Glicko-2 does not require accounts to start at 12 kyu. So why do we do that?

Not everyone is on the forums as much as you, it’s really no harm explaining it again when it comes up in a new thread.

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also, now that we have “cursed the darkness” (identified the issues)

we are advocating for “lighting a candle” (addressing those issues)

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Match making never used humble-rank

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Match making always used humble rank, that was the whole point of it.

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Just because it should have done that doesn’t mean it actually did.

I checked it multiple times in the past. humble rank was not applied on custom games.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Rookie here

Apologies for bombarding this thread, but I believe we were having two separate but parallel discussions of the current rating system, it’s impact on beginners and what has been done, and what to do about it.

For reference

This was the current post before the merge.

As a rough summary:

  • Do we need to require accounts to all start at the same value be that 12kyu 6kyu etc? --OP

  • Can the Glicko Rating system handle multiple starting ratings/rankings in terms of stability

  • Alternatives to the uniform starting points

  • The current attempts at dealing with the issue for beginners and weaker players than the starting value

  • How to do something now without changing the system in place


I probably have my own comments I could add on any of these, but I hope we can agree it’s the aspects of the same issue/discussion and apologies for any confusion with the merge.

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As someone who still remembers well how ogs used to be when players were allowed to choose their own starting rank…
It made both dan-ranks and the lowest kyus into a total mess.

Back then ogs had 3 kinds of dan-level players: 1) total beginners who didnt yet know how go-ranks work and (correctly) assumed that they should be the end of the rating scale, and for everyone familiar with metric-system 6d looks lot smaller than 30k. 2) users who deliberately chose dan-rank in order to boost their own ego or appear stronger in chat, or to get teaching games with real dans, or just for the fun of it. 3) actual dans, whom were small minority between the other two groups.

Basically any time you saw “high-dan” game being played on ogs neither of players knew how to make two eyes. And back then “how we can get more strong players to join ogs” was one of the main questions pondered on the chat and forums.

And on the other end it made the lowest 30k rank a real dungeon, and lot worse than the “forever 25k” problem which was somewhat fixed by rating update in this january. It doesn’t matter what is the lowest available option, there are always a lot of players who think “i’m gonna start from the bottom and see how high can i climb”. Its quite natural for people to challenge themselves like that, and go players in general are people who like challenges. The downside of this was of course that real beginners were stuck at 30k for very long time without any realistic hope of reaching 29k.

This was the ogs rank distribution when user were allowed to choose their starting rank between 30k and 6d…

I’m afraid the same thing would happen again with the lowest available option for starting rank…

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I’ll just say absolutely NO to making new players take tests and tsumego and stuff. Most would just close the browser and never come back, which would be the normal reaction.

Imagine going to a new dance club (as a trophy winning dancer or someone who just wanted to check out that place faint music is coming from) and being stopped at the door for “just 5 minutes” for someone to ask you how many feet positions you know, if you’ve danced before, what style of dances etc.
Just getting a dancing partner for starters is the goal.

And FYI being stepped on is much more painful than a bag of sand or air online.

Most solutions suggested are all for rank accuracy, seasoned players looking back, but I see once again the distinct lack of empathy for clueless newbies. inb4 I expect experienced players who hop online to be more understanding of having to play a few games to adjust, after all they surely know how ranks work.


What about a simple introductory window of “to quickly assess your rank, we start you at about 15kyu. It will take about 10 ranked games for the system to assess your actual rank. Feel free to challenge bots or other players. You can also play unranked games! Welcome.”

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I was thinking about this angle or something related to this angle :sweat_smile:

tldr - other games have ranked placements

There’s quite a lot of games that when you want to play “ranked” you have to go through a placement period, whether it’s a shooter like Valorant or Fortnite to an extent, car football like Rocket League, or RTS like Starcraft 2 or Age of Empires 2. I don’t necessarily play these games but I think they probably do the whole “Placement Period” or “Placement Games” part a bit more clearly I imagine.

In various other games a “Ranked” mode is kind of synonymous with being competitive though.

tldr - maybe we emphasise rank in go too much even in casual games

In Go it’s possible we overemphasise ranks, even in casual games, to try and figure out if handicaps would be appropriate for example. It’s probably quite common to ask a player what is their rank if they show up at a club?

In particular with beginners, it’s probably not the case they want to be competitive but just to learn how to play, although I’m sure some do want to get good.

One could think of having the equivalent of “Beginner lobbies”, that is a particular pool you can only enter if you’ve played less than X games. Other games have done this to different extents I believe, and there’s pros and cons with such an idea. On OGS one could set up a separate matchmaking beginner pool for example which you can only enter for X games, lets say 5 or 10:

Pros:

  • you don’t need to join if your an experienced player, it can be opt in.
  • beginners get to play beginners until they have some experience, and don’t have to be crushed immediately
  • beginners don’t have to play 6kyus or DDKs etc, wherever the default rating would land them in order to drop down in rating.

Cons:

  • You could keep making new accounts every 5-10 games to troll beginners. It might have to be manually dealt with.
  • It’s obviously something new that needs to be implemented
    Edit
  • It might also be incompatible with ranked if it also happens to lower the beginners uncertainty/variance. Imagine a bunch of beginners that all settled at 6-12kyu because they played each other starting off :stuck_out_tongue:

^^Alternatively you could just do as was already suggested and direct beginners to existing groups and tournaments aimed at beginners. Maybe add a sitewide tournament every day for beginners.

