Okay so I will try to address the topics brought up.
Firstly, I am sticking by my decision to allow correspondence games as OGS has a very large percentage of players who only play correspondence. Many players cannot play live games and they just don’t have time. I want them to be able to enjoy the event as well.
As for games finishing in March, I delayed elaborating on this because I wasn’t even sure if it was possible for Anoek to query when games started vs when they finished in the same query and we even discussed if the average time started/finished should be taken into consideration. But again, I needed to know if this was even possible before responding.
As such, it is possible but with more brainstorming, I still feel people who play correspondence will likely need the extra time since 30 days is not a lot of time for those who only played 1-3 moves per day per game. Thus I will not be changing the rule that we will just count games that finished in March.
With that being said, I do agree with many concerns, the main one of which is it seems to be most effective to combine correspondence with live games to achieve the highest results. I personally don’t see this as bad because more games are more games. But I can understand how many people will feel cheated if they only played live but others did something else that gave them an edge. With this information, I plan to add a separate category for correspondence and separate live from correspondence in the future as many people seemed upset at the way it is currently done. My reason for not doing it is with more divisions there is less prize money per person.
As for the point about the math, I’m fully aware that it is not worth someone’s time to get the prize. But I would like to ask you how many Go tournaments are? I’ve won tournaments and I’ve spent more money going that the prize was. It was just a nice bonus but I wouldn’t refuse to Go compete because I lost money. I enjoy playing Go. This is an unfortunate problem but Go just doesn’t have enough money. Teaching Go is my main source of income and it is not a 6 figure job where I can sponsor a ton of cash. I apologize if the prize is not incentivizing.
To be clear, the event is to encourage more games. I understand that some suggested taking the prize money out. I can almost guarantee though, if I had made the event without prize money many players would say that I won’t get people to join without offering a prize. I doubt I can please everyone so I plan to keep the prizes to reward those who go above and beyond.
I will repeat, this event is to encourage more games/activity on western servers. This year, specifically OGS. To respond to some of Bonesaw’s concerns. I believe you have a very understandable misunderstanding about this event. The previous year, the Western Dan Challenge was targeted at getting more Dan played to play on OGS instead of Tygem and Fox. Due to a lot of excitement and request, we included kyu players as well. When I say the event failed, I do not mean that it didn’t do well, it just didn’t achieve the specific result I wanted.
I set out to try to get more Dan players on OGS. While many did play for that month, almost none stuck around. However, if I remember these numbers correctly, we upped the games played in February from 2,000-3,000 live games played to something like 10,000 games. We also have over 300 people register for the event. (I don’t expect the same results this year as it is less promoted and less inclusive.)
Because it didn’t achieve what I wanted I didn’t plan to try again, however there was a lot of people excited to meet the challenge and wanted me to host the event again. With all of this, I decided to change to goal from getting more Dan players, to just making a fun event for everyone to participate in and create more activity for the community. Thus, the name change.
To expand on your point about Fox being the go to for Dan players. I agree completely. However, looking into this, LiChess has roughly 10,000 people online at the same time. I expect Fox to have similar numbers. OGS has about 2,000 people on at the same time. This event will NOT increase OGS users by 5 times. As for getting new players, while the event did get a lot of new accounts and people coming back to play, there wasn’t really any lasting effect that we could tell. So this event will not be able to solve that problem and thus, I change it from solving a problem to just making something for people to enjoy and increasing activity in the community.
I will also include that this is a challenge more than a competition. I will admit with prize money it does come off as a competition more than I expected/wanted it to. However, I really did try to make prizes for everyone who completed the challenge as well as reward those who took it even further and played the most in the month.
One more note on the correspondence before I forget to mention it, I do plan to change it next year to be it’s own category like Rengo. But I will not be doing it this year as I don’t want to make such a massive change right after announcing the event.
Please remember, this is a new event and I will be learning more about running it and making it better each year. I do take the feedback into consideration and I try my best to make an event that most will enjoy while accepting I can’t please everyone. However, please do not make the entire thread arguments about if I am running it correctly or not. If you have stated your view and responding with clarifications, just leave it at that. I don’t want to see arguments start over this event and I really don’t want my event to have a negative feeling in anyone’s head. I’m simply trying to make a fun event for everyone.
As for the streamer prize. I just didn’t have it in the budget this year. My wife and I are having a lot of medical bills to deal with and for our privacy I request that this thread not start a discussion about it.
For others offering to donate to the prize pool, there was a lot of issues managing money for many sources and it was a bit stressful to get it all right and not miss anything or lose much from transaction cost. I also feel that while it is great to have a bit bigger prize, it is not significant enough to make a huge impact to solve the problem of, it is not worth someone’s time mathematically because the hourly rate will still be low regardless. Additionally, being accused of stealing money from strangers is not fun. (I do have records of all transactions btw. So no I didn’t steal it.)
I hope this addresses all the issues pointed out above. To clarify, I do not expect this to solve every issue. But I will continue to run this event as best I can and try to improve it each year. Thank you all for the feedback, and let’s all try to remember that we are all Go players who are just trying to help our community.
~C