That use case seems niche enough that it merits a visit to the Custom Match page
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If handicap would be always on in automatch, Custom page should be made more clearly seen or be united with automatch. Or those who like fuseki of even games would have problems.
I’ve made a few adjustments based on various suggestions:
- Times are rounded to the nearest minute and don’t include a range
- Game Speed renamed to Game Clock
- The toggles are replaced with drop downs, which are more descriptive and offer the difficulty balancing / handicap setting of “Standard”, which is basically prefer that they are on but accept games where they are disabled.
10 Likes
This is quite a nice solution except that the text is small and excessive for mobile. Don’t suppose there come be some kind of “I” thing for the info in a pop up instead?
Suggested shortening edit:
“Assign starting stones and Komi to make games closer to being fair between stronger and weaker players” or “… players of different strengths”
Who asked for this? Terrible change. Having both the 50 and 90 range was brilliant!
You’re adding more options, not less 
1 Like
anoek already explained how they indeed are
Looks nice, really.
Will it work with multiple selection?
I mean if I am open to a
13x13 or a 9x9
and a time setting like
30+3 or 30+5x10 or 2+5
Can I push all this buttons at same time?
If so and both do the same multiple choice, what would be the default choice by the automatch maker (biggest board and slowest fisher time in the selection made by the players?)
This multiple choice would enlarge the pool of games at disposal and be adequate to users without a so specific request in mind
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No, that’s one of the things he explicitly took out.
1 Like
I had a thought to have the ability to select multiple clock settings now that we have a drop down (the thought being selecting the “multi” option would allow you to toggle on/off various clock settings), but things aren’t quite primed for that on the back end so it’s not implemented yet, but I’m not closed to that idea. .
I definitely heard more complaints than praises about the complexity of our existing board size selector, hence why I simplified it to select one size. The other issue with multi-select of board sizes is the time settings are tied to the board size, so overall having that be a multi-select system is kind of a ui/ux pain and my general impression is most folks don’t want it.
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Do we really need so many buttons for the clock settings? I mean, if you have been playing blitz you won’t suddenly switch to a slow game right? Why not just keep one for the last used setting and move all the settings elsewhere or change to a drop-down?
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I think when you keep minimising and hiding UI with drop downs or modals, there’s a point where you start trading screen space for usability and general ease of use for new players.
Like the more you hide things the more a new user needs to do to figure out how to change things, the more effort it becomes to change things when you’re trying out various settings to see which you prefer etc.
I think there are some negatives is what I’m getting at to going too far in the simplification direction, whereby if you go down that route, deleting is probably better than hiding in some cases.
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But the user doesn’t know this is what they measure from looking at the page; they would need to come to the forums and find anoek’s post to learn that. Maybe they are 25th and 75th centiles. Maybe minimum and maximum. Maybe mode and mean. You could put some extra explaining text or a tooltip, but that would make the screen even busier, so if it’s not blindingly obvious and intuitive what a precise measurement is measuring, don’t have it precise.
Note this is only an argument for changing 26 - 48 minutes to 25 - 50 minutes, not for losing the range entirely.
Reminds me of this joke:
Some tourists are at a natural history museum looking at a dinosaur skeleton. One of them notices a cleaner nearby and asks “How old is that dinosaur?”
“65 million and 25 years old” she replies.
“Oh, how do you know so precisely?”
“Well, they were 65 million years old when I started, and I’ve worked here for 25 years”
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Edit: this message is useless, see BHydden’s answer below.
Perhaps we could allow to select the two fast time settings at the same time: 30s+3s and/or 30s+5x10s.
Same thing for medium and slow speed.
This would notably decrease waiting time.
The flexible toggle already does this.
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Indeed but I think that jlt asked is an indication that it’s not clear. Took me a while to work out that that this is what “or” is telling me. I expected both boxes to be highlighted but only one is. I get that the reason for that is that the highlighted one is “preferred” with the “or” one accepted as a fall back. However I’m not sure this is really necessary. If you don’t mind then you shouldn’t mind. Couldn’t “flexible” go further and be “don’t mind”. (And then you don’t even need to show the clocks, just the approx durations…)
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Then perhaps, if “flexible” is on, merge the two buttons of similar speed:
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I’d like to take into consideration which piece of information is the most meaningful/useful for players to help them choose, and how that can be conveyed most clearly.
I’d personally be most interested in how big a time window I’d need to reserve for myself to likely finish the game (not so much in the average/median game duration). The p90 total game duration may be a good indicator for that (also see Revisiting Automatch Time Settings: Data-Backed Proposal for New Automatch Settings on OGS - #216 by gennan).
With some rounding, for 19x19 p90 total game duration you’d get:
- blitz: up to ~15 minutes
- rapid: up to ~30 minutes
- full: up to ~50 minutes
For 9x9 p90 total game duration you’d get:
- blitz: up to ~5 minutes
- rapid: up to ~10 minutes
- full: up to ~15 minutes
So I think this is great:
…, except for clarity I’d add “up to” to those labels.
And perhaps the label of the correspondence option could also have a p90 total game duration indicator?
How about “odds balancing”, “odds adjustment” or “odds amendment”?
I like it!
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Definitely not! This makes it sound like gambling and that it’s a game of chance. If only there was a word for fairnessising!
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I used “odds” as a short term for “win probability”. I think “win probability balancing” describes the purpose of handicap more accurately than “difficulty balancing”, but it may be a bit too long.