Pining for the original OGS, considering picking up go again

[Leira]

Hi gamesorry, great to see you here.

You addressed some of the things I actually wanted to say, but dissuaded myself at the end, as it was getting too long, but here we go again:

1) Without Nova taking over, there might be no OGS now.
-I think if it's true, then however bad it is, we have to say something is better than nothing.

If OldGS had ever died, it wouldn't have been for lack of users. I had taken the habit to check on the list of players once a day (or actually, on the days I logged in) and it was never decreasing. The collected results, however, disappeared from my recycle bin very long ago.
However there were rumours (and more than rumours) that the system was thoroughly broken, and required intervention on a daily basis.

-The number of correspondence players/games also increases a little, but I think if there were no more title tournaments, there would be substantially fewer correspondence players.

We've got you to thank for that . On a related issue though, I was always surprised that, at the time, there were so few people who were willing to do something about it on their own, and wanted all and every solution to come from above. That too, has improved now.

1) There are more bugs than the old OGS and DGS.
-I don't recall any obvious bugs lasting for a long time on old OGS and DGS.

I'm not certain about this one. Bugs were not very visible on OldGS, but they were plenty (and also very odd, I encountered, described and reported quite a few myself). dmg would sink into them and try to fix them as quickly and as best he could, but at some point they were just getting the best of him.
If we compare downtimes then... well, there's just no comparison, is it?

2) The bug report doesn't get a reply.

This is sadly true, I can attest. Sometimes you'd feel like you'd not be listened to, and I'm pretty sure that was one of the main reasons many users left, more than anything else. However I think many were very unforgiving on that regard, taking it too personally.

6) Tournaments with Group Elimination format no longer exists.

This is slightly inaccurate. The code for them exists within the server, but was disabled to the public (that was mentioned in some thread, but please don't ask me to produce the link here). Perhaps I misinterpreted, but you should ask the devs on that (they might let you use it, if still available).

7) Tournaments with League format no longer exists

Even the old one required devs to intervene (which was why it would always start several days later than expected). I like to think we could create a better automatic system, which could perhaps be imported back into mainstream OGS code.


The other things you mentioned about tournament custom preferences (weekend stop, timeout threshold, etc.) I but agree wholeheartedly. It would be great to have those options, and many others, available for the tournament directors.

Oh, and about the new trophies, yeah, no offense, but they feel lame in achievement. One of the things OldGS had was a "canonical" measure of achievement which rewarded more or less proportionally to effort. Right after the new system came out, people went crazy with tournaments with insane settings; this has calmed down a bit, as things converge back to title tournaments and a few other now familiar faces. That pleases me.

[gamesorry]

Just one small comment:

There are much more to say and I will update it in the future

IMHO better to make a new comment then and not update THIS comment otherwise people could miss your updates. (But maybe I misunderstood)

Yeah you're right I'll make new updates by adding new comments.

[gamesorry]

Hi gamesorry, great to see you here.
You addressed some of the things I actually wanted to say, but dissuaded myself at the end, as it was getting too long, but here we go again:

I also refrained myself several times from putting them out altogether I think you make good amendment to my observations

We've got you to thank for that . On a related issue though, I was always surprised that, at the time, there were so few people who were willing to do something about it on their own, and wanted all and every solution to come from above. That too, has improved now.

Thank you But I tend to believe that even without me, eventually there might be someone else standing out (the idea of holding Title tournaments manually comes from @tegais). Perhaps the major difference is that I'm a programmer;-) Most people were hoping that the criticism could make the developers change their minds (at that time, it looks not so impossible), and we do need certain kinds of support from the above. For example, in the Kuksu League Group A started today, two sets of games are created but we only need one set (probably an old bug presenting in a new way). We still need the admins to go into the database to do something (e.g. delete the games) not open to the API interface.

I'm not certain about this one. Bugs were not very visible on OldGS, but they were plenty (and also very odd, I encountered, described and reported quite a few myself). dmg would sink into them and try to fix them as quickly and as best he could, but at some point they were just getting the best of him.
If we compare downtimes then... well, there's just no comparison, is it?

Yes, the visibility of the bugs is the major difference

This is slightly inaccurate. The code for them exists within the server, but was disabled to the public (that was mentioned in some thread, but please don't ask me to produce the link here). Perhaps I misinterpreted, but you should ask the devs on that (they might let you use it, if still available).

