My opinion on integrating corr games is slightly different.
It will encourage both, corr games before 1 march and live in march.
But then the challenge will become a OGS internal affair as i highly doubt that players from other server will well understand this.
For these players who will discover sooner or later that it works like that and start with a fair disadvantage, I’d say in fact that corr games integration will not encourage but discourage playing live which is the reverse of the original goal.
Note that in anything you avoid to create ressentiment and misunderstanding. Calling a challenge march when in fact it starts a month before (now) may lead to this.
I didn’t read the whole thread, but here is my two cents as to why I’m neither excited nor planning to participate in this event. It encourages people to play as many games as possible, as opposed to “do their best in the games they play”, i.e. priortising quantity over quality. I understand that quality can’t easily be measured, so it would be difficult to organise an analogous event priortising quality. However I personally don’t agree with the idea that I should play more go. I’m playing a healthy amount of go for my lifestyle at the moment, and am rather striving to play higher quality moves (and to explore fun go variants).
That being said, I wish everybody who participates a lot of fun!
Got it.
From my experience on running LoL community events, there is no reason to run an event for people that do not plan on having fun during it or do not deem themselves to be the target group of the event.
So, this is an event to promote “more games in the West” but will be done in OGS because the organiser cannot possibly find the time to include another server. He tried it last year and it was “a huge pain”.
From your perspective you think you cannot win this because of correspondence stackers or just people who will just spam games. And because you are a Go streamer this creates the extra trouble of having to play in OGS.
Fair enough.
There are four constructive things to do, as far as I can tell:
a) Propose some improvements that would make it good for streamers (e.g. the addition of a streamer prize that was mentioned that existed last year iirc?) b) Propose to help the organiser with either counting the results on another server that you deem has more live games OR, even better, follow the spirit of the competition and organise within your Go streamers community and see if you could stream and play amongst you a lot of games on OGS or something similar. c) Participate for the fun of it, outside your streaming schedule. d) Decide that this is not organised to your liking and that it is not worth your time.
Having said that I think that …
… that most people will agree that excluding a big chunk of the server so that you can participate is not an improvement.
The organiser replied again and again.
At best what will happen is make the correspondence games have 50% of the time/moves made in March so they can count or get them to be in March from start to finish.
ok.
This event is clearly not here to replace someone’s job.
I mean, really?
Yeah, that is how he thought he’d make it more interesting.
If you have a better idea to make people play more games, please propose it.
Do not just say “hey you! Find something better!”
Someone is putting down his time and money to organise something.
The least you can do to help them is to propose an improvement for everyone involved, instead of ordering them to magically “do better”.
I wonder about that.
Let’s say we fund a year-round competition only for streamers here on OGS, but in order to participate there are no “super blitz simuls”, you have to play almost tournament styled games (where you will be using the extra time to explain the moves to the viewers) with main time 20 minutes and some hefty byoyomi, the games have to be streamed, you will have to have more than 10 viewers on average, and you have to play 100 such games per month and no sand-bagging.
A combination of games played and games won, gets more points. New users from other servers get a bonus in points.
(e.g. you get 2 points for playing a game, +2 if you win against a better opponent, +1 if you win against a weaker opponent. 10 bonus points for new users in order to acclimate to the new server. )
Let’s say, first place, a couple of thousand dollars at the end of the year.
You playing?
If not, then here is what you should do.
Take that casual idea/suggestion, improve it, and propose it to the OGS mods and owners, instead of piling over someone else’s event.
You want things done? Do them.
P.s.
For the record, I am not participating in this event this year either.
First of all, Clossius, thank you so much for this challenge! I think the initiative is simply fantastic.
Regarding the conversation. It seems we are slowly moving into the territory of “don’t critique the poster/author in any way; he is doing his best and for free.” I think that deep reflection or even analysis is highly beneficial, and on top of that, BoneSaw and smurph did put a couple of alternatives forward: simply no live games or corr games should start in March. And they provided great strategic thinking in terms of the OGS brand, i.e., what is the focus of the server: live or correspondence? I would love to see such a level of discussion from all the future posters.
I would like to add a couple of thoughts regarding the goal and motivation. One hundred games per month is an insane number, especially if you have a day job. Add to this a demotivation BoneSaw discussed when he sees how hard it is to push the number of games playing only live ones; the situation doesn’t look good. I think a simple solution to motivation, cheating, etc. would be:
altogether remove monetary prizes
fight for a cool badge instead. A symbolic prize is a prize nonetheless. More on this down below
live games only – to improve the OGS brand as a “live server” and push the number of concurrent players up in the hope that it will stay the same after the event
lower the number of games required to 50 or so. The number shouldn’t be extraordinary, but it should be more than a typical number of games per month per player to set a challenge
Following this logic, the tournament’s goal is not to win monetary prizes. And I think putting financial rewards and saying “don’t worry about them, let’s just play games!” is a little bit strange; it’s a contradictory message. I propose to remove it and fight (yes, fighting, because Go is a competitive game, say what you want. People are fighting here) for symbolic prizes of two types:
play >50 games a month (everyone gets that badge)
TOP-3 place in the games played (only three players per DDK, SDK, Dan level get these badges).
Additionally, motivate streamers to stream and spread the word: add a separate badge for the most games played for streamers.
P.S. Saying “just do the thing if you want an alternative” is not a super-fair thing to do. Some people have much more known brands than others, and they have much more marketing potential. Hence we are discussing here and not creating separate challenges.
The spirit is “don’t attend a chocolate party expecting to only eat dark chocolate, acting surprised and annoyed that organizer wants to include all chocolate, pushing for only serving dark chocolate, disparaging those who just like chocolate in general and trying to convince everyone that only dark chocolate is real chocolate”.
