How NOT to select players with the question mark rank?

[espoojaram]

Well, since we’re pinging, @anoek, I’d like to bring your attention to what I think are the easiest and quickest things you can do to slightly improve the beginners’ experience on OGS, before jumping into more complicated fixes and new systems:

@paisley

• Show “?” players ranks as “?” everywhere, so they aren’t discouraged by incorrect notions about their rank falling, or who “should” be their strength peers.
• Allow ranked matches between any rank, so that new players can immediately start playing whoever they think is appropriate. (A form of “self-identifying” strength, I suppose.)

If you’re not aware, there’s a bug where the true 6 kyu provisional rank is displayed in game thumbnails instead of a [?].

Also, it doesn’t make sense that the provisional rank estimate is shown in the profile, not only because it’s initially a meaningless number, but mostly because players who don’t understand the ins and outs of the rating system can often get confused by it – as evidenced by

this, from the same thread.

@espoojaram

If the graphs can’t be overhauled that way, at least the current rank estimate should be hidden everywhere until it’s somewhat established, to avoid confusions like this one

@meowkorkor

In this game, my opponent (12 kyu) asked me whether I was 6 kyu (this was before I even finished a game):

meowkorkor vs. Petru Dumitriu

Which, I believe is the most likely explanation, happened because of the thumbnail/“humble rank” discrepancy, where the confused player probably first saw the graph saying something like “12 kyu” and then saw the thumbnail say “6 kyu” and that’s why they said “that’s not what I saw initially!”

This is what the rating area looks like for a brand new player:

and this is what the graph looks like after the first ranked game:

In both cases you can see the humble rank, which for provisional players is almost as meaningless as the true rank, and just as much confusing and misleading to the untrained eye.

So I believe the second thing you should fix is hide the humble rank from the profile page (and I mean both from the number table area and the graph, remove the line in the provisional period). I do also have other ideas on how to make the graph more readable and meaningful, but for now just hiding the line would be good I think.

And for the third thing, although maybe this is actually the most important thing, you should probably remove the 9-rank restriction, at least for provisional players. That restriction often causes confusion, and is also implemented in kind of a weird way, since it follows the true rank instead of the humble rank.

I’m sorry that I can’t help with the code, I would if I could

Thank you