To clarify we didn’t target 50/50, we targeted consistency. That turned out to be about 43% as you’d expect, that was a natural number that emerged though and not something that was explicitly targeted.
But because we targeted consistency for multiple handicap levels, that changed the bend of the curve so to speak, which is why our lower ranks don’t align with the current EGF’s lower ranks (note those are subject to change as they are working on that too, I’m very curious to see how things look after their adjustments).
Right now I’m questioning my sanity a little bit though because intuitively since the EGF black win rate decreases as the handicap stones increase, that would seemingly imply that black needs more handicap stones, so the ranks need to be farther apart, which is the opposite of where the data and simulations led me with this rank update. I think I need more coffee to think that one through again, I’ve rationalized myself into circles a few times on that topic.
On the topic of handicap 1 being worth about half a stone, we did run simulations with considering hc1 as worth half a stone, but honestly it didn’t seem to make much of a difference - if anything it seemed a little negative in the results, but it seemed pretty close to noise to really say. Because of that I just kept with the current “one rank difference is one stone” for the sake of simplicity and ease of communicating that to players.