Only if there are no games on OGS. Playing on Fox is very inconvenient. The issue with OGS is that everyone says “would be a lot more convenient to play there, but there are no players”. I sometimes try to find game on OGS, then open the VM, boot windows, update Fox, try to find game on Fox and I get one before OGS finds anything.
There is no reason to run an event for people that aren’t the target group of the event
The target group are to bring people to play more on OGS. It’s western go players. However, with those rules, you’re cutting your own target audience in half when simply making the “start and end in March” rule and are giving a reason for players NOT to go and join the event. They’re at a heavy disadvantage and, therefore, will see the event as an event of OGS for active OGS players (which is fine but excludes them so they won’t play). Hence Clossius remark of “I’m not sure it had any impact” of course there wasn’t. No new player was brought on OGS
Because you are a streamer this creates extra trouble of having to play on OGS
Not just as a streamer, as a player too. The event doesn’t bring more live games since you’re at a disadvantage for coming on OGS from another server
Propose improvements
I did. Or, at least, I thought I did. I did suggest to only count live games and/or only use the games that have started and ended in March. I also threw another idea on discord being “count the most amount of moves in March” (which is more of a pain, but would bring the playing field 50-50)
Participate for the fun of it, outside your streaming schedule
I was streaming 7h/day… That was waaaaaaay outside my schedule
Create your own thing if you don’t like it
Sure, I could. That being said, when someone has a good idea (but has a flaw in it), I’d rather try to point it out. I could also organize something from scratch and do all the work but trying to say "Hey, please change one definition slightly (games that end in March vs games that start and end in March) and the event is perfect. I COULD make the same exact event with that slight rule change or try to argue my point…
I agree that it would be best to keep a positive atmosphere for this great event, but on the other hand it’s rather unfair to dismiss any critic or alternative suggestion as entitled and grumpy. People explained their concern, and good points were made above.
I’m literally trying to say “The event says it’s to promote eating all chocolates. However, the rules make it a real pain to have white and milk choccy. Please change so that all chocolates can have their place”. Also, it’s a “Keep the rules the same for everyone”. Right now it’s “It’s an event in March! UNLESS you start ahead of time in correspondence games, in which case doesn’t really matter when you start the games, just make sure you end it in March. So you can have many games 90% done that started before March, making this more of a Feburary event”
Of course I’m not referring to all critics, I’m referring to entitled and grumpy critics.
I like some of the suggestions, I agree with some of them, but when I suggest something I don’t automatically expect it to happen and be right about it, I acknowledge that others might have a different vision.
I think I said it quite clearly here. Of course you can have a different opinion. I even think it’s a valid, 100% legit opinion and I support it. Just don’t think it’ll fix queue times or bring streamers/higher rank players on here. By keeping that rule, you’re not giving everyone the same starting time in the race. That’s all I’m saying and I’m asking Clossius to make it a fair race between everyone. For a race to happen, it’s not just “whoever crosses the finish line first” but also “let’s all start at the same time”. A race with different starting times will be seen as unfair and won’t attract the same amount of runners
March is Clossius challenge month. Let’s respect that for what it is and let it be the main course.
Let’s have an appetizer:
Today is February 1st. Starting February 2nd (day starts at midnight UTC), first Go streamer who reaches 50 live streamed games (legit games, I don’t think any streamer would make a joke of their stream for a cash prize) on OGS only, gets 20$ from me. If first has more than 80% (I don’t watch streamers, is that a good percentage?) win rate, they get 40$ (they can discard lost games if they want to go for double). If winner feels like it, they can say “Gia is wrong” live on stream for my wrongness to be recorded for eternity.
If anoek allows it, and if community allows it, and if Clossius doesn’t mind, I’m game.
That’s not what this whole thing’s about. As stated, it’s about making everyone start at the same time and end at the same time. Like any race or any thing ever.
If a Marathon says “doesn’t matter when you start, as long as you happen to cross the finish line on the day means you ran the whole thing”, expect low participation and no impact with this race. Unless you make it fair, don’t expect people to join.
So yeah, that’s why I’m trying to get the organizer to set a starting line. Make the playing field even. I didn’t think there would be such a great opposition to it
So you get an honestly offered event how you like it (starting date same for all, live only, prize incentive, focused on streamers) and you are set on changing the event you don’t like? I’m honestly confused!
You don’t have to use your own money. There are so far 4 categories with 200$ prizes in each, and 1000$ of prizes are announced in the title… So there is probably some room to add a streamer prize.
The tourney you suggested is completely different than the goal Western Server Challenge claims to be pursuing. It’s also different from what I claim to want to achieve.
Goal: Bring more people to play on OGS
How you do that: Get more people to play on OGS, thus reducing queue time
Most effective method: Make an event (with some kind of reward, be it money, teaching game, profile banner, tag on OGS, doesn’t matter) of who can play the most games in a given amount of time.
The key here is the given amount of time part. Clossius’ event is exactly what OGS needs. Only that the “in a given amount of time” part is missing. After all, why would you run in a race when everyone else has already started? Sure, some people will, but you’re removing a lot of potential participants (hindering reaching the goal of getting more people to play on OGS. Hence hurting your own event)
Note that nowhere in there do I mention streamers or anything. If the goal is to get more players, the event is doing it wrong. I like the event, I want it to succeed cause I think it’s what OGS needs and MASSIVE props to Clossius and all the organizers that made the whole thing possible. Just please, fix the flaw from last event!
Your event offer (as nice as it is) doesn’t address any of the points listed above. So sure, if you want to organize it, you’d have my full support, I might also pitch in. But it does nothing to solve the issue the event is trying to mitigate
I’m just saying “hey, this time, please put a starting line in your race! More people will want to join ^^”