I agree that the current question mark business is just a bit vague. One could even update the 10 games, with a best guess on how many more it might take (assume we know how much the deviation tends to drop per game) :slight_smile:

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I don’t know if, and only if, someone enters an EGF, AGA etc link to their profile they could have that rank and not ? from the get-go.

General FYI: In case anyone hasn’t noticed, the posts in this thread are out of order, as can be seen from the timestamps, due to the merging of two threads. My two posts regarding the 6k rank are out of order, making them appear rather inane (I’m old, but not yet in the dementia category), and the general flow of discussion is somewhat disjointed and confusing. Nevertheless, I do think that merging the threads was a good idea.

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That is alt sandbagging, which has long been a huge problem for TPKs and DDKs, and to a lesser extent for SDKs.

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My suggestion wasn’t to force them to do some tsumego, it would be an optional extra to help you asses your rank if you choose. The workflow would be more like:

  • Know your rank? Select it from this dropdown (with some texty descriptions so people who don’t know what kyu and dan don’t pick nonsense)
  • Don’t know your rank? If you are a beginner pick 30k.
  • Have played a bit but don’t know your rank, do these 5 tsumegos and we will assign you 30k / 20k / 10k / 1k/ 5d based on the first one you get wrong (the first one would be just capture a single stone in atari).
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I love the typo from a heavenly dan to a lowly kyu. :stuck_out_tongue:

(I know it’s a typo, I’m my usual cheeky self)

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In my opinion nothing will change if we mix all and propose to change things which are not badly working. I’m refering here on the system we have for not beginners players.

So we should focus only on how to welcome beginners better. For that you need to determine who is beginner and i don’t really see better friendly way as to ask directly when someone register.

The welcome process could be more elaborated as now. I too don’t think a test is the way.

The way is

  • Let them play together (shouldn’t this be obvious?)

  • Give them an opportunity to have a kind of coach (we have the means to do it).

  • Let them be automatically registered as 30k at first (why asking them to do it?)

Starting from that we can build a specific system for them to make them experiment the best beginners’ place on internet.

Mods may not agree with my perception so It’s a kind of question about the sandbagging problem. Is there so many beginners that we could not assign a tutor/coach for each of them? I mean a 15k or stronger who on his will take care of the first steps, helping to close boundaries, understand the 2 eyes, the scoring… Same time isn’t this a very good filter against some sandbagging intention?

On a side note i think live games are much more appropriate as correspondance games as it was suggested.

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I’m sorry for misunderstanding what you wrote. There was no intention of quoting you out of context. I see now that both statements were in regard to the Glicko-2 algorithm. I took the first statement (the one quoted) as referring to what is happening on OGS (which has caused tremendous confusion in multiple threads over months).

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No worries pal :grin::+1:

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Is this a sign that lots of people erroneously set their rank as 30 kyu (whether on purpose or by accident) as suggested? Or is this actually a sign that we genuinely have a lot of beginners? Without some more detailed analysis of the data, it’s hard to say. :man_shrugging:

These are important issues. Thank you for raising them :slightly_smiling_face: To address some of these issues, I suggest the following:

  • Clear guidance on how to select initial rank (avoids beginners thinking 6d is appropriate)

  • New accounts declare rank (if known) to set initial Glicko rating but rank still shows as [?] until deviation drops below existing threshold (avoids ego chasers, etc.)

  • Option to reject games from [?] accounts (allows existing OGS dans looking for serious games to avoid new accounts erroneously set to Dan and allows established 20-30 kyu accounts some protection from sandbaggers)

This is a really good idea :smiley: Coupled with my point above that even with declared rank it is still high deviation and shows as [?], this could work quite well. It could even be a couple of questions on the registration page. Something like this:

Ranks allow matching of player abilities for fair games. Most new accounts start with a provisional rank that shows as [?]. This should settle on an appropriate value automatically after a few games (5-6 on average). The questions below may help to reduce the number of games necessary to get a confirmed rank.

  1. Do you know your rank? Yes / no

If yes:

  1. Enter your rank here: [rank drop down] [association / server drop down]

  2. Enter link to your association / server profile: … (This will allow moderators to confirm your rank and skip the [?] stage completely)

If no:

  1. Select your level:
  • Beginner
  • Novice
  • Intermediate
  • Advanced
  • Don’t know

(the above would map to, say, 30 kyu, 20 kyu, 10 kyu, 1 Dan and don’t know reverts to current behaviour, i.e. 6 kyu)

This is similar to @Uberdude’s suggestion :+1: but without the need for any tsumego :wink:

This also covers some of the sign-up process parts of @Groin’s ideas. I also like your idea of assigned coaches for beginners but I think that would be difficult to implement. You would need volunteers and someone to manage assigning of coaches to beginners. I like it in principle but I can’t see if working in practice :slightly_frowning_face:

Both. Ogs is very popular place to start playing thanks to different languages and working on a browser. Theres constant flow of new users who have just learned the basic rules, they all stack at the bottom of rank pool and they are all improving their skills with every game they play.

There’s some good suggestions. Ogs indeed had some sort of “how experienced you are” thing when registering but it got scrapped quite fast, i dont know the reason why. Maybe if @anoek has time he can tell his opinions on that.

I feel like the biggest problem is that we’re forcing those established 13-8 kyus to play constantly against beginners. Many people feel its “waste of time” and they rather just resign from the game when realising the (lack of) skill level of their opponent. I assume this doesnt feel very good for the new users either when they would like to play and learn, but their opponents give up just after few moves.

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