Only if we can make a Go the RPG game, and a mobile RPG game. It would be the new media than manga or anime. Or better yet, turning games into RPG stories. Technically we can call GO a “rogue-lite-like” game (you accumulate skills, and gather “territory” throughout" and can not trace back, however, there are almost infinite branches, which will lead to death or winning, and losing can lead to learning to play better next time).
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Yeah, but unlike computer games where skills are quantifiable and reliably awarded, this is real life and those two things are not standard for human beings.
E.g. two new players could put in the same effort, one could be 1 dan in a year (as someone posted recently) and another one could still be DDK.
In a game we are all blessed with the magic of “the system”. If only that trope existed in real life, like it does in manga like “Murim Login” (highly suggested by the way).
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While a, c, d are all nice ideas they would probably not fit into the first 50 things I think should happen to solve the issue.
b on the other hand would be great but seems to be wishful thinking. I’m not seeing that happening any time soon but would be happy to be wrong of course.
Nobody was talking about pro leagues. Not sure what this has to do with my comment.
Again this lacks context. Baduk has enough players. OGS just doesn’t attract enough of those.
This would actually be a great feature. But there are simpler and better ways to attract new players.
Why do you think that? Why would implementing some features that are typical on far eastern servers deteriorate the experience for “western” users?
I am interested in hearing those 50 things then 
Nothing directly with your comment, just my own addition which was pertinent to my point. Sometimes organisations tend to think that “making more pro leagues” means more audience, but that is putting the cart before the horse.
Also the last part is clear. If there aren’t enough amateur clients, a new Go server will have not enough audience to be viable.
Globally? Sure.
In the west, which OGS and that new server are mostly operating in? I wouldn’t say so, but if the people running the game are happy with those numbers, I am cool with that. I have no financial stake on the commercial success of Go, so if the people that do have such a stake are happy, who am I to disagree?
From mobile games? I’d like to hear those too.
I think the EGF at least would be quite hesitant about online competitions, because of cheating with AI. They enforce some anti-cheating measures for online EGF tournaments (such as recording oneself while playing), but those don’t seem all that effective and they rub many players the wrong way. I for one won’t participate in such online competitions, because I don’t want to record myself on video while playing.
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That’s my whole angle here. My impression is that OGS, that Flavien dude and you follow the same approach of thinking about ways to improve Baduk online servers for the western players. And my personal opinion here is that that approach is wrong.
I think that (mostly) western servers should not be fighting to get an even larger share of the minority player base but they should try to get a minor share of the majority player base. Even if OGS or Game of Go or whichever server would attract 100% of all non far eastern Baduk players this would still only be a tiny fraction of the global player base. IMO they should instead focus on trying to get 10% of the far eastern players onto their servers. This would have a much bigger impact compared to getting the last five westerners to also join OGS.
I mean, maybe one should do an analysis like the one the Flavien dude did but with players from China and South Korea.
I personally have some ideas on this but I don’t want to spend the time spelling them out for OGS because of the lack of appreciation that the product designers get here. I do not appreciate that development effort gets rewarded with top tier supporter status but OGS product designers like myself go empty handed.
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What if we can make some kind of “magic system”? RPG is supposed to be “role-playing”, it doesn’t have to be “real game”, but role-play game. A lot of the simple joseki are easy to split the sides and corners, we can abstract them, and divide them by the stones used in the area to get stone efficiency. You invest resources (stones) to get "a reward (potential territory) and gain mana (influences) that can addon to the existing reward (extend the framework). How efficiently they can use their resources depends on their skill tree. It certainly has all the elements to become an abstract strategy role-play game.
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What’s that? Did someone give you this denomination or did you take it yourself?
It’s incidental.
Chesscom tried something like that
but honestly it’s not that much more engaging than just playing chess.
There’s not really any special abilities other than maybe being able to review games after or challenge certain bots.
I mean you can unlock new board themes and pieces etc, but mostly it didn’t add a whole lot that I think would make me play chess more than usual. It could’ve improved in the meantime but yeah.
