Accurate rankings are useful to Go players for many reasons:
Finding suitable opponents for even games.
Setting a fair handicap for handicap games.
Context in discussions, especially game reviews and teaching games.
Tracking their progress.
Choosing study materials (many are marked as for certain skill levels).
The earlier topic was about volatile ranks, but I believe highly inflated or deflated ranks can equally cause credibility issues (like suspicions of cheating).
In this game, my opponent (12 kyu) asked me whether I was 6 kyu (this was before I even finished a game):
Turns out new accounts appear as 6 kyu, which is too strong. A game between a new (TPK) player and a real 6 kyu would not be fun for either player.
After five losses to 11-12 kyu opponents and one win, I finally got ranked 16 kyu, which seems reasonable.
What is strange is my only win. My 14 kyu opponent started with saying âI donât know how to play. I hope you can give me more advice!â That does not sound like a 14 kyu. I thought a 14 kyu would be able to kill my top group and would not spend 50 moves on an obviously pointless invasion.
Just wondering what the OGS community thinks about whether OGS ranks are inflated or deflated and the impact of such inflation or deflation.
It depends on what youâre comparing OGS ranks with, and it also depends on which rank range youâre looking at.
The 2021 rating update aimed at aligning OGS 1d between AGA 1d and EGF 1d. My impression is that this goal was achieved.
As for OGS DDK ranks, I feel they are softer than EGF DDK ranks. I donât know how they compare to AGA DDK ranks.
The title of the thread doesnât correspond to the first message which points out the fact (already mentioned multiple times on this forum) that starting all new accounts at 6k makes no sense, especially for beginners.
EDIT: turns out I was wrong, provisional ranks are indeed at 6 kyu, even though they are displayed in the graph as 11.9 kyu! [End of Edit]
âStarting all accounts at 12k (which is where players actually start, by the way, I think 6k might have been an older rating system) makes a lot of sense, especially as a partial counter-measure to sandbagging. We canât have beginners self-identify, and AFAIK we donât have the resources to have every beginner be vetted by a trusted user (unless we organize such a system very carefully, but even then I wonder), so a good method is to let the system, which is well-suited for it, guess the rating over the course of a few games.
âFrom the point of view of a beginner, itâs a bit of a trial of fire, but I personally believe itâs mostly painless for most people, as it only takes a few games, and if youâre a beginner hopefully you donât expect to win all your first games.
âWhat definitely doesnât make sense is to have a userâs rank be visible (in the profile page) until itâs established. There are preconceptions as to what a â12 kyu playerâ should be able to do, and most people are unable to interpret the concept of âuncertaintyâ (11.9kyu ±4.9 basically means âanywhere between 25kyu and 3danâ, if Iâm correct).
âSo Iâd say itâs better to completely hide the rank, plotting and profile page included, until thereâs a good amount of info necessary to guess it.
Just to be clear: at no point in your history you displayed a 6kyu rank. Your opponent who said that was just guessing on their own. (EDIT: uh, maybe? see reply below)
(To the OGS community:) Can we stop with the misinformation, please?
I remember I used to do something very similar when I first came to OGS, and I was around 18 kyu at the time, so definitely a possiblity. I also suspect the ranks have further inflated since then, so that 18 kyu is probably todayâs 16 or 15 kyu.
I wonder. Yesterday I got to play a ranked live custom-challenge game against provisional (only one game on record) 11.0k as ~1.3d. How does that work. Thatâs more than 9 stones?
There is an incredible and huge confusion here between being a beginner and a 12k.
Offering to play a dozen of humiliating games to a beginner for him to get finally his rating is not the way i think to welcome him and stay around playing go.
Once again, to clear up the perennial confusion on this issue, players start at a pseudo-rank of 6k. It used to be 12k, but it changed in 2021. You can see this in the rank shown on the thumbnail board of any beginnerâs first game. The thumbnail display is the only place it shows, so far as I know. The profile and inside the game will show a question mark.
You are right, and itâs so strange. I searched a bit and am now watching a new player play ranked games against 1d players. They lost the first one and the rank went up from 11.8k or whatever it was to 10.8k. Then the second loss brought it up to 10.3k. Now itâs showing 7k in the thumbnail.
Thanks for pointing out the thumbnail thing, but the rest is wrong, as you can see from @Feijoaâs screenshot and as you could have seen by just looking yourself at any new playerâs profile page yourself.
So again, my guess is thereâs a bug, potentially a remnant from either an older rating system or a remnant of some experiment run by the devs. The rank shown in those thumbnails does not correspond to the actual rank that provisional players have.
Edit: by the way, Iâm seeing more and more indications that while the rating system (usually) works decently enough, there are clearly a lot of bugs festering it, and even how it communicates with the GUI, apparently.
EDIT 2: I was wrong, the true provisional rank is 6 kyu: explanation
It definitely changed to 6k in 2021. It was never 6k before that. There was a lot of discussion about it at the time, and it prevented beginners from playing anyone weaker than 15k, which was a big problem. If it is now 12k again, then it was changed again after that, which suggests that the 6k in thumbnail display is an uncorrected remnant from the 2021 standard.
That would make sense. Do you have any sources supporting that it was intentionally changed to 6 kyu in 2021? Iâm too new to know, but I havenât seen that anywhere.
There were extensive discussions about it at the time, and it was concluded that the old âprovisionalâ ranking system was no longer working. You will have to do you own research.
I just found a beginner with no ranked games, and it does indeed show 11.9 in the Ratings chart, and 6k in the thumbnail. However, it remains unclear as to which number is used for auto-matching.
Also, itâs subjective whether the experience is âhumiliatingâ. Losing as a beginner is natural (have you ever heard âlose your first 100 games as fast as you canâ?), though I do agree that it would be better if beginners could be educated on that.
Many years ago, the first time I learned Go rules, I went to a Go server, I believe KGS, and I arrogantly expected to be very good and talented from the start. That Go server had an Elo system and started players at 1500, and wasnât as good as Glicko-2 at ranking new players, so I had to lose several games, and every game I saw my rank slooowly fall down.
This was probably a big reason why I gave up on Go for years. So while I agree that it can be a lesson in humility to lose many games for a beginner, the current OGS system is leaps and bounds better than that, and players rarely have to play more than 5 games to get a good estimate.
