A person joining at, say, 500 has the opposite effect of someone quitting at 500. Because if both events happen, it’s like nothing changed.
So if we’re not overly concerned about exits, why control where people enter?
Surely the rating system drifts, but if that’s a concern, measure it and add some drift in the other direction. Don’t make beginners play a bunch of pointless games to fix a numerical problem.
Even better idea to demonstrate the pointlessness. If a beginner picks 500, have the system pick a few random DDKs and create fake game records, having the new player lose until he has reached his desired rank.
New player reaches rank, no pointless games played, exact same effect on the ranking system as what we have now.
allow new users to set their rank.
and put in a notice thats says " if you are a complete beginner click here" which sets them to 25 kyu, and possibly even directs them to the tutorial.
to avoid brand new accounts declaring themselves as 9 dan, have a maximum rank you can set. off the top of my head maybe 3 kyu?
Again my presumption would be that either it’s due to stability in some sense or people must be collectively and possibly independently misreading/misinterpreting the glicko instructions.
Else why say things like Chess rating systems • lichess.org
Glicko 1
The Glicko rating system has a better prediction accuracy than Elo, but is more complex mathematically. It is a popular choice for new games and sports.
The Glicko system paper specifies that ratings start at 1500.
Glicko 2
An improvement over Glicko 1, adding the concepts of volatility, for even greater accuracy.
Ratings still start at 1500.
and http://www.glicko.net/glicko/glicko.pdf
(a) If the player is unrated, set the rating to 1500 and the RD to 350. These are default reasonable choices, but the RD of 350 in particular can be determined through optimizing predictability of game outcomes (not described here).
instead of “pick your favourite rating”?
I did mention chess dot com seem to do it with the Glicko system
but I haven’t tried to dive into if they’ve encountered any issues due to it. Maybe someone knows?
Except that’s what KGS (not with glicko) does but they correct it nearly every game, anchoring the rating system to certain stable players, and you end up a rating graph that looks like the following even though I only played one ranked in all those months
And other servers like Fox might do that, but they also don’t use Glicko2 ratings.
I’m not sure why you’d assume that? Something has changed, if a player plays games and drops to 500, they’ve given rating to other players, possibly taken rating from others.
If they leave and someone else with the same rating takes over on a new account that’s not really the same, since it’s likely that their deviations, volatility and parameters in the ratings system won’t be same as the person that left.
I think we’re looking for something not convoluted if anything. This is incredibly convoluted.
But back on the topic of the bump - some people might want to play bots, but on average I’m not sure everyone would want to be forced to do it to get a rank. So I can agree/understand.
If something does need to be done then maybe
This sort of idea I can understand. If somebody can just challenge and lose to 25kyus, I expect their rating to drop quickly, and I’ve given some example players that seem to have done just that, albeit maybe after losing to an 11kyu or something initially.
However I guess the potential problem might be that as you rating deviation goes down with games finished, that if you pick too easy opponents, (beat the 25, 20kyu etc ) as your first few games, then maybe your rating settles a bit around the default (6kyu) and it might even take more games to lower the rank down to whatever it should be, like 10kyu or 15kyu etc.
I would like to test a few things out on beta though. I might need to lower an account to 25kyu and other TPK ranks.
i dont understand why the rating system would have a problem with starting someone at a beginner rank. it can obviously handle adjusting erroneous ranks, currently it starts new accounts at an incorrect rank (for all but a tiny number of actual 6kyus) and adjusts from there.
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
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
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.
there is something special about beginners. they are new to a confusing game and removing one source of that confusion will help keep more of them around.
i am much less concerned about a 4 dan fox being inappropriately ranked, they would have enough domain knowledge to understand what is going on.
if it makes any difference to the ranking system, how about a choice of 2 arbitrary entry points to the system: beginner (25kyu) and non-beginner (6kyu). even this would be a very big improvement over the current system.
From a ratings perspective I mean. Everyone has to play ranked games to get ranked.
I can understand being frustrating in having to lose a few games to get a rank, but it’s not unique to Go, many console games will have placement matches to get a rank.
(Irrelevant aside) Some would equally argue (and have) that we also might want to keep more strong players around.
Why not allow people to choose from 5 different starting ranks
or why not 10 or any number of ranks? That is the question “the why”.
any of these options seems very much preferable to me to the seemingly unchangeable status quo.
Ok a little search and here we go
Forgot i wrote that compendium
The documentation says 1500, so we use it.
For new player we could simply ignore the rating and do the match making as we like. After all, the rating systems is telling us, it doesn’t know what the rating of the player should be.
I do get confused, because I feel like it still displays the humble rank some places like the profile, but the I think the mini gobans (thumbnails) show 6kyu
For whose who think there is no real problem with beginners, just consider that it’s not that easy to report a bad experience you got on a server that was recomended by some good friend as being the right place to go learn the game. Still we have reports.
It’s not that stupid to go play rated games. We don’t provide any warning and it’s a feature well implemented for other games servers which will assign you the right place to start.
So you come here get crush like average 7 games then plop got your first rating (still wrong) and get crushed again for another 7 games.
If you got the chance to be warned before and try to find players discovering the game like you (clever beginner who wants to correct the viciousness of the system) well no no no That’s not possible. You got that lie “this player is too weak for you”
How many years more before any change in this policy?
I’m not into changing the system by introducing various entrance doors instead of the “everyone pass by the 6k”, seems that the wildness is appreciated and that’s not the debate here. I’m concerned by the new players coming,to have a fun experience discovering go with OGS.
That was my point. Convoluted but obviously less so than what we have now, where the players have to actually sit through these games.
Surely it’s better to just let the beginners set their rank to 25k.
Even better, let the beginners set their rank as… beginner. Simple as that.
Surely it is better.
Unless of course it’s implemented and then 3 months or 6 months down the line a sizeable rating correction or adjustment has to be made because it had some unexpected impact on the rating system. What if that has to be done regularly?
Equally, what if in turn it has some unexpected negative effect on the current 20-25kyu players which again may have to be corrected. One is preferring hypothetical players to the actual current players.
It all sounds like a great suggestion, but there’s no proof that it is a good suggestion.
Presumably this
and the related point
is a good start and at least not as drastic a change?
The automatch won’t work if we ignore rating, or at least the rating or pairing method needs to be specified.
If one unilaterally lifts restrictions on challenging players from new accounts, one might have to wonder if there would be impacts on the already volatile bot accounts - which presumably would propagate due to the amount of games they play?
It really just sounds like OGS wants “the best ranking system”, and is sacrificing “the best player experience” to do it.
If you’re conflating my concerns with “what OGS or anoek wants” then that’s probably not correct.
There might be some silly badge beside my name, but it doesn’t mean everything I say is some official stance.
In particular I believe the statement
is completely ludicrous.
I would like to see what in particular makes you believe that is the case up until now.
Up until now the only thing I’ve understood from the recent posts is “I’ve had a good idea, with no downsides that I’m willing to consider. So why hasn’t it been implemented yet?”.
I don’t recall saying that, and I had hoped that my reputation wasn’t that shoddy that one would expect me to think that.
The reason I say that is because there have been many complaints about this since glicko was implemented.
I don’t think that statement is wild and “out of left field”, as I can recall many complaints and attempts to convince OGS to allow beginners to select their rank over the years.