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Me neither, but this is why I said that those tournaments are supposed to be aimed towards widening the playerbase. They do not have to have actual monetary prizes and thus they do not need strict “anti-cheat” measures.
If someone wants to risk cheating in order to win a “world-wide 15-10k tournament” with first prize 6 month of free OGS AI analysis, then the stakes are low anyway, but the potential promotion is big, as is the potential good time that people will have being in an “official yet fun” tournament.
That’s where we live though. Shouldn’t we want to promote Go in our countries? 
Again that is just expanding in an already existing playerbase and actively competing with other established platforms. I fail to see how poaching is a creative long-term solution for the promotion of the game.
What about bringing in NEW players?
I’ll award one point for originality on that evasion. 
I am happy to inform you that I have a zillion solutions for global strife, famine and poverty. Pay me and I’ll let you in on them 
If you never wanted to tell/discuss them, do not go on about “fifty other things that should be done first” ok? That’s just ridiculous.
I think Go Magic does that. It has a skill tree and similar things with an RPG.
As for making it into an actual “abstract strategy role-play game” that sounds appealing to me, but I am not sure about how it would work. It needs quite a bit of thought.
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We also already has something similar to this
But I am not talking about solving tusmego or playing against AIs, and building “kingdoms” out of played games. But the actual abstraction of the strategies in Go into RPG-like system. It’s not about teaching players Go or combined card-game, tabletop games like 烏鷺爭霸,
it’s about introducing skills and terminologies of Go through an abstract RPG, where very casual players who don’t even want to spend time learning or researching can have fun and get some adjacent knowledge, or even feel like they were “skilled players” as they “role-playing”. Some of the whole board principles and directional principles are pretty straight forward, if we can assume any local exchange have similar stone efficiency, or some of the local losses allow gains from other places, or swaps between different values, where different proficiency and skill level let players to be equal locally even if they invest fewer stones in them (that’s how handicap games were won by stronger players, they played less moves but still come out even. And we technically can abstract that.
I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time. A few months ago, it was just about how can I like design a historical RPG games, where players can role-play as historical figures, with very rough big pictures of the games with only key moves needing “decisions”. But after some thought, if we lower the abstraction, and divided the board into regions like we often do with UL, UR, LL, LR, Up, Bottom, Left, Right, and Center, we can introducing many Go terminologies and high-level concepts as RPG elements and beyond just Go-themed RPG.
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But is “promoting the game” the point? Or is it having the best server to play on?
If it’s promoting the game, of course you want to target people that don’t play yet. Offering a nice environment to existing Go players is just incidental to that goal.
If it’s having a nice server, then you want it to look cool, you want nice features, and most importantly you want a large userbase which is more easily achieved by attracting a portion of the existing players. Attracting newcomers through that environment is incidental.
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Who is we? That might be where you and I live but OGS is a webapp, I really do not see why it should only cater to western players.
I do think that this is a different topic. I’m trying to give my ideas on what I think would make OGS an even better Baduk webapp. This is completely unrelated to if we should promote Baduk in our home countries. We obviously should also do that.
Having a large player base on a modern game platform would be great for having a more enjoyable Online Baduk experience. Playing on OGS I often wish for a larger player base. Playing on Fox I often wish for cross-platform capabilities, better translations and a better ranking system. This problem could be solved by increasing the player count on OGS.
Great I love getting points 
Not sure if I worded my comment poorly or if this is a cultural issue but I, quite obviously, never intended on sending you a 50 item list. I wanted to express that those ideas you had rank very low in priority according to my own assessment.
It’s way more important to run in the right direction compared to the way you end up running. I already said what I think the direction should be, and that is giving a big pointer.
In terms of the whole topic of “evasion” and “never wanted to tell them”, this is my small protest of the way the appreciation is allocated in this project. You can of course disagree, but I think product design is just as important as development, and for some reason it often does not get the same attention in community software projects (and OGS is a good example for that too). I’d like to see that change.
