Indeed it’s incredibly easy to sandbag, so you can win all your games for quite a while with a new account if you want to.
If you think about what this actually means, it says “new users” which could be real new users who might not stick around beyond a few games, or “new” users creating a new account to sandbag, are more important than the players that actually play on the server regularly who will have to deal with this.
I’m not sure I agree with that.
I think there’s probably some middle ground where we improve new user experience but don’t become a complete sandbagging mess where anything goes at all ranks.
There’s always unranked games, where you can do whatever you want, but there isn’t an automatch for unranked games I suppose.
That’s basically not the right idea, as this not IMHO how newcomers use game servers. See this last testimony. A beginner who went through the hassle to get his rank fixed invite a friend and what? Is he considering playing an unranked game with him?
So they don’t use the sandbox that much and they don’t expect to start at an intermediate level but as a starter at the lowest end of the ladder. They even don’t understand (“Is it a bug?”) why they are forbidden to play a regular ranked game together. When already experimented then yes they may hope to get a bit higher entrance point as we provide in some way. Note that the same problem exists for high dan who may feel a bit strange to start at 12 (6?)k but at least they understand better how a ranking could work. Still a 6d could feel rude to start at 6/12k when the lowest request he met before around was like 1k.
Compared to other go servers, is sandbagging a so overwhelming problem here that we have to ask everyone to start in the middle?
Where are the stats? The so famous quickness of adjustement of level by a gliko(which i still believe in some way) should be useful to alter those sandbaggers fake ranks instead of putting everyone in a kind of artificial sandbagging from the start.
I meet players who gave up of the kgs system because they have hard time with their 〔?〕tattoo to just get a game. Server moving to be a closed small family. With its different way of managing the welcoming and entrance in the rating, I am afraid OGS will end up finally with similar disappointment and walls.