It's been awhile since KGS introduced the automatch modus which looks automatically for players and connects them. What do you think? Is it used? Does it work? Should this feature be deleted soon because it doesn't work?

There are currently about 450 games on KGS now, and I counted about 90 are automatch. It seems like it works pretty well to me.

I use it all the time.

And what's your evidence that it doesn't work? I use it occasionally; I know people who use it more often. As another poster pointed out, a fair share of games use it. So what's your beef?

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

I use it about half of the time, and I always enjoy the games I get through that feature. I appreciate that less games seem to be escaped and there is of course no opponent selection - in fact it's one of the only ways I get to play higher ranked opponents.

If anything, we should be talking about how to improve the function.

One thing I notice is that recently I get significantly more opponents who are weaker than me than opponents who are stronger than me.
Not sure what the reason is. There might just be fewer stronger players, stronger players might not use auto-match as much, or they have chosen a smaller rank-range.

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Sanity is for the weak.

I was told that escapes in automatch count as immediate losses, so you are unlikely to get the kind of escaper who does it occasionally yet not enough to lead to losses.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

No you still have the same number of escapes before you get losses. The big difference is that escaping in the first few moves always counts as an escape, ant not just if the opponent decides to save the game.

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Sanity is for the weak.

Same here. I like it very much.

Li Kao
I always use +-1 rank, because I don't what to play against handicap ^^ By the way I also thought, I'd played against weaker oppents far more ofen but in the end I just played one more game as White (out of 33 since October).


post scriptum:
Further evaluations show: 8 times played against a higher ranked opponent, 13 times against an even ranked and 12 times against an lower ranked opponent.

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

Such is life - if you were 20k, the reverse would probably be the case.

Just checked and it's not that biased. It was just a bad streak in october that seems to have formed my mind.

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Sanity is for the weak.

I would say that 99% of my rated games are found through automatch. I doubt I would find as many opponents without it.

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Life is what you make of it, as long as you live.

I've only ever used automatch. Unfortunately it doesn't work so well past about 1d, there don't seem to be so many stronger players using it. But I persevere, maybe others will join me

I've noticed more higher level automatch games recently with Japanese players making the majority of players. So it may also have something to do with time zones too.

Yes I noticed an increase in Japanese opponents(automatch) for me recently. What did happen there?

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Sanity is for the weak.

Not sure. I've been meaning to ask that too. It's just been a noticeable increase, but I haven't seen the cause.

Probably a consequence of the influx of Japanese players. They open games in the Japanese Room (which is almost as big as the English Room now) so you don't see them, but automatch is the same for everyone.

Automatch is cool. I use it whenever I play someone on KGS I don't know (though last time was almost one year ago)

I think it works very well, especially for sluggards like me who don't play online very often and have trouble maintaining a solid rank, and it is rapidly becoming my first option instead of posting a game in the EGR.

I practically never play automatch just for the reason I can't choose a ruleset
and have to endure Japanese rules.

I know many people on KGS aren't even aware there are different rulesets and
even if they are , most don't know that a game on different rulesets plays out
the same way 99.9999% of the time. But it is the accepted standard I guess.
Filtering automatch games by preferred ruleset will make it far more difficult
for people to get paired with automatch so there's nothing you can do about it.