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KGS Wishlist - Game Handling
Path: KGSWishlist
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Keywords: Online Go, Clubs & Places, Software
2. Game Handling
- [21] General Game Stuff
- [22] Editing
- [23] Score Estimator
- [24] Rule Systems/Time systems
- [25] Ratings
- [26] Game Start
- [27] Game End
[21] General Game Stuff
- During editing, after editing control is released, could there be an prominent icon to indicate that the other player can now politely take control of the game editing.
- Why must kgs stop at 9 dan ? Can't there be a 11 dan that is 2 stone stronger than a 9 dan ?
- Game variants
- Hu: Support for team games.++
- One color Go game type. Perhaps so that only the ones playing sees it that way and the observers see the real colors.
- Ghost go game type. Players only sees their own stones and they're told if their move was valid or not. How many stones where put in atari (of both colors!) and how many stones that where captured after each move. Extremely exciting spectator sport and a lot of fun to play too.
- Put players at top of observer list and perhaps separate them with a thick line. +++++
- Immediately join an open game you were playing upon reconnection when you've been disconnected.++++
- A checkbox in New Game / Create Game windows that disables / enables Undo's + -
- Blake: I really don't like this idea. You already get a dialog asking if you will allow the undo; isn't that enough? Just put in your info that you only allow undo for misclicks--or that you don't allow undo at all. I have had my fair share of misclicking experiences, and I just don't think it's fair to say "Okay, you just clicked one space over and put your entire group in atari, but, since I don't allow undos, oh well." It's not a very friendly-seeming attitude, to me.
- Remember what type of game was last offered, just like the time and board-size is remembered? That avoids the situation of setting up a free 19x19, then canceling to change the 'Note' and re-offering, ending up offering a rated game.+
- Default to 'free' if your remembered board-size is non-19x19, or if you select that in the dialog?
- Uneven (asymmetrical) time limits, i.e. 1 hour for Black vs. 5 minutes for White. Don't know how you'd have a rated game with such a handicapping system, but would be fun for Free games or Simultaneous games.
- Sebastian: This is already possible. Just give your opponent additional time at the beginning.
- Allow to add custom time (Ex.: add 20 min)
- When observing a game, make the panes for the observers list and chat box adjustable
- Make "menu" pane optional, so allow more space for the board+
- Add an extra column in the list of currently played and offered games, to show the available time and the time system. To avoid a clobbered game listing, perhaps show this info in a "tooltip" when the mouse hovers over the listing? Some mention of this is/was in KGS Plans. +
- Indication of response time experienced by your opponent.
- Don't mark current move with a circle in the SGF file, or have it as an option or preference option.
- Slider-bar navigation of moves.
- Replay option for client+. Wish granted for release 2.5.4.
- Some way for players to agree to delete their unfinished game. After an extended time has elapsed, people often have no interest in finishing a game from when they were many stones weaker.++
- Do not allow opponent to ask for undo multiple times for the same move. (wms notes that the solution is to minimize the undo request window and ignore it. It will remain blocking further requests until you make your next move.)+
- Then please give the undo requestor a notification when an undo is rejected, so they know the window was seen and acted upon. If a player makes a move quickly, sometimes you have to re-request an undo.
- Do not restart clock after an undo in the scoring phase. This can be disconcerting in cases of dispute over old "special ruling" cases. Besides, the game ended by agreement, already.
- holosys: When observing a game, allow user to select the level of chat they want to see - all chat, player-only chat or no chat. Would help immensely for studying without the distraction of idle chit-chat, and avoid having to use the current kludges of positioning the chat off the screen, covering it up with another window or censoring/uncensoring heaps of users.++
- Hu: Would like "New Game" button on the "Open Games" tab. (I think you have to be "in" a particular room to start a game. The "Open Games" tab is not a room. -Jared)
- Hu: Would like option to display all Global games, offered and played in the Open Games tab, which would be renamed "Global Games". Then I could stack the Global Games tab, and move all room window chat divider bars to the top.
- Open Games tab needs option to sort by game type (rated, free, teaching).
- Open Games tab needs highlight with rank mask. Ie. "highlight when a challenge by 1-10k appears".
- liopic: Create a new tab of high level games, listing all games now playing at KGS by high ranked players (dans and pros). I (and probably lot of people) have English and Japanese room opened, ONLY to look for "good games" to watch. It can be like "Open Games" tab, not for challenges but for high level games.
- eng60340: label the games with a unique ID (and allow sorthing via ID). so that when i ask for game advice, the advisers can locate the game quickly.
+ ZeroKun: Dunno if this was purposed, but I have a better idea for ctrl click, instead of ctrl click to paste the board coordinates, it should just be a double click, and depending on which button you use it would play a W or B next to it. I think this would make things alot easier than just ctrl click and then having to write the color of the move.
