Do you think it is reasonable for people who know nothing about go to lose 90 % of their games in the beginning?
0 voters
I canât answer the poll 
I believe it might be humiliating, but at the same time itâs idealistic to imagine a system where beginners (or weak players) win 50% of the games from the get-go.
If beginners can self-identify without vetting, sandbaggers will self-identify as beginners. If we start players with a low rank, sandbaggers donât even need to do anything.
Unless we have a solution, I canât answer 1.
None of this has any relevance to my comment. My only point was you seem to have misunderstood the saying. I wouldnât even care except that you criticized it for being a myth. You also seem to miss the kind of âgallows humorâ quality of it, which I guess is understandable with a foreign language.
It is pretty obvious that discouragement is a serious problem in any difficult game (or sport). I think few people would disagree with that. Any other truisms you want to debate?
Btw wow, is the discrepancy really that enormous? dwyrin is 7d on Foxy and easily beats 3d on OGS without even remarking that they seem stronger than Fox 3d.
I, too, canât answer because it mixes together what we expect and what we want. And, of course, it depends entirely on whom they are playing.
7d on fox is very different as 5d on fox
I intentionally worded the poll that way because if you do believe that losing 90 % of your games as a complete beginner is humiliating and unacceptable, youâd have to devise yet another complete overhaul of the ranking system. Otherwise, why complain?
Well, when I was 1d OGS I managed to get 5d Foxy but Iâm not sure if I could hold it, I kinda got bored there. But 1d OGS is solid 4d Foxy, 2d OGS is surely 5d Foxy.
But on Foxy ranks are jammed. You have like 9d pros and AIs. Some weaker pros even got knocked down to 8d. And you have 1d amateurs at like 4-5d. So jumps in difficulty with 6-7d are big.
Itâs not difficult for me to imagine a system where beginners can play rated games together and so, have a 50% chance of win.
I didnât say it was difficult, I just said it was idealistic, but whatever. How would you solve the sandbagger problem?
Donât you expect the increased presence of sandbaggers at the lower ranks to make the true beginnerâs experience worse?
So how would you achieve that?
Well, that has been debated a lot in the threads i mentioned before. Want me to write all again?
One thing to mention is that itâs completly useless to give a unique entrance point to the gliko system to work.
Besides a beginner could enter as beginner, even no need to set a ranking on his own, and get what he wants.
Anyway please read the debates which already happened and which are not out of date (unless you find some new ones, and i would be pleased to update the compendium)
Itâs the OGS version of Godwinâs law: all conversations about ratings eventually end up about the terrible system for beginner ranks!
Which is a special case of rating inflation and its impact (my intended topic), thus relevant.
Well, you gave me quite a bit of homework there, but I think Iâm 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:
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 youâre 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 donât 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 itâs 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)
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 donât even believe letting beginners play with one another without supervision is usually the best way for them to learn, and I feel itâs kind of âthe lazy wayâ to do it instead.
âEspecially in such an uncontrolled environment as a worldwide public online platform, itâs absolutely unpredictable what their experience will be, as every person is different, both in character and in technical proclivity.
âSome 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.
âThe 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 donât have the resources to actually give them a teacher or someone to supervise their games.
Thatâs what I believe, and thatâs 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 donât believe itâs likely to do more good than harm.
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 didnât really know where to put it) and point out that thereâs at least one thing we can probably all agree on, and itâs 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 donât know if anyone is gonna listen to me, so unless someone expresses interest, I wonât bother creating the concept graphics.
If the graphs canât be overhauled that way, at least the current rank estimate should be hidden everywhere until itâs somewhat established, to avoid confusions like this one
Which, I believe is the most likely explanation, happened because of the thumbnail/âhumble rankâ discrepancy, where the confused player probably first saw the graph saying something like â12 kyuâ and then saw the thumbnail say â6 kyuâ and thatâs why they said âthatâs not what I saw initially!â
Oh, and by the way
This is an opinion that has long echoed through the halls of the forum, and Iâm not sure itâs as straight-forward as it may seem.
âFirst 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 itâs actually not that far off (itâs bang on if we talk about modes, and itâs only slightly off if we talk about medians), though that might partially be caused by a self-fulfilling prophecy.
âBut the rating doesnât appear to have drifted too much since the 2021 system has been in place, so I donât think that applies.
âOne could also say that if itâs true that itâs too high an estimate, that arguably makes it a good countermeasure to alt-sandbagging â by making setting up a new sandbagging account annoying because you have to keep losing on purpose until the rank is established.
