So, in case whoeverâs reading is not aware, one issue that makes the current rating system unwelcoming to beginners is that they have to face much stronger opponents until their rank adjusts.
Since I am 15 kyu and I like helping beginners, I had this galaxy brain idea: what if instead of playing an unranked teaching game with them like I usually do, I make it ranked and make sure I win, so that it helps their rank go down while also helping them learn?
It would work better if I had an even lower rank, but I genuinely think this is a pretty good idea.
So the question that naturally arises is that it might look like Iâm farming newcomers for rating points. Or, regardless of what my intentions are, I might end up doing it unintentionally.
From my understanding of how the rating system works, I shouldnât really gain too much from winning games against provisional players, or at least thatâs what I thought. Yesterday I tried this, and the bump up to my rank I got from winning against the [?] player was small but arguably not insignificant â 0.2 kyu. Maybe with the volatility of our current rating system that doesnât mean much, I donât know. At the moment I donât play many ranked games, so it would definitely build up if I kept doing this.
So there are two questions:
Do you think thereâs any âethicalâ issue with doing this?
How do I explain it without making it sound suspicious? I believe in transparency so I feel that I have to tell the beginners that Iâm intentionally making the game ranked to help their rank go down, but on one hand I donât want to have to explain how the rating system works, and on the other I donât want to say âtrust me bro, itâs best for youâ
If theyâre losing against a player who is much stronger than them, it shouldnât âmake their rank go downâ too much, but rather âhelp stabilise their rank and remove their question markâ. Perhaps phrase it like that if it helps.
There is also the question of whether you play in the same way in a ranked game than in an unranked game. Iâm sure there are people who would play âpedagogical movesâ in an unranked game, but would mercilessly crush their opponent in a ranked game. If you decide to play ranked games with beginners, be aware of whether that influences your play style.
You will see, in the linked terms of service, that correspondence games have an exception stated to this rule which is that you are allowed to use joseki dictionaries.
Didnât know this and probably have broken this rule many times.
Wondering if SDK players who request a teaching game (and usually send the challenge) are aware of this rule.
Maybe a message or an extra option on the Create Challenge page?
I reread the whole page to be sure, and I found no reference to ranked and unranked games. It looks like those terms do not make a distinction between ranked and unranked games at all.
So, giving advice to beginners doesnât seem âmore forbiddenâ in ranked games.
Itâs definitely the case that anyone with a mind to do it will be able to pick apart the TOS language.
There are more ways to do it than you mentioned.
My understanding is that the intent of them, and the implementation of them by the moderation team AFAIK, is as I have said. But anyone can appeal or debate that, itâd be interesting to get a recent ruling.
Well, in a way thatâs actually where the ethical issue may arise. I often hang out in the chat, and when a beginner comes to say hi, if I have time I ask them if theyâd like a teaching game â so itâs almost like Iâm âfishingâ for them in practice.
Yes, it is a bit of a problem. Since Iâm only 15 kyu, it can be surprisingly difficult to play a âgentleâ (and principled, so not fight-oriented) game while also making sure that I win â thatâs why when I tried it yesterday I played a 13x13 game, since I feel that in a 9x9 game the only way to ensure winning is often to play pretty aggressively.
To answer @Atorranteâs question, by âbeginnersâ I mean âGo beginnersâ, not just âOGS beginnersâ (which I usually call ânewcomersâ). Since I talk to them before offering the game, I can ask them directly how much experience they have, and of course I only offer teaching games to actual beginners.
I had an inkling this would come up. I canât find the topic now, but there was a similar situation with a player who asked âhow do I get to play beginnersâ and someone, @Uberdude if Iâm correct, perhaps jokingly, said âmake a new account, all the beginners are 6 kyuâ, and a moderator replied that intentional rank manipulation is not allowed.
I imagine the same issue would be brought up if I proposed to teach beginner newcomers how to manipulate their rank to get down to 25 kyu as quickly and painlessly as possible.
âWhile I donât like to start a fight, I have to say that all of this is absurd: the site has set up a system that forces beginners to go through a kafkaesque rigamarole to be able to do the main thing that they usually want to do coming here, playing other beginners, and most if not all of the attempts to help them go through that as painlessly as possible are marked as against the rules*, and implicitly threatened of moderation measures even though theyâre clearly meant in good will.
*I do understand that theyâre marked against the rules because the same behaviour could be performed maliciously, such as for cheating or intentional rank manipulation.
I think you donât need me to tell you that I donât agree with this kind of position. I wonât respect the rules if the rules are being enforced in a mindless way that hurts the community more than it helps it.
For the most part, the terms of service of OGS were clearly intentionally written to be vague, so that it would be up to the good sense of the moderators to only enforce them when a malicious intent was detected in a user, or to quench behaviours that would hurt the community even without malicious intent.
So in the context of OGS, I believe it is quite tone-deaf to point out that the rules do not allow something if that something is both done in good faith and doesnât hurt the community.
I believe the initial proposal (usually attributed to you?) was meant to bring the initial matchmaking rank to something like 18 kyu (6 kyu minus twice the initial deviation), but it was implemented as â6 kyu minus once the initial deviationâ, so the current initial matchmaking rank is 12 kyu.
