No more title tournaments on OGS

TegaiS · #1

Sad news: https://forums.online-go.com/t/title-tournaments/3124/2.
It's a pity that almost 10-year tradition was ended. And it was the most real way to become a Honinbo.

RBerenguel · #2

TegaiS wrote:

Sad news: https://forums.online-go.com/t/title-tournaments/3124/2.
It's a pity that almost 10-year tradition was ended. And it was the most real way to become a Honinbo.

Very sad news. Title (and user) tournaments were the main way I was into playing on OGS.

quantumf · #3

Just join an active group, e.g. reddit, and you'll soon be in more tournaments than you can handle.

RBerenguel · #4

quantumf wrote:

Just join an active group, e.g. reddit, and you'll soon be in more tournaments than you can handle.

I only play 9x9 correspondence on OGS, and there are not that many tournaments with these settings...

Hong Ny · #5

I'm sure that, given time, the Leaderboards will make up for it. (And cool new tournament formats for correspondence will follow to fill the gap!)

oren · #6

Hong Ny wrote:

I'm sure that, given time, the Leaderboards will make up for it. (And cool new tournament formats for correspondence will follow to fill the gap!)

Looks like DGS is filling the gap.

viewtopic.php?f=61&t=11294

Hong Ny · #7

oren wrote:

Looks like DGS is filling the gap.

http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=11294

Maybe. But then again, old OGS Title Tournaments had over 90% quitting rate, and an extremely higher number of people complained about them, compared to the supporters.

I will wait for a (better) compensation on OGS.

illluck · #8

Hong Ny wrote:

oren wrote:

Looks like DGS is filling the gap.

http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=11294

Maybe. But then again, old OGS Title Tournaments had over 90% quitting rate, and an extremely higher number of people complained about them, compared to the supporters.

I will wait for a (better) compensation on OGS.

As an old OGS user who played in quite a number of tournaments, I am a bit skeptical of the 90% quitting rate and "extremely higher number of people" complaining compared to the supporters. Of course, I've stopped playing in tournaments after the max timer was decreased to 3 days to speed them up, which could very well cause a large increase in abandonment rates.

RBerenguel · #9

illluck wrote:

Hong Ny wrote:

oren wrote:

Looks like DGS is filling the gap.

viewtopic.php?f=61&t=11294

Maybe. But then again, old OGS Title Tournaments had over 90% quitting rate, and an extremely higher number of people complained about them, compared to the supporters.

I will wait for a (better) compensation on OGS.

As an old OGS user who played in quite a number of tournaments, I am a bit skeptical of the 90% quitting rate and "extremely higher number of people" complaining compared to the supporters. Of course, I've stopped playing in tournaments after the max timer was decreased to 3 days to speed them up, which could very well cause a large increase in abandonment rates.

I can only comment on 9x9 tournaments, and I think the quitting rate was less than 15-30% in all I've played.

TegaiS · **#10**

I made a request to continue the title tournaments here. May be the devs will change their mind if there will be enough votes.

The other option is to manage the tournaments by ourselves. But that will be difficult.

drmwc · **#11**

It does seem a shame to lose the title matches. It's not really clear to me that the leaderboards are equivalent - it seems likely to me that tournaments will be a lot smaller than the title tournaments. For example, currently the largest by sign ups is 27 players. (I am ignoring the quick tournaments.) This is significantly fewer than a title match would attract.

bayu · **#12**

Hong Ny wrote:

Maybe. But then again, old OGS Title Tournaments had over 90% quitting rate, and an extremely higher number of people complained about them, compared to the supporters.

I will wait for a (better) compensation on OGS.

There was no 90% quitting rate at old OGS. It was a smooth experience. On new OGS it felt like a quitting rate of 50%.

Many newcomers signed up but never returned to the server. And people from old OGS got frustrated maybe because holidays didn't always work properly, bugs in the elimination algorithm got later rounds completely screwed, handicap games were set up without handicap, the league was silently turned into a simultanous macmahon, people got the wrong number of macmahon points for their wins (still happening, nobody replied so far to the post in the ogs-forum) or other reasons.

Maybe in a year's time, quality will be sufficient. So far, the sitewide tournaments didn't get the love of the mods they deserve. I really hope the new ones do, or they wont take off.

gamesorry · **#13**

I have created an OGS Title Tournaments group https://online-go.com/group/515 and I plan to manually hold the Title tournaments in case the official ones stopped. You're all welcome to join!

