All new players should be ranked via bot

[shinuito]

@mafidufa

but why in the world do beginners especially need to do this? let them say i am a beginner, be ranked appropriately and get started playing go so we have more go players in the world.

But everyone has to do it there’s nothing special about beginners. You sign up, the rating system gives you a default rank and a high deviation so it will adjust quickly based on your results, since it doesn’t know what to give you as a rank.

I don’t really expect beginners to know what rank they should be any more than a 4d on fox would know what rank to put themselves should they choose to start playing on OGS.

So really

@mafidufa

i dont understand why the rating system would have a problem with starting someone at a beginner rank.

could probably be rephrased as “why would the rating system have an issue with people declaring a far from correct rank or abitrary rank in general?”

I honestly don’t know.

I think @Vsotvep did some simulations which showed some rating drift and eventual settling with some different conditions

Why does "restrict rank" allow ? players?

I also looked at the math once, and at that time could not discover any reason why starting at a different rating would have impact on the overall system. However, I was not completely sure, and expected that drift may be a factor, therefore I thought to test it experimentally. I simulated 5 players in the system, assign each an initial strength (1 to 5), and let the chance of player A winning from player B equal 0.5 + arctan( strengthA - strengthB ) / π (the wider the gap in strength, the more …

I do wonder what happens when you have thousands of players though but I haven’t tried to download the GitHub repository to test the real data.

I believe @flovo has more experience though with the rating system also. Is there any reason why all initial ratings are set to 1500 (or I guess it’s 1150 for us) for all players.

They also have some comments in the same thread Why does "restrict rank" allow ? players? - #80 by flovo

though I can’t remember exactly the conclusion reached.

I do remember previous posts about many users asking for ratings resets when they realised they picked the wrong starting rank.