- If "seeking a game request" window is open with specific conditions indicated therein, and one is interested to find out that are the game conditions asked by a fellow player who also has an "seeking a game request" window open, one should be able to do so instead of an error message stating that "you are already playing a game.."+
- (Sebastian:) Absolutely! I would go even further and question if there ever is a reason why somebody who has a challenge open should be treated as playing a game. Another consequence of this is that, when you want to chat you get the message "x is currently playing" (see [1301]).
- wms: Please see KGS Status. I'm already beginning to fix this. By the way, the window is called the "Challenge Window" (because it is where you challenge other players to a game). It isn't labeled that, so you can call it anything you like, but it took me a while to figure out what the "seeking a game request" window was, and it's easier if everybody uses the same terms. :-)
- Joshual000 A feature I think would be nice is allowing a user with a currently open game to open a challenge window from the game list for the purpose of watching the game. The buttons could be disabled, etc.. (I often like to watch several games while I play - if a player from a different room currently has an open challenge, and I'd like to watch, but am playing a game I currently need to: open the room they hail from, locate their game on the list and click (or find them on the user list)) Currently much easier to keep many rooms open to allow for watching games.
- Fwiffo: It would be nice to be able to kibitz our own games - that is, make comments that you and the observers see, but not your opponent (like on NNGS). I sometimes want to keep notes on game positions while playing and it would be much more convienient to do it in-game.
- Lyon: It would be nice to be able to focus on one part of the rank graph, maybe just specfic months, or maybe just a magnification option for the part you click on. As people's accounts start getting older the rank graph gets real small :P.
- Daan: Allow observers to guess the next move by clicking on the board, instead of naming them in the chat section. The board could then display the number of clicks per location (either numericaly or through something fancy like a colour gradient though I wouldn't recommend that) allowing or course only one click per observer per move. It would require an option to turn this on/off of course.
- rubilia: If you just don't like to type coordinates (although that´s something different, I know): it is already possible to ctrl-click at a point to paste its coordinates to the chat line. To (be able to) see the guesses at the board would be nicer, though.
- Vlad I think it would be nifty with a "rematch" option after a game, which directly opens a new game.
[22] Editing
- Allow giving away ownership or control of a demo (including review), so a starter can leave. ++
- Display of current move number and move you are looking at. [This is how it is now, is it not?]
- Edit window to become a permanent part of the main board window, switching back and forth is cumbersome. Dockable? Pop it up paired with the game board to second from the top? +++?+ Alternately, a way to visualize moves in the tree without deploying the edit window (e.g. display the current branch and a list of the coordinates of the child branch moves, or perhaps ghosted stones like gGo). It would be nice to be able to disable the "look ahead" for working on problems.
- Change the layout of the edit window to make it less tall, but maybe wider. Right now, fitting both game and edit window onto the screen (without overlap) is a bit of a squeeze. Maybe also offer two different edit window layouts, one vertical and one horizontal that users can choose from.
- Have undos delete moves, at least in demonstration mode. +++
- Hu: A clue in the commentaries to distinguish between those made during the game and those made after. Perhaps a dashed line separating before and after commentaries.+
- Some way of distinguishing, in the comments/chat, what branch the comment/chat appears in. For instance, instead of labelling all 10th moves as "Move 10", label them "Move 10", "Move 10 (a)" and so forth.
- When saving SGF, add sequential numbers for all comments so they can be made sense of (followed through the file?), store comments with the move where typing started, not where the user hit enter. [This would seem to require extending the SGF format. It is unlikely all interested parties would agree.]
- Being able to clean up all comments from the game. This is especially useful for further reviewing (submitting to GTL, for example), or when one wishes to look at high dan game w/o all the noise. Similar functionality as
http://www.red-bean.com/sgf/sgfc/ +
- Another version of cleaning up final SGF: consolidate entire game to get rid of all undos and make one continuous string of moves. +
- At least make undos a variation rather than the main line (as they are today) in the SGF +++
- wms: The variations are all in chronological order. Undos are first because they happened first. I don't plan on changing that, more likely would be changing the editor to detect undos and automatically make the second variation the default one.
- dnerra: Please note that the way you are doing it is incompatible with the "official style guide" for SGF. See first paragraph in
http://www.red-bean.com/sgf/user_guide/#style. I don't think it is reasonable to expect SGF readers to automatically detect undo's, given this clear recommendation.
- Yet another suggestion for cleaning up the SGF: add a mode that steps through the game (including variations) as was done during the game. I.e. if a teacher started on the main branch with moves 1,2,3 and then jumped to another branch with move 4(a) and 5(a), then came back to main branch move 4, allow the user to automatically traverse the game through moves 1,2,3,4a,5a,4 without the user needing to work out the timings of the thing by looking at the comments.