@matburt told me that the original elimination algorithm is too buggy to fix, so they hide it. I have once requested to help rewrite the elimination algorithm but got no reply I'll try to make a request on that later.

Even the old one required devs to intervene (which was why it would always start several days later than expected). I like to think we could create a better automatic system, which could perhaps be imported back into mainstream OGS code.

I hope eventually we can achieve this. At the current stage, there are still many things we are not able to do through API in one shot, e.g., we have to invite the players to join the specific tournament and wait for them to accept the invitation, which is time-consuming and not stable (people always overlook the invitations). It would be best if we have the access to arrange the players in the specific tournaments.

[Uberdude]

Gamesorry has made a well-thought out and thorough analysis for his 2(00) cents about tournaments/correspondence play, but there are three pretty majors flaws I see in new OGS that relate to real-time play that haven't been mentioned:

- Reloading the game page is so friggin' slow: 20-45 seconds (on Chrome S3 android phone on good wi-fi, for comparison, bbc news, facebook etc load in a couple of seconds). Is it so much data, or loads of javascript, or fancy new technology like websockets? Actually playing stones when it works is perfectly fast (can even play 6 second blitz, which is pretty impressive for a browser client, I don't want to sound too negative!). If you are playing a game with 10 or even 30 seconds byo yomi and you get the "error submitting stone" pop up bug even when your stone was placed in the board you need to reload the page to continue playing, and by then you have lost a few periods of byo yomi or lost the game on time. Very annoying.

- In 'submit button to play' mode, the pass button is in the same place as the submit button. This is infuriating when playing on a touchscreen phone. This means if you tap on the board to place a stone you then tap on the submit to play. However if your tap registers as a double-tap, or your tap seems not to work but is just laggy and you tap again, then you place and remove the stone. Then when you tap where the submit button used to be it has transformed into a pass button so you pass instead. The alternative of single-tap or double-tap to play is also open to misclicks. Coupled with the undo problem below makes this one even worse.

- You cannot ask for undo on your move (as you can on other servers). So the following multi-choice adventure happens:

Code: Select all

  misclick -> 
    opponent answers quickly before you can ask for undo -> 
    can't ask for undo -> 
        ask for them to undo their move so you can undo yours in the game chat ->
            they don't read the game chat so you sit there waiting for your clock to run out, or keep going with your absurd misclick
            they read the chat but don't understand English, confusion entails, or go to above step.
            they read the chat and understand English but don't understand what you are talking about. You explain it to them, by which time you might have lost on time.
            they read the chat and understand English and understand what you are talking about but don't see why they should undo their move, or can't find their undo button.
            they read the chat and understand English and undo their move! Hooray! You then ask to undo your move but they don't see the undo request text hidden down below the board and they get bored of waiting and play another move. Doh!
            they read the chat and understand English and undo their move! Hooray! You then ask to undo and they see it and grant it but by then you've lost on time. Insert coin to continue. 
            they read the chat and understand English and undo their move! Hooray! You then ask to undo and they see it and grant it. You play the move you indtended. Hooray! Proceed to next level.

[Uberdude]

Also I would like to add support for increased visibility of correspondence games. I sometimes wander by and check out the games of vitality, Sadaharu, drmwc, nrx and other names of top players I recall from when I played (I find it interesting that nrx has gone down to 2d and vitality up to 5d). But what about new players? Is there some new 9d? It is hard to discover them unless you happen to see them as an opponent of one of those I know or they are in some ladder I look at (which as mentioned is less appealing now). By allowing players to observe a game and then having an Observed games list sorted by observers as in old OGS would be a good, community-driven way to address this: I recall my game with breakfast on old OGS had 100 or so observers, whilst title matches would have a fair few. Sorting by observers rather than strength also allows interesting (as defined by the community) games between weaker players to be visible.

[gamesorry]

--The haunting point bug (https://forums.online-go.com/t/duplicat ... ments/5367, Recently gets fixed, cheers!).

Unfortunately I was wrong, this bug is still happening:

https://online-go.com/tournament/12120

Here's my guess on the reason:

There are multiple scripts running on the back-end. When a game ends, it creates a temporary game-ending event (x_i) in the database.

