I feel there are a lot of extreme feeling on the subject.
I check regularly the streaming linked by OGS. Telling that most are sandbaggers are not true at all. Most are players trying to get higher ranking on fox with more and less success.
Sandbagging, to not be bad, shouldn’t be a secret activity. Like informing your opponent before the challenge to be accepted. The fallacy is in the many players who think that a crushing is still a good teaching.
Dweryin may offer a teaching to the viewers or let say a show at least but that’s on the shoulders of someone who didn’t ask for it.
Besides sandbagging is not an easy matter to regulate because players tend to overestimate their strength or what it could be if not this or that, and get very sensitive or even upset for what could break their dreams. On OGS like on any other go server, rating is the sacred upon anything else.
I was rather surprised after Conrad’s strong language like “fraudulently” and “illegal” that his and OGS’s position is it’s OK for dwyrin because he’s a celebrity, reminds me of “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
(yeah, I know it’s not anything, there are conditions on the OGS policy allowing it)
As usual you have misunderstood what I said and weirdly conflated two different comments. No, I do not excuse Dwyrin because he is a celebrity (which would beg the question of whether he is), but because I agree with the mods that his educational content is valuable.
The comment about celebrity, both with reference to Nakamura and to Dwyrin, is about how I would personally feel if I got sandbagged by either of them. It is a comment about personal feelings, not about policy. Surely you understand the difference?
Here is an idea that would at least address the loss of rating points when dwyrin sandbags in a ranked game.
The mods could require him to self-report the game when it is over, and they could annul it without warning. This would be a win-win, because no rating points would be lost, and dwyrin would be saved the trouble of constantly having to create new accounts.
So it’s a single player history thing.
It doesn’t seem to be too harsh of a constraint.
That sounds good to me, unless there are ultra quick players who play hundreds of games in a very short time.
I see, thanks for clarifying. Relevant posts from you and shinuito quoted below.
So the OGS policy allowing sandbagging by creators of educational content is based on that content, not their celebrity. So whether it’s dwyrin with thousands of subscribers/viewers of BillyNoName with 2, so long as it’s for making educational content that’s fine.
But then Conrad personally thinks if someone is aggrieved from being sandbagged by dwyrin they need their head examined (or is that only for Nakamura level celebrity?) because he wouldn’t mind, due to the brush with celebrity. But that’s just a personal opinion, so people have every right to be aggrieved and not think that celebrity brushing makes up for it. But being sandbagged by non-celebrity BillyNoName (also allowed by OGS policy), even Conrad wouldn’t like that?
Wow, you continue to misrepresent what I said, and it’s not complicated at all. Why is that? As you well know, and others can see for themselves, the remark about “their head examined” referred only to sandbagging by Nakamura. Linking it to dwyrin is your invention. All I said about dwyrin was
You do understand what “personally speaking” means in that context, right?
This also is your invention, but I don’t mind addressing it. Again, personally speaking, not speaking on behalf of OGS policy, I don’t think I would mind (1) if it were done respectfully (as dwyrin usually does), and (2) if it were actually educational.
However, I do think that loss of rating points is a problem, and I have suggested a way to resolve that in my previous post.
What if we had special accounts for players such as Dwyrin?
We could automatically annul all wins made with the account, and leave all losses in place.
We could also have a setting for other users that would allow them to opt-out of encountering such accounts.
This way we would avoid the impact on the rating system, we wouldn’t have to get wins manually annulled, players who want to avoid these kind of accounts would have the option to do so, but the opt-out nature of it would allow a healthy supply of accounts for people like Dwyrin to play against.
I’m not very familiar with “speed runs”, but I believe part of the point is to see how quickly you can make your rating climb. Unraked games don’t affect your rating.
You’re right. I thought the abselute main point is playing weaker players and explain the game. But if raking up itself is also some part of it, unranked games won’t help.
Often, Sandbaggers or “Educators” create accounts with artificially low rank to bypass the rank restriction that’s set by players who would like to play exclusively with people at their level. In fact, with the proliferation of Sandbagging/”Education”, quite some few people have developed the habit of checked their opponent’s account history at the beginning of the game, which adds some inconvenience. That begs the question: Did OGS give the consent in their place? Or Is it a moral necessity to offer a small fraction of the community as sacrificial lambs to keep the community at large entertained (via entertainment streaming), for the greater the good? Is this the dictatorship of popular vote?