- wms: This is not possible with SGF as it stands. This belongs more in the SGF Wishlist I think.
- (Sebastian:): Actually, this is possible with SGF because SGF explicitly allows the introduction of new properties. However, it doesn't even have to be done using SGF. I proposed a feature earlier to include sequential numbers in the comment text itself to clean up the current confusion with text that has been added during review of the game. (This was something like "{#123}". Unfortunately, that wish seems to have been lost during the major rewrites of last month.)
- Full FF[4] capabilities in the editor; area, line, and arrow modes added to the edit window (or the conjoined docked editing box). For an example of what this looks like see
http://jeanfrancois.menon.free.fr/rubygo/screenshots.html and go halfway down the page til you see the screen where these tools are used. ++
- Integration with SL: markup (such as [[ and ]]) that would allow making a clickable link to SL.
- Include game type (Free/Rated/etc.) in the SGF file, even if just as part of a comment entry.+
- Ability to change between the 8 possible orientations of a game to help compare openings. (Four rotations multiplied by a reflection of each make eight. 16 if you count reversed Black and White, as would be useful.)+
- Ability to rotate the board in the middle of a game. +
- Hu: Ability to Exchange Black and White, useful for joseki study.
- Possibility to turn the "number moves" feature on for whole branches of a sgf-file. (with or without all subbranches, from a node along the active game branch etc.)
- Expand and reduce variation-branches (explorer like: with a small "+" or "-" in front of each node with brach connections.)
- Additional cut and paste features:
- Cut or copy a branch from one file and put it into another open SGF file (clipboard).
- A possibility to copy part of a board. Mark several stones or mark a specific area of the board, nice for the preparation of Go problems from games.
- Fwiffo: Option to make the stones in the game tree window smaller so the tree can be more compact and fit more moves and branches on the screen.
- After a game has been reviewed, allow every spectator to save the game, not only the reviewer. Reviewers mostly quit without saving the game in their profile - such a review has most value to watchers. One should consider an option to let reviewer disallow saving the review.
- 'Up' currently only possible for node's direct childs. Allow 'Up' anywhere: implement by recursively applying the 'Up' action to the node (if any) of the current (sub)branch of the selected move.
- Degan: Allow use of arrow keys to move through game:
Right=forward
Left =back
Up =previous branch (if exists)
Down =next branch (if exists)
- wms: Already done. Just use ctrl-arrow or shift-arrow. Seems not to work unless one of the arrow buttons has focus; not sure why this is the case, it looks like a java bug.
[23] Score Estimator
- Possibility to help the score estimator by manually specifying which stones are dead and which are alive (click to switch their status) where appropriate. wms isn't making any changes to the score estimator code any time soon; someone else wrote it.+
- Option when reviewing editing SGF files: to have Score Estimate window available and updated on every move, irregardless of its inherent limitations to be used as a guide in this way. (see ScoringEstimatorConsideredHarmful).
- Good idea - not only for to be used, but also to make the limitations more obvious.
- Allow use of score estimator in Free games.+-
- Jochie: The score estimator seems to go into deep recursion or some endless loop on the end position of my
recent game against AndresD on KGS. While I can understand wms's wish to not touch the code, I hope he'll glance at this one and see if it's something easy/obvious.
- The score estimator seems to be confused by sekis. I think he counts the groups as dead thus leading to a false result. An example is
this game: Altough white won with 17.5 points, score est. thinks black will win with 30.5 points.
- How about being able to use GnuGo as score estimator like gGo does?
[24] Rule Systems / Time systems
- Eggtimer (aka hourglass) time: An initial amount of time is specified and a player loses if the difference between the player's time and the opponents time exceeds that amount. ++
- Hu: Wild mode (W): An even game where the server makes the first three moves for each player randomly anywhere on third line or above. The players then continue playing from that position. See Wild Fuseki.+
- rubilia: Default komi for game offers with New Zealand rules now is correct, but when changing a different ruleset offer to NZ rules for a challenge, the komi doesn't seem to be adjusted.
- Neil: Let me override the default compensation for the ruleset I choose. My observations show that the 7.5 default for Chinese rules is very, very unpopular, with most players dropping it to 5.5 (or even avoiding the game altogether). Being able to set this to 6.5 would be nice. Someone else is going to ask for an auction, but I don't agree with that.
- JuhoP: There is currently the blinking 'blitz'/'ultrablitz' warning when the time settings are short. I think it would be good to have a similar 'fast overtime' warning when the overtime is less than 15 s/move. This is because some people seem to use settings like Canadian overtime 30 sec / 5 stones to mislead people to think it is byo-yomi instead of canadian time. 15 sec would probably be a good limit because it covers the cases of 1 min/5 stones and 30 sec/5 stones, which are the most misleading ones. The warning could appear in the same place where the blitz warning is now, and of course only if the game is not a blitz game already.+
[25] Ratings
- Jared: Rank field in User Info should be in decimal form. Alternatively, both decimal form and truncated form could be displayed.
