I have seen various threads and people complaining about OGS ranking problems for newbies (especially @Uberdude 's compelling arguments on that issue ) and a lot of people posting a vast array of numbers on the issue and, I will be honest, I never really much cared about the whole thing since it is an executive decision that I couldn’t really go back and test and have an opinion on.
However, after seeing that Baduk miracle exam I kind of wondered if I could have passed that exams and that maybe it was high-time to revive an alt account that I had made for fast/blitz games in order to see if I can actually play that fast live and train myself.
And while at it I thought I might finally check all those things about the newbie ranks and if it is a real problem.
By my estimation when no given ample time to think I am barely 10k and to keep it even fairer all the games were played past midnight or, in the case of the last one, when I was half-asleep. This should simulate a new high-SDK player well enough.
The experiment runs like this, I would be playing against people of the level I was thinking that I am really at in 5m and 5x10s byoyomi. Which is 12k to 7k.
To my surprise I was doing “ok” and after the first games I had won against one of each players in that rank range and my rank was inflated to 2.4k, just by winning against opponents that were nowhere near that or the initial 6k ranking.
This means that at that moment that account had a better ranking than my actual account, which makes no sense.
Bear in mind that this is a result than actual new high-SDK player account could have very reasonably accomplished, but at that moment I was getting a lot of cancellations and people were really afraid of the [?] and the inflated rank. A new player might have felt that this is not a good environment to play since other players would be actively avoiding and cancelling the games.
After that, I unfortunately lost on time since the opponent tried a ko and I didn’t notice that I had no other byoyomi and I couldn’t test how far up the ranks I could have gone with victories like that before I lost the [?] and at the last game I missed an atari for being asleep at the helm and playing my own moves. Thus the experiment ended at 6k instead of around 3-4k, which is still absurd as a new player experience that only won against high-sdk and ddk players.
I think that some mock test should be run to see the actual results on cases like that (which are not really edge cases at all) and re-evaluate the “new player experience” because I really got a lot of cancellations after the first games. Something seems to be wrong in this system at this moment and it probably needs some tweaking.
P.S.
I could not find which might have been the appropriate topic to put this. If a moderator wants to append this to a different topic in which it would serve better, please do so and sorry for any extra bother.