Stronger dan players on OGS?

Over 7d so 8d and up iirc. Probably you can pay fox coins or something to get it nevertheless.

I’ve never seen an analyse board on fox, but then I’m not Chinese so didn’t explore every button and just stick to the workflow I know and need of automatch.

So here we have a suggestion, write everything in chinese only :rofl:

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If you are using the English client, it’s in the bottom right, next to the Estimator and Quit. I too wasn’t aware you could do that on Fox until I saw it in Hanayeol’s stream.

I just tried negotiating games using two of my own accounts. The analysis board is enabled and I can’t find a way to turn it off lol. What a weird server.

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Maybe a new feature or my client was old? Checking one of my Fox videos from August 2020 Leading after mistake in AI joseki: Fox 3d Game 5 - YouTube I see at the bottom buttons (some disabled):
Undo
Pass
Mark Dead
Count
Force Count
Draw
Resign

Or over on the right under my camera video?

图片

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Obviously, the main reason why Fox has strong players is that it’s designed for Chinese players (and China has many strong players): many things are written in Chinese even on the English client, Chinese pro matches are relayed there, etc. To attract strong players, OGS needs other qualities.

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You mean like the AGA and EGF playing their pro tournaments here?

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Yes, relaying EGF or AGA pro matches, as well as top tables in competitions, are a good way to bring dan players on OGS, at least as spectators. Some countries have been doing that for a while, but not every western country does that.

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I think we are getting there too. I think I have heard some informal comments that people like being able to just log onto Fox or Tygem or something and see a player like Ke Jie playing, a live game or a relay etc.

Unless a tonne of CJK pros suddenly find and like OGS, we might not get that any time soon, but we have a bunch of pro accounts, and some play live teaching games too regularly enough.

It probably won’t be the easiest thing to fix quickly, but bit by bit we might get there attracting strong players or having our own rise up through the rankings.

(minus some of the other reasonable comments about the number of notifications, I do find OGS is doing a pretty decent job of advertising general go events at different levels, streams, relays, study groups etc - well I mean hosting and supporting that ability anyway, naturally people put up their own notifications a lot of the time :slight_smile: )

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From listening to Hanayeol talk about it, when strong asian players use OGS they find it unintuitive.

Contrast this with Fox which, translation issues aside, is much easier to use. You log in, and not only can you instantly see all the top games, but there is a big PLAY NOW button right there.

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That’s an interesting feedback, but not easy to understand… OGS also has a “Find a game” button right in the middle of the landing page if you have nothing ongoing (on top of being translated).

Is there more specific criticism from asian players?

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Speaking about top games… How is the list of games ordered?

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I can’t test it right now because I have a correspondence game going. Does it start an automatch, or just send you to the play page?

It should ideally be a button that instantly searches for a game with standard settings, and is always there. Something a young child with an account would have no problems with.

Hanayeol said OGS comes across as a site made by very smart programmer type people who feel their site is easy to use because they are the ones who designed it, but overall it has a poor UI experience. Don’t underestimate the downsides of a few extra clicks.

Sorting is broken right now.

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This could be improved for players that don’t play correspondence for example if one did (and actually it was hanayeol suggesting it last time I saw it)

I think generally we’re bordering or recovering some of the ideas in that “OGS is unintuitive thread”. That’s not a bad thing, but just from an organisation of ideas perspective.

I have a feeling we just need a list of concrete changes to make, and some polls or something supporting such changes. (ok, well at least we can point to the analysis disabled poll :slight_smile: )

I think smurph was commenting on the kibitz situation a while ago, but some of the points there are similar, re games list ordering, empty space on home page if you don’t play correspondence etc

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Pretty sure with all the filters on default, games are sorted strongest to weakest by the weaker of the two (your picture goes 6,3,3,2,1,1,1,1…)

However, for whatever reason, playing around with the filters seems to break the sorting :man_shrugging:

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Makes sense. In other servers, games are ordered by the strongest player’s strength but ordering by the weakest player’s strength makes sense too. However the ordering doesn’t seem completely accurate for correspondence games. In the list below, Novakun is treated as a 5d.

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We used to have it like that, but people were complaining that it was pushing x kyu plays superhuman bot up above 3d plays 4d, so we swapped it.

lol ok maybe it’s just totally borked who knows :rofl:

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It sends you to the play page.

The play page itself may deserve a few more criticism though, chief among them being the graph on the right side which takes up half the screen and, in my view at least, serves almost no purpose apart from looking weird and complicated.

It seems Hanayeol also proposed that this “find game” page be merged with the landing page, which I think is a great idea. I don’t really get the purpose of the current landing page.

Another regular complaint about OGS’s UI is the search field which is hidden in a menu instead of being displayed in the upper right corner as is common in webdesign.

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Perhaps it would be more efficient if the automatch buttons appeared directly on the homepage.

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Yeah that was the idea behind this: