Also been playing some chess recently and noticed chess.com has copied Starcraft and has leagues but the leagues are not related to ELO but essentially activity so you gain points for wins and dont lose points for losses. This is separate (obviously) from ELO.
I suspect they are doing this for the same reason that starcraft did with their Bronze/Silver/Platinum/Diamond leagues in that it gave a target that made players more likely to play.
Starcraft also split the leagues into monkeyspheres of a 100 players and increased points if the player had been away (even though you were unlikely to play against anyone in your specific division it gave a mental boost from climbing the chart and meant more active players felt a reward).
It seems a clever idea and might be worth considering as a way of increasing play rates and those that want to ignore could and those that like it it might help.
Anyway I dont want OGS to become chess.com 2 but equally not waiting 7-8 minutes for a game in the evenings or 60-70 in daytime week would be nice and make it more likely that the ELO matched better as wellâŠ
That might explain why its so hard to get a game at higher/mid ddk.
Curious actually whether the server makes charts of player activity by grade over week and for (say) 19*19 short etcetc
Be interesting if my perception is wrong or whether there is a droughtâŠ
fox certainly doesnt have this issue but A - most seem injected with aggression and B - i also suspect they feed bots in the guise of players (at least at the ddk levels) so may not be real
1: OGS just doesnât have a lot of players in comparison.
2: Waaaaay too many people on this server play correspondence. It is so bad for this server imo. It prevents people from actually playing the game. Some correspondence is fine but the ratio is horrible for this server compared to other game servers.
3: Bots are good for the player pool. There should be many bots and if a player doesnât get paired within 3-5 seconds, pair them with a bot. These bots should only play automatch. They should never have bot in the name. And there should be a setting in the users profile settings (not in the automatch settings as this should be a tiny secret feature) that prevents matching against bots in automatch. People want to play games. Get them in a game and let them play. But have a way to turn off bots for those who donât like it. Just donât be blatantly obvious about it. But also donât lie.
They do inject bots (Iâm SDK, get a lot of clearly bot games in the 9x9 pool), but I imagine the player base is also larger even without the bots.
I donât think this is a zero sum situation. If corr were banned today, I donât think it means the live pools would flourish. I think people would just move to DGS or something.
I want to play humans.
Playing Go itself and playing human are 2 different goals.
Its possible to train in Go by solving tsumego alone without any opponent, but its just training. Playing in real Go club with real human is much more fun because you know that someone reacts to your moves, you cause different feelings in your opponent by playing different moves.
Go servers should emulate real Go clubs as much as possible. They should increase number of human vs human games and decrease wait time for humans who wait for other humans. Auto-pair with bots as default would decrease number of human vs human games and so it would increase wait time for those who wait for human. Auto-pair with bots should be turned âoffâ by default. Turning this setting âonâ should be additional action for those who care about Go more than about humans.
People should know if the opponent is a bot or not, else it is, in fact:
⊠a lie.
⊠or maybe do the opposite and have the feature to be able to be turned on, for those that are in such a dire hurry that they need a game in 3-5 seconds.
Yup!
It wouldnât decrease them, it would probably totally eradicate that category, if the server is flooded with bot games.
Maybe but on fox i dont know if its bot or real and its getting to the stage that the wait for a non bot on ogs is more irritating (and never 3 to 5 seconds , usually 5 minutes at âbusyâ times and â40+ before giving in at non busy and by non busy i mean not evening/weekend uk)
So yes im likely to switch to fox if this doesnt improve even though i suspect many bot opponents and few humans.
Thats why clossiusâs suggestion makes sense for server health and also funds. Why pay for ogs gold thingy when u only get 2-3 games a week?
Either that or rejoin one of the caster leagues where games are planned but that also means less random human opponents on ogs as the hobby gets balkanised.
Meh not sure what the solution is. I much prefer ogs games and time settings and general experience but the wait times then getting multiple opponents 2-3 kyu higher than you who used to be 8âs historicallyâŠperhaps i should start creating non ranked instead as ranked is not pleasant (different issue there perhaps but one where more players playing at your rank would solve)
1. How does it do that? People who want to play live, can play live; people who want to play correspondence, can play correspondence.
2. What do you mean by âactuallyâ? This reminds me of the naĂŻve debate about whether solidity is actual, since âsolidâ objects are mostly space. Correspondence games have a long history in go and in chess. Perhaps it is live games that are not actual, since they give rise to more blunders. If popularity determined facts, we would be living in a much stranger universe.
3. Do you want to discriminate against old people? Live games, generally speaking, put old people at a disadvantage. Old people generally think more slowly and have declining visual memory (reducing reading ability). Playing correspondence compensates for these physical deficits.
I refuse to believe this has been a case for you. Was this a hyperbole or you actually face this?
If it is bots that you (or anyone) wants to play with, why not just do that, as OGS has a lot of bots or varying rank. Go to âPlayâ section, and click âPlay Computerâ.
It would be lovely if people who dont see the issue , whether they just play correspondence or perhaps are at a rank/timezone where plenty of availability exist would consider that there is a slight possibility that maybe! Just maybe a different person might have a different experienceâŠ.hard to believe. After all if you dont see it then no one else possibly could.
But dont worry, without fresh blood and people being able to get games without twiddling thumbs for a huge amount of wasted time then those players will drop and it will get to you in the end.
I figured my opinion was a hot take and would get a lot of hate lol.
But the fact of the matter is, people leave OGS for Fox whether anyone here likes it or not. Why do you think there are so little Dan players? And itâs been an ongoing theory that Fox has fake accounts that are bots. Assuming it is true, whether you like it or not, it creates a better server experience so that people leave other servers to go to yours.
Edit: Wait time = people leave the server to play somewhere else, or something else. I myself got tired of waiting for a game on OGS many times and went to Fox or Chess so I could actually play something before going to bed.