- To me this just shows an unhealthy obsession with ranks. This will do nothing to address the number of people on KGS wishing to play opponents within a strict grade boundary. I can see no obvious benefit from such a change. WMS has already caved into enough moans over ratings.
- Show equivalent ranks in other systems, eg: AGA, BGA, etc, as well as KGS rank.
- mgoetze: I don't believe there is a simple formula for this, and if it were implemented it would be more misleading than anything else. +
- It would be nice to see statistics about how many people of a particular rank are playing at any given time. Maybe a graph? +++
- Hu: Change the "9d?" rating that gets awarded players who win a lot of games to something like "9d+". ++++
- Rewrite the ratings algorithm for ? ranked players, or perhaps cap their ratings until the ? is gone in order to avoid the accelerated drift ? ranked people can experience.
- Revert [xx?] ratings to [?] if their last rated game is unfinished.
- (Sebastian:) Display each lost and won game (or only rated ones) in the rating graph as little dots. The height is a function of the rating of the opponent, handicap and komi. Color codes win/loss (e.g. White = won, red = lost.) This would show at a quick glance if the rating has been earned actively or passively (see mgoetze's example "if you only play one rated game" above) +++
- Display rank curve differently where questionable (rank with question mark). (This doesn't have to be as fancy as in some other servers which show error margins. Just using a different color should suffice.) +++
- Cheyenne: Do not use a game against a xx? player to recompute one's rank. As a rated player my rank should not be altered if I win or lose a game against a xx? player. If players know that their own rank will not be affected by playing an unknown I suspect they would be more willing to play such games (you would probably see fewer "no ?" requests). This will make KGS a more welcoming place for people who just joined and are trying to establish their initial rank.
- If this is already in place -- maybe having it alittle more visible in the online help.
- wms: Cheyenne, in general I cannot have a game affect one player but not another. It would make the whole rank system unstable. But why shouldn't playing a "?" player affect your rank? If your rank is solid, then it will affect your rank only a tiny bit, but even better, as the player's rank becomes known it affects your rank as if you had played their solid rank. For example, if you play a "4k?", and lose, your rank will change very very little at first because your rank will be much more confident than theirs; but if, a week later, this "4k?" has played (and won) a lot more, and becomes "1k", then your loss will have a greater affect, but it will affect you as a loss against a 1k, not as a loss against a 4k. So in general, there is no reason to treat "?" players special; the data returned has little affect when their rank is unknown, but when it becomes known, it is as valid as any other data. As for more info, the page in the help on the rating system says everything about the rank system - the algorithm is there.
(WME note: Leaving the following alone, numbers scare me. -TJ)
- Sebastian: Try to minimize rank drift during a hiatus and sudden jumps when users resume playing rated games after a hiatus. This can be achieved by the following:
When computing Rank_A at time t, do not use the current Rank_B(t), but a weighted average such as
Rank_B_Avg := w(t-t0) * Rank_B(t) + (1-w(t-t0)) * Rank_B(t0)
where
- t0 < t
- is the time when the game was played
- w(delta_t) !
- = exp (-delta_t/t_halflife*log(2)):is a weighting function. On second thought, maybe it shouldn't even be time-dependent. A constant, such as 1/2, might just do as well. IT would reduce such complaints as "I won a game and my rank went down". It's your call.
- t_halflife
- is a time constant, probably best something like 60 days
(I assume that if Rank_B(t0) is not available (e.g. because the player had a question mark) you already just reduce the overall weight factor for that game.)
- mgoetze: I don't see how this fits in with the current rating algorithm.
- Cheyenne: Get rid of the ~ tag (tilde) and replace it with a user rating defined ranking. When a game is finished, allow the players to optionally indicate if the game was helpful to them (put the question right on the same pop up that shows the "game done" and final score). Each player gets to make the selection and it is stored as part of the game record (doesn't have to be included in the SGF file). There would be two flags (one for each player). Then when processing one's rank, use the flag to determine how many games one has that the opponent marked as helpful. If a certain percentage of games are marked as helpful then give that person a "gold star" next to their name. +-
- wms: While this gold star system might be nice, I don't see it replacing the ~ because it is fundamentally different. If it were added, instead it would have to sit alongside the ~. The ~ was added because many strong players who would play weaker players complained that it was too hard for them to determine whether or not the weaker players they played were returning the favor (by playing yet weaker players). The gold star scheme seems more like a "who's a nice guy" thing, it isn't tied to playing weaker players, which was the reason for adding the ~.
