Edit: Turns out this topic is about amending the TOS or something, hop in 🤷

[espoojaram]

I appreciate that – I wasn’t worried that you might take unwarranted offense, though, I’m worried that my response will be objectively inflammatory.

There are few things that make me as bitter and emotional as having to make extensive effort to “debunk” arguments that I perceive as being illogical, and that’s likely to cloud my judgement and make me veer into rhetorical fallacies and a smug tone without realizing in the moment.

I might try to write a response over time, hoping that re-reading what I wrote after some time will help me keep things civil.

In the meantime, you have brought up the idea that the volatility of the ranking may reflect actual fluctuations in the player’s ability, and thus momentarily make the matchmaking more accurate.

This is an idea that other people, including myself, have proposed in the recent past, but since it’s just a hypothesis, we’ve been discussing the possibility of testing it to see if the evidence backs it up.

(And after thinking about it quite a bit, I believe it to be wrong)

While I have many ideas in merit, the main thing I lack is the general programming ability and the specific understanding of OGS’s code that would be needed to put it into practice, and the ability to autonomously gain those abilities; so unless I receive help, it’s unlikely to ever happen.

So if you think this would be worthwhile, I invite you to read this thread and consider helping us (me?) out:

Testing the Volatility: Summary

So, there was a previous thread mostly about this, but it started out forked from another one and got very long and technical, so I expect not many people have read it or had a good idea what it was about. I thought I would sum up the salient points here and keep going from there, so that people who don’t have much time can know where we’re at and have the opportunity to maybe jump in with topical suggestions.  And since I expect this thread to get quite long-winded and technical too, I plan t…

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By the way, when you brought up my rank you said

@joooom

it seems some take [the ranking system] too seriously and assign very idealistic qualities to how a ranking system should operate. Looking at your OGS profile, I can see how this may have come about […]

So while you then used the atypical smoothness of my rank to develop your further arguments, you did have a good reason to talk about my rank in particular, conjecturing an explanation for me apparently idealizing the ranking system. It makes perfect sense.

I mean, you were wrong in this case, as my understanding (whether right or wrong) of the ranking system comes from having thought about it a lot and having looked at a lot of other evidence, but your inductive reasoning made a lot of sense nonetheless.