In Covid-19 times a lot of go clubs have started to play online, but not all players have a rank here. This wrecks the automatic pairing and handicap in tournaments.
Sure, the affected people could play to get to their rank, but not everyone has the time to do so and it does not help on the short term.
I think it would be a nice feature if you can set your “club ranking” in your profile page and have the option in the tournament setup that allows the club rank to override the actual OGS rank.
I believe that’s mathematically problematic with the new (relatively speaking) rating system. It shouldn’t take more then about 5 games for the system to adjust to your rank, or close to it.
On top of this, “club rankings” are almost guaranteed to be disparate to OGS rankings, just like OGS rankings aren’t equivalent to Tygem, or Pandanet, or AGA, or EGF rankings.
Also, I think they don’t even have to play outside their club, if one person is ranked and then maybe a second gets ranked, it’s pretty easy to get the 5 games needed for the rest of the members (maybe they’ll need a couple games with gen pop to move faster, maybe not). Even taking part in a live tournament in the site it’s mostly an afternoon and you end up with probably 5 ranked games anyway (not sure if they count the same, I’d guess they do).
Wouldn’t they play games in their club anyway outside of the tournaments?