The title might sound a little strange, especially since I haven't exactly played many games on here against others and I'm not terribly high-ranked, but I do think that this site is quite good and would really benefit from having a wider base. Essentially, the question is, how can we increase the user base to the level where you don't have to wait a long time to find someone at your level or where certain resources aren't a little threadbare?
Obviously, there are other, bigger sites, such as 81Shogi, but those tend to be either a little harder to use or they tend to be old-fashioned in some way. 81Shogi works, but it has problems which I find aren't so apparent here. Another problem is the number of inexperienced players: on basically every site, there is a very big skew towards high-level players, at least as far as regular users are concerned (I'm not really helping, as I feel I need to practise against the computer, but it's a vicious cycle). This makes it difficult to find games and also means that the site (and the game of shogi itself) struggles to grow properly.
I really want to learn more about shogi and play more shogi myself and I want to see the game expand outside of Japan, especially considering there seems to be no real federation or union of players, but if it's a struggle to find good resources as someone who's interested, how will people who are only trying it out be able to get into it? I'd say that the main way to make all these things easier, from more resources, more games and more people to play against at any level (and also just improving the website itself), is to expand the number of players and the user base of the site.
Anyway, the question is how? So far as I can tell, outside of Japan there isn't any company with money to pay for advertising or any TV show that showcases the game to be able to help spread it easily. There isn't any proper shogi federation outside of Japan either. So the work has to be done online, and that's why Lishogi is a big part of it.
The best solution I could come up with is some sort of partnership with or endorsement by Lichess or something, seeing as this site and the owner clearly mean to replicate the enormous success and charity of Lichess. It doesn't have to be much, just having a link to this website or something as part of their 'Chess variants' or some other way to help raise the profile. Of course, any other big chess platform, such as Chess.com, could have shogi as an option, and that would be a great help. I think the association of chess and shogi might help bring in people who enjoy this sort of tactical thinking, especially considering that millions upon millions of people play and enjoy chess and would probably enjoy shogi too. Another option would be some sort of celebrity endorsing the game or some very popular work of fiction coming out (I mean, there's a famous anime for everything, these days), but it feels like that might be unrealistic. At least, unrealistic for us to do.
In any case, I think that we as a community should try to do something, like reach out to the likes of Lichess or Chess.com and hope they're willing to try it out, to try to help spread shogi, and I think it would be fantastic if this site were the centrepiece of the entire thing, because so far as I can tell it's the most modern and well-built shogi website that's available to Western audiences. If anyone has any ideas, I think it would be great if we could get them all together in this forum and perhaps do something about them.
(P.S. Sorry that this is so long. I really want to see some improvement and so I'm just kinda writing down everything that comes to my head.)
How to expand (Li)shogi?
Lichess may or may not be receptive, but I a have a feeling that chess.com doesn't exactly like free and open source chess servers as competition :P.
No, I completely agree, but if they can incorporate the game into their website like they do with all those other versions of chess that they do, even for a short period like a month, it would be beneficial to shogi and they'd probably make inroads in Japan, where there are 125 million people, of whom very few play chess (proportionally, at least), so there's some reason to do it.
But, yeah, they don't exactly like competition... My hope really is with Lichess more than anything else.
You can't post in the forums yet. Play some games!