Here’s my take: We can’t ask new users questions and quizzes about things, it’s not beginner friendly. It’s great for folks who already know how to play the game, but one of our primary goals has been to grow the community, and asking brand new players questions about things they don’t know about yet is not a very welcoming thing to do. Also allowing people to set their own rank causes a bunch of problems (as mentioned in a previous post, we used to do this, it caused a lot of problems with sandbaggers and heliumbaggers), so that somewhat precludes doing things like making an optional button they can click to take a quiz or something.
The humble rank idea I don’t think will really solve anything as all it does in effect is shift the matchmaking problem down, and will probably have unintended bias consequences on the rating system.
Increasing the starting deviation (ie decreasing starting confidence) does not help (I ran a bunch of simulations with this back when picking values, turns out that Professor Glicko fellow knew a thing or two and picked some great default values).
Basically, there’s no perfect solution, but so far I think this is the least bad. I do think there might be some tweaks possible with matchmaking to help bias against matching high confidence 13k’ers with low confidence 13k beginners - however I’m not sure this will be the panacea that one would hope for either since we need to balance matchmaking time with quality of the match being made, and we only have so many 13k’ers looking for games at the same time.