Life In 19x19

How is KGS doing after all compared to OGS? Is it dying or did it become stable with players? I played some games there again and noticed a lot of bots, not as many players as in the past but also not as empty as I could have imagined.

I would prefer KGS to OGS, but I'm not playing a lot on either.

I just logged on a few servers to check:

KGS: 550 online (max=920)
OGS: 1775 online
IGS: 2599
Fox: 23800
Tygem: has several servers (Premium, Sudam, etc.), each has typically 2000-4000 connected users, total comparable to Fox.

The OGS stats seem peculiar to me
I checked just now and saw 95 live games, 47 users in chat 2250 users logged in. The percentages are pretty low if we are talking about active users.

95 live games on OGS but over 17000 correspondence games.

Correspondence figures probably make a good comparison between K and O impossible. You don't need to make any comparison however, you can just observe that the KGS figures are steadily dropping. I would imagine that fewer beginners go there now, the whole broken Java thing is one element which deters them. The server needs to make an active attempt to recruit or advertise in this area.

I wish KGS would keep my last solid rank if I stop playing for a while. I no longer play regularly and every time I come back to KGS I have no rank or some crazy rank with a ?.

Then it's difficult to find games, there are not enough bots for them to be a solution and it's just way too much effort. I just want to play a few games against somebody (not a bot) around my rank. This is a very unfriendly system for returning and casual players, I often just give up and play somewhere else instead.

I've found that automatch will usually provide me with a game inside a minute, sometimes almost instantly. And it doesn't seem to care if your rank includes a "?". (Posting game offers when you don't have a solid rank is a waste of time though.)

Does WMS still care? Or is he out for good?

wms sold KGS three years ago.

Have there been any changes at all since then? I feel KGS stalled since WMS is done. I mean why do so many people play on OGS instead of KGS?

Pippen wrote:Have there been any changes at all since then? I feel KGS stalled since WMS is done. I mean why do so many people play on OGS instead of KGS?

The difference is the correspondence games isn't it? If I look on both servers now (around lunch time in Tokyo), there are more live games on KGS than OGS (although not twice as many). Is that different at other times of the day?

dfan wrote:wms sold KGS three years ago.

Three years ago, when it was claimed that KGS had been sold, and people were speculating about who the new owners were, some admins pointed out that what WMS didn't say that he had sold KGS, only that ownership had been transferred. WMS might have donated KGS to the AGF, for all we know.

The official announcement says he ceded control.

Jujube wrote:I work, penance for my sins, as an IT consultant. More often than not, I work with clients that have these set phrases that drive me crazy:- "isn't it as simple as...", "couldn't you just...", "what would be good is if we...". And, I have to turn around and say: no, dammit, it's not just as simple as taking this spreadsheet and "sticking it in the database".

When I began as a programmer, a senior program told me someone at one of our clients often suggested changes to the client's software cold be done by rewiring. I suspect he was familiar with plugboards, which were used on some data processing equipment before electronic computers became common.

Marathon wrote:When I began as a programmer, a senior program told me someone at one of our clients often suggested changes to the client's software cold be done by rewiring. I suspect he was familiar with plugboards, which were used on some data processing equipment before electronic computers became common.

That brings back memories. When I was a kid and computers were ACs, I got a small computer kit that worked by wiring. So the first computer program I wrote, which played a very simplified variant of checkers, was in Boolean algebra, which I converted to a wiring diagram.