All new players should be ranked via bot

[shinuito]

@teapoweredrobot

I have no idea how the rating system works but statements like this did give me a sense that

And statements like this give me the sense that

@shinuito

If you’re conflating my concerns with “what OGS or anoek wants” then that’s probably not correct.

OGS =/= shinuito.

It’s like if I read

@teapoweredrobot

And actually on that point, it’s fairly normal to prefer potential customers than existing ones

and then concluded “ @teapoweredrobot is a moderator so OGS must hate their current player base”.

@teapoweredrobot

In that managing the rating system is an effort for OGS rather than players,

I think at the moment the rating system seems like it works fine. There might be some debate on stability of rating when players play thousands of games either a day or a month, but other than that I feel like people end up with the right rank after not too many games. It’s the method of obtaining a 25kyu rank people are objecting to, that is having to lose games in order for the system to see you as below a particular rank. Of course it might mean losing more games if one doesn’t or can’t challenge existing 25kyus.

However what people are suggesting could require much more maintence and while you say

@teapoweredrobot

preferring hypothetical downsides to existing ones

I don’t believe that the hypothetical downsides are nonsense. For example if you look at old posts when the system used Elo/Gor style ratings

@anoek

The ranks at OGS have been severely depressed for a long time now. There are several causes for this, all of which play a factor, here are several that we’ve identified as being notable contributors to the problem, either directly or indirectly.

@anoek

1. The ELO/GoR ranking system is a zero sum system, this means if everyone starts off at 30k, the average rank will always be 30k. In both “the old” and “the new” OGS, while you could select and change your rank, it was very common for folks to just leave rank at 30k and “let the system figure it out”. With no substantial way to inject points into the system, this is the number one reason why our ranks are depressed.
2. When people transfer in from other servers, if they pick a rank at all it seems more common than not to sandbag a little, as they don’t want to start off too hard. This problem is only compounded by the fact that OGS has a reputation for having depressed ranks.

and that required solutions like

@anoek

We don’t want to take the approach of dropping everyone in the middle of the ranking system and let new players get slaughtered, so in order to solve the beginner start problem we will begin injecting points into the system by scaling back the K factor in the EGF GoR function for the losing player, dependent on their rating. In layman’s terms, beginners won’t lose as many points when they lose a game as they will gain when they win a game. Intuitively, this makes sense as beginners playing each other can increase in skill greatly even from a loss, so their ratings shouldn’t plummet from a single loss. We will also be capping the K factor at 122 for ranks less than 20k, as this seems to improve results in our case. Our proposed scaling looks like this:

where there’s more fiddling needed to be done. Note that dropping a beginner in the middle of the rating system in Elo would likely be much worse than in Glicko, since there isn’t a concept of high deviation etc where ratings can adjust quickly as one can see in the post about swapping to Glicko.

@anoek

Most of the shortcomings can be traced back to the fact that the system is too slow to find a player’s correct rank, and too slow to adapt when jumps in strength occur. Operationally this has been quite troublesome. Not only do we have to require new players to provide an initial rank when they sign up (which is confusing for new players, and hard to answer correctly for established players because a rank only means something per server), it also opens up the system for abuse

and (if players/moderators don’t adjust the rating back then)

@anoek

and if that doesn’t happen, it can take dozens and sometimes hundreds of games to find their correct rank, all the while they are affecting other players’ ranks negatively along the way.

Re:

@teapoweredrobot

My proposal for consideration would be to have some kind of humble rank that can be set at different points (25k, 10k, 3k) and use that as a shadow system until the certainty is established.

I believe that falls under

@Glicko-2 does not require accounts to start at 12 kyu. So why do we do that?

If match making is the problem, why fiddle with the ranking system? Glicko has no restrictions for match making.

to which I said

@shinuito

is a good start and at least not as drastic a change?

and yet all I see are responses saying

@Kaworu_Nagisa

It really just sounds like OGS wants “the best ranking system”, and is sacrificing “the best player experience” to do it.

and

@teapoweredrobot

In that managing the rating system is an effort for OGS rather than players, who in broad terms don’t care about the rating systems (some obvs care about their rating but that’s not the same thing)

which I hope you can appreciate is a bit frustrating.