You can view the results here: Results
First of all, thank you to everyone who joined the event! I hope you all had a fantastic month full of Go games!
As I’ve mentioned in my previous post, I do plan to run this event every year. I plan to learn new things each year to make the event better and better.
This year I taught myself a web building program and connected it with OGS API in order to display the results. This went over very well and I am very happy with the result! Next year I plan to handle the whole event with the site instead of a spreadsheet. Also, having this site do all the counting for me saved me sooooo many hours of work xD. I will say I spent probably more hours building the thing and learning how to use it than I would have counting them…but this skill I think will be very useful for future events.
Things I plan to take from this year’s event:
- Use a website and API to handle everything. Manually running things is a pain and prone to mistakes.
- Make a separate category for correspondence games. I explained my reasoning for this here.
- Make the event count non blitz games instead of blitz. I will elaborate on this below.
- Don’t use servers that don’t have API. (I didn’t use KGS this year and it saved me a ton of effort. If someone can teach me how to count KGS games through API then I will add it again.)
I will say that I should try to emphasis more that the event was a challenge and not a competition. I found that having the prizes created a miss-leading idea. The event is suppose to be a challenge to play 100 games in a month. While I do like the ideas of prizes for the individuals that go above and beyond, we could also explore ways to use the prize money to get prizes for the community or perhaps pay for something that we can give to everyone who achieves 100 games. (Perhaps get a pro lecture for every 10 people to complete the challenge.) This is something to think about in the future but we shall see how it goes.
We played over 13,000 games in March!! That’s an insane number of games! We ran a comparison, with the same users (and various filters), the amount of games played in January were somewhere between 3,000-5,000 games. We pretty much tripled the amount of games played by the 258 players.
Some explanations:
There was some controversy about the amount of games played by some and how they played them. I wish to clarify this. We already discussed the pros and cons of correspondence in the link above and concluded that it will be a separate category. There was a method of playing ranked blitz simuls, about 3-4 games at a time in different tabs. This was a very creative solution to maximize games whilst staying within the rules. It didn’t violate the spirit of the challenge as it did give more games to opponent’s and the win rates were within 40-60%. However, due to how difficult this is, there were some large rank swings that creating the illusion of sandbagging. I will not be handling any sandbagging accusations as that is an OGS TOS thing.
As for the event, I wanted to make sure that moves were not just being played and then immediately resigning which I did not see. There were some games that I felt were early, but they were in a losing position and was within the right to resign. I think it is difficult to determine exactly how far behind you have to be to consider it a lost game worth resigning. I think many people with have different opinions on this.
My reasoning for making it live games next year is as follows. While blitz in no way defyed the spirit of the challenge, though it was a very cool solution, it wasn’t quite what I envisioned the event to be. While I felt that the games were played honestly, the quality dropped more than I liked. To clarify, I also did simul blitz and found it very fun, but the quality of games and the volatility of my rank just made it something I personally felt wasn’t the games I was wanting to create with this event.
Thus, I will be added the rule to only be live games, not blitz or correspondence, for the main categories. My current plan is to make the time settings a minimum of 5min 5x30. I will probably also require byo yomi. But this second thing is only to make it easier to search with API. I will still be allowing simuls. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with this. I just personally want to increase the quality of these games.
I think in the future, there will be a place for a blitz event and perhaps even OGS leaderboard for records such as “Most Games Played in a Day.” But for now, this is currently how I am envisioning the future of this event to go.
Now let’s talk about Rengo. We were able to add that in this year! Very happy to have this feature on OGS. With that being said, I think it was very new and I noticed a lot of games being timed out very very early on. This wasn’t even players timing out on purpose, most of the time it was their opponents who just left. I hope this improves in the future, but this year I felt about 1/3rd of the games I looked at were not even played more than 30 moves. I may brainstorm ways to help improve the Rengo community in the future. For now though, I felt that it wasn’t fair to not count games played by those who were actively playing Rengo games and just had bad luck. With that being said, I did rule that you could not keep playing Rengo against the same people over and over. I felt this was against the spirit of the event. This doesn’t mean you can’t be a team and play lots of games together, it just means that the players of both colors could not be the same pool of players repeatedly. The goal is to be an opponent for more people. (This gets me thinking that I should create a team Rengo event though 
xD)
In conclusion, I learned a lot from this event and I consider it a massive success. I really hope you all enjoyed it and had a great month! Once again, thank you for playing and I will see you all next time~~
~C
Shameless Plug: If you would like to support me for the time and energy put into running the event you can do so here: https://ko-fi.com/clossius