- Cheyenne: Also keep the idea of having "gold star" as a separate request (apart from the ~ issue) +
- Sebastian: How about combining both ideas? Give special stars and lemons +:
- "gave me nice feedback" from weaker players; +
- "was polite" from any players; +
- "escaped" from any registered players, or so ... +
- mgoetze: Quoth KGS Plans: Add icons next to names in name list. What do those icons indicate? Many different ideas, not sure yet what ones will actually be there.
- bocephus For those who are interested in avoiding the '~', give some mechanism to display a metric on how close (or far), one is from getting this award. Also, maybe technical detail in one place (i.e., free/rated, game size, [?]/[x?] players) on how the adjustments are made. [All game types and sizes apply and you can also reduce tilde scoring by playing newly registered players or provisionally ranked players.]
- Rakshasa: This sounds like a feature to make it easier for greedy players, why not also implement a escaper meter? ;)
- Bass If the game is not recorded (resign as first move), do not reduce "stigma counter"
- don't show temporary ranks ("xx?"). They are most of the time wrong and misleading, in particuliar for beginners (sensen) -
- DragnSlayr [2501] Show guest ranks as a G and not a ?. This would make it easyer for newly register players to get a game I think.+
- Reuven - Wouldn't "-" fit that purpose, without introducing anew symbol?
- (Sebastian:) Allow rated games of any size. (Well, at least 6x6). Use a weighing factor proportional to the size. It just doesn't make sense that you don't get a rating as a beginner when you play as recommended. This would be an important incentive for those newbies who currently play only guest accounts because they wouldn't get ratings anyway, to switch to a real account.
- wms: Not a bad idea, but the problem is that nobody knows how other sizewins/losses relate statistically to 19x19 wins/losses. KGS is based on a statistical system, you can't just weight them differently, then you will still have wrong data, just at a different weight. If somebody can find data on % wins for players who are x ranks apart (where 1 rank = 1 stone on 19x19), then I'll be able to include off-sized games, but until then, it would screw up the rating system.
- Neil: If ratings are made easier to get, then they are made less meaningful and reliable. Leave it alone, I say.
- (Sebastian:) This is a specious argument. In the contrary - any statistician will tell you that reliability increases with the number of samples taken.
- Neil: Yes, what I just wrote was very bad. It didn't communicate what I meant at all. What I mean is, right now to earn a rating you have to play full 19x19 games (usually with decent time, but that's another wish). To be able to gain a rating playing 9x9 allows you to get by with fewer skills. That's what I mean by making a rating easier to get.
- (Sebastian:) OK, I see your point. But I don't think this is an unsolvable problem. One way around it could be to set the weight dependent on the rank: Phase it out smoothly between 20 and 10k. (If someone really manages to beat 15k players consistently on a small board then she/he probably is at least somewhere around 16k. This player may be in for some surprises when he/she starts playing on a 19x19, but I don't think this harms the system.) Another coult be to apply this only if a player has a ranking with a "?" (and it would not suffice to remove it). In this case, well he may appear a rank or two stronger, but it wouldn't do any harm.
- phenomene: 9x9 or 13x13 go is just another game. Rated games on small boards sizes for 30k-20k players may be a good idea, as they often rush into playing 19x19 without enough knowledge of the game in order to get a rating. But allowing 9x9 to be rated between say dan players is a very bad idea in my opinion ; it is another game, that shouldn't influence one's real go rating.
- (Sebastian:) I agree. That's exactly what I meant by "Phase it out smoothly between 20 and 10k": Use some weighing factor under 20k, and let it be 0 above 10k, with a nice transition in between. However, I'm not sure how much effort it would be to implement it. If it is more than wms can presently afford then I still would hope he finds time for the basic feature. As I said above, I don't see this difference as an unbridgeable problem.
- DrStraw How feasable would it be to implement separate ratings for each of 9x9, 13x13, 19x19? The mechanics of rating should be easy but displaying the ratings would require some manipulation of the user info screen. The biggest problem would be determining the difference in strength for each handicap stone but there are commonly used standards which would be used initially (3k/stone for 13 and 5k/stone for 9). KGS could blaze the trail for comfirming (or contradicting) these numbers by permitting these ratings and periodically adjusting the factors to keep these ratings in sync with 19x19 ratings.
- (Sebastian:) I like this idea. Internally and on a users home page, keep separate statistics. In the "ranking tag" (the short "[25k?]" added to a name and used for sorting) and the graph just display one value (This can be a weighted average or the most secure and significant of the three, with bias for 19x19. Conversion takes place at current "exchange rate".)
(Additionally, it may be a good idea to show in the ranking tag if is based on a small board rank. This can be either with an "s", similar to the proposed "g" for guest accounts[2501], or simply with a "?").
