE: Site supporters will continue to not have any ads anywhere on OGS, this would affect non site supporters only
- Yes, and don’t make the ad optional
- Yes, but make the ad optional
- No, service is good enough outside of the US
0 voters
Should we add a second ad (probably a smaller “block ad”) to the “Overview” and/or “Play” pages?
- Yes, to both
- Yes, but only to the “Overview” page (the page you see when you first log in)
- Yes, but only to the “Play” page (the page you go to to find a new game)
- No, service is good enough outside of the US
0 voters
What region do you view as the most important to improve service to first?
With any luck we will be able to improve services in more than one region with the increased revenue, but this poll will help us order and prioritize.
- Northern Asia (Japan, South Korea, Beijing China)
- Southern Asia / Oceania (Australia, Hong Kong, Taipei, Thailand, India)
- Western Europe
- Eastern Europe
- Western United States
- Central America
- South America
- South Africa
- North Africa
0 voters
do not ruin the beautiful simplicity and dignity of go. Anywhere else…
).