Well, you gave me quite a bit of homework there, but I think I’m mostly caught up now.
I believe the only place in all of those links where the sandbagger problem is discussed extensively is in this topic, starting from about this reply, and my personal verdict is
no good solution has been proposed to the sandbagger problem.
I would agree that the system has changed a lot in the recent years and that testing would be required to verify or falsify this following hypothesis, but:
- the most likely scenario of letting beginners self-identify is that the situation would revert back to the old landscape, where beginners get stuck at the lowest ranks unable to ever get up, because that’s where all the sandbaggers are, and moderators have a huge burden of having to deal with all the reports of intentional and unintentional sandbaggers and airbaggers.
Most sandbaggers at the lowest ranks would usually not get caught because beginners usually don’t have the experience needed to recognize a sandbagger and report them. And “getting stuck at the lowest ranks” would be psychologically awful for the beginners not because of purely cosmetic reasons of them wanting to rank up, but simply because they’re constantly being stepped on by sandbaggers in the process.
This is the best counter-point I found:
Intuitively, this sounds naive to me, for the reason mentioned above: if you get stuck as a beginners with all the sandbaggers, you are already getting stepped on. Except in the current system you only get stepped on for at most 20 games if you’re extremely weak, and less than 6 games in the majority of cases.
So I have to say, the current system might actually be the best case scenario in the interest of the beginners themselves, excluding scenarios where, say, we have the resources to have trusted users manually vet each and every self-identified beginner, or direct beginners to some kind of tutorial instead of letting them play.
(Instead, one group of people that is undoubtedly burdened with the current system are the established SDKs, who have to deal with all the new accounts, including true weak players who often don’t understand etiquette, fake weak players who are setting up to sandbag, alt-sandbaggers, and strong players essentially sandbagging unintentionally.)
But then again, my hypothesis might be wrong and letting beginners self-identify might lead to a better situation.
I guess this is the point where we need a forum-wide poll to let people vote on whether it’s worth it to try out that system. Though we do also need to agree on the details of the system.
(Well, about one year ago was the point to do it, apparently, but better late than never)
Before somebody comes along and chants the old adage that "there's no empathy for the beginners", (click to expand)
I want to clarify that I (believe I) do empathize with the beginners, and my personal view, perhaps a very unpopular opinion, is that I don’t even believe letting beginners play with one another without supervision is usually the best way for them to learn, and I feel it’s kind of “the lazy way” to do it instead.
Especially in such an uncontrolled environment as a worldwide public online platform, it’s absolutely unpredictable what their experience will be, as every person is different, both in character and in technical proclivity.
Some beginners are somehow 20-25 kyu from the start, some are closer to 35-40 kyu. Some come here with an understanding that losing often means learning, some of them want to conquer the world and get soul-crushed by the perception of being average or even weaker than average.
The beginners who are technically or psychologically weaker especially need to be handheld one way or another. Even an automated tutorial is better than just throwing them in the pit, if we don’t have the resources to actually give them a teacher or someone to supervise their games.
That’s what I believe, and that’s why I believe changing the rating system to let beginners self-identify is not necessarily the main priority.
Letting beginners play each other might be the most efficient way to have them learn, but nowhere near the most effective, and if those games are not supervised, I personally don’t believe it’s likely to do more good than harm.
To be clear, my personal position is that I’d like to see the experiment happen: I’d like for OGS to try out a system where beginners are allowed to self-identify.
Even though I personally believe it will lead to chaos, we need the test to know for sure.
I believe a combination of this proposal and this proposal, with a few tweaks and polish, is a good starting point.
To conclude, I want to get back to this thread (
I guess in the future I might have to copy-paste this reply somewhere else, but I didn’t really know where to put it) and point out that there’s at least one thing we can probably all agree on, and it’s that (with the current system) letting users see the estimated rank of provisional players, in thumbnails and in the profile page graph, leads to a lot of confusion.
At the very least the thumbnails should not display the rank without question mark, and they should just display a question mark.
I personally believe the graphs should be kinda overhauled to be more readable for science/maths/statistics laymen, and I do have specific ideas on how, but I don’t know if anyone is gonna listen to me, so unless someone expresses interest, I won’t bother creating the concept graphics.
If the graphs can’t be overhauled that way, at least the current rank estimate should be hidden everywhere until it’s somewhat established, to avoid confusions like this one
Which, I believe is the most likely explanation, happened because of the thumbnail/“humble rank” discrepancy, where the confused player probably first saw the graph saying something like “12 kyu” and then saw the thumbnail say “6 kyu” and that’s why they said “that’s not what I saw initially!”
Oh, and by the way
This is an opinion that has long echoed through the halls of the forum, and I’m not sure it’s as straight-forward as it may seem.
First of all, the idea that 6 kyu is not a good estimate for the average strength of a newcomer to the site: according to the histogram it’s actually not that far off (it’s bang on if we talk about modes, and it’s only slightly off if we talk about medians), though that might partially be caused by a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But the rating doesn’t appear to have drifted too much since the 2021 system has been in place, so I don’t think that applies.
One could also say that if it’s true that it’s too high an estimate, that arguably makes it a good countermeasure to alt-sandbagging – by making setting up a new sandbagging account annoying because you have to keep losing on purpose until the rank is established.
Specifically, it might be a good countermeasure for sandbagging in the lowest ranks, the kind that afflicts beginners in self-identifying rank systems. In other words, the longer it takes for the true weakest players to reach their true rating, the more annoying it is for people who want to sandbag at those levels to get there, thus discouraging them to keep doing it.
I don’t know if that’s true, and even then I don’t know if it’s necessarily worth making it more difficult for beginners, but… it’s a point 