I sort of like this. With typical ranking system you constantly look at your progress after each game, how much it gave you. On OGS it’s bouncing up and down regardless so it kind of doesn’t matter. Just play good games.
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There’s a few tweaks to the rating system so please understand. What’s important is your games, not the rank (but still, nobody’s happy when they win a game and their rank drops) I believe there’s no need for a second topic on this question. More similar topics are popping out recently.
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Because OP makes 38 (hyperbole) duplicates of each post 
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@RubenScholz, I don’t know what your graph looked like 12h ago, but when I go to your profile page now, I see that your rating had its lowest point on August 9, and after that went straight upwards.
So what are you complaining about, exactly?
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Thanks, Captain Obvious. 
But the graph looks all fine, so I don’t really get it. He had a loosing streak, his rank went down, he had a winning streak, his rank went up. And now his rating maybe changed ~20 points or so downwards after one game, but nothing really changed, right?
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My opinion is that the default setting on OGS should be “totally discrete ranking” – the only information that can be seen is “6k”, “15k”, “3d” etc.
If you want to see decimal ranks like “5.8k”, or measures of Glicko uncertainty like ±75, the option to toggle that on and off should be in the user settings.
Every single week we get a thread by someone – “I won a game but my rank went down??”, “I lost rank even though I lost”, “Bug report – losing rank from won game” etc. by people looking at the little fractions of ranks that fluctuate in unintuitive ways in the Glicko system.
Sure, people would still “inexplicably” lose visible rank, but it would be a lot less common.
Can we at least have some sort of FAQ page so that flovo can just link that and then close these threads?
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There’s an implied phrase to be inferred from context:
My opinion is that the default setting on OGS should be “totally discrete ranking” – [in which] the only information that can be seen is “6k”, “15k”, “3d” etc.
I thought that’d be obvious, but that’s an oversight on my part, I guess
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Sometimes I miss these things; I am not a native speaker.
Agree with your post.
Cut those threads.
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Or maybe change the ranking system and then these threads will stop?
The 15-game window is a bad idea. If a 1d plays 15 games in a row against a 9k without handicap, then these games are completely uninformative for assessing strength (assuming that the 1d wins them all). Rating systems like the one used by FIDE for chess doesn’t use a window and winning never removes points. If someone insists on using a window, then the width should be measured in units of information, not a fixed number of games.
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This is more like general post relating to most of these complains, not just this one…
I think that one thing that is causing a lot of confusion is ppl not realising, that ogs is showing us ranges of where our rating probably is comparing to other users, instead declaring a specific number.
For example @RubenScholz has his current rating as 1191±64, which means that rating system thinks his rating is somewhere between 1127 and 1255. On august 9th it was between 1029 and 1161, and on august 5th it was between 1158 and 1292 according to rating system’s estimate. So, looks like your rating has actually been pretty solidly “around 1160” for the last week, it just looks somewhat confusing if you just look the medians of those ranges.
And now when that rating is converted into ranks which are then rounded down (1.9d is 1d, 4.1k is 5k etc). The rank is actually the thing most humans do look at, not rating and especially not the ±-part.
Could there be a simpler and more understandable way of showing ratings as a range and making users understand that the “1095±66” and “1225±67” can actually both be the same thing?
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You could say it uses 1-game window.
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Could you explain what are these units?
I’m no expert in chess elo rating but I know there are important differences between chess and go rating for their objective like existence of handicap and more interest to play with players of same level (as to just establish who’s the best) which is integrated into the ranking (there is no ranking in chess, right?)
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I guess you’re right and you could say that Elo is the combination of the rank 1 game ago and a window of 1 game. If you calculate the importance of each game from a player’s history, then the result is smooth exponential decay.
By comparison, OGS is a combination of the rank 15 games ago and a window of the most recent 15 games. The result is a staircase.
In Elo, the amount of information in a game result is simply the absolute value of the rating change caused by the game. Right now people justify that rank is going down after a win because an impressive win (1d beats 3d) was replaced by a less impressive win (1d beats 3k) in the window. The rank would stay constant if the window was measured in units of abs(rating_delta).
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I keep on challenging stronger players and losing and my rank goes up.
Maybe I should just loose on purpose.
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You can all say whatever you want it is still very very puzzling: I’m 12k I have an historic (for me) win against a valgrind 5k, and my rank went down to 13k. (his rank went down to 6k, he has not played since).
Also check the rank history of Tetraphenylbenzidin . This guy is a bit extreme, playing 500 games simultaneously. His rank is varying from 10k to 20k and back over days, while the system has plenty of information to measure a more stable rank.
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Is there not a bug/typo in the volatility or did that get fixed?
Wasn’t one of the intentions of the recent ratings changes to stop ratings going down after a win. It’s too confusing, enough people don’t seem to like it, so it’s not worth advocating for in my opinion.
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Actually if you look at the profile of Tetrapheny etc… https://online-go.com/player/738093/ one can see his rank is oscillating more wildly after beg of june when the new system was enabled (Ok this could be due to other factors like the way he plays or select his opponent)
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That’s not the explanation. His rating went down because some of his past opponents have lost rank and therefore some of his past wins against them are worth less than they had been when previously assessed.
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Yes, but as you can see it isn’t working. This became evident soon after the change, apparently because the tweak that anoek made wasn’t working for some reason. Hence the principle, I as I understand it, still holds.
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