Javaness2 wrote:
At the end of the day a server needs to pay its bills, so I don't see any real reason to complain.
There is quite a difference between a server paying its bills (hosting/bandwidth is what, maybe a few hundred dollars a month max?) and paying a decent full-time US software developer wage for the server to be under constant development. How much are they hoping to make? $60,000 a year? I've no idea how much you can make from the type and quantity of banner ads they now have (not so restrained!) and also wonder how many users will use adblock (I guess go players more than average of internet population, but some will turn it off to be nice to OGS) and how much of a return they will actually give advertisers (I think I am a very poor audience for advertisers and I imagine quite a few go players are like me: stingy techy males and not the impressionable middle-aged women who think the internet is that program with the blue e that actually click on ads whom advertisers love; but hey, if google can convince companies to give them money for ads people ignore kudos to them and good luck to OGS).
Compare this to old OGS, which to me was essentially feature complete from an end-user perspective as a great correspondence server*. It was quite a pain for dmg (the developer / server admin) doing some of the tournament draws (the Kisei was pretty manual iirc) and we did have occasional server outages which corrupted games (but dmg added admin tools which meant we admins rather than only him could fix them), but I would have been happy for old OGS to continue bobbling along with a new server admin rather than going to full-time development, which costs more like $1000 a year than $60,000. Of course there is a danger you can stagnate like that, perhaps KGS being an example of getting left behind because of lack of development. All water under the bridge now though...
* board thumbnails and better reviews with variations being the two major improvements I see in new OGS, apart from broadening to become real-time too.