My last several games on KGS have been against Hirabot 3D. My mentality is that since nobody is going to observe my game anyway, why not play the strongest opponent possible so that I can learn new things? (This was pre-Leela and Crazystone) I believe a lot of people feel this way. The reality is that after 6D+ players left KGS to play elsewhere (tygem, fox, etc), what you have left is people like me, training against bots at the top of the list. It was only recently that one could play offline against a bot 6D+.
I want to bring up OGS, but not in an attempt to detract from your original point about KGS.
A couple of instances of Leela (6D) are running on OGS. There are some additional developers who run bots while clearly stating it in their profile, but it is not overwhelming at the moment. I think it's safe to say that without these instances, there would rarely be a single game above 1d on the server. When it's done right, these types of games can generate a lot of excitement in the same way Zen19L (9d+) did on KGS. Example:
https://online-go.com/game/7884026I believe it is both the prevalence of 30k - 4d bots on KGS (representing around 90% of the distributed ranks in the US), and the fact that it is nearly impossible to get a rank established without playing a few games against bots, that are killing competition on servers. If anything, I say get rid of bots that are below 6D all together. It'll class up the servers and make people want to spend time on them again.
_________________
Ko is the best solution.With Ko, I can keep eating and drinking until I am full.
Visit
>>>Koosh's Study Journal<<<