- wms: As Dr. Straw pointed out, the biggest problem with multiple rating systems for different sizes is displaying the information. Having one rating system, which is for standard sized boards, is much simpler and fits the needs of 99% of the people, so adding something more complex (whether it is making the rating system some bizarre 19x19 and 9x9 hybrid or adding multiple rating systems) doesn't seem like such a great idea to me. Rather than having multiple rating systems, I'd be more tempeted to have a tournament-like ladder system for 9x9 or whatever size you wanted.
- Hu: I'd like to see in User Infos an average time spent per move in rated games. This would be make it easy to distinguish those who have earned their rating by blitz and ultrablitz from those who have been more thoughtful. The average time is easily computed if the database remembers the number of moves played and the time spent moving. The server can easily track the time since it keeps the time for both players.
- uxs: Why would that be useful ?
- BlueWyvern: I don't particularly like this idea. I never play under blitz settings, but I almost always play at a fairly brisk pace, especially if my opponent is playing extra slow and I have already read out a response to thier move before they play it. The speed I play at is frankly my perogotive, and if my opponent is satisfied with the time settings, I don't think it's anyone's business how fast I play.
- Reuven - I play both.. It can be aproblem for those who play blitz mostly and a couple of reall long games - Getting blitz games'd become impossible for them..
- Vlad This is a question (for wms), not a suggestion, but I didn't find a good place to ask it. Given the current rating system, how many wins in a row, with proper handicap, one needs in order to go exactly one rank up? That is, ignoring rank drift. TIA.
- wms: The algorithm for the rank system is on the KGS help pages, any questions about ranking are answered there. To answer your question directly: Depends, could be 1 game, could be 1,000,000 or more. So many factors are involved, that even giving a typical value isn't very useful.
- Vlad: Thanks for the answer. The algorithm isn't very useful in this question without knowing all the coefficients involved, that's why I asked. Keep up the good work!
- rubilia: (restored, because not obsolete at all) Weight ratings according to the average time per move rather than to the total playing time of a game, and use a continuous function to do so.
- The ability to recognize that the opponent has moved and where, then to shift the mouse to any point and to click the button there and, not at least, to have a fast pc and internet connection, is of no importance to what I'd call an appropriate rank, and hardly correlates with players´ strength. Hence a weighting function which depends on how big a part of the total playing time is supposed to be afforded for those matters, is advisable. I assume something like w := max(0, (T-N*k)/T) would work fine, where k stands for the time which is practically needed to perform a move without spending any time on thinking. N is the total number of moves played in the game and T is the total time length, while (T-N*k) is the "left for thinking time". Maybe 2 seconds per move (spm) would be a good starting point for k. Using this k value, a game lasting for 80 minutes and consisting of 240 moves (which means it´s a 20-spm-game), would weight 0.9 times the maximum it could achieve. A 5-spm-game would get 0.6 and a (2 or less)-spm-game would get zero weight. k could also be estimated by experiment: let a representative set of people try to "play" as many stones per minute as they can, then k approximately is the average time per move.
- Rakshasa: It seems more logical (and much simpler to implement) to require ranked games to be blitz or slower. The code should already be there for detecting ultra-blitz. Then noone can complain about ranks being unfair because of weights. (This is done in 2.5.8.)
- rubilia: To weight the games 100% or 0% only, is simpler, that's true. Though, about the "more logical" issue, I cannot agree. In fact, at KGS each game is already weighted continuously (with weight being anything between 0% and 100%), depending on the opponent's rank confidence (as well as on how old the game is). There are games which get 0.10 (10%) of the maximum possible weight, while other games get 0.93 (93%). I have never heard complaints about this weighting, but I have heard complaints about ranks being unfair because of the weighting function doesn't depend on game speed.
- Rakshasa: Those weights are related to how long ago the game was played and the weight of the players. It's not that weight i'm talking about here, each game has a constant base weight. (It's worth a single win or loss) If time changes the base weight, you suddenly end up with more games with way longer time that is needed. Is it fair that a game with an arbitrarily long game time gets weighted alot more? (They might not even spend half the time) What i think is fair about the ultra-blitz cutoff is that those games are mostly used by either time cheaters or those who want to have fun playing blitz.
- rubilia: If you think about the w function given above, carefully, you will recognize that it does respect these two components, but in an gradual instead of the "whole or nothing" way. The "not-possible-to-think-in"-time is the part which shouldn't contribute to the rating. What KGS calls "ultra-blitz", e. g. a 3-spm-game, mainly consists of that kind of time, hence it would get a very low or no weight at all. On the other hand, the w-difference between, say, 10 spm (80%) and 20 spm (90%) is rather small (10%), but there is one, because the 10 spm is slightly more influenced by not worth to be rated factors. Compared to the huge weighting differences which can occur because of different opponent's rank confidences (which KGS users usually don't know anything about), the w-differences between reasonably timed games are hardly noticable. I would not expect serious players to play slower without thinking deeper just in order to make the result slightly more evaluable for the ranking calculating algorithm.
