I've heard from various sources that wms is making an html client for KGS. Anyone know when it will be up and running and how it can be accessed?

Watch the KGS G+ page.

Cheers, Tom

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

The html 5 client is only in a limited alpha test right now. Hopefully once some of the bugs get worked out and the client is a little more polished it will move into a beta.

Just have to wait and see how it turns out.

What are the numbers of accounts/players 2012 and right now? I have the impression KGS gets fewer and fewer players. Even with automatch it takes quite long to find an opponent and mostly you just have a handful of dan players offering games while 30 bots make the game window seem full.

Is this the beginning of the end? I basically abandoned KGS...and I wonder if I just followed a general movement that is going on very right now.

Out of curiosity, how restrictive are your automatch settings?

Presently KGS usually runs around 800-1200 people on average (barring major event / tournament / KGS+ Lecture / etc). It will vary with time of day. For a big event it may be 1800-2000 people. It is down a bit from it's peak, but that's generally been attributed to the HnG fad passing as participation in Western go in general has dropped off in recent years.

The growth of bots has been a mixed blessing for finding pairings, because if you want to play a bot there is almost always one there to play. This means that players just looking for a game who aren't picky may often be paired with a bot (reducing the pool for players who specifically want to play a human). In the past you may have had 3-4 people in the low to mid-dan level waiting for a game, but now they can just play a bot and you may have 1 left.

From my experience doing random data sampling in the past, automatch usually seems to account for about 20% of the games played in the "well populated" ranks (15k-3d)

A lot of people seem to avoid automatch, for various reasons, mostly so they can pick their opponent from what I can tell.

So far in blitz mode I only need to wait between 1 and 5 minutes for a game. Granted, sometimes it is against the same player I had in the previous game, but I've found no problems with automatch, never waiting more than 10 minutes. Of course, I'd never wait more than 10 minutes for a game either, but I think so far this has only happened once. I rather prefer automatch games, so I do not pick the player but are given one at random, actually.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

I've had quite a few waits longer than 10 minutes in the 6-12k range with slow time settings. I normally go +/- 2 stones though, which might have something to do with it.

Oh, yes. I had to raise to ±4 for this, and have been tempted to raise it a notch more to ±5.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

I never get to play even or near even games at the club so when I log onto KGS I feel like scratching that itch rather than giving or taking 4+ stones as is more usual for me over the board.

At 2-3k, I do +-1 and usually get a match in a couple min. If any longer, I try a different server.

Lately having to switch has been rare though. It may be time zone difference as well. Lots of automatch players when I'm playing are using Japanese client.

You may be right, I don't have much to any free time during "European Prime Time" but often try and get some sleep before the US community really gets going.