Of course it is really nice to play someone of your rank because that way you are almost guaranteed to have a good game. But I miss something that used to be part of most online games before ELO and other ranking systems became popular: randomly playing other “anonymous” players (in the sense you don’t know how good they are).
What I’d like to suggest is a mode where:
You are matched against players of any level between -10k to +10k of yours (or something like that, I didn’t waste more than a few seconds thinking about this so there should be better ideas here);
You can’t see who they are (so you really can’t find out their rank) and you aren’t told who they are even after the match;
The matches are not ranked;
Chat may be enabled or disabled (as an option);
Chat is enabled after the game regardless of the chosen option, so if both of you are interested you can then meet each other;
These are private games in your profile, no one else can see them!
Although it may sound crazy, I do think this is a very nice feature in some cases.
You can play random games for fun, without the fear of being “tested” (yes, that’s a thing).
You can play against weaker players and end up teaching them something; you can play against stronger players and learn from them.
Everyone start at 13k now. So If you create challenge with 13k rank restriction, [?] will challenge you. There may be 25k or 9d, you can’t know even if go to their profile.
I’m pretty sure there are 13 kyus that aren’t new players too… In that case really not having a rank restriction won’t make much of a difference, IMO. Maybe OGS could allow logged out and anonymous players to create unranked games on the server, like lichess does, which would also be good for people who want to try the server before creating an account.
