Where are all the Go players?

General Go Discussion
1

One thing that puzzles me even though OGS is said to have more people on the server on average than KGS( http://senseis.xmp.net/?GoServers#toc2), why is it that when I go to the ‘play’ page, I see so little people there (looking at total people looking for games, regardless of eligibility of rank) in comparison to KGS?
Furthermore, there are some people with duplicate requests so the real no. of people there is lesser.

Since we’re on the topic of finding games I though I might suggest an automated game search for players that fit your criteria. It’s already a common feature in other servers.

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OGS also has correspondence games, so maybe a lot of the members are just playing correspondence games.

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More people can mean games are more easily accepted and disappear off the play page.
I’ve always found games on OGS I create to be accepted fairly quickly anyway.

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and don’t forget to discount all the bot ‘players’ on KGS. Every time I check, at least half of the available games are from bots.

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I can’t speak for others, but with all the correspondence tournaments I signed up for, one begins just as soon as another ends, so my dance card is pretty full constantly, even without my ever needing to look for games. I imagine there are a few in a similar position.

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Agreed. One can easily accidentally rack up more than 50 concurrent correspondance games through the weeklies, so imagine what one can do when purposefully seeking games.

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Thanks for the tip @kitten1
somehow I ignored the turnaments so far but all of a sudden I’m flooded with running correspondence games, awesome!

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From what I see, it seems people here play mostly correspondence (I almost never touch it) so they don’t really have issues with finding games? hmm hmm.

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I started out on live game here months ago, now I play corresponding games mostly. I never had issues in the past for live game either in the weekends. I now mostly migrated from KGS to here. Both sites are on par for players number.
My gut feeling is that due to additional feature for corresponding games, OGS probably already beat KGS on players number

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I almost always go for correspondence games. I used to play more live games, but I’ve realised you can play at live speed if you are both online at the same time, and if you need to go for whatever reason you can easily pick it up later.

What I don’t understand is when people accept your challenge and then resign after only a few moves. Or accept a challenge that has a five days per move setting, and then start berating you for not moving immediately.

Now I have been on here a few months, I have a few people that I like to play again and again, because they are always polite, and never timeout.

My real bugbear is when you play someone of a much higher grade and then you timeout, which inflates your grade.