- Rakshasa: What you seem to miss is that if a player only plays games with the same time then all of those games will have the same weight. If ultra-blitz only counts for 10% of normal games, then he'll just have to play a few more games before he gets a solid rank.
- rubilia: k could be adjusted to any value, e. g. 10 s, giving even a 10-spm-game no weight at all. I just want to point out that, wherever the treshold is set to, (the result of) a game which is only a few seconds slower shouldn´t get the same weight like a long-time one.
- tasuki: After seeing "tom3d" on kgs this evening, I think that blitz games should not be rated. I have also once seen a player from russia (cant remember his name though), who played games with one minute sudden death. He was clicking just *completely* random, the opponents playing him were trying to play at least a bit reasonable moves in hope to force him to resign, but it was of course useles. He got a very high rank like this (7dan, or maybe stronger). It is not go anymore, it is something between competition of better response time and nearly random placing of stones. I think that these games actually don't tell much about one's strenght in go, they should be played only as a free games. I know it is a matter of choice, but it influences the rating of us all. I know wms will not change it instantly, so what about making a petition againts rated blitz games?
- I strongly disagree with the above. The player in question played games with 5 periods of 7 second byo-yomi. True - it is very fast and an element of randomness due to netlag is introduced. But it is entirely possible to finish games under these conditions, more than half the games he played did not end in a timeloss - even not accounting for resignation by letting the time run out. Also, looking through the games should convince you that tom3d is a strong player - most probably considerably stronger than KGS 3d. To sum up, if you dont like rated blitz games then don't play them, but do not force your preference on the great body of strong players who do like them.
- I think the decision by wms below is very rash. This is just falling into the trap of thinking that rating is the sole purpose of Go. If somebody wants to acheive such a rating in this way let them. I fear what you're actually going to do is punish the many people who can cope quite easily and actually enjoy playing with pretty fast Canadian time limits.
- tasuki: of course rating is not the sole purpose of Go, I only said that fast games are rather irrelevant for your actual playing strenght. You can actually enjoy playing with pretty fast Canadiam time limits (I enjoy it sometimes as well, I only think that it should not affect ones rank). And many thanks to wms for doing a statistics and adjusting the things.
- wms: See KGS status (I'll make the change right after this). Just finished some looking into this. There will be changes.
[26] Game Start
- Hu: Don't start the clock until the first stone is played. ++++++++++
- Allow users to agree to change game settings before first move. +
- This can not go on infinitely, otherwise a game will never start. Perhaps one final adjustment change should be allowed.
- A chat area to the "Create Game" window, where offers can be commented and/or discussed. Might even replace the current "notes", which only the game creator can change (that can only be replied to by opening a new chat window with the user directly, or starting the game). ++
- rubilia: I am not sure if it's a bug: when starting a game, not only komi (according to the chosen ruleset) but also the resulting ranking value of the game doesn't seem to be adjusted to any changes made by the challenging player in the game setup window. Recently, a 6k? was suggested (by kgs default) to take white against me (8k) with 2 handicap stones. Though, he took black himself with 2 handi, since he thought to be around 10k. He won the game and became 4k? wich seems much too high a jump for his actual win, even in the ?rank modus (but appropriate if the game was scored with the - not applied - default settings). Yet I couldn't verify this with more accurate ranked players because the influence of a single game's outcome to the rank is much lower then.
- (Sebastian:) (related to previous) When starting a game with a Guest and/or [?] account, give the guest black by default. Most guests and [?] accounts are beginners.
- Vlad Since New Year (2004) I noticed that whenever I challenge someone with the same strength, the default is that I get black. Before that, it was a random choice. What happened? I think having the server choose at random as default is good.
- imho? i would prefer server checks which one is the weakest even in the same rank to give him blacks as a default
- DrStraw The latest version seems to have introduced a new feature. Not sure it is it intended or a bug, but it is certainly annoying. The game type now appears to default to the last type played. I'm getting tired of having the wrong game type up in game offers because the default is no longer consistent.
- JuhoP Wms has said it is a feature, and at least I like it better this way. (Though it is more important to keep DrStraw happy than me :-)
- DrStraw If that is the case then I think it should be based on the account. I only play free or simul games with my admin account but play rated games with other accounts. I do not lile my serious account to come up as non-rated when the last game it played was rated.
