I know this isn’t strictly related to development, but it’s someone’s opinion as to why despite trying to love OGS for it’s advantages, I stopped playing on it entirely.
Hi, I’m a player who’s been on OGS since… pretty much the beginning of it. Not under this account, but I make many accounts… I’ve also been playing on other servers and irl. I really wanted OGS to do well for it’s obvious advantage of being online. However, after years, I finally gave up on it since I’d still rank it one of the worst places to play go online. Here’s why:
- Talking to the dev team is awful: I’ve made a few posts reporting bugs and how these bugs made me feel as a player. Each time a dev went in the conversation, I was told I should be grateful that OGS is maintained by volunteers and that I shouldn’t be complaining so much. “Thank you for reporting this! We’ll look into it when we have time (we’re just a team of volunteers)”. It’s not hard to do. At the very least, don’t attack the person that made the post!
- Bugs: A logical continuation of #1. I’ve lost many games due to a timer freezing, a server out of sync making me timeout, etc.
- Takes a long time to get a game going: I get that there’s a small playerbase at higher ranks on OGS. However, it’s still a valid criticism. On other servers, I see participating with leagues and other things to promote the server. The only thing I see from OGS is a correspondence game event.
- Political opinions: You’re a go server. Not a political organization. I come play go to relax and think about something fun. What isn’t fun? War and politics in general. So coming to the website and seeing the politicized OGS logo… Hard pass.
- Bad ranks: There seems to be an issue with the ranking system due to them not decaying and/or considering 9x9 and 13x13. But it seems like some rankings are very much out of state with the current rating of the player. Maybe it has to do with a low number of games per account… Unsure, but it needs some love.
- Lack of growth: All these complains CAN be fixed. But they’ve all been a thing for so long now (we’re talking years). Some new servers came in and are simply better than OGS because they have none of these issues. Other servers also have some of these. However, they offer a choice between “convenient and unstable” or “less convenient and stable” with their client. So you can go for whichever one suits you best and keep playing on the same account.
I truly hope that OGS fixes some of these. However, for the time being, I won’t be back until at least some of these have been fixed or there’s sign of growth in the server again.
Godspeed