Awesome 
we’re doing all of these things 
Possibly, but I’ve moved on to other things and don’t have the time any more.
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OGS is really not doing anything to attract strong players, from what I have seen. All servers might lack bot detection capabilities but some already have their population. To “attract” not “keep” you need something that distinguishes OGS from the other servers people are already playing on. I have relayed suggestions by mid-high dans and pros several times here, on chat, to OGS team and everytime it was no result.
We are still waiting on automatch default becoming “no analysis”. Do you really expect strong players to play games with analysis tool on? Is it just that strong players don’t need an automatch on OGS? How about review tools being fixed to match expectations of strong players, something expressed by them several times?
The way things are, I assume that OGS doesn’t want strong players. It is perfectly happy with providing games and tools for beginners. The average rank of the OGS team points to that as well. If OGS wanted to attract stronger players, it’d first recruit stronger people for the team and there would be many different policies and prioritization regarding what to work on next.
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5 dan, 18 SDK, 1 DDK (total averaging 4k)… compared to the ratios of the server as a whole, sounds pretty high to me.
Also, Ten isn’t a moderator, but he helps the team out occasionally.
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I don’t think so. OGS has his own story but my impression is that OGS is catching up on strong players. EGF events, rengo… Things have to evoluate anf maybe it’s just long waiting.
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It doesn’t sound high to me at all. I’d say the team running the server should have much more experience and involvement (and hence rank in the long run) compared to the casual players of the server. Also, comparing it to server ratios doesn’t sound useful since the issue is that the server isn’t preferred by strong players in general and hence is weak in average playing strength. Add the fact that most dans in the team aren’t active and the team becomes one that lacks the necessary experience to pinpoint what seasoned players are looking for in a server. The results confirm this as well.
It is nice that Ten helps out but it is not close to strong/experienced players having a high weight in making decisions on a consistent basis.
Well, moderators don’t exactly run the server… we just try to kick out the toxic people to keep it being the amazing place we all (well, most of us…) love.
If you wanna talk about running it is essentially just anoek. Sure he’s a weak SDK player on our server… but he’s who we’ve got. Until a high dan comes along and decides to code his own Go server, it’s us, KGS, or the Asian servers… I think OGS is the best, not perfect, but the best. We’re also the fastest improving.
I don’t even know who runs any of the other servers, because none of them have the community that OGS has. When you have one dev, things change slowly, but nobody can deny that OGS has been constantly growing its entire life.
Our average rank is essentially the same as your rank… if we aren’t strong enough to run the place, how are you strong enough to criticize us?
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anoek also has a close working relationship with a lot of the leadership in EGF and AGA, and a lot of the requests that he receives directly from them he works really hard to implement ASAP.
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How is the ranks of moderators / devs at all relevant?
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I understand your eagerness and you have interesting suggestions in mind. Now i understand too the OGS side that the way to proceed is to find something useful, and not too complex, if it brings more fun then we ll get echoes from volonteers developers like here. This save time for the backend integration. … and evolution
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Anoek’s rank matters little as long as he has good company advising him on the proper subjects. Sure, you don’t run the server but Anoek trusts the core team and collaborates with it on a significant basis. I’m saying that advice/help should come from a group that involves more experienced/active people.
I haven’t denied OGS has been growing. I didn’t even say it needs to attract stronger players. Serving to beginners is a perfectly valid choice. I started go here and still use OGS heavily for study purposes. If it does want to attract stronger players though, different policies and priorities are clearly needed.
For example in making decisions regarding the nature of the game… I would assume a team full of experienced and high ranked go players would not advocate a quickmatch system with analysis tool. Or for being able to make decisions regarding botters on a daily basis when there are reports. I’m surprised I have to explain that experience and know-how regarding the game is useful in running a server for the game.
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This is more of an artifact of OGS starting as a correspondence server than an issue of player strength.
We have tools for this. Relying on gut impression alone would be highly inconsistent and irresponsible.
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It may be useful, but I believe other qualities are more important.
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I’d say that about 5% of the reports has to do with actually knowing the game of Go, and probably not even 0.1% of those requires a dan player.
The vast majority of reports is about human behaviour, like escaping, insults, or sandbagging. AI use required strong dan players in the past, but with newer detection methods in place, it has become possible for any of the mods to make valid conclusions about botting (in fact, one might say that using methods that do not rely on human interpretation are more fair anyways).
Of the few reports that actually require knowledge of Go, the main three ones are deciding whether a player is stalling, whether a game is scored incorrectly, or helping players with rare positions (seki, bent-4-in-the-corner, triple ko). For the first you only need to understand what it means for endgame to have been concluded, for the second we have AI review giving us the answer, and for the last one generally speaking an SDK is easily familiar with these.
Moderators aren’t “advisors” to anoek. We’re moderators, we help with keeping the server clean of misbehaviour.
Suggestions for what to improve come from anybody with a good idea, and anoek is the one who decides what is being worked on. Moderators have no more input in that process than you have (well, perhaps except for improvements with regards to moderation itself).
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You make good points.
I still believe the core team has more weight in advising Anoek than a casual player does. The fact that live quickmatch games still have analysis on and review tools aren’t being updated makes me think “the team isn’t aware of/doesn’t point out to Anoek what needs to be done to grow the culture of the server as to attract more/stronger players”.
I may have missed something. What is wrong with review tools on OGS?
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We’re not his advisors, he’s a big boy now and does as he pleases. He tries to consult the whole community on a range of matters, but ultimately does what he thinks is best for the server. Sometimes we don’t agree with that but we support him. FWIW I reminded him recently about the poll to change automatch to analysis off even though I voted neutrally on the matter because I thought the results were pretty significant. What he does with that is up to him, but we are not poisoning him against the rest of the community 
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I’m glad you reminded him.
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Analysis on and handicaps off by default are 2 of my bugbears (that I have banged on about for years) that make me think of OGS as “the server made by DDKs, for DDKs, designed to keep them as DDKs”. Which I think is the point snakesss is getting at,
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Again, these are more corr features than ddk features…