Sometimes there are multiple tournament-handling threads (T_i) running. The normal process would be:

Thread T1 fetches the oldest event e1
Thread T1 deletes event e1
Thread T1 updates tournament table
Thread T2 fetches the oldest event e2
Thread T2 deletes event e2
Thread T2 updates tournament table
...

The time between the fetch and delete operation is very small, so in most cases the multi-threads work well. The actual running order could be like:

Thread T1 fetches the oldest event (e1)
Thread T1 deletes event e1
Thread T2 fetches the oldest event (e2)
Thread T2 deletes event e2
Thread T1 updates tournament table
Thread T2 updates tournament table
...

However, the problem happens when the [fetch, delete] operation is not atomic:

Thread T1 fetches the oldest event (e1)
Thread T2 fetches the oldest event (e1) (!)
Thread T1 deletes event e1
Thread T2 deletes event e1
Thread T1 updates tournament table
Thread T2 updates tournament table (the score is increased twice!)
...

[Gohst]

This is certainly a reasonable speculation on how the bug happens. It's *very* easy to create issues like this with improper multi-threaded programming (I know this from long experience).

[lorill]

It might have been solved too, but the android client was nice (and my main way to play go), and disappeared without notice with the merger.

I didn't play any turned based game since. I do like the new OGS for realtime games, I just wish people would be more talkative, wait for reviews like in the old times on kgs.

[oren]

It might have been solved too, but the android client was nice (and my main way to play go), and disappeared without notice with the merger.

I didn't play any turned based game since. I do like the new OGS for realtime games, I just wish people would be more talkative, wait for reviews like in the old times on kgs.

If you like the old OGS app you can still use it to play on DGS.

[Uberdude]

So apparently new OGS is getting banner ads, which is something old OGS promised not to do. The devs don't have enough time to do it as a hobby anymore so want to earn money to make it a job. I suppose it's better than doing a kaya!

From the horse's mouth: https://forums.online-go.com/t/moving-ogs-forward/5727

[oren]

So apparently new OGS is getting banner ads, which is something old OGS promised not to do. The devs don't have enough time to do it as a hobby anymore so want to earn money to make it a job. I suppose it's better than doing a kaya!

From the horse's mouth: https://forums.online-go.com/t/moving-ogs-forward/5727

Gotta make some money somehow.

[Uberdude]

I was actually rather surprised they think there's enough traffic to pay a competitive US software developer wage from a restrained amount of ads (not on game pages (yet!)). That post says 1800 new players a week joining which is darn impressive if they actually stick around and play go, but how many of those just click sign-in with Facebook, look around, and leave? (And how many unique humans vs alt accounts?).

[oren]

I was actually rather surprised they think there's enough traffic to pay a competitive US software developer wage from a restrained amount of ads (not on game pages (yet!)). That post says 1800 new players a week joining which is darn impressive if they actually stick around and play go, but how many of those just click sign-in with Facebook, look around, and leave? (And how many unique humans vs alt accounts?).

Yeah, I really miss the old games list to see how many games are going on and what they look like. You can only get a list of real time games which is about 60 right now. I can't imagine ad revenue will be too much.

[illluck]

I was actually rather surprised they think there's enough traffic to pay a competitive US software developer wage from a restrained amount of ads (not on game pages (yet!)). That post says 1800 new players a week joining which is darn impressive if they actually stick around and play go, but how many of those just click sign-in with Facebook, look around, and leave? (And how many unique humans vs alt accounts?).

"Restrained"...

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[temifar]

"Restrained"...

Ads.png

It still has your games in the center while the ads are restrained to the periphery. It easily could've been the other way around.
The good thing about that horror is those are google adsense, which on my PCs are blocked on so many levels I have little luck seeing them even when I want to.

On the "old vs new" theme. I was a regular on the old OGS. Then I haven't been playing for some 5 years, starting againg only this summer, so I've missed the entire merger drama. For me the main difference between the two servers is that the old one has correspondece play as its main and only focus. Being mostly a correspondence player, I felt right at home there. Now that focus is somewhere else. There are many good things about the new server and my experience on it is mostly positive, but still somehow I feel like I'm a part of minority, whose needs are of secondary concern. That feeling is propably the chief reason why I'm not yet a paying supporter of the new OGS (the second reason is that I tend to avoid recurring montly Paypay payments like a plague), while I did support the old one.