As someone who actively engages in the old/new OGS and other servers, e.g., DGS, here are my two cents:
Pro:
1) Without Nova taking over, there might be no OGS now.
-I think if it's true, then however bad it is, we have to say something is better than nothing.
2) New OGS enables live games and brings the community of live players.
-This is better than the old OGS.
3) There are more live activities on new OGS (e.g. Friday with xhu, live teaching games)
4) New OGS brings more players.
-This is mostly related to the live players.
-The number of correspondence players/games also increases a little, but I think if there were no more title tournaments, there would be substantially fewer correspondence players.
5) The group and the group tournament functions is great.
-This is superior than old OGS and DGS.
6) The API interface is good.
-Although the detailed descriptions are not very up-to-date.
7) The review tool seems better.
Con:
1) There are more bugs than the old OGS and DGS.
-I don't recall any obvious bugs lasting for a long time on old OGS and DGS.
2) The bug report doesn't get a reply (getting better now).
-In the beginning of the merge, there are many major/obvious bugs, but the reports are mostly ignored then. Now I can see this issue is getting much better on the forum.
-The problem might be that what old OGSers see as serious bugs (mainly related to title tournaments and the ladders) are not something serious for the developers who almost never play in tournaments and ladders.
3) After a short reply, the bugs are not addressed for a long time.
-This is also getting better. Here are some famous issues introduced after the merge that get fixed after some time:
--The tournament table display (finally gets fixed).
--The problem that weaker player always takes black (finally gets fixed).
--The grouping of the players not consistent (finally gets fixed).
--The haunting point bug (https://forums.online-go.com/t/duplicate-score-updating-leading-to-incorrect-scores-in-tournaments/5367, Recently gets fixed, cheers!).--The duplicated score updating problem is still not fixed (
https://forums.online-go.com/t/duplicat ... ments/5367)
4) Title tournaments are officially stopped.
-This has been discussed in another thread.
-This was the major frustration to me. Thanks to the group tournament function, we are able to continue them manually.
-The abandonment rate, which is the main reason why they are closed, could be significantly lowered down by various means, e.g. (a) a looser disqualification criteria; (b) shorter period between the announcement of tournament and the start time (~10 days is enough);
-Also, if the organizer pays more attention to the tournaments (fewer bugs, etc.), the abandonment rate will also be decreased.
-As an example, the recently finished Meijin Nines 2015, 78 out of 115 players (67.8%) finish all the games in the 3-round tournament, even with the disqualification-by-a-single-timeout feature.
5) Minor bugs need to be fixed:
-The tournament score updating/tournament starting engine stops working from time to time (
https://forums.online-go.com/t/tourname ... ating/5599)
-We cannot set up tournaments without weekend pauses (
https://forums.online-go.com/t/tourname ... auses/5483). This makes some tournaments unnecessarily longer than they should be. The tournament director should have the options to specify the setting.
-We cannot see the remaining time during the weekends/vacation/pauses (
https://forums.online-go.com/t/tourname ... auses/5483).
6) Tournaments with Group Elimination format no longer exist.
-The only one remaining contains many bugs (
https://forums.online-go.com/t/how-is-e ... cided/3831)
-Single elimination and double elimination is not suitable for large-scale correspondence tournaments since they require too many rounds (I'll elaborate it in details).
-DGS, on the other hand, has good elimination tournament format now.
-In terms of tournament types, OGS is still superior than DGS now. But once DGS gets the time to implement the other tournament types, it would be quite competitive.
7) Tournaments with League format no longer exist.
-Right after the merge, Kuksu leagues were turned into Simultaneous MacMahon format.
-Now we are running it manually through the API, however it's better if we could unify all the groups in one single tournament.
8) The ladders have little incentive now (at least to me)
-On old OGS, the historical best ranking is listed on the profile page.
-On old OGS and DGS, all players are listed on one page.
-On DGS, there are hall-of-fame and various statistics for the players participating in the ladder.
-As a result, the DGS ladder (
http://www.dragongoserver.net/tournamen ... .php?tid=3) has a larger number of players and more stronger players now.
-But even on DGS, there are discussions on what incentive the ladders should provide. This is an open problem.
9) The disqualification-by-a-single-timeout feature cannot be disabled.
-This is too brutal. At least the tournament director should have the option to decide which strategy to use. There are much better criteria, such as the number of games timeout, the last log-in time, etc..
10) The tournament trophies have nearly zero values now.
-All tournaments, from 3 players to 300 players, share the same trophies. A finalist (green) trophy on the old OGS might worth much more than 10 gold trophies on the new OGS.
-Also, the leader board, which intends to replace the title tournaments, conveys little information on how strong the players are.
11) The title match could only be held through friendly-match now. No summary page any more.
Finally, I'd like to analyze why live/correspondence tournaments are closely related to the number of players.
It looks like all official tournaments have very few players now (mostly limited to 10). Here are the reasons:
1) They are live/blitz tournaments. Within a short time there could only be so many players online.
2) They are too frequent. Yes, if you can participate in another one tomorrow, why should you participate in the one today? (Note that I'm not saying we can't have frequent tournaments, see the one below)
3) Their names are not attractive. Compare these: (a) Blitz 19x19 Elimination Tournament 2015-11-26 01:30, (b) Sitewide July Single Elim. Corr. 19x19, (c) Honinbo Main Title Tournament 2015. Which one would you like to participate in?
4) The large-scale sitewide tournaments happen randomly without a unified name.
5) Single/Double elimination format takes too long (too many rounds) to finish.
-Example:
https://online-go.com/tournament/7951, tournaments with 100 players need 7 rounds to finish for single elimination, whereas for Simultaneous McMahon/Group Elimination tournaments, 3 rounds are enough for 200 players. For League, one round is enough.
6) The formats of some large-scale sitewide tournaments are not fair to the players.
-Example:
https://online-go.com/tournament/7953,
https://online-go.com/tournament/7952, The subsequent pairing method is based on strength, which makes little sense for the achievement (It's like in the FIFA world cup, 16 teams from Europe and South America play for one ticket in the final and the rest of the world play for the other one). I can expect the same thing will happen to
https://online-go.com/tournament/7951.
7) With too short time control for correspondence tournament, most results will become win-by-timeout.
-Example:
https://online-go.com/tournament/9771, despite the large number of active dan-players participating, only one game is finished NOT by timeout now.
Therefore, it's not us that choose the Simultaneous MacMahon/Group Elimination/League correspondence title tournaments as the format for large-scale tournaments. It's because live/blitz tournaments cannot get enough players within a short time, the other formats cannot handle/balance the fairness among a large number of players, and other names could not attract enough strong players. Hope the developers could reconsider the issue.Finally I'd like to thank the developers (@matburt, @anoek) and hope they could keep up with the good job recently, as well as the collaborators (@Leira), suggestion makers (@tegais, @herminator, @Uberdude, etc.) and the tournament participants.
There are much more to say and I will update it in the future