Success story

[taatelikakku]

Today I wanted to play unranked 19x19 game vs any bot a little stronger than myself.
Here’s how it went:

1. try to play vs DreamingElephant
   -> nope, max board size is 9x9
2. try to play vs Spectral (19x19)
   -> nope, please use manual handicap
3. set handicap
4. try to play
   -> nope, please set minimum 10 minutes main time
5. set main time
6. try to play
   -> nope, please set maximum 2 minutes byo yomi for live game
7. set byo yomi
8. try to play
   -> now playing vs Amybot-Beginner because I forgot to re-select Spectral
   the selected bot resets every time dialog is closed
9. cancel game, re-select Spectral
10. try to play
    SUCCESS FINALLY! HURRAY!!! got a game vs Spectral
    Most of the time I quit trying after about 5 steps but today I was persistent. Maybe we should just remove all options from the bot dialog altogether, as none of them work?

[BHydden]

The options are the same ones used for any game creation, including against humans. We do not create the bots, they are user hosted and as such have certain unique conditions they can accept or not. We are not in a place to present a fully customised game challenge screen for each bot that registers to play on our site, however, most of them should detail on their profile page what kinds of games they can accept. If you find this information missing, please email the owner of the bot which is listed on its profile page near the top.

PS. Congrats on finding success!

[hexahedron]

Although OGS does not control the bot options, one thing that is within OGS’s domain is the fact that that when the bot game creation dialog is closed or fails for any reason, the next time you open it, it’s reset to selecting the first bot in the list, forcing the user to manually re-select the bot they want. (which would be taatelikakku’s #8 above).

I’ve also found this annoying when trying to set up games and made mistakes because of it. A more intuitive behavior would be, IF the same bot selected before exists the next time the dialog is opened (I know that the list of active bots does change over time if a bot controller takes their bot offline), then select it again by default the next time the dialog is opened.

This is actually how all other game settings in that dialog work (which is very nice and useful!). It’s just this one selection box within that dialog that behaves inconsistently compared to all the others.