But the humble rank seems to be working â although with the fact that itâs displayed in the profile page and that thereâs also a glitch causing the real provisional â6 kyuâ rank to be visible in game thumbnails, it also often causes confusion.
Also, related to the humble rank, is the fact that 12 kyu established players (and surrounding) are unwillingly tasked with the burden of dealing with all the newcomers on OGS. See this topic around that, and this reply of mine if youâd like to know my proposals to improve the system.
IIRC the thread in which Humble Rank was first proposed was a thread that I started where I was raising exactly this kind of issue
IIRC it was something like âwe are doing harm to beginners with this systemâ.
I didnât think of Humble Rank, but when it was suggested I definitely got behind it.
AIUI, without going back over history, there are two problems with Humble Rank.
It isnât applied in all matchings. I canât recall where it is and is not applied
the rating system changed after it was implemented, and as you say, the effect of this means that the humble rank might still be too high.
I still think that it is the âright kind of answerâ to this problem:
It just needs to be fully implemented and adjusted so that humble ranks are suitably humble.
You went on to say:
⊠I dispute this. As I said in my previous post âIn most cases these things donât matter, and no-one is really fretting about them.â
By this I mean âthere are few if any reports against people conducting well-intentioned teaching, and few if any moderation actions resulting, as far as I knowâ.
In contrast, what is generally happening is that obvious well-intended behaviour is allowed to happen, without painfully trying to write watertight rules that allow sensible things and disallow undesirable things: a thankless and unlikely-to-be-successful task
But ⊠maybe we could draft something now, since a few obvious holes in both the wording and intent of the TOS have been exposed here?
The âyou canât get assistanceâ applies to ranked games, not unranked games
And yet, do we want to tolerate AI cheating in unranked games?
Thereâs really no harm in the opponent (or a mentor) offering assistance to a player who is so far below their opponent in rank that the assistance will not change the outcome of the game (and therefore the rank result will not be âwrongâ)
On the the ethical/diplomacy issue, the old tale still rings true:
Once, in ancient Greece, there was a ship going on a trade mission. A huge storm went up and the ship sunk and everyone was tossed into the sea. The rich merchant that owned the ship started begging the godess Athena to help him survive the storm and if he did, he would made huge donations to the temple.
Then a nearby sailor that was treading water told him the phrase âÎŁÏ Îœ ÎÎžÎ·ÎœÎŹ ÎșαÎč ÏΔίÏα ÎșÎŻÎœÎ”Îčâ which means âWith Athenaâs help, for sure, but try to move your hands, as wellâ
The epimyth is that help is useful only when it is accompanied by some action from the recieving party. If OGS doesnât want help in this issue, you are losing your time.
One person devoting their own time in helping a couple of new players is not really going to help. You have to enjoy the game as well, right? If instead of âI am here to play Go and have some funâ you switch to âI am here to play and fix the problems of OGSâ you will burn-out, especially when you realised that the system is burdening a lot more players than you could possibly help.
Instead of you doing this, you could just tell the beginners to go play with an AI bot 5+ times, play 20 random moves and resign, so that it counts as a ranked game.
If that sounds bad to them, remember that it is their rank and it should be their choice.
If they dislike the system, remember that it is OGS teamâs decision and it should be their problem. If the beginners leave and go to other servers, the OGS team will notice and rethink their decision. Until then, Iâve seen various topics with proposals for them to pick from and there is no shortage of them.
My take on this is that on your own time you can offer the beginners actual teaching games, if that is what you enjoy and you can both have fun.
I do usually have a tendency to want to ârevolutionize the systemâ everywhere I go, and I failed at it and got depressed in every single community Iâve been part of in my life.
Catching the vibe, I was also depressed in the last few weeks at the realization that not only I donât have the power to protect the world from climate change and political radicalization, but I donât even have the power to significantly improve something as comparatively small as OGS.
I did my self-reflection to come to terms with that and the only thing I can do is focus on helping individuals. Of course itâs unlikely to change the system, but at least Iâm helping someone, and it makes me feel better in the moment, it doesnât matter how insignificant it is in the grand scheme of things.
I have not only thought of this, but Iâve done it in at least one occasion. The main drawback is that there are many little details that one needs to understand to do this successfully, and many newcomers donât actually understand how a rating or ranking system works, even though some people refuse to believe that. I am wary of overwhelming beginners with too much information, so I donât like it unless the beginner seems very quick on the uptake.
But even if I liked it, remember that intentional rank manipulation is against OGSâs rules
Iâm guessing the TOS-as-written never changed, but the TOS-as-enforced changed quite a lot over time.
In particular there used to be a relatively-official tournament on OGS that was meant to be played by players assisted by AI, so clearly AI-assistance was not against the rules. Then at some point AI-assistance became against the rules âeverywhere, except in the official AI-assisted tournamentâ. Then at some point the AI-assisted tournament was deemed to be against the rules and discontinued.
But I donât think any written rules actually ever changed.
I believe in transparency so I feel that I have to tell the beginners that Iâm intentionally making the game ranked to help their rank go down, but on one hand I donât want to have to explain how the rating system works, and on the other I donât want to say âtrust me bro, itâs best for youâ 
