Results
First of all, thank you to everyone who participated in the challenge! We had a total of 114 players sign up, and 25 have completed the challenge, with 5 Grand Slams!
The most games played was by @ehomba with an impressive total of 1,001 games!
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Closing Statement
This has been the 3rd year of the WSC. I admit I was not able to give it my full attention due to having other priorities in my life right now, but I wanted to make sure the event was still held regardless and plan to for as long as I can.
Every year, in addition to supporting activity on OGS, I also try to support something about OGS or the community as a whole. This year was about supporting the Automatch features on OGS. I felt that one of the big weaknesses of the Automatch was that not enough people use it and thus makes it harder for users to get a match, which in turn makes less people use it. I decided to only include one button of the Automatch, the Blitz button, as I wanted players to focus on the same button to reduce wait time.
Blitz was decided on as the goal was 100 games and I felt 20m per side was far too much for this type of event. There was a lot of mixed opinions about blitz being the only option. I do agree that 5m per side would have been ideal, but this was not a possible option.
One could say that the Automatch button restriction was an epic fail, but I actually found the results quite informative. It is my hopes that @anoek and @GreenAsJade can use the feedback of this event to improve OGS even more in the future. 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.
This is just my opinion, but I think user pool is just not big enough to support automatch features. Rather I think the buttons should be quick match options, where clicking the button instantly creates a custom game with pre defined settings. It is still a one click, but this does not limit who can accept the game only to those using the automatch feature. It also allows for more options(buttons with different settings) which I think many people want to see. (This should not be the place for discussion about this, a different post would be better.)
I hope that everyone found this event enjoyable and was able to enjoy Go as a game rather than having rank/serious pressure. I truly believe that just by having fun and enjoying the game, you will improve naturally. Once again, thank you all for participating and I hope to see you next year as well!