PRHG if you want to cheat online, then you can do that through either devious or simple means.
The casual observer cannot easily check the score given OGS’s implementation. That detracts from the user experience when you’re watching a tournament relay. Fixing that wouldn’t stop people cheating. Cheaters cheat.
Could you be more specific?
As I said an observer has direct access to the good SE
Groin: honestly, I am not ranting when writing this. I just wanted to give a few examples of technical debt on this server. My point being, wouldn’t it be great if the dev could fix it. If I wanted to write a rant I would start on the GoPanda client.
Sorry for the strong word. I’m simply suggesting you to split your ideas for better efficiency. Imagine we start debates for each point in this thread. Luckily we are mostly debating about SE. Although IMHO it would be better in the original thread.
Do you have to pay to access the good SE? When I observe a game I only see a link to /OGSScoreEstimator/OGSScoreEstimator-0.7.0.js from the menu to the right of the board. The menu option to enable/disable the AI analysis does nothing in my browser.
SE is for everyone. Good and bad. Well I think so. Nothing to buy or configure.
Right, so you might as well not make it easy for them
Front end is open source, so anyone can contribute. Human desire is almost endless, but resources are not. There are many things the devs would like to be doing but they only have so much time. It doesn’t help that they’ve had their hands busy with other matters recently:
Where is the link to the Good score estimator in that case? Honestly, I don’t see it on a review board..
I’m simply reporting you the decision made from the old thread. Don’t ask me anything technical. I just know that this is automatically chosen, according if you are still playing, an observer… it’s the same button.(There is no information of the switch made automatically, which is a bit weird I agree on that)
Yeah kinda ^___^
Anoek and matburt owned the Nova server, while OGS had a small team running it on a shoestring budget. They then decided to merge the two servers as one, basically keeping the ogs’s name and nova’s interface, and combining the playerpools and the main features of both servers.
I’m not sure how many active users we still have from pre-merge ogs. I think Uberdude might be the only one from the pre-merge ogs team whose still around?
TBH its not very good, mainly because 3 reasons:
Are you implying that OGS use only one SE in every case possible (used by players during running games, by observers, when reviewing)?
LOL let me reassure you that we (developers) can do better than you can if we want to make a list of technical debt at OGS 
FYI things feel “particularly unstable” at the moment precisely because we are working on technical debt. Ain’t that the irony, that fixing up old technical debt makes the serve feel more unstable for a while.
A big thanks to the brave folk helping with that! (You know who you are!)
I wonder if you can simply adjust how well the estimators work. If its just a matter of settings, it may be worth to discuss to make the SE a little better. So it does actually estimate something. Because how it is right now, it is imo useless. Like literally. For newbies even completely missleading.
Its not such an important feature anyway I guess.
Edit: Tbf. any kind of estimator is always missleading for newbies. Bad argument.
And you can expand it to “any estimator is bad if you don’t understand it”.
If KGS’s estimator is good or Fox’s estimator is good it’s most likely because a player using it understands when it’s reasonable and when it’s unreliable.
Of course when it’s unreliable more often than not (like the weak score estimator is), then it comes across as useless. Or you might have to do a lot of work like adding more stones or capturing dead stones to make it reliable. Time is less a problem in correspondence (though maybe tedious) but not great in live (and people do use them in live games in various places and servers.).
I think the clearer we can categorise what we want a score estimator to do and what we don’t want it to do, then the easier it is to fix it. Without a clear expectation, it’s hard to improve something.
Probably we can have that discussion in a dedicated thread, either a new one or continue and old one like
Or this one (linking to suggestions of using a flood fill rather than playouts)
Or a manual score estimator
Useful to note that it was decided to remove a better (Katago) estimator because it was too good, which was probably a good decision. You can see the breakdown of when the old vs new estimator is/was being used.
I think the SE is perfect as is. It does exactly what it’s supposed to, give a starting point to estimate the score by accounting for what it got wrong, without giving away too much good info otherwise
That’s one I’ve not heard before 
Really? I thought that was the consensus, that we had reached a good middle ground where it was not too strong but not too weak?
I mean it’s a reasonable middle ground, but “perfect” is not a word i would use to describe that estimator
I think having a really bad score estimator perhaps indicates that the opinions you’ve compromised upon should have been treated differently