I agree to make one big class - it will be more interesting with a big class and easier to find players to play

i have to be very clear here and say that delta VI is exceptional in comparison to ALL other delta classes. Why? Its a combination of things i think, but what is truly different to delta VI is that it consists of ONLY new players. What i do know is that they are ALL from different timezones and almost all of them played a game. So my guess is that we found a bunch of truly motivated players and this is RARE somehow in delta.

Also i would like to point out the following thing why i think delta is pretty inactive.

Consider all delta has 15 of 30 active players and all gamma have 15 of 20 active players.

In gamma the 5 who demote to gamma have played only 5 games on average, they go to delta.
In delta the most active players players rise up to gamma while the worst promoting player (no 7) played around 7 games.

You end up with the 5 almost not performing gamma and the 8 not active enough players in delta which both got a mental hit for either demoting or not promoting. That 13 demotivated players who play on avg 5 games a month!! Will they play again next month?? Imo unlikely.

To get back at the 1 dollar motivation, a transaction costs money (2 percent or smth) so you can never be fully reimbursed, also if you do this i am suddenly a organisation and this comes with a ton of stupid taxes and so on.

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

I "liked" this post, but I also just liked it. I think the best opportunities to improve the league experience will arise when those who know the league best really put their minds to thinking about what has happened up to now and what it means. What really drives the experience that people have throughout the different levels, etc.? People like me, with no real experience, can drop by and spout off, but it is the admins and players who have been deeply involved over the life of the league that have the best background for analyzing the experience to date. There are quite a lot of posts with suggestions, but there is not much real analysis. Each individual's experience is different. It is hard work, but I think necessary, to accept that some people have had a great experience while others have had a poor experience, and then try to work out how to preserve the great experiences while introducing changes aimed at improving the poor experiences. I do not think there is an easy solution (despite my user name! ). It is a matter of finding the right balance. It can only come from some real insight into how the league works. Thanks stalkor!

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Dave Sigaty
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
- George Carlin

I don't think the ASR was ever something that was about money. A league with a membership fee would look /very/ different than the ASR. Just me personally, I actually like it "free". There are paid leagues out there if you are interested, I would suggest Breakfast's league, it's an excellent paid league on KGS with pro and 8d+ teachers.

ok now im seriously scared of the following conversation i had with a league member:



this is a part, not the full convo but this seriously is something i cannot allow EVER (see eternal beta's thread)

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

My reaction is - don't worry about it in advance. There are two outcomes more or less. First, it turns out not to be a big issue in practice. In that case worrying turns out to be simply a waste of time. Second, there turns out to be a significant block of players that are active/successful enough in big delta to be promoted but find the experience in the current class structure unsatisfactory to the point that they will not accept promotion. To my way of thinking there is then an opportunity to use that feedback to tweak the higher classes until it is possible to have both the entry level and the higher classes provide a satisfying and attractive experience for everyone. However, the time to consider that is once it clearly happens so that there is real information to use if appropriate. One step at a time!

"It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time."
- Winston Churchill

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Dave Sigaty
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
- George Carlin

Is there enough information available to chart some typical "life cycles" within the ASR? There is obviously a large group that signs up in delta and then fails to play enough games to continue. Are there other typical paths, e.g.:
* Players that come into delta, play enough to continue, but never score enough to get promoted.
* Players that go steadily up through the classes, peak at some point, and settle in for a long stay in the same class.
* Players that go steadily up through the classes, peak at some point, and then drop out all at once/fall back through the classes.

Do we know whether some paths are extremely common or does the ASR tend to be unique for each person?

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Dave Sigaty
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
- George Carlin

if i think about it i cant see a particular standard pattern, its all different.

We have the standard sign up and never play again.
The play, get promoted but then doesnt play anymore (for some reason ppl don't get that if you promote, you are playing next month. Also ''forgetting'' to tell ''i quit'' is common too )
the slow riser.
The infinite gamer who only stops playing go to crash into bed or worse.
The disapearer who is very active but doesnt tell he is on vacation for a month hence signing up a month later again.

Did i miss one? Probably:p

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

Can you freeze your ASR division for vacation?

not exactly freeze and we don't do it most of the time unless you really are away over a month.

what we do is that for every month you are away you are treated as if you are the last person in that class (without being visible) so you are demoted for every month you are away. So it only applies to alpha and beta since if youre in gamma, youre in delta anyway next month.

I've done it once or twice over the last 3 months, so its not common. This is reasonably ok to do on a small scale because:

- another player gets promoted in his place for that month (more activity)
- adding the vacation player a month later adds only 1 to a class extra (so class size +1) which is not a big deal.

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

btw the votes have been cast and next month delta will be 1 big enormous humongous titanic unbelievably large class.

one thing that will change with this is the way we give out prizes. I've already seen that if you are in delta you are having an advantage for getting whole league activity prizes etc and topazg pointed out (correctly imo) in chat that there are little to no perks for being in alpha. so were going to do things a bit differently and will post about that when i come back after the tournament in Brussels this weekend (yay, tourney time!)

what do you guys think, prizes too bottom heavy or not?

