Most of the time I look for games to watch, the strongest players are 1d or 2d. Why aren’t there many stronger dan players at OGS?
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They play correspondence games.
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It’s a self fulfilling prophecy that we’ve always struggled with. Strong dans don’t often play here because “strong dans don’t play there”
As in, the primary reason a lot of them don’t play is because the others don’t. So they’re pretty much all on fox these days 
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Some historic perspective may help you to have an opinion.
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tl;dr
OGS was born as a corr server and had a live server grafted on top 
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I think these are the latest statistics available with ranks.
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which sadly suggests the number of users we have 4d or stronger is comparable to the number of users we have 39k! or weaker…
crazy to think that 13% of our users are weaker than 25k, and that I am in the top 18% of OGS users despite being a mid-tier SDK
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It would be interesting to compare proportions instead of quantities. Like between a national association and OGS.
People who register in a national association generally play in competitions, so are more serious players than average. You would have to compare them with OGS accounts that have at least 100 games.
Can be more complex, there are bridges too, players playing here and there. We can see if afterall there are similar proportion, and then it’s more a matter of global quantity of players, or it is that strongers ignore OGS.
I hope that rengo and the choice of federations to play match games here (like EGF) will attract more of them.
Most mid to high-dan players I know play very little on OGS and prefer Asian servers like Fox or Tygem. Some of them still use KGS a bit.
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Yes, it’s a network effect. Strong dans feel that they don’t have enough strong opponents here, as the majority of strong dans is playing on other servers.
It’s the same reason why I use WhatsApp. The people I want to communicate with, are using WhatsApp, so I use it to communicate with them, although there are better alternatives.
Interoperability would solve this issue. Making OGS users able to play against Fox users, would be very convenient. Another possibility is to wait until OGS users evolve to become strong dans (without switching to another server).
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Because I got banned.
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I think it would help to have handicaps as default. This is how strong players on Pandanet can guarantee a balanced game. Strong players likely don’t want to play even games vs kyus all the time.
I believe it’s been suggested before, but I think the automatch button should draw from, and contribute to, the custom game lobby. This would help overall with wait times.
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Strongly agree. It would also help calibrate the rating system and reduce perturbations from timeouts. Handicaps on by default, analysis off by default. 2 tiny changes with big benefits that still haven’t been done after endless forum posts.
Latest one from reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/s0u5lj/why_does_ogs_not_give_the_lower_player_in_a/
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I think handicaps are already on by default in automatch.
I frequently get handicap games using automatch (though sometimes people resign immediately).
With “By default” I guess I really mean “without any choice”.
I think every other server keeps the automatch options very limited to prevent splitting the player pools, with custom games for everything else.
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Stones or komi?
Because I would absolutely hate it if I was forced to play with 9 stones on the board all the time. I’d rather just not play.
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As long as we can continue creating custom game offers of even games, this doesn’t affect me, but I suspect many people would not be happy being forced to play handicap if they wanted to use the automatch.
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Stones. Of course it would only be if you were playing someone 9 stones stronger. I’d suggest keeping the rank range setting to prevent the high handicap games if someone doesn’t like them.
I’m not particularly strong, but I find it great that even during dead hours in Japan, I can jump on IGS, max out the rank range, click that default automatch setting that everyone uses, and I know I’ll always get an evenly matched game. Of course it’s not a great server for any kind of custom settings, but OGS already has the custom lobby which works great for that.
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