The defining theme of those games is crashing the opponent in the most humiliating way possible, that’s what gets more views. I am not gonna name any particular streamer, but if you view some streams with this kind of content, they are full of bullying innuendos.
To be honest, that’s not just a sandbagging thing, and it’s not just an OGS thing, you see the same thing happening on Fox. If you’re looking to improve your rank, or maintain it, you’re incentivised to look at your opponent before playing and see, are they strong or weak for their level, are they on a win streak or a losing streak etc.
I don’t believe that’s the case for a number of streamers, otherwise this rule would likely not have been decided upon. You can feel free to pm any particular streamer you think is misbehaving in such a way on OGS and using alternate accounts or sandbagging a main account. The same said was said to @iakgnoh, but I haven’t received any pms with accounts to look into yet.
I think rules need to be based on evidence and not just feelings. If a particular streamer is making accounts or lowering their rank, and they are generally going against the exception of
then we can look into it, warn them about it, close accounts, return rating etc.
If they’re not, and if we have no examples of problematic streamers, then we only have the feeling that some streamers might be using accounts to crush lower ranked players, or that they’re only doing it to entertain and not to teach, or various other things we can formulate.
I think he still is playing mostly unranked games (maybe 8 out of the last 20 were ranked on one account, even more unranked games on another). Ranking up isn’t strictly the point of those games, and I think he’d rather have an account at a certain level than to have to lower the rating down manually.
If you think of the point of making educational content, you want to play a person at a certain level range like and OGS 5kyu, or an OGS single digit kyu, so you need an account in and around that level. Ranking that account up isn’t really helping you with that goal after the account has that level, you need to either play unranked, or keep manually deflating the rating in some way.
Would you say the theme of Inseong Hwang 8d playing weaker opponents is to crush them in the most humiliating way, or it’s to show how players at a certain level play, and how you can play against them yourself in your own games?
Something like this does sound like a practical option. Some sort of compromise with not having someone’s rating impacted and still allowing the creation of educational content.
Probably opting out is a better option than opting in, in terms of not making it harder to find opponents.
One could imagine labelling the accounts either as chess com does for speedrun accounts
Official speedrun accounts for streamers are closely monitored, clearly labeled, and all rating points lost during speedruns are returned to their opponents:
Something that one could look into implementing. Maybe aneok, when revisiting the ratings later this year (for aligning with egf/aga and potentially splitting the overall/9x9 etc rating) can look into implementing something concrete for streamers.
I actively refuse to watch or support all such content and I’m guessing similar is true for others who share my sentiment.
I did more recently look at Dwyrin’s content since I was curious what he’d say when he lost a game (would he congratulate his opponent, would he review his own mistakes?). So at the time, I searched for a loss and found the stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5WWLjL4iCo&t=1300s. Surprise surprise (sarcasm), he just blames his opponent for using AI afterwards even though the game looked nothing like AI.
And if you rewind the game, he didn’t seem all that respectful towards his opponent during the game either, deriding every one of his opponent’s move. For example, at the timestamp I linked above (1325s), he described his opponent’s move as “he’s throwing in some weird stuff now”. In no way does it feel educational / respectful towards his opponent for the entire course of the game.
As if I’m ever going to support or take his content seriously after seeing that.
That’s not really an example of being disrespectful, I don’t think, unless you’re setting a very low bar for disrespect. I think that’s part of normal discourse if you review games with someone for example. Many people will tell me of the weird or strange moves I played and then proceed to tell me the normal move or normal shape.
That said, I’m happy to sit down and watch the full game now.
And that account was banned for AI use. I’m not part of that decision process, but there apparently was enough signs to be fairly clear to the detection team that AI was used, and the account was warned previously.
I know you’re not part of decision, but this was the game in question for people following: ngenvi vs. Treemeow
All moves felt pretty human to me during that game and the accuracy (aside from the early game josekis) looks pretty bad for both sides.
Possibly he used AI in a different game since I haven’t looked through all his games. But at least for that game and a sample of other games I looked at, it seemed pretty human.
