Online-Go.com has joined forces with Nova.gs to bring to the Go community a state of the art web based go server! Here you'll be able to play both correspondence and live games, perform reviews in real time, voice chat with other players or spectators, and a whole lot more!

In addition to being an excellent place to play Go, OGS now has several features for Groups of players. So whether you have a local go club, an online study group, or just a group of friends, you can use OGS groups to create yourself a private forum, chat room, organize your members, and best of all run group tournaments and group ladders!

The already great tournament system of OGS had has been improved and extended, bringing in several options for tournament structures, controls, an advanced pairing algorithm, as well as adding the capability for users to create their own tournaments through the group interface. Additionally, we will be adding much better support for real time tournaments, automated tournaments, and some additional tournament structures in the near future.

While our core go server services (playing, reviewing, and running tournaments) will be ever evolving, we will also be focusing a lot on services, tools, and content for the Go community at large, so whether you choose to play here or at one of the many other excellent go servers out there, we hope to provide you with some interesting useful things in the near future, so stay tuned!

This merger marks a major accomplishment for all of us here and it wouldn't have been possible without the guidance and support of countless people throughout the community. Our sincere thanks goes out to all that have given us feedback, thoughts, ideas, bug reports, translations, media, moral support, and so much more. We aim to repay this help ten fold by giving back to the community an ever increasingly amazing site for Go players and by growing and enriching the Go community overall.

Thanks from all of us at online-go.com and nova.gs!

Full bulletin: http://online-go.com/news/8

Congratulations on the surprising coup, and good luck!

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Patience, grasshopper.

And the features i really was looking for on OGS suddenly got implemented, this is really a great turn around! May OGS prosper and have many many many members in the future!!!

This is great news. anoek, matburt, this was a good move and it's so exciting to see Nova's playerbase double overnight. Looking forward to the future!

Wow, I was thinking it would be cool if there could be integration between the two sites, but I didn't see this coming. This is great news!

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

It occurs to me that I should have seen this coming. A few weeks ago, I got a game notification from nova concerning one of my OGS games. But while I wondered if nova was somehow monitoring OGS, I didn't think of the obvious.

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Occupy Babel!

I have never used OGS but it sounds like a good place. What does it have to offer which I cannot get from my KGS and DGS accounts?

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

OGS had a few nice features that weren't available on DGS, including conditional moves, popup analysis, a javascript based replay mode, etc. I started using OGS, and soon stopped using DGS.

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Occupy Babel!

Folks, I’m … speechless, this is so amazing.

In a world where everybody is competing and fighting to be “better than the other”, you get together and join forces can’t remember when I’ve seen something like this. RESPECT! And thank you!


Greetz, Tom

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

User created tournaments were the most interesting thing for me. You can pick a format, then set strength limits, and tournaments usually fill up very quickly (unless you set 5d+ ). Then there were "title tournaments" which were organised by the site, massive McMahon Tournaments and similar.

It makes things a bit more interesting if you enjoy some competitive play, especially with invitation tournament between groups of friends who no longer live near each other and similar.

Double? The player base increased by a factor of 25.

I think nova doesn't have an android client yet, while OGS had one?
It might have been smart to wait until there was such a client in order to not alienate that part of the OGS userbase.

Also, for OGS users: the scoring system on nova currently requires filling dame (or marking dame in the scoring phase) for a correct calculation of the score.

I like the general idea behind the merge and hope people will start playing live games regularly on nova, now.

However, nova was de facto a correspondence server since the start, as nobody played live games there.
Now you have migrated the userbase of an *actual* correspondence server to nova, in order (I presume at least) to increase live games.
So even though there are now approx. 300 users online currently, there are only 2 live games being played (by ddks).
For example ladders on nova are still *correspondence only*. It would be really great to have some sort of "live" ladder system.

I guess we'll have to wait and see if nova can get away from being "yet another correspondence go server".


And lastly, blurring the distinction between correspondence and live games might be an issue when it comes to players' ranks. I, for example, am 6k on OGS (and now nova), simply because I could never be bothered to play enough rated games there just to "update" my rating.

I think a lot of other people on OGS have "outdated" ranks. Maybe people will start making seperate accounts for live games and correspondence games, we will have to see.

I believe anoek and matburt plan on releasing an open beta android client later this week.

_________________
We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

This!

For me, the biggest part of Nova which deterred me was the lack of RT games - since I don't really do correspondence. The merger seems to strengthen the 'correspondence' aspect of the server, while it remains to be seen if it has done anything to change the RT situation. With larger user base, there should be also more RT games, but the user base got increased by adding a whole bunch of accounts which rather play correspondence (thus they were OGS users to begin with), so not sure.

For example: I just logged in, and from the 5000+ games (nice!), only one was RT, and that was a 9x9 game.

But time will tell...

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Remember though Bantari, Real Time games on Nova can be set up as Correspondence. Due to the auto update on the page of moves, you can set up a game where you're playing real time when you're both logged on or correspondence when you're not. Most of my correspondence games on there have played mostly at real time speed. I'm usually playing people I know and they poke me on Skype or whatever so we can get some moves in.

Oh, I did not know that.
So when I sort the games by time, and the times says 1week+1day it can actually be a RT game?

In any case - all the best to Nova or OGS or both (whichever is appropriate.)
I would still love to see some interface improvements though.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

we've had dozens of live games just this morning alone. I think part of the problem was that OGS just didn't have an interface to play live games and nova didn't have the users. now that we've solved both of those problems it becomes less of an issue.

you almost can't pick up a live challenge right now they are accepted so fast.

It's that if the time says 1 week + 1 day, if the players want, it can be played at real time speed. I mean that, you can't know from looking at the time settings what speed the game is actually being played at here due to the hybrid system. I imagine the majority of games would be played at correspondence speed though for the most part.

Now I only need you add a RewriteRule to send http://online-go.com/games/mygames.php to the current game list (can't find it, since I just moved in all my games.)

Also... Is it possible to mark on-screen the two previous moves by number (or dot)? In "OGS" I used to quickly tap back and forth moves to see what I moved (I easily forget my intention with a move) to decide what my next move should be. In Nova tapping back-and-forth enables analyse mode, which requires an extra tap to get back into the game. Seeing the last two moves solves the problem without changing how the UI works, which is always interesting

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

I think it's you (or anyone else making a similar argument) that is missing that go is a competitive game, and the time setting is part of the competition.

Basically your idea works in the social context of people who know each other (comparable to a game in a go club, where clocks usually aren't needed). However, to have a lot of people play go against each other anonymously and competitively, you need to assume that both players want to win the game, and will use the time setting to their advantage.

On that note, a lot of games on OGS (before the merger) were actually played as you describe it, with many moves being played in a single session in quick succession. That didn't make those games "real time", since when a tricky tactical situation cropped up, each player could have stopped to think thoroughly, which would have been impossible in 10s blitz, for example.