Upcoming changes to the Play page and general time settings

[shinuito]

@benjito

but I think it’s pretty clear that automatch users want a less fragmented player pool.

@anoek

I worry that that poll is going to be a bit skewed since it has the fear factor about the pool size, but I think that’s not as big of a deal with flexible on by default (which is why it is.)

It’s also the case that automatch users just want a game quicker.

So if there’s any improvements to speed up the auto matching algorithm, I bet that would also make a difference to whether people care if there’s a X options or Y pools.

We have reason to think that maybe there could be some improvements possible? The latest WSC challenge we had some comments about the automatch maybe being a bit slow at times

@jlt

I did make an effort to use automatch every time, however it often took more than 10 minutes to get a game, …
Although my settings were “prefer handicap, up to 9 stones”, I rarely played with more than 1 handicap stone, people generally canceled the game when they saw several handicap stones.

@Clossius1

The general opinion was that it was much better to not use the button at all. It generally took about 10m or so to get a match vs creating a custom game with the same settings was pretty quick taking 1-2m at most.

I too when testing time settings on beta, to record which ones were being used by automatch, found the automatch to be a bit slow, given I was using several accounts that should’ve matched with each other and I was 100% the only accounts in the queue

So if there’s any intentional waiting times, like “there’s is a match in the pool but we’re waiting X seconds or minutes for a better match to come along first”, as part of the algorithm, then that could be one point of optimisation for example.

Especially when there are flexible options like a rank range or handicap or time settings:

• if you want a fairly specific matchup change your settings,
• If you have it fairly flexible like up to 9 stones, a huge rank range any time control, it should probably match quickly over finding someone within one rank and waiting for it?

Edit: I’m not saying it’s bad, but rather that even a little optimisation if possible probably goes a long way?