The game between you and SUNDJER happened at 6:23 AM PST, September 3. At that time, his Blitz rank was 23k. Then, probably after you reported it to the mods, at 8:55 AM PST, September 3, one of the mods, mlopezviedma, adjusted his Blitz rank to 14k (Please refer to his rating graph).
Therefore, at the time the game happened, your Blitz rating was 16k and SUNDJER’s Blitz rating was 23k. If you’re playing on a 1919 board, the handicap would be about 6 stones. However, on a 99 board, the handicap is reduced to 2 stones (I think I read somewhere that the handicap stones for different sizes of boards are 3:2:1 for 1919, 1313 and 9*9, but perhaps somebody could help us find the documentation).
I agree with your analysis, which shows the buggy nature of the current rank calculations fairly clearly.
If the OGS ranking system is really intended to work this way, that is, to allow two automatic handicap stones to a stronger player, making him even stronger and more likely to win, then the whole system that is intended to work this way is not only buggy, but the intention by the developer is that is be buggy.
I don’t believe this for a moment. I’ve seen evidence of the present developers fixing bugs in a very responsible way.
I’m only confused by their reluctance to recognize the bug reports in this thread, and to fix them.
Go is a subtle game of balance, and the handicap system is supposed to restore some balance to make the game sensible when a stronger player is paired with a weaker player. The current “intended system”, which acts in the opposite direction to create imbalance, must be deeply flawed, no matter how many people step forward to present defenses of it. I simply cannot understand all these rationales to avoid calling a bug a bug. Nor do I wish to understand them. Just, please, get the bug fixed so I can use the “automatic handicap” checkbox again and give only my weaker opponents the boost they need to make the game interesting for both players.
I’ve decided that this thread is wasting too much of my time. If no one wants to agree that I have reported a bug that should be fixed, then my repeated statements of the problem will have no beneficial result.
I will let my existing posts in this thread stand and hope that someone “in power” here understands them. As I have said, this bug is fairly severe. But I have had my say, and I will not post further in this thread.
As a software developer you must know that a bug is a piece of software that under certain circumstances does not act the way it was specified or intended. You can disagree with the intention, but this is in fact the intended behavior, and therefore not a bug. Also, it should be really easy for you to win in any game with a time setting that you rarely use, maybe that helps.
You can call this feature and not a bug but as far as HCP calculations go, everyone has on HCP, no matter is it a fas, slow or correspondence Go with postcards and stamps.
Look at the bigger picture. Correctly implemented (not throwing errors) but flawed feature is still a bug - software does something it’s not supposed to do (calculate different HCP depending what hand I use to move the mouse).
The fact that you don’t like the intended result and don’t want multiple ranks for different kinds of games doesn’t make it a bug. Repeating this wrong claim again and again without engaging in reasoned discussion shows that you are unable to distinguish between what you want and what other people might want.
You are very uncivil, but at the same time complain about others being uncivil to you. I accept different standards of politeness, but double standards are never acceptable.
You should have reported the problem, of course, but also asked which problems the separate ranks fix. They were introduced because a lot of people were hesitant to play a game in their non-favored mode because it would trash their rank. Myself, I have a huge difference between blitz rank and non-blitz ranks and I actually still hesitate to play the blitz rank to more than three stones rank difference because people like you might become uncivil because of the difference. If I play a lot of blitz games, my “overall rank” will be five stones stronger than if I play a lot of live games. This remains true if the different ranks are removed, so you will regard any of these ranks as “true” depending on how many games I played that day. I suspect that your answer will be that blitz games should simply not count. So, in effect, you probably want to remove a blitz rank because you were playing a ranked blitz game and didn’t like the ranking system which means that you actually do not have any alternative for the described problem.
I have also had the described problem, of course. I regard it as impolite behaviour by your opponent who knows very well that they have not played a game of this speed ever and the rank cannot represent their skill. They should ask a moderator to fix their rank, just like they would do if they came back after a year’s absence and knew that they had improved by eight stones in the meantime. I don’t think that it is a good idea to fix sandbagging behaviour by making things work worse for everyone else.
In my opinion, 10 minutes for 9x9 should not a blitz game, independently of ranking issues, but the borders of different game types will always be borderline, by definition.
This thread is outdated since Jul 2017. At this point the OGS rating system changed to glicko2. The rating system changed in many aspects. All info in this thread about Elo on OGS is obsolete.