Two Suggestions Related to Correspondence Games

Two separate suggestions/feature requests, which I think would be helpful for correspondence games:

  1. Do not auto-advance (for people using that feature) to the next game, if a conditional move is triggered, or when you make the second pass initiating the scoring phase.
  2. Add games where you need to confirm the stone life/death status to the rotation of games where it is your turn (as cycled by clicking on the number in the top-right). Also, it would be nice to get an email notification when it becomes your turn to confirm or reconfirm the stone status.

For the first item, it would be nice to stay focused on a single game until it is fully taken care of, rather than having to come back to it after moving onto another game.

For the second item, right now it seems a bit difficult to figure which scoring phase games are waiting for your confirmation rather than your opponents. It seems that the only visual cue is that your name will be in bold next to the game thumbnail. They are easy to overlook, especially since the rotation seems to skip theses cases (i.e., they are not considered as a game where you have a move to make). This is especially problematic if your opponent changes the status of the stones after you first confirm, thus requiring you to reconfirm. Without a email notification, or the game being in the rotation, it’s easy to mistakenly assume that it is just waiting on your opponent’s confirmation and not yours.

Edit: opened a GitHub issue for the second suggestion: https://github.com/online-go/online-go.com/issues/700

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Strongly agree with both of these.

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I have in mind a case against #1: if you play many correspondence games, expecially with fast timesetting, it could be more important to play all “urgent” moves (where your time is expiring) than to stay focused on a single game.
Playing a move will give usually at least 8 hours more to your clock, so you’ll have time to come back and check other moves or confirm stone removal.

So, it would be nice to have this one optional, if it wasn’t the matter of having another checkbox on settings page! :slight_smile:

I don’t remember about #2: I would say that it’s already so.

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Some months ago, games in stone removal phase were in the rotation, but lately (past 2 weeks or so) I noticed this games aren’t in the rotation anymore.

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I think this a good point, however, I don’t think that addressing both issues would necessarily require a checkbox option. Perhaps the auto-advance feature could use the following logic:

After playing a move in a correspondence game:
    If there is another game with an "urgent deadline",
        Then, advance to the "most urgent game".
    Else If a conditional move was triggered Or scoring begun (second pass),
        Then, stay on the current game.
    Else, advance to the "most urgent game".

Where urgent deadline means your turn to move with less than X minutes (perhaps 10-30?) left on your clock, and most urgent game means the game where it is your turn and has the least amount of time left.

Triggering a conditional move or entering scoring does not happen too frequently, so if player wants to override staying on the same game, they could always just click on the number in the top-right to move on to the next game in the queue.

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I’ve also noticed this behavior in my two most recent correspondence games that went to scoring.

The current state, which makes it a bit harder to realize that a game is waiting on you to confirm stones, could possibly be abused.

I had a game where I was second to pass and hence marked the stones first. At some point later, my opponent inappropriately changed the stone status and flipped the game result into their favor, but I did not realize that it was my “turn” to reconfirm or change the stones (since the game was not coming up in the rotation nor did I get a notification). However, I happened to enter the game by chance (by clicking on the thumbnail on the home screen, which I only did since I wanted to the check the profile of my opponent) and then saw to my surprise that the stone status had been changed and that the system was waiting my confirmation. If I had not luckily checked the game again, I believe the system would have simply accepted my opponent’s erroneous stone marking once I had timed out. After I fixed the stone status, it seems that my opponent may have never realized that I had done so, since the game only ended 24 hours later when apparently their confirmation clock ran out.

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I like both of these ideas, i hope they will get implemented ^^

I’d also like to see games waiting for score acceptance at the very top of home screen. Why? cause in general it feels more ‘urgent’ than games that are just waiting my moves, and also there is only 24-hour timer for accepting the score, which is usually less than either player has on their clock when the passes were made.

And while we’re talking bout that timer, have you guys noticed that it gets broken on weekends? When a game that’s currently on weekend pause gets to scoring, the 24-hour timer starts running on game screen, but after reaching 0.0 nothing happens. If it gets to 0.0 before weekend pause is over, it will stay like that forever - or until score is accepted or changed.

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I opened a GitHub issue for the second suggestion:

Addressing the first issues would also affect the prioritization of urgent games, and perhaps the best way to handle that is not as clear cut:

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A third suggestion related to the first issue:

  1. Do not auto-advance when your opponent triggers your conditional move in a game that you have open.

I had a correspondence game open, chatting with my opponent since they were also online at the same time and it was a teaching game. It was my opponent’s turn to move, but I had entered some conditional moves since the exchange was obvious. All of sudden, the website navigated to the next game, since my conditional move was triggered by my opponent playing a move.

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I’m bumping this thread because I think those are awesome suggestions.

I’m currently in a game where my opponent played a sequence of 6 obvious forcing moves, for which I had programmed responses in the autoplay. This sequence could have been played by my opponent in a minute, since all my responses were automated… Yet my opponent systematically waited for their clock to almost-run out before they played their next obvious atari.

My guess is that they had “auto-advance to next game” activated, and so they didn’t even notice that I had autoplayed the obvious response.

I don’t know how exactly the “next game” is determined by the auto-advance. But it seems reasonable that if a move was programmed in the autoplay, the “next game” should be the current game, not another game.

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I think the “next game” is the most urgent one, i.e. the one with the least remaining time.

(BTW I am not the player you are talking about (I generally play more than 1 move/day), but if I don’t answer immediately despite that you programmed conditional moves, it’s not because of the way “auto-advance” works, but because I don’t want to play impulsively.)

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No problem. I normally don’t mind my opponents’ playing speeds. The reason I noticed in this game in particular was because it was a long sequence of forcing moves and they kept waiting for their time to nearly run out before they played the next atari. It didn’t feel like they were taking their time to think about the game, quite the opposite. I’m guessing they didn’t even notice that I had autoplayed the responses.

I don’t think so. See for instance these quotes from anoek:

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You quoted old posts. This post

suggests that things have changed recently.

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I think they have a name for that in statistics :yum:

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Some people wait for email notifications before placing a stone! :scream:

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