We’ve been working on some improvements to the Play page to address several issues:
Our existing Play page is confusing and overwhelming to beginners
Our existing Play page is confusing to many experienced players (in particular the automatch settings)
The time controls were never clear as to what to expect from your game
Our default time settings were not very good for a number of cases
To address these, we’ve re-envisioned how things work:
The Play page has been broken up into two tabs, a “Quick Match” tab and a “Custom Games” tab.
The Quick Match tab has a streamlined game creation view with all of your settings clearly presented on one screen.
For clarity and predictability about what kind of game you’re going to play, we’ve gotten rid of the board size multi select and now only one board size may be selected.
Time settings are explicitly presented as options now so you know what you’re getting. There is a “Flexible” toggle that, when enabled, will prefer the time system setting you’ve chosen (for example Fischer) but will accept a similarly paced Byo-Yomi game instead if it’s available.
We’ve removed the Canadian time control as a quick match option as it was not very popular.
We’ve removed the rule set option as virtually everyone was using Japanese. (Computer games will still use Chinese because that’s the most compatible with bots.)
We’re trying the “Difficulty Balancing” nomenclature instead of “Handicap” because I think it more clearly expresses the purpose of adjusting stones and komi for more interesting games, and hopefully reduces the reluctance of enabling that feature.
The Custom Games tab has the seek graph, games list, and all of the game settings you find when creating a custom game.
For those interested in poking around and experimenting you can check out the update on the beta site: https://beta.online-go.com/play.
Maybe not the most important observation, but I always found it a bit confusing that when you set a challenge that you could annul by (orange) cancel and (red) remove. Why should you be able to annul a game via two buttons, that have different labels?
Yep, I figure this will probably be the most questionable thing. I left the HC there on purpose with the thought that it’d be a breadcrumb / relatively clear to experienced players that what we’re really talking about here is handicaps.
Ehh, for 9x9 and 13x13 handicap is more complicated than just stones, you adjust Komi too. The purpose of doing this is to adjust the difficulty of the game so that it’s not as easy for the better player, and not as hard for the less experienced. Hence, Difficulty Balancing, it seems like it captures the intent of the adjustments better, that’s my logic at any rate. To a beginner “Handicap” doesn’t convey anything useful, but it sounds negative.
Very clean look on the Quick match and welcome changes overall
On the custom games page however, you have to scroll quite a bit to see the open games. I think those should be the focus of that page. My suggestion would be to put them on the top, or on the side, or even hide the whole game creation settings in a popup behind a “create custom game” button. There should be as little friction as possible in accepting an open challenge, when you go through the effort of creating a game with costum settings, clicking one more button is not an issue.
(Also I really don’t like the term ‘difficulty balancing’, handicap is a perfectly fine term. If it was up to me I’d label it “Handicap (suggested)”. But it’s a minor point and personal taste.)
Edit: I’ll also miss the “no preference” option for handicap.
I think “no preference” as default would be best
then handicap likers can turn handicap on if they wish
and handicap haters can turn it off if they wish
when 2 “no preference” users are paired if their rank difference is ±1 game should be even
if their rank difference is ±2 or bigger game should be with handicap
Sometimes the tournament clock for the ASTs starts at 30 plus minutes. That is when there also starts an AST at the whole hour. This one overrides the clock for the half hour tournament.
So if I arrive late in the lounge for the half hour tournament, I can only join that tournament via Play > Tournaments > Live (and not by clicking the trophy icon)
That is a bit of a detour and also might led to less (maybe not even enough) players for the half hour tournament.
Isn’t it a bit weird to give the whole hour tournament precedence over the half hour tournament? The last starts with in a few minutes while the first starts in more than 30 minutes.