- JuhoP Hmm. First I need to admit I put it wrong. It is not the last game played, but the last game offer you made, with the same account, that determines the default game type. So it is exactly like with time settings. This is how it works for me, and I like it. But if you are correct, then there must be some bug or additional feature that I don't know.
- DrStraw From the way it behaves it seems like it is in the user preferences, which are stored locally and the same for all accounts on a single machine.
- Grauniad: Make the open games lists more stable somehow, so they don't change while you are trying to select a particular game offer, resulting in you selecting the wrong offer.
- wms: The open game list will only "resort" itself once in every 2+1/2 seconds at most. When I first wrote KGS, I was worried about this problem, and put a lot of work into looking at different systems. I tried not resorting the lasts when the mouse was over them, but that got to be incredibly annoying - if you accidentally left your mouse over a list, it would become way out of date before you noticed. Anyway, I think the current system is a good balance between keeping up to date and making it possible to click on the game/player you intend, so I'll probably leave it as is.
[27] Game End
- It sometimes happens that when marking dead stones at the end of the game both players miss a hard-to-spot dead stone or stones and press Done, and thus the end score is wrong. I have even witnessed a game between very high dans where white should have won but because he missed one dead stone he lost the game. So I suggest some way of going back to the dead stone marking stage even after both players have pressed Done. (It probably would be a good idea that it's not possible to go back to the game anymore, only to the dead-stone marking stage.)
- (Sebastian:) My first reaction was "no - people should just treat the scoring as serious as any move in the game". Which, logically, lead to: This should simply be handled as an undo request. (Maybe it already is, - Never tried it out.)
- wms: I don't think this will happen. There must be some point where the result of the game is final. If people notice a scoring mistake 2 months after the game ends, should they be able to reopen and re-score? I don't think so. On KGS, the moment that you press that done button, you are saying "I am 100% happy with the score of this game and I won't ever try to change it." If you aren't yet certain of the score, if you might want to change it later, then don't press the done button. That's all there is to it. Up until both players press "Done", the score can be changed, the game can even be restarted by just pressing "Undo," but once you have pressed "Done" you accept the current score, and once both players accept the current score, that's that, the game is done.
- (Sebastian:) Good point, I'm convinced. Moreover, you have all the time you want before pressing "done". And it's only one button, so it can't be a clicko.
- Cheyenne: Possible solution, have the "done" processing do a check to see if it can spot any uncleared dead stones (maybe use some of the function from the score est). If there is, then indicate that there is a possible problem and require another click to continue with the "DONE".
- Warp: My idea was that spectators could tell the players that they forgot to mark some dead stone (this is why it's important that they can't continue playing after both have clicked Done). After they leave the game then that would be final... Another idea: How about marking non-scoring territory very visibly (I don't have any good idea right now how to do that but somehow which is very easy to see): This way if at some place they forget to mark a stone it will be very eye-catching that there's some non-scoring territory left there. (Of course it could be confused with unfilled dame points and sekis, so I don't really know if it would help that much after all... It would be necessary to test it in practice.)
- TJ: Done is done, that's why it says "done". It has to be final at some point. If you can't find dead stones in a game you just finished playing better than a mere observer or, heaven forbid, a computer, then you deserve to lose anyways! Never having played in a tournament or seen one even, I assume that opponents score games together and agree on a score (eventually) there too, final score being final, so why make things complicated in order to help the careless or ignorant remain so on a go server?
- (Sebastian:) Actually, Warp's idea is neat. Why not mark dame points with a red triangle, if it helps newbies? It doesn't diminish the fun for advanced players and should be easy to implement.
- Rakshasa: I'd rather not be distracted by colorfull icons while checking the board for dead stones.
- Have the notice that appears when someone loses by time say the players names instead of "black" and "white", like the other game-end notices.
- Jraitsev: I am not sure if this makes any difference in computing the rank or not, but often times players who lose by a sizeable margin, click 'undo' right after they see by how much they lost and than resign. Again if resignation and losing by 1/10/50/100 points bears the same weight in scoring, it makes no difference, however if this is not the case, someone may use this to abuse the system. Perhaps KGS should differentiate between resignation and loss by some points.
- rubilia: As far as I know, kgs doesn´t distinguish between several margins or ways of winning, and I don´t think it should. In traditional go, a win is just a win and a loss just a loss, no matter of the points difference, and therefore playing strategy is not intended to maximize the expectation value of points difference but to maximize the probability of winning.
- jeremiah: A dialogue box pops up to announce the final result. This takes application focus away from the text window where the user is often trying to thank his opponent for the match. The need to stop and dismiss the result box is an annoyance. Perhaps the result box could be generated without focus and/or backgrounded.++
Path: KGSWishlist
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This is a copy of the living page
"KGS Wishlist - Game Handling" at
Sensei's Library.
2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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