Upcoming changes to the Play page and general time settings

Hello All,

We’ve been working on some improvements to the Play page to address several issues:

  1. Our existing Play page is confusing and overwhelming to beginners
  2. Our existing Play page is confusing to many experienced players (in particular the automatch settings)
  3. The time controls were never clear as to what to expect from your game
  4. 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.
    • Based on the discussions had in Revisiting Automatch Time Settings: Data-Backed Proposal for New Automatch Settings on OGS we’ve made blitz games more blitzy and added a “rapid” game speed which based on a lot of numbers we think a lot of people will prefer. We’ve also updated the Fischer time settings to pair better with their byo-yomi counterparts.
    • 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.

New Quick Match screenshot:

v1 screenshot

21 Likes

I like the new quick match form a lot!

Heh this was the one thing I had trouble parsing (esp since the letters HC are still there). Could be change aversion though.

Anyway, great if it encourages people to use it (and I think enabling it by default will go a long way as well)

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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?

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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.

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A very valid point! I’ll unify those.

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Handicap stones are exist or not exist. Words “Difficulty” and “Balancing” do not contain such information

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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.

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to experienced Go players Difficulty Balancing doesn’t convey anything useful

add “()”
Difficulty Balancing(handicap stones, komi adjustments)

5 Likes

At first glance I was overwhelmed with the number of buttons lol

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I chose computer, clicked play and got forever 'cancel search" button
clicking this button or any other don’t work
I had to refresh page

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Thanks, sounds like a 2x fail, computer should accept quickly, but sounds like the cancel button doesn’t work. I’ll get those both fixed up…

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I click “Create Game”, nothing happens
challenge do not appear in list below

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If I turn off “Difficulty Balancing” and click “Play”
will I have game with those who turn this on but have same rank as me?

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Interesting, I can’t seem to replicate it, everything seems to be working over here. Is it still not working for you now or did it resolve itself?

It should but I’ll have to go double check, that part is some old code, if not I’ll look at making it so it does.

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It still didn’t work now, clicked several times. Then I changed board size to 19x19 and it started to work. I returned it to 9x9 and it works.

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Ah that’s a good hint as to what’s going on, thanks I’ll see if I can get that fixed up.

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Very clean look on the Quick match and welcome changes overall :slight_smile:
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.

6 Likes

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

5 Likes

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.

EDIT:

Scherm­afbeelding 2024-10-19 om 20.26.06

Please use the term “handicap”. It’s been a standard in go for decades.

12 Likes