2020 Rating and rank tweaks and analysis

not really… the “ratings period” is a period of games that updates your rating, when a game leaves your ratings period its effects don’t suddenly disappear, it’s just not creating new effects. The total does not go up the difference, it goes down by the effect of the new loss, plus whatever effects are in the other games within the period

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I just lost a game and moved up (or would I say down) a rank (17kyu to 16kyu)

I think this is a pretty good analogy.

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The promlem with the moving window probably is you get 15 more or less independent ratings.

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Improve to my fix idea:
Always increase rank after win and always decrease it after lose. This zigzag like graph is displayed for user.

System in parallel calculates real rank with any complicated method. And displayed for user rank in zigzag like motion will try to be as close as possible to real rank.
Numbers like ± 1.2 on users should be higher when zigzag rank is far from real rank, so there is no lie.

(again) only real rank calculates rank. Zigzag rank is cosmetic improvement to not confuse user and to treat user, zigzag rank even may be functionally used (in rank restrictions, handicaps, …)

Its easy to implement. If zigzag rank increases and its below real, increase it until its equal to real. If zigzag rank increases and its above real, increase it very little. (same idea with decrease)

(most of time zigzag will be equal to real)

@anoek ?

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Please, everyone, read this latest announcement before commenting here with noticed bugs. They may have already been identified…

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@anoek ranking down on winning seems to be happening frequently. It never happened to me before the recent changes. OGS rating always seemed very sensitive but at least it consistently went up when I won and went down when I lost. Now it is still hypersensitive and moves in the wrong direction frequently, which is frustrating. I just won a game and it ranked me down from 6k (5.7) to 7k (6.1). It doesn’t seem right that it should do that. I hope this can be fixed. Thanks.

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Yep, see Rating system issues … we’ll be changing it.

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OK, thanks.

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Damn, fallen to 4k. And my frequent opponent who was 2k at the worst has fallen to 5k.

Finally ranking that’s worth something!

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No, though that’s not a rating difficulty thing, that’s a “How do you do all the right thing in tournaments and ladders?” thing, and I also don’t want the moderation overhead of going back and changing games upon request.

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The sheer wordage in this thread is astounding. I think this may have a greater words / post ratio than any other thread of size on the forums…

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Sure? The language learners library (by you!) is a good candidate. There are some low-word posts in here as well, but the language thread has mostly high-word posts.

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Just a quick note that the rating system seems to have gone upside-down for me lately. I was at 5.0k, I beat a 4.x k and my rating went down to 5.1k. It wasn’t a big change, but in the wrong direction, and left me with the feeling that I had been “ranked down” in a way that seemed unfair. Then I got beaten by a 7d and my rating jumped up by 0.4 to 4.6k. Strange. This has been happening a lot, that when I lose to much stronger players my rating goes up. Is this how it is supposed to work? It seems very counter-intuitive to me.

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It seems counter-intuitive because we think this way. We think that since we just played one game since the last rank update, this game should determine how the rank changes. When really the ranking system looks on a period of games, and the last one is contributing but doesn’t determine how the rank changes.

And really these minute changes don’t matter. If I won a game today and was ranked up 0.3 level, does it actually mean that I’ve become 0.3 level stronger? No, it means absolutely nothing. We can see the trend of improvement only over many games, perhaps many months even.

But we’re monkeys and we seek, how do you call it, instant gratification. Long-term improvement is vague and hard to track so we just want our 0.3 level for winning a game :stuck_out_tongue:

It reminds me a little bit about climate. How people say that climate can’t be warming because it snowed today.

I get that people are complaining so the rankings will be changed. But I’m pretty happy right now. It allowed me to pay less attention to these small changes.

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Good reply, thanks. I just got used to the rating always moving in the “right” direction after each result, and am finding it hard to get used to it no longer doing that. You’re right that it is best not to pay too much attention to the rating.

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I turn the ratings off now when I play a game - I turn them on afterward just to see or maybe if I’m observing games etc.

I’m still under the impression that this isn’t the way it was intended to be:

I think a system where you’re rewarding with points for a win and deducted for a loss makes much more sense no matter what. You might say one win/loss shouldn’t mean anything, but this can be reflected in the scale of the change surely?

Intuitively a string of consecutive wins against stronger opponents should result in a net (large) increase in rating, while against weaker opponents a net (small) increase. Similarly losses should be the opposite (increase->decrease and small<->large). You also don’t want it to take forever for people to reach their true rating (be that a rescaled/remapped/equivalent rating from IRL/other servers etc.)

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Maybe there should be a “matchmaking rank” and a “personal growth” rank?

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While I don’t like GoQuests implementation of their ranks vs ratings, it could be a thing to consider implementing something related.

Basically a highest rank achieved display, or possibly achieved and stable (maybe stayed above it for x amount of games - time would messy because of correspondence live blitz timescales for games).

On the one hand it would definitely give people either something to work toward/reward them for getting there (the max rank wouldn’t go back down even if rating did), but at the same time I’m always iffy of the general elitism that can come with it - ‘oh x kyus always make these kinds of mistakes’, ‘trust me I’m a dan player’ (re studying habits, variations in game reviews etc).

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Considering the 15-game sliding window, when a new game is added an old game is discarded from the rating analysis set, right? In my case the old game was me getting beaten by a 3 dan. The new game was me getting beaten by a 6 dan. The other 14 games should be the same. Net result: rating increased by 0.5. Mysterious.

Maybe it is working correctly, I’m not really complaining, I’m just saying I don’t understand what it is doing. Often, but not always, when a process produces strange, inexplicable results, it is because something’s not right.

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