Life In 19x19

Hi everyone,

I'm back from a one yeah hiatus, and i'm unsure wether my perception is wrong or not, but I feel like everything slowed down in the western go world :
* less posts here
* less games & game offers in kgs, longer wait with automatch
* less activity from eurogotv (it seemed like they were broadcasting almost every weekend last year)

Does anyone has any stats ?
If it really slowed down, what happened ?

Couldn't let such post remain uncommented, it would be too sad.
Sadly I share a bit of the same feeling. But I haven't post for several months, so here comes the wind of change.

I disagree. I think the community has spread out a bit. There may have been a slowdown on kgs, but more old kgs players are playing on different servers such as Tygem this year. Also there are more people creating video content on go than ever.

Tofu wrote:There may have been a slowdown on kgs, but more old kgs players are playing on different servers such as Tygem this year.

I know, i'm playing there too from time to time but didn't notice too many westerners. I didn't look for them, though.

Though some players have moved from kgs to other servers, I still think that Go activity on the net has decreased...

Half of go blogs and sites from last year have been closed or abandoned. Actually, I had to remove 36 sites from the active list on SL...

Anyway, the amount of newbies in KGS has decreased during the last 4 years. When I started it was very easy to find 30k games.... Currently, my "pupils" have some difficulties in doing so

I don't think it is Go-specific. Looking at forums for other abstract board games, L19 is really quite active, and consistently so. They all seem to have decreased activity since 2005-7, and maybe abstract, geek-y games just aren't currently "in". This is likely to change again, though I don't really notice much of a decreased activity here or on KGS, but that's probably subjective.

It is interesting to note that When I started playing go a year ago, there were many players in the 20 kyus on kgs to play against. Since reading this thread I have been keeping an eye out for them, and have not noticed more than a handfull of them on at a time. Right now the lowest ranked game waiting for a challenger is 7k. There are also only 2 games between 20 kyus going on.

I don't know, the real drought for me was around 13k. 20k-15k I found matches very quickly, 13k-10k things slowed down a lot for me on KGS. Though, it could be a time thing, in March there seemed to be a lot of ddks around, now not so much.

These things really seem to have an ebb and flow to them. I've noticed that forum activity here tends to calm down a bit during the summer. This probably has a lot to do with students. A lot of students - high school, college, etc. - go from having a lot of time on their computers during the year, to a lot being on vacation or working jobs that don't give them as much free time.

I know that happened for me.

Now I just work for a living, and peruse from work - but rarely post. Just don't have the time while working.

schultz wrote:Just don't have the time while working.

I find myself having more time while I'm working.

Meh, I'm surprised you guys think the forum is slow this summer... seems buzzing to me.

Seems mostly fine online to me (things do seem to slow down summer though). Wish I could say the same for my city. lol

I believe that it is possible the Go community has slowed down...but maybe just became more obscure instead? I stopped playing Go about two years ago and getting back into it fairly recently, a lot of what you guys are saying is true. When I first started playing online two years ago. There were a lot of games on the KGS server that were mainly beginner games and the pros were struggling to find games and then now when I log on, it's the other way around. Although I noticed that this time around, there are a lot more outlets for Go not only in my hometown, but online as well. More people are spreading out to different websites/clients, and to me that kind of broadening the horizon especially in the West. Westerners are looking for more of an outlet and not only just to play games, but also to be a part of a community such as L19.


It's really hard to say what's going on exactly with the game in the West, but as long as you know where to look, you will always find Go somewhere.