Life In 19x19

Very nice! Glad to see KGS making a comeback!

I'm a bit surprised that a delay was needed to agree on the contents of a short statement, but this is one of the thing you can't get away from with groups. I look forward to hearing what Oren and Lee plan on doing with KGS.

From Google+

I was hopping the new Management would take a more energetic approach to engage with the community. Start an issue tracker and stuff like that. Guess not.

Morgoth Bauglir wrote:I was hopping the new Management would take a more energetic approach to engage with the community. Start an issue tracker and stuff like that. Guess not.

They only made the announcement a week ago. Give them some time.

If you do want to see an issue tracker for a KGS client, check out https://github.com/jkk/shinkgs. It's improving quickly, and it's recently been moved onto the KGS domain (https://shin.gokgs.com/) so that it doesn't have the "group ban" difficulty that plagued it (and all other web clients) early on. While it's still officially a third party client, I wouldn't be surprised if the new owners are evaluating whether something like this is the direction of the future.

I hope this marks a recovery for KGS. Last time I tried playing there, it took forever to wrangle cooperation out of that dismal java client and then, once I could log in, I found the tone of the place to be completely toxic.

It is hard to get a game... (I've rather played on OGS lately - but there ranks are like random)
At least there are some bots to play on KGS.

Last time I was on KGS it was with a new account 'cos my previous one had deactivated due to inactivity, and none of the bots were active right then so there was nothing I could do to get a rank. Automatch won't pair you with anyone, and every time I tried accepting someone's open challenge they immediately refused the game. So I went to the Help Room to explain all that and see about getting some games to establish a rank. I won't ever forget the answers I got:

"Awww, don't cry"
"LOL you want a cupcake?"

Of course, I immediately logged off. I'd spent over an hour and a half trying to get a game of go and failing.

Completely toxic place. No way would I ever go back there.

I play exclusively on OGS now and, though it has its oddities, most people there are not jerks.

TheBigH wrote:Last time I was on KGS it was with a new account 'cos my previous one had deactivated due to inactivity, and none of the bots were active right then so there was nothing I could do to get a rank. Automatch won't pair you with anyone, and every time I tried accepting someone's open challenge they immediately refused the game. So I went to the Help Room to explain all that and see about getting some games to establish a rank. I won't ever forget the answers I got:

"Awww, don't cry"
"LOL you want a cupcake?"

Of course, I immediately logged off. I'd spent over an hour and a half trying to get a game of go and failing.

Completely toxic place. No way would I ever go back there.

I play exclusively on OGS now and, though it has its oddities, most people there are not jerks.

FWIW I had precisely the opposite experience the last time I tried to re-establish my rank on KGS.

Maybe you were just luckier than me.

Completely toxic place. No way would I ever go back there.
I play exclusively on OGS now and ... most people there are not jerks.

Most people are not jerks. Unfortunate you had a bad experience.
Yes, enjoy whichever venue you prefer.

EdLee wrote:

Completely toxic place. No way would I ever go back there.
I play exclusively on OGS now and ... most people there are not jerks.

Most people are not jerks. Unfortunate you had a bad experience.
Yes, enjoy whichever venue you prefer.

I agree. I had a handful of bad experiences on KGS when I started, but it was an unlucky draw. Overall, my experience has been very positive.

That said there does seem to be fewer players at the DDK level. I often couldn't get a game, but since I broke into the SDK range, I haven't had any problems. If this is generally true, it might be a good thing for the new owners to focus on. There are only two routes to building a larger customer base: convince existing players to spend more time on KGS than other servers or recruit new players. Seems like KGS's existing strengths in teaching could be effectively leveraged to do the latter, but it would require some focus on the DDK range players. Seems like this would also fit well with the goals of the new owners as well.

TheBigH wrote:Last time I was on KGS it was with a new account 'cos my previous one had deactivated due to inactivity, and none of the bots were active right then so there was nothing I could do to get a rank. Automatch won't pair you with anyone, and every time I tried accepting someone's open challenge they immediately refused the game. So I went to the Help Room to explain all that and see about getting some games to establish a rank. I won't ever forget the answers I got:

"Awww, don't cry"
"LOL you want a cupcake?"

Of course, I immediately logged off. I'd spent over an hour and a half trying to get a game of go and failing.

Completely toxic place. No way would I ever go back there.

I play exclusively on OGS now and, though it has its oddities, most people there are not jerks.

I really feel you there. The presence of some nasty people were the single biggest reason why I all but stopped playing on KGS completely.

It didn't matter much that it was the most popular western server at the time, or whatever state the software was in. It's been years since, and KGS continues to bleed out players.

In my (very subjective) opinion, that's at the very core of the problem, which no amount of remake will revert. It remains to be seen whether the new administration is willing to do something about that problem.

A bit strange, we dont have this problem in the French Room(ecept 3,4 trolls of Hikaru No Go wave, several years ago, who are not more here).
As Blindruck say, i this this is unluck, insist a bit, for me KGS's community is the strongest point of the server(for fr )

Fenring wrote:A bit strange, we dont have this problem in the French Room(ecept 3,4 trolls of Hikaru No Go wave, several years ago, who are not more here).
As Blindruck say, i this this is unluck, insist a bit, for me KGS's community is the strongest point of the server(for fr )

Ironically, I've actually been rethinking my comment! I still agree with the general statement -- the KGS good significantly outweighs the bad, and if someone has a bad experience at first, it might be worth sticking it out a while longer because things will likely get better.

That said, I think this misses a more important point in TheBigH and peti29's posts. No matter what the ratio of good to bad actually is, the negative experiences are sufficient to have deterred two players from continuing with the server. Said differently, while some of us may be willing to continue with KGS given the current ratio, there are players who are not. Ergo, this is a dimension on which KGS could focus to recruit users.