does anyone have any ideas for better matchmaking? i had my first match and i got absolutely torn apart, even though i had a full understanding of the rules. please send ideas
Full understanding of the rules is far away from being enough to not be crushed. Welcome and no worry, we all went through this. Sadly there is no shortcut, go is difficult (especially) from the start. But the reward is great later with all the perseverance needed.
For chances to win, stick to players around your level, you can use customs games with your preferred settings.
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Welcome to OGS. Hope you will enjoy your stay.
With matchmaking - I think - you refer to the pairing method used in the various types of go tournaments.
In the screenshot below you see the automatic site-wide tournaments (ASTs):
If you look for a fairer pairing you might want to try Swiss and Round Robin.
Although these are tournaments without a handicap (and you might get crushed by some of your opponents) there is a bigger chance of meeting more or less equal strength opponents.
In custom games you can set the context of the game yourself, as you can see in the next screenshot.
Note that Handicap=none is the default setting, but you can change it to automatic, thus ensuring a fair game.
Good luck!
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Did you use the automatch feature or accept a custom game from the list of available challenges?
It could be the case that if you’re a new player, because you don’t have a settled rating yet, it pairs you with people of any strength, because you could be any strength when new to the site.
If you are new to the site just play about five games and it should settle on a rating and then hopefully the matchmaking system improves.
On the other hand, there has been discussions to add more rankings beyond 25kyu before, but I’m not sure if any decision on whether that would be implemented or not was made.
If you search the forum there are plenty of materials to read for improvement but I’m not pushing you most important is to play and enjoy.
Hope you find some way to play interesting games.
We have humble rank these days, don’t we? That’s certainly a step up from 13k-default in this regard.
I’m still in favour of reintroducing the 25–30k ranks. I’ve never understood why they were removed in the first place. Servers with weaker ranks can do that and even take out 20+k as well; OGS can’t.
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