It’s part of it for some people. We have different expectations with online go. Some come in a relaxed way just getting some fun (many times with quick settings), some want to get serious slow games because they don’t find them in their real world, some are searching progress through teaching…
Your way is respectable as much as different ways to use OGS and some are quite related to educational/promoting material.
A lot of the things mention in the OP are pertinent to this.
E.g. “improving the ecosystem” almost automatically is about more player attraction and retention.
To not spend too much time on it, here is the image:
All the noted parts require some promotion/expansion of the playerbase way beyond what OGS has, else they will not work or, even better, else they would have worked on OGS as well, right now, with minimal effort.
If we are just once again splitting the playerbase in multiple servers, I do not see how any of that is feasable.
Now, if poaching the eastern servers is their desired goal, I cannot say it is unreasonable, however I can say “good luck with that” and that it is not really useful overall on the long run.
We here discussing this. Some/most of us live in what is colloquially called “the west”. The topic was made for our (and with our, I mean “everyone who is willing to click on the topic”) information and feedback. That’s how fora work, by their very design.
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We here discussing this in this forum do not all live in the west. I know that you tried to qualify your statement by using “some/most” in your last comment, but I still think it is completely inappropriate to use the word “we” in the OGS forum when wanting to refer to “western people”. OGS as a server, a forum and a community is a global project. The people here are not all westerners, they don’t have to be and you shouldn’t assume that they are.
It feels like more and more individual actors want to try and create their own thing (a tsumego website, a go server, a visualizing tool, etc) which I commend but also wish people could work together to incorporate into current great setups like OGS or Go Magic, who may be trying to create their own server (don’t quote me on this). The obvious challenge is that working together and revising currently-existing setups takes much more work and time BUT I think it’s worth it in the long run.
As to the point about getting more “market share” or maybe just attracting more interest in Go (particularly in the West), I think OGS is already really well setup thanks to the great work of many people (a big thank you!). I think the issue continues to come back to the challenge of having either a current public figure start spreading the word or having a new star from the west do very well at the top level of the game all of a sudden. Think Lance Armstrong when he started winning the Tour de France and brought a ton of interest to cycling in America but without all the cheating, doing, etc. of course I know it is extremely wishful thinking to say a non-Eastern player can just spread from no where and catapult to the top.
If we had some more popularity going like with chess and had a big public figure, we do something like this: Chess announced for Esports World Cup 2025 - Esports Insider
All the above being said, there are aspects I like about Go not being mainstream in the West but I still want it known enough that there is a bigger community and some more resources that can flow to it.
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Here’s my understanding of OGS aspirations:
OGS absolutely is interested in catering to the global community, and absolutely does not limit its mission to “serving the west”.
OGS absolutely would love to find a way to attract players “from the east”.
(providing that does not mean introducing gambling, which is ruled out on OGS).
The fact that you don’t see efforts in this direction is because it’s really hard. Really hard to come up with credible suggestions that really would make a difference and that can practically be implemented.
It’s not because we don’t want to, nor because we don’t explore these questions.
Hang on a minute.
We’re desperate for good Product Designers.
We’re renowned for not having Product Design, and we lament it regularly. We developers know our limitations.
If there’s “some perk that a Developer gets that a Product Designer wants”, it’s worth chatting about that.
I’m curious what specifically this means: “development effort gets rewarded with top tier supporter status but OGS product designers like myself go empty handed”.
That “reward” has a well defined contribution needed to earn it.
And in what form are you an “OGS Product Designer”? How much have you done?
What actual deployed design have you contributed to?
We literally have had only one OGS Product Designer that I’m aware of, and that wasn’t you
(Unless you were in disguise? 
)
So - introduce yourself, get involved, and if there’s something you feel others get that you don’t lets sort it out - once you’re actually working with us.
But note: “get involved means” talk to the developers, and start working on something. It doesn’t mean “throw ideas into forum discussions on possible features”.
The forum here is great for soliciting and validating input and ideas. Awesome.
But totally not the place where actual design and development can be done.
It’s not reasonable to say “I’m an OGS Product Developer, why aren’t you rewarding me” if you haven’t done this.
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