says it all. In 2014, when the ladders started, these settings were chosen. Now in 2023, almost a decade later, preferences of participating players or potentially ladder interested may have changed. The OGS community of 2014 doesn’t exist anymore. It is rather likely that the present OGS community is quite different from the generation of 2014.
Is the 2014 setting still what we want today?
1 move a day is a natural pace for correspondence games on an international server.
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Hey some of us are still quite active 
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If you want more ladder games I’d suggest to join this group and the corresponding 9x9 ladder:
and/or that one
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I just visited these two 9x9 groups. Nobody was playing any games.
Maybe you have the wrong settings on your filters?
The top one has 300 ongoing corr games (123 9x9)
and the bottom has 88 ongoing corr games (36 9x9)
If I understand how to visit these games, they are all correspondence games. When I said that no one was playing any games, I meant real games, live games, games where you can actually make moves.
Currently there are only 101 ongoing live games on the whole server that don’t involve a bot. It is unlikely that any one group is going to control a significant number of those. Live games tend to either be found on the play page or else special events such as club nights or Automatic Sitewide Tournaments (when they get enough players).
I don’t understand. I never asked to participate in any correspondence games. I don’t enjoy correspondence games because they are like puzzles: you get to explore them all you want before you move. Someone told me there were two 9x9 groups, but neither are playing any live games. Please tell me what I did wrong? All I’ve done in this thread is to ask about improving game play in the 9x9 Ladder. I’m starting to feel attacked. Is it just me misunderstanding things? Or is it real, did I do something wrong, deserving of attack?
I think people are just trying to explain how the site works. You haven’t done anything wrong, and I don’t think anyone is attacking you.
No attack. Here is your confusion. OGS has no live ladders. All our ladders are correspondence. Sorry. Many have asked for live ladders, but how to practically implement them is not at all clear.
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Ngl live ladders would be dope.
cc: @GreenAsJade - idk if it fits into the tourney updates you’re planning, but I figure it doesnt hurt to have on the radar 
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It’s still correspondence, but this might be your best chance of getting “more than 3 moves per day” outside of regular live games.
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Isn’t it just a matter of specifying the desired average time per move? Probably many players love having 3 full days to leave go and do other things. I don’t. I want to play. So, I want to play most of my moves within an hour or two of the last move. To me, that is a compromise with a live game that still leaves me free to do other things. The problem that I’ve found is that many of the players in the 9x9 Ladder do not respond to a move within two hours. I can’t tell whether they prefer four hours, or three days, or whether they will NEVER respond to a move. Many of the players I have challenged time out and lose the game because they don’t respond in three hours.
So, why can’t we each choose the timing when we make the challenge? If the recipient of the challenge doesn’t like the timing, they can simply refuse the challenge. Just don’t make us wait for three days or even three hours to find out what the recipient wants to do. There are lots of ways of changing the current procedure. Just pick something easy to implement and agree on and make the change, so that people who don’t really want to play aren’t there, and so people who really want three days between moves can say so. I want most of my moves an hour or two later, and much more than that overnight each day because I sleep for lots of hours. Please change the Ladder rules so we can all get the kinds of timing and opponent reliability that make the game fun for us.
Because one of the fundamentals of a ladder is that you can’t refuse a challenge.
If you can refuse challenges, then you can camp at the top.
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…and this necessarily implies people should have at least a day to respond to a challenge, since just the combination of sleep and work can easily add up to 16-20 consecutive hours of being unavailable to monitor your hobbies.
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Then ladders are not for you. People in the ladder may be in another timezone, so may be sleeping when you are awake and vice-versa, especially if
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If it were this simple all the changes would have been agreed and implemented by now and we’d all be happy. Trouble is everyone has different preferences.
To try and stay on topic, I agree there could be improvements to ladders. I particularly like the idea that you can challenge more people at once and keeping the number of challenges you can receive at 3 is sensible.
I think allowing groups to set their own ladder rules would be great but sounds like hard work to implement.
For your particular case @david265 , it sounds like using automatch or making custom challenges in the play page is going to best for you to find live 9x9 games. You can also join ASTs when the live 9x9 ones come up and see how that goes.
Finally you could message in this 9x9 groups to ask people if they’d like a live game. Or ask in main chat or on the forums. Agree a time etc and challenge directly that way. You never know, you might build up a little list of opponents you like to play and also like similar settings to you.
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I understand the frustration with players not responding to Ladder challenges. And I can see why you might think that changes to the Ladder system would be necessary. But I’m a bit confused by the proposed solutions.
Firstly, decreasing the initial Fischer time from 3 days to 24 hours would be punishing for players who have real-life commitments like work or school. I mean, not everyone can respond to challenges within 24 hours, right? And it would be especially punishing for players near the top of the Ladder, like me. If I miss a day in that implementation without setting vacation, that’s it—I go from #2 to #1522. So, while it might shorten the time with unresponsive players, it could unfairly penalize others and lead to fewer overall players on the Ladder. Not a great solution if you ask me.
Secondly, increasing the number of people you can initially challenge from 3 to 10 could cause some serious imbalances in the Ladder rankings. I’m being selfish again. I’m just thinking about all the challenges I’d get bombarded with, on top of my own challenges to stay at the top. It would be chaotic. I can see myself feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of active games I’d have to play just to stay in the Ladder, let alone compete for #1.
Speaking of which, here at the top of the Ladder, I have no problem with unresponsive players. I did when I was first climbing up, but the issue resolved itself within about a week. Nonresponsive players would get dropped from the Ladder after three days, and I’d move up to their spot. So even though I understand the frustration, I don’t think we need to make any big changes to the Ladder system.
But suppose we wanted to address the unresponsive-player issue. Better solutions are out there than decreasing the Fischer time or increasing the number of initial challenges. For example, automated reminder emails or notifications could be sent to players who haven’t responded to challenges within the first 24 hours. A tutorial or video explaining the Ladder system could also help. And hey, automatically dropping players with no Ladder activity within the last X months, would increase the ratio of active players.
Anyway, my two cents.
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But this suggestion has evolved to allow people to make (up to) 10 challenges but still only be able to be challenged 3 times. Does that make a difference to your thinking?
This sounds like an interesting suggestion.
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