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

You forgot the "It's the already the 30th and I still need 3 games or I get mod killed. PLAY ME1!!11" type of player.

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Sanity is for the weak.

I was playing with the class listings for the last few months (March through October 2011) to see what kind of picture they give of the activity in the league. Some (interesting?) facts:
* The league varied in size between 511 and 263 members in those months.
* There were a total of 1033 distinct members.
* A total of 591 people joined and 790 left the league.
* By class the average percentage of leavers was: Epsilon 39%, Delta 36%, Gammma 30%, Beta 19%, Alpha 14%.
It appears that there is a core group of about 90 members who persist across all the months. A third of all members appear for one month only, while three quarters stay for one to three months.

The challenge is to build an experience in the league that takes into account the significant range of people. Hopefully it is possible to make the league something that more people will be attracted to for longer periods of time.

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Dave Sigaty
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
- George Carlin

posted on site but posted here too for discussion

with the new implementation of the huge delta class we have thought about what this would do to prizes we give out. I've already said for a while that prizes are bottom heavy, this means that you have the best chance for prizes if you play in the delta layer. This is obviously not a good thing, because you worked yourself all the way to alpha just to have a minor chance for 1 prize. Furthermore the win% prizes are against the spirit of the league. you win points and you should be awarded according to that.

So we are making a change, making alpha a place with perks and more prizes.

first of all, all full league prizes will be from now on only from alpha to gamma, delta has a serious advantage towards activity prizes so they are therefor excluded from it.

alpha:
Top 3 prizes mainly the pro tgame, the kgs+ and an audio lecture. furthermore if you get 25+ points in place 4 to 6 you get 1 audio lecture.

beta: 1st prize is a donated teaching games from high dans (tabemasu or the likes), interchangeable for 1 audiolecture
2nd prize a audiolecture

gamma: 1st prize donated teaching games from mid to low dan, interchangeable for 1 audio lecture

delta: 1st prize donated tgame by low dan or 1 audiolecture

activity and kyu prizes remain the same but apply only from alpha to gamma.

we cant give away prizes if you dont help us out by donating! please donate here or speak to an admin about donating a teaching game or the likes!

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

It's a very large step you've taken, Stalkor, with making the bigroom. And I am very proud and excited for you and to be a member of the league. So I don't want to rush you. But I will be blatantly honest as I am known to be; there are still three things left to be done:

1. Before someone gets invited to the league, check to make sure they have 3 to 6 month's of existing game records.
Reasoning: Exactly the conversation above.

2. Before someone gets invited to the league, check to make sure they have been playing at least 10-15 games per month.
Reasoning: How many people habitually play 1 game a month only to be kicked out the following month for doing what they've always done? I'm not talking about entry requirements. I'm talking about asking someone why they think they can make our "stay a member" requirements if they obviously have not been able to do so in the past. It's a simple check (like #1) Ask your admins to do it? ^^

3. Change the activity reward on a room-by-room basis.
Reasoning: Now that you have a bigroom, the 2 for 1 reward system of the past, which worked so well for lower levels, has become passe at top levels (alpha and beta). Please make them more competitive. This month in Alpha I only got ~2 reviews out of 8 losses. I played 23 games. Look at teach with 16 wins, and he didn't get even 3rd place. For Alpha, at least, the 2 for 1 system does not work so well. If you want to attract strength to the league, reward it. For alpha, please make 4 points for 1 point loss. For beta make it 3 to 1. You should think about this, Stalkor. Alpha is going to become more active than ever with the new promotion rules and the bigroom. Quelling the activity reward there is a very good thing. Seriously, teach should have been 1st place. Of course in a 4 for 1 system Teach would have been first place. So this is not a self-serving request. True strength should win in Alpha. The most active and the strongest players congregate there. We need to increase the competition there a notch. I am so tired of playing an alpha game and the player leaves immediately after the match. This would change that. Think about doing this please.

This seems to me to be letting fear drive the administration of the league. Note that the proposal is to essentially ban from the ASR all newcomers to KGS because someone might create a new user name to stay in Delta.


I went to the results page for October and clicked through to the KGS games of 15-20 of the people who failed to play four games. There were a few that fit the pattern above. However, they were actually very few. It is much more often the case that someone active in the past stopped playing or that someone is still very active on KGS but failed to play in the ASR. We should not imagine that we understand what is happening until after checking the available information. And the information is all readily available. League activity is detailed on the various results pages. All members' complete playing records in the KGS archives are directly linked to from those same results pages.