Uberdude · **#14**

Well, as the former winner of many of the 19x19 title tournaments, this a big disappointment to me and means I have little incentive to ever go back to OGS. The old OGS title tournaments didn't have 90% dropout, at my level it was probably under 5%. I expect the big dropout is because the title tournaments on nova OGS have/had so many bugs and the developers don't seem to care about them, and also many real-time players will join and quit them because they don't appreciate correspondence go.

gamesorry · **#15**

Uberdude wrote:

Well, as the former winner of many of the 19x19 title tournaments, this a big disappointment to me and means I have little incentive to ever go back to OGS. The old OGS title tournaments didn't have 90% dropout, at my level it was probably under 5%. I expect the big dropout is because the title tournaments on nova OGS have/had so many bugs and the developers don't seem to care about them, and also many real-time players will join and quit them because they don't appreciate correspondence go.

That's what I was thinking as well

On the other hand, I'm trying to restore the title tournaments in a manual way, and you are more than welcome to join the group and tournaments (https://online-go.com/group/515)! A good sign is that there have been 110+ players (including 20+ dan-level players) registered in the upcoming Meijin Main Title tournament (https://online-go.com/tournament/4494), which shows that the title tournaments are still attractive to most players

Charlie · **#16**

I only ever participated in one such title tournament and I was really enjoying it until the unannounced annexation by Nova. At the time, the tournament was towards the end of round 1 -- I had finished all my Round 1 games. Round 2 simply never started.

The merge broke the tournaments completely. As far as I remember, the U.I. for the tournament pages was also terrible - you couldn't find the people in your group or the games you were in or the status of the rounds.

Bonobo · **#17**

Charlie wrote:

[..] the unannounced annexation by Nova [..]

To be honest, this sounds quite defamatory to me.

To all I know, it was not an unfriendly takeover (how should such a thing happen?) but it was rather that OGS was handed over to anoek and matburt because the original OGS devs weren’t able to maintain and develop it further, and apparently they thought that these two guys were the best for the job.

Since the original announcement seems to be lost, I’m documenting it in the following quote from boardgamegeek.com (as quoted there by user “Phelan”):

anoek at nova.gs wrote:

The new OGS
Welcome to the new online-go.com!

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 here!

To our existing users

Now to apologize! We know that this merge comes as quite a surprise for most of you. Hopefully after the shock wears off you'll see it as being a pleasant surprise! Normally we wouldn't keep such a large change as a surprise, but for various technical reasons, this was clearly the thing to do. So sorry for being secretive, it's not really our nature, hopefully you'll be understanding and forgive us :-)

To our nova.gs users

With this update we're bringing you the most requested feature, players! In addition to a large influx of new players we're also turning on site wide ladders, forums, and title tournaments! So please help us welcome the players coming from OGS, help show them around, and enjoy all of the new games to be had!

To our online-go.com users

There is a lot of new stuff for you to check out. This marks the third generation of server software used by OGS, which is an impressive feat for any online site! OGS has withstood the test of time and your new developers (matburt and anoek) are proud to be carrying the torch for the next leg of this journey.

We've worked hard to preserve all of your game history, active games, forums, tournament data, and just about everything else, so rest assured your history on OGS has been preserved. If you have questions, concerns, praises, bugs, or anything else please stop by the Chat, the developers and many people from the nova.gs server will be around a lot to answer questions and field issues. For bug reports, you may also want to use the bug reporting system found under the Help menu.

Unfortunately there's some bad news

During the migration process the old OGS server failed to produce the expected database backup for the 2013-10-18 and we had to use the backup from 2013-10-17 instead. This means an entire 24 hours of moves, game outcomes, and forum posts were lost. This is certainly not the way we wanted to start things off, but that's how they are, so we hope that you'll be understanding and in time forgive us. We worked long and hard to make sure all of your data was moved over to the new system appropriately, but unfortunately if we don't have the data we can't move it :-(

Never the less, we're hoping you'll find it in your hearts to overlook this somewhat major hiccup and enjoy the new site and all of the new features and functionality :-)

Some other notes about this merge:

Challenges have not been imported. If you've challenged anyone recently, you'll need to re-challenge them.
Active games that have move times of 1 day have been changed to have 2 days to ensure no one times out because of the merge.
All game clocks on active games have been increased to their maximum time for both players to help ensure no one times out as a result of the merge.
All games which are in the stone removal phase must use the new system to select and agree upon the removed stones, so you may want to check up on any games that are in the stone removal phase.
- anoek, 2013-10-19

(Sadly, the original news article that was at http://nova.gs/news/ seems to be lost)

I’m also documenting a screenshot of that same post, just in case …

Charlie · **#18**

Bonobo wrote:

To be honest, this sounds quite defamatory to me.

Fair enough but it is no less true: the merger between OGS and Nova was kept secret and the community was neither warned nor involved. That is old news, off topic and it has been debated to death. I did not intend to derail the thread, I was simply referring to the event that scuppered the tournaments.

No more title tournaments on OGS

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