Fix or Remove OGS Tournament Leaderboards

[alemitrani]

In this post I explain why the leaderboards seem to be broken, and I propose either fixing them or removing them.

How do the OGS Leaderboards work?

How does the leader board work, and how do you get on it?

The linked help file in the above thread (Leaderboards) describes a rolling 6-month window used to define tournament leaderboard positions.

The same help file was offered in response to another recent query:

Leaderboards: what do the gray numbers mean?

[image] What do the gray numbers to the left of each name mean? Obviously not number of tournaments won(?) Unless there is some metric for partially won tournaments…

Again, the same question, and the same answer:

What do the Leaderboards show?

OGS has leaderboards on the main page: https://online-go.com/leaderboards What do these show, and does anybody know why? My initial thought was that they’d be the top players by rating for each game type, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, as there’s a 5k at the top of the “overall live” ratings. Number of games doesn’t seem to be a deciding factor, either, as there’s lower rated players with fewer games ranked above higher rated players with more games. There IS a number next to each pers…

I briefly checked the live 9 x 9 leaderboard and the #1 player doesn’t seem to have reached first, second or third place in a live 9 x 9 tournament since July 2020 (10 months ago). Similarly, the person in second place doesn’t seem to have participated in this type of tournament for over a year. On the other hand, people who I see regularly participating in these tournaments and winning medals (some having hundreds of gold medals on their profiles) do not feature in the corresponding leaderboards.

So, the explanation linked above does not seem to describe what is being done in practice.

There are two lists of names with zero points for types of tournament that no longer run.

Leaderboards bug?

I don’t really understand how leaderboards work, but I suppose this is wrong: Live 13x13 and Blitz 9x9 have same players in same order and all of them with 0.00 points. [immagine]

I can understand why they have zero points, but wouldn’t it be better to remove those lists entirely?

On the subject or removing things, it has been suggested to remove the leaderboards entirely.

Main menu discussion

I do think some simplification would be good. For a start just ditch the “leaderboards” item. And consolidate all the Go learning resources together (learn to play Go, puzzles, joseki explorer, other go resources, maybe also the “games” item and even demo board and sgf library). And put “about” in docs and faq. I don’t know about these things but it seems odd to have leaderboards as such a higher priority than settings for example. And on mobile the menu is very long!

If no-one has time to fix and document the leaderboards, then I agree with this idea.
Leaderboards which don’t work, are not maintained, not understood, not documented and not cared about have no business being the fifth item from the top on the main menu. OGS would be better off without them compared to keeping them as they are now, which is a waste of time.

Comments welcome.

Thanks for reading.

[teapoweredrobot]

I couldn’t agree more of course.

[Groin]

It’s seems to me that the leaderboard is not linked to the AST but to the title tournaments.
Big misteries whatever, a documentation is missing at least.

[AdamR]

I would not mind seeing them gone either. I honestly don’t really get the point even if it did work properly

[Groin]

A well rounded leaderboard attracts some strong players (who like to be at the top)

[AdamR]

Fair enough, and it is quite possible it’s just not my cup of tea, but for me ladders seem much better suited for that purpose.

Simple one on one battle of wits where you can directly challenge the higher ranked players. Dragging random tournaments into the mix just seems to obscure things and bring in a lot of “luck” factor depending on time zones and random pairings, and I don’t think scattering the playerbase into multiple such places to compete is necessarily a good thing.

[Groin]

I love ladders too.
The leaderboard has surely to be revamp to take in account all other activities new format of tournaments, title tournaments, even automatch?

If this is too complex, then it can simply be the top of the OGS rating dispatched, like in many other go servers “fifty best players of KGS by rating”

if we display ratings, a sub leaderboard for sdk, and one for ddk would be nice, just to see how far you are from breaking through.

[alemitrani]

I was thinking a bit more about this. A nice way to revamp the leaderboards would be a simple points-based system that could be checked, and which would reward activity. A bit like openstudyroom.org leagues where you get 2 points for a win, 1 point for a loss, and 0 for not playing. For OGS it might be 3 points for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze, and 0 for any other place. The points would simply be summed over a fixed time period (1 month or maybe 3 months). The system would re-start from zero at the end of each new time period. This way it would be easy for people to tally their medals, work out how many points they should have, and check that the system is working as expected.

[alemitrani]

I submitted a bug report here: Leaderboards broken · Issue #1489 · online-go/online-go.com · GitHub