Imagine that you wish to draw a picture. But on the paper list someone else already painted some parts of something. You are no longer have 100% freedom of what to paint.
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In Go I NEVER paint that “picture” alone, it is ALWAYS co-authored with the opponent …
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In even game you can ALWAYS create unusual situation on the board. Opponent will be forced to react, its no longer possible to play 100% standard against such situation.
Against handicap stones you will not have time to do something like this, you will only have time to try to win, you no longer have choice of how to win.
And when you already have boring standard 4-4 stones in your corners, you can’t use your favorite 4-5 stones instead. Sideseki also will not look like sideseki.
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This doesn’t fix the being unable to play even-game openings like 5-4 or sideseki (likely, at least), I just felt to mention that free placement handicap can be very interesting too in its own right 
I’ve been finding NZ rules handicap tournaments in which I’ve begun participating recently very interesting and refreshing compared to the standard Japanese opening 4-4/4-10/10-10 handicap layouts ^^
(NZ rules are free placement handicap, like Chinese type rulesets)
Recently I played as White against this creative opening by @dexonsmith , which I really enjoyed playing with and considering strategies to handle 
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Yep, free handicap placement may satisfy your creativity side, as pointed by @fuseki3
Besides, one likes better to bring some advantage from the opening but considering the strength of intermediate players, this advantage is quite anecdotic to what happen next in their games. in french we say “ne mets pas la charrue avant les boeufs”
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I think nobody is pushing for handicap to become obligatory on OGS, so if you don’t like handicap you can just play games without handicap, even when handicap is more popularised on OGS.
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But defaults matter, and I think it’s good that handicap stones are an option rather than the default, as they do have a major impact on gameplay
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I think it’s a fact. Whenever I feel my opponent is weaker than their rating suggests, I click on their profile, and 90% of the time, their rating on 19x19 is lower than their aggregated rating.
I think we should do like lichess or chess.com, and have a separate rating for 9x9, 13x13 and 19x19, because when you think about it, these three are very different games, so being strong at one doesn’t guarantee you’ll be strong at the others.
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102% agreed with a 2% margin of error. I’ve put forth lichess as an excellent model for emulation in this area
Many people thought about it, and intuitively I’d think the same too, but it seems data disagrees with this view which is why it remains.
That said, this question/suggestion keeps coming up for a reason. I don’t think the status quo is really satisfactory either.
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I wonder if, just like the japanese byo-yomi, it’s a matter of tradition. Every go server has an aggregated ranking that merges games played on different board size and time control, and chances are ogs didn’t want to disturb the old habits.
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OGS is the only server i know with a rating system covering the 3 sizes and all time settings together. That’s not so traditional.
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(Sorry to bump this old thread, but I didn’t reply before, and I was thinking about this older thread because of this newer one. I wanted to reply here because there weren’t many people agreeing with the OP at the time, but the OP’s experience isn’t too far off from what I’ve seen myself.)
Anecdotally, in the last three months, my overall rank has varied between 0.7k and 5.5k (mostly getting weaker, but it was getting stronger in the three month period before that). I think my “wins/losses against stronger/weaker opponents” have looked reasonable at all times, but that doesn’t mean that opponents are getting good games against me.
I think it’s a combination of factors:
- The ranking system is aggregated. Coming back to Go after a long period away, I focused on 9x9 to help with my reading, and improved a bit. I’ve recently started playing 19x19 again (lots of atrophy there…) and 13x13 (which I basically never played before).
- My own playing strength is volatile (even within a game) because I play mostly correspondence. Sometimes I take some time to read. Sometimes life demands I treat every game like blitz.
- The current OGS ranking system is just inherently volatile. It’s an implementation of Glicko-2, which is period-based (adjust ratings based on average playing strength in a given time period), but it has stripped out time. I believe this makes OGS ratings bounce around a lot more than Glicko-2 should.
- Handicap games are relatively uncommon on OGS. Typically the rating system can learn more from a game with auto-handicap than from an even game.
All that to say, I think the current metrics of “black win percentage” (what currently gets tracked for goratings experiments) and “wins/losses against stronger/weaker opponents” (the pie chart), while useful, are insufficient, and don’t fully describe how well the ratings system is working. It can be simultaneously true that (1) a player’s average rating over a 3 month period is correct and (2) the rating was usually multiple stones off from the correct rating at any given moment.
Also, I have some thoughts about how to improve it in the other thread.
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But I don’t think your argument is very sound so far.
For instance if you want to explain your variability in rating it’s useful, as you mentioned to look at
Your results might be reasonable in that you’re winning the expected games, losing the expected games but you’re playing a lot of games where the result should be one sided. That is there’s a large rating gap between the players meaning one side probably has a 90% chance or more to win each time.
What that means is that the drift in rating will be down to how many of each type of game you play over time.
If you’re 5k say and over the next while you play 200 games against 10-20k players with a few other ranks peppered in, your rating will drift upward from all the wins.
If then later you start playing more players above 5k in the next while your rating will have to gradually drift back down, especially if you lose to a 1k while at 1k etc.
The same thing will happen with Elo and plenty of other systems, there’s nothing magically wrong with Glicko or how it’s implemented in this example.
Just to hammer it home, zoom in on when your rating went up
Compare to when your rating went down
Look at the ratios between wins vs weaker and losses vs stronger for example.
During the year 2023 I played over 100 rated games on my main account, only correspondence 19x19 and my rank varied between 1.2d and 3.0d.
In March, because of WSC I played 101 Blitz games (19x19) and very few other types of games. During the last 50 games my rank varied between 1.4k and 0.2k.
So I think that if you always play the same board size and game speed, your rank varies by at most ±1.