âSpecifically, 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 donât know if thatâs true, and even then I donât know if itâs necessarily worth making it more difficult for beginners, but⌠itâs a point 
Could someone clarify what sandbagging is in a Go/OGS context? I know that in some other sports, it is deliberately playing weaker and losing rating points in less significant games, to gain an unfair advantage in more important games. Never heard of airbagging.
Other questions:
While beginners should expect to lose most of their games, the process does affect their experience (and whether they continue playing). There is a huge difference between:
Having new accounts self-identify their rank was the system when I joined in Dec. 2016. OGS provided a short rubric to aid in self-identification. That system was abandoned when the first iteration of Glicko-2 was introduced.
Sandbagging is very rarely reported, and then only in vague terms (âthat guy is a lot stronger thanâŚâ) or of rank manipulators (resigning from won games, etc.). The influx of experienced players new to OGS makes it impossible to say someone is sandbagging just because they are strong. And rank manipulation is trivial compared to alt sandbagging, which is virtually undetectable by non-moderators.
Although starting players with a pseudo-rank (whether 6k or 12k) slightly limits the effect of sandbagging, it is too slight to give it consideration.
In sum, sandbagging is a separate issue. I think it is best to devise the best rating system without taking it into consideration, with one exception: talking about the win-rates of provisional accounts is an exercise in fantasy since the exact effect of sandbagging on those accounts is unknowable.
As always semantics gets in the way, but I use âsandbaggingâ as an umbrella term for âanyone who deliberately acts in a way that will cause their rank to be lower than their true ability, for whatever reasonâ.
ââUnintentional sandbaggingâ should be self-explanatory. âAirbaggingâ is the same as sandbagging but substitute âhigherâ in the place of âlowerâ. Usually done to boast, troll strong players, or just to get to play them.
I imagine that âalt-sandbaggingâ, or the practice of creating new (alt-ernative) accounts to have an easier time sandbagging, is expected to have a small inflating effect on the mid-level player base, and a deflating effect on the lower level player base. But it all depends on at what level alt-sandbagging is more common. It might just be that itâs spread out enough to cancel out and not have any net effect.
According to the 2022 histogram, about 7-8% of the âestablishedâ players are TPK. It doesnât take long to become âestablishedâ in the rating system, though, and it might not reflect an intuitive idea, so Iâm not sure that answers your question. I imagine where you were going was âare there long-time active and established TPK players that we can consult for their experience?â, the answer to which is I donât know
For the other question (âHow do other Go servers handle ratings for new accounts?â), I just know there quite a lot of variety of systems, but hopefully somebody else can answer in detail.
There are two types of sandbagging: rank manipulation (people deliberately lose games, usually by resigning won games, or they weaken their rank by losing to bots) and alt creation (they rank up a new account until it is within a couple stones of their real rank, and then they abandon it and create another new account, ad infinitum). For report purposes on OGS (i.e., not speaking ethically), sandbagging only applies to ranked games.
Airbagging is when someoneâs rank rises to a stronger level than their real strength. This results from undeserved wins: score cheating, successful stalling, wins given to them from rank manipulators, and computer exploits. Such wins are annulled by the mods when they are discovered, in order to preserve the integrity of the ranking system.
OGS has lots of TPK players. We used to get about 200-250 new accounts per day. During the lockdowns, this rose to about 900 per day (one day was even about 1,200 as I recall), but subsequently fell back again. I do not know how many it is now; only the mods know.
You are right about the possible differences in beginner experiences. I seem to recall that someone once proposed having two or more different âroomsâ on OGS. For example, one room where a provisional player would be matched with other provisional players, and one room for players with established ranks. Players could freely choose which room they wanted to play in, thereby accommodating new players who are not beginners.
@espoojaram previous post
Well i will give a short answer just about beginners / rating system and sand bagging.
I donât see the point to be worried about sandbagging beginners as this is just what the system is pushing. Go play your first games against so stronger players. So we sandbag because we donât want sandbagging? Just absurdity.
Now as fact, we got feedback here from beginners who were suffering from our system. They basically wanted to play fair games but thatâs not what they got, and even worse when they tried on their own to play a rated game with another beginner it was refused because of the difference of rating (guess the other brginner did already go through the process of successive crushes) Absurd again.
We should respect experimentation and discovery instead of bragging with our strength, and let them enjoy the game even if it feels like laziness (your words, sorry)
In my opinion a self register as beginner (not asking for a specific ranking )wonât go into that much sandbagging because well it will be so obvious when someone is not a beginner. I still have a bit of confidence in human beings.