I found this issue from the Help chat channel and have a simple fix to propose for it:
December 31, 2025
[ 8:46]RustyDoge: with auto match feature, how do I not play against unranked players?
[16:28]Eugene: You don’t have that choice at OGS.
[16:28]Eugene: New players need opponents - we prefer to support them in finding one.
[16:41]shamisen: sounds like an inconvenience, people who really don’t want to play against unranked opponents will just cancel/annul the game and then both have to rejoin the queue
[16:41]shamisen: this is exactly what happened to RustyDoge’s opponent today: ChZoepfchen
[16:41]shamisen: he had 4 games cancelled on him in a row by 4 different people
[16:45]shamisen: i read somewhere OGS had a good reputation for having great customizability/custom options for setting up correspondence games, doesn’t make sense to me why OGS doesn’t try to extend that reputation to automatch
[17:12]Eugene: It’s a tough one. It has been debated in the past. The best place to propose it “seriously” is in the OGS forums. They are thee place where change is instigated
[17:14]Eugene: If [?] were able to be filtered, this would be a lot harder for newcomers
[17:14]Eugene: Instead, we ask newcomers to set their starting rank appropriately, and this _is_ taken into account in matchmaking.
[17:15]Eugene: [?] says “we don’t have enough data to be sure yet”. But you can find that person’s underlying rank on their profile page.
The fix:
Include the underlying “unsure” rank with the ? next to new players’ names after they’ve played at least one match. Yes, their underlying rank can be seen by clicking a link to access their profile page and viewing it in another tab, but this is not ideal UX (user experience) design because it takes at least 2 clicks with the current UI and draws attention away from what the players truly want to do – find an evenly rated match. If [?] is replaced by [10k?], players immediately have a sense that the system tried to find them an evenly rated opponent, or at least more information about it upfront. The result is less cancellations/annulments will happen.
I’m especially certain that this works because it’s how it worked on KGS back in the day and people avoided [?] players there much more often than those labelled with a number as in [10k?].