In my opinion, it is more welcoming than cancelling a game I don’t want to play.
When you think about rank restriction in custom games, where is the logic in being able to restrict numbered ranks but being unable to block [?] ranked players?
Would you argue that someone not accepting games against 25k is not being welcoming to new players? To me, it seems like a logical extension of being able to restrict rank in custom games.
Let us assume we have 4 sets of people:
I’m saying A>B>C>D in terms of size. Note B>C. If there was such an option, some of the newbies who would have gotten a game relatively quickly (and probably lost it - 70% lose their first game after all) simply would have to wait longer. People usually check out a website for at most 5 minutes. If they don’t like it, they won’t look back. Having newbies meet someone who resigns out of boredom is probably better than to keep the newbies waiting for 10 minutes.
In other words, the relative investment for seasoned players is low. They recognize a newbie, they can finish the game, talk to their opponents, help them, direct them to different introductions or sources, they can also just cancel or resign the game if they consider introducing someone to Go a waste of their time.
It’s relatively low because out of the thousands of hours the seasoned player has invested in honing his craft, 5-20min don’t mean much. For someone who has never played before or who only spent little time on it, 5-20min can be anything up to 100% of their lifetime Go experience.
Edit: Can we get a statistic of the % of newbie games that are cancelled/resigned (by newbie vs by opponent)/scored/timed out? What are these games like? Usual board size, duration…? 
'won' |by veteran | by newbie
=========|===========|===========
scored | |
resigned | |
cancelled| |
timeout | |I wouldn’t consider introducing someone to the game to be a “waste of time”, I just want the option to not play against beginners, especially if I have already played a few of such games in a row.
Let us not forget, longer term players have as much of a right to a good game as beginners.
You’re 9k, all you need to do is set the minimal rank to 11k, 10k to be sure. For quickmatch, you can also set it asymmetrically -x/+y.
But then I’m excluding 13ks, that’s not a bad game for me or for them!
Look me in the eye and tell me that once you’d checked that “no provisional players ty” box, you’d actually remember and uncheck it on some idle tuesday.
Hmm - I thought you guys were discussing having this option even after humble rank.
Since humble rank seems squarely on the table, there seems little point in debating some other proposal to avoid 13k beginner matches.
That would be solved by having to check that box in the create game dialog every time…
Hurray for defaults!
I only have the ranked games, therefor there are no numbers for canceled games.
I consider a player as veteran if the deviation is smaller than 150
First ranked game against veteran September
| won | lost | |
|---|---|---|
| scored | 448 | 1477 |
| resigned | 1287 | 3075 |
| timeout | 258 | 701 |
| canceled / annulled | ? | ? |
last year:
| won | lost | |
|---|---|---|
| scored | 4885 | 12900 |
| resigned | 12256 | 24522 |
| timeout | 2038 | 5963 |
| canceled / annulled | ? | ? |
Last year 50% of new players were weaker then 16k.
In September 50% were weaker then 18k.
For more info take a look at the linked topic:
It’s interesting to see the stable ~25-30% winrate regardless of type of outcome.
For fun, I picked a fairly stable 13k and went through 400 games, cancel rate seems to be around 5%. Necessarily,the cancel-due-to-newbie rate is going to be even lower. But even if we assume 5% for that, with 2000 new users per week and <10000 games between them, that’s 500 games at most.
Of course the relevant percentage would also be affected by whether the cancelee is actually a newbie. Regardless, unless my sample was biased or my coffee isn’t working, it’s unlikely that a new account sees more than 1 cancellation per 4 games.
Now, provided that the cancellation is handled courteously, that shouldn’t be a big problem.
Alrighty an initial cut of the humble rating/rank is up on the beta site for anyone curious and wanting to test things out!
Hm. Not much going on there. And somehow I doubt correspondence games are the best choice for a betatest server. ;D
The feature is now live, we’ll see how things go!
Thank you for all your hard work on OGS.
I had just 2 new player (1150±350) accepting my open challenge with rank restriction min rank 18k, max 8k.
1150 ≈ 20.6k if I’m right.
Is it intended, that provisional player can accept my games even if their rank is not within the rank restriction?
What’s weirder is that this guy started at 1150, lost his only game, his 19x/overall properly dropped to 789 (31k) but his overall/overall rating increased to 1192 (18.4k), variance dropped to 253.
Somewhat unrelated: can we have an automatic message to the new account’s opponent with something like “Your opponent cannot chat, because the account has not been verified.”? I think it would ease some tension with newbies.
The unverified player could get a similar automatic message in chat saying “You can only use chat after verifying your account by linking it to an email (Top left menu > Settings), logging out and logging back in.” Or does that already exist? 
Not weird at all. My overall/overall rating is ≈1500 at the moment, while my 19x19 ratings fluctuate between 1000 and 1200.
With humble rating, his rating is 1500±350 but is shown as (and used for matchmaking?) is 1150±350.
After the game, his overall rating droped to 1315±253 (= 1171±253 humble rating).
Since my 19x19 ratings are much lower than my overall rating, his rating loss there is much higher for 19x19. (loss against much weaker opponent)
My 19x19/overall rating before was 1019. Therefor the rating drop from 1500±350 → 1056±319 (781±319 HR).
Same for 19x19/corr (my rating 949): 1500±350 → 1020±327 (726±327).
(Btw: Why is my calculation of the new humble rating off by 20 points for overall and 10, 5 points for 19x19s? I literally copied the conversion formula)
I still don’t get why his overall/overall rating should increase from the loss. It’s his only game.
Edit: Ah, I see. So the decrease in variance alone was enough to counter the rating point loss and turn it into a net gain. That’s just weird.
Oooer. Did we end up with a concept of humble rating?
Surely it was supposed to be humble rank, derived from your glicko rating (the only one you have)?
Concept:
“Your humble rank, for matchmaking, is the lower bound of the rank derived from your glicko rating”
It’s going to be confusing as heck if we now have two “glicko ratings”.
What’s more, if someone is 1500+/-350, they can’t be 1150+/350 as well. They are 1150 +700/-0.
I had imagined we would have one rank - the humble rank - which has no stated uncertainty, it just is the rank you are assigned, and it is derived from your glicko rating, by taking into account your uncertainty.