Sorry, but if teach didn't get third place in alpha, who did? That said ( ), there are a couple of important points here:
* First is the low number of reviews received from stronger (at least winning) players. My understanding is that the opportunity to play stronger players and get reviews in all classes is what drives the desire not to concentrate the strong players in alpha. Is it a general experience that only a minority of games result in a review? Do we know? Why do/might people play in the league but avoid doing reviews? Do we know? Any thoughts on improving the situation other than concentrating the strong players in alpha, which obviously will only hurt the other classes exactly to the extent that it helps alpha!
* "The most active and strongest players congregate there..." Actually this does not seem to be true if I look at the last few months' results. Rather the strongest players continue to be spread across the league because although they are consistently strong they are not consistently active. Interestingly, if I look across the class results for June through October, alpha appears to be the class most consistently won by the most active rather than the strongest players. This may be because the current weighting of wins versus losses pushes the active players up more consistently than it does the strongest players. However, if that is true, then changing the rewards in alpha only will not change that. What it will do is allow strong players who become less active to remain in alpha (look at who was demoted from alpha in October and consider who would have remained with a different point structure). In order to concentrate the stronger players by promoting them out of the other classes, we have to apply a different point structure to all classes. Consider, for example, beta I in October or beta II in August. Any change in the point structure will change who gets promoted. However, it will be a pretty fundamental change in the league. What will the present membership think of the change? If we picked a new point structure, recalculated the results for each of the last three months, and published the results, would it be reasonable to poll the membership on which they thought was a preferable set of results?

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Dave Sigaty
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
- George Carlin

Stats for this month (october)

Total number of players registered this month: 312
Players not yet completed enough games to stay in: 95 (30.4% dropout)
Total games played this month: 1272 out of a possible 7394 (17.2%)
games per active player (>4 games): 5,86 games
games per player: 4,08 games
average games per day: 41,03

a much better month imo

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

Hi there-

I'll admit I didn't have the time to go read through all the responses to this section, so I apologize if this is redundant. As a whole, I really like the ASR League, I enjoy reviewing for weaker players and relish the opportunity to play 3-5d's in even games, even if I rarely even put up a fight. For me, the most frustrating thing is the way the promotion system works right now. I find that really it doesn't reward skill, but just how much time one has to play. I work 60+ hours a week and only have so much time for go, some of that I like to spend playing rated games. For me the draw to the league has always been the opportunity to play stronger players. However, what I've found many times is come the end of the month I may be 8-0 or 10-1 and end up losing out to a player who is 2-20. Now, nothing against this player and I'm glad to see them playing as much as they do, but personally, I can't imagine they enjoy losing nearly every game every month. Given that 13ks get very little extra from playing a 4d than they do a 3k it seems silly for this player to move up when stronger players with better records do not. I should probably preface this by saying I did in fact promote this last month (and should this new system be enacted, I would find it difficult to promote up from beta as a 2k, so I'm not whining so much as giving my opinion). Perhaps my view of playing in ASR not so much to move up the ladder but to earn the right to play players stronger than myself is mine alone, but what I would like to see is wins worth more.

example
1-0 3 for a win 1 for a loss
2-0 4.5 for the winner, 1.5 for a loser
1-1 3.75 each

This certainly will promote stronger players (assuming they play a reasonable number of games) to move up and will keep weaker players in the lower levels (barring those who play outrageous numbers of games), but my thought is that there will still be stronger opponents for the weaker players (new players and players who were mostly inactive a previous month), but they will also get more games against players their own level, thus promoting improvement for players who wish to move up the ladder.

Also, given that finding games can be a chore, especially in certain time zones, I would prefer that the diminishing return for wins be removed. (ie with the current system: 2 points for a win, 1 for a loss regardless of how many times you've played the person)

I disagree with this. I have never played 10-15 games/month on KGS, but I don't think there's any reason I can't participate in ASR.

Fwiw, xzenith, this month your description of your W-L is accurate, but you did promote; last month you went 5-4, and did not; August, 8-6. I'm not trying to call you out, but I know how our memory can be completely warped a few months on. If it were true in general that 2-20 13 kyu were promoting and 10-1 2 kyu were not, that might call for careful thought. But since that's not the case, it's not worth compromising the ideals of the league.

The underlying principle is that the ASR promotes the playing of lots of serious (=long time settings and reviews) games. "Lots" is key there. It's easy to play two serious games a month, or to play bunches of quick and sloppy games, but the ASR wants to martial us to play games that are both time-intensive and time-extensive. So showing up and committing the time to play all those games is a more important contribution to the league, and a better embodiment of its ideals, than winning. --- And I completely sympathize with not being able to play as many games as other people. I think I had time for fewer games than you this month, and in the past I've been forced to drop out of the ASR because I was too busy. But at the times in our lives where we have no time for go, we want the ASR pushing, pushing, pushing us to play go anyway; and where we genuinely have no time, well, those are months when the ASR is not what we need, rather than months when the ASR needs to change for us.

I would be more open to usagi's suggestion of tinkering with the win/loss point balance for alpha if it were actually true that inactivity steadily declines as you go up the divisions, such that alpha never has any problems with inactivity. But although this month was a very good month for alpha, it only gets really impressive levels of participation (=substantially higher than beta) about every other month. If you only get impressive levels of activity half the time with activity encouraged, then removing that encouragement means even less activity.