Western Server Challenge 2024

Announcements
104

Unofficial top ten totals:

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Eleven additional players finished 100 games of one board size.

Four additional players finished 100 or more total blitz games, but not of one board size.

Thank you, Clossius, for hosting the event for another year. I had a lot of fun playing some blitz, and made progress towards overcoming rank anxiety on OGS. Before this event, I’d been playing mainly rapid games on Fox, but now I feel more comfortable playing ranked games on OGS again.

Congrats to ehomba for playing 1001 games! wow!

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105

For the record, here’s an unofficial snapshot of everyone with 100+ games:

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Shoutout to all of my opponents who have 5000 or more games in their total OGS history. They were often ones who accepted many of my posted games, and they probably regularly play hundreds of games every month without ever signing up for any challenge. Also tend to never chat. Just play.

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107

Who else is trying to do some last-minute games?

108

When does it end? I just played a few more games but they aren’t showing

Finally, 100 games! It is not updated on the website though

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I think all games have to be finished in March 2024, and the time of reference is UTC. So if you were playing on March 31st evening in the US, your games don’t count.
5 people completed all three challenges.
2 people completed just 9x9 and 13x13
11 people completed just 9x9
1 person completed just 13x13
2 people completed just 19x19
4 additional people played over 100 games but didn’t complete one of the three challenges.

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Results

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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!

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It could be that, or it could be that the automatch needs some tweaking to just get people a game as opposed to their perfect game.

As in if a player matches the criteria and you could match them in 30s do it, rather than wait 2-3 minutes for the “prefer” settings to work or for a match within 1 rank to show up, then expand to 2,3,4 ranks etc.

I don’t know exactly how it works behind the scenes, but I do expect people to cancel after 1-2 mins rather than wait for it to work, and as mentioned

2 Likes