Evolution of OGS ranks? Are OGS ranks getting harder?

Internet Go OGS
1

Ayo guys! I was scouting reddit’s r/baduk, and saw this post. I wonder what your thoughts are on this?

I kinda agree that even tho I’m only 11k I’m not ranking up very fast even though I’m winning and improving a bit and it feels like 10k players are stronger than they used to be. Also I’m coming back from a long break from go and I was a bit surprised to see the noob_bots are stronger and are all ranked roughly the same (noob_bot 1 to 3). I saw some players with quickly deflating levels, that used to be like 4k and are now ddk.

So I was wondering what you guys thought of that, what were your opinions on it, if you also see the same thing? :stuck_out_tongue:

2

Rank drift does happen from time to time. Mine is about 2 stones lower than usual, but thats within the usual error bars so idk if it’s a widespread thing.

3

Hum, unless sandbagging that is hard to believe.

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4

Rank graphs were recalculated, dots from some years ago may be painted higher now than it actually was some years ago.

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5

This could happen for several reasons, like

  • timing out many correspondence games
  • disease
  • aging
  • they used to cheat and they stopped
  • change of board size and/or game speed (people may be strong at 9x9 blitz and weak at 19x19 correspondence or vice-versa)
  • changing opponents: they used to play the same bots over and over again, and now they are playing humans.

Conversely I’ve seen accounts with a stable OGS rank, which belong to people whose rank IRL is stable. So if there is a rank deflation, it may be by 1-2 ranks at most, but not by 6 ranks.

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6

I don’t really know I was curious caus the guys on reddit noticed it and I noticed it as well haha. So I was curious if some of you guys noticed this kind of things too. Not really talking about rank drift but really a general deflation, I do see some people who were stronger and now are 10k and seem to be struggling to get out of it, but are way stronger than me.

btw do you know if there is any plans of doing another OGS ranks survey like the ones in 2015 and 2018?

7

I also think one needs to be significantly stronger now than a year ago to have the same rank. I did some analysis, but peer review wanted me to improve it and I got distracted by other stuff. :sweat_smile:

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8

You mean that ranks got harder to reach?

9

Yes, to me that seems to be true.

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10

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11

Mh… for me, your “aging” point definitely seems to be true.

Also, IIRC it was two years ago that I had scratched at 3k very shortly, for less than 24 hours … then I quickly fell back again to 4, 5, 6, 7k, then 8k, then 7k, currently back at 8k.
But it might have been that back when I had that stronger rank a few opponents lost on time perhaps, or resigned prematurely.

12

Sad story but the regression is sometimes real too, simply by getting older (I don’t want to hit anyone about this)

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13

Ranks fluctuate, typically by ±1, and sometimes ±2, so if you scratched very briefly at 3k, your real strength was probably at most 5k-6k.

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14

It kinda depends on trohde’s average at the time ig, maybe they were stable 4k. But yeah I guess some people can get weaker with age.

Anyways, I checked the account of a guy a know, who is like 3k or 4k EGF (who used to be 3k OGS), who is now losing to 9k OGS regularly, like if some people got stronger but haven’t ranked up.

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15

Well, I know people who avoid playing ranked games for fear of losing their rank :roll_eyes: (you know who you are, @nickname!)

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