Title tournaments

drmwc · January 1, 2015, 3:20pm

Hi

Do the title tournaments still exist? I could not find a sign-up page for the 2015 Honinbo, Meijin, Turing etc. I assume this is just me being inept at navigation, but a search of tournaments didn’t show anything up.

trohde · January 1, 2015, 4:39pm

@drmwc: does this help you?

HTH, and a healthy and happy new year!

Tom

matburt · January 1, 2015, 9:14pm

Nope, this is a good observation… we have entirely sunset the Title Tournaments as they existed on the site prior to the Nova and OGS merge. Once the current Title Tournaments complete we will not be running them anymore

What we are seeing, pretty much universally and across the board with the title tournaments, is something like 90% abandonment… I’m even getting messages from long time players on OGS who thought they had been forced to join a tournament because a new round started and they got a bunch of new games… it had been almost 8 months since the last round started and they genuinely forgot that they had joined the tournament.

We’re seeing tournaments that can run for more than a year and in some cases more than 2 years and with such a high abandonment rate I feel like it’s just not a good mechanism for players and has lead to numerous support requests.

Instead of running these extremely long title tournaments we are going to fold Correspondence tournaments into our sitewide leaderboards which you can read about here:

with somewhat shorter time controls to try to keep tournaments more engaging. You’ll notice on the leaderboards page that sections are broken out for different speeds.

tegais · January 3, 2015, 4:20pm

I made a request to continue the title tournaments https://ogs.uservoice.com/forums/277766-online-go-com-suggestions-and-feature-requests/suggestions/6917013-continue-to-run-the-title-tournaments-and-matches. May be the devs will change their mind if there will be enough votes.

drmwc · January 3, 2015, 9:54pm

Thanks tegais - I agree with you that title tournaments are good, so I voted for your idea.

gamesorry · January 7, 2015, 11:06am

What we are seeing, pretty much universally and across the board with the title tournaments, is something like 90% abandonment

However, no other tournaments have as many registered players as the title tournaments (not even close).

I’m even getting messages from long time players on OGS who thought they had been forced to join a tournament because a new round started and they got a bunch of new games

They can just resign from the tournaments with no hurt. But cancelling the title tournament can hurt many people who love these tournaments.

We’re seeing tournaments that can run for more than a year and in some
cases more than 2 years and with such a high abandonment rate I feel
like it’s just not a good mechanism for players

I don’t see it as a problem. For players who don’t like them, they can simply ignore them.

and has lead to numerous support requests.

Partially because I repeatedly made several requests as they seem to remain unsolved…

Instead of running these extremely long title tournaments we are going to fold Correspondence tournaments into our sitewide leaderboards which you can read about here:

There’s no information about the correspondence tournaments yet.

I apologize if some words sound aggressive.

Here are my viewpoints:

Many players (including me) are mainly interested in corresponding tournaments. I’m more likely to abandon the tournments with shorter time because I simply don’t have so much time in a shorter period.
Keeping the title tournament running does not need much work since they are already there.
For any reason, if you really don’t want to use the ‘Title’ words, please at least keep some official corresponding tournaments running, such that there are enough strong and serious players who would like to join.

drmwc · January 7, 2015, 12:41pm

I had one further thought on the topic. The 90% abandonment rate may in part be due to the move to Nova. This understandably produced a number of logistic issues which caused a number of the tournaments to suffer long delays between the expected start date and the actual start date. (This was the case with the Turing tournament, for example.)

Nova is now a well-established platform, and has undergone major developments since the migration. So such delays are unlikely to recur. So I would expect the drop-out rate to be materially lower for future title tournaments.