Here’s my opinion (I voiced something similar a few months ago, but it was dismissed as impractical for some reason).
I think there should be 2 options for new players -
- accept a 12kyu provision rank and play games until this rank adjusts
- take a quick / automated test and accept whatever provisional rank that test assigns.
Personally, I think that the test could be very simple - one could even take bits of the already-existing LEARN TO PLAY GO structure, and adapt those to tests. You could have simple things like
- black to play to make two eyes (simple false eye tsumego)
- look at a finished game and mark the dead groups (basic knowledge of life/death)
- some very simple tsumego
My guess is - given the types of mistakes beginners routinely make - these tests would quickly catch 90% of the 25-30kyu players who arrive, assign them the appropriate TPK rank, and send them out to find players of similar strength.
For that remaining 10% that passed the first 3 questions would then receive 4 increasingly complex tsumego (15k, 10k, 5k, etc) until they made a mistake, and then that would be their provisional rank.
This entire process would only take new arrivals like 5-10 minutes tops, instead of the much greater time/effort required for someone’s rank to stabilize if they’re faced with playing multiple games (especially 19x19, and especially correspondence - it’s good to remember that a LOT of beginners are intimidated by live games and don’t want to be rushed…)
When I first found OGS in 2016, I mistakenly assigned myself a rank of 15kyu because I had finally beaten GnuGo on the lowest AI level, and I had been told that this was roughly equivalent to a 15-17kyu. I was WAY off. I was actually a lot more like 23-24kyu, and some very nice mod changed it to 25kyu for me. Having to play 12-15 kyu players was very confusing and intimidating, and it almost scared me back into my “only play against bots” hole rather than engaging with the site…