In the upcoming next minor patch (4.1) we will be removing the ability for users to manually change their rank after the initial account creation.
This feature was originally added while the server was new and helped to ensure players could keep their rankings in sync across servers, however it has far outlived it’s usefulness and has been detrimental to the stability and credibility of the rankings as of late, so we’re finally getting rid of it.
So how will that work? you set your rank when you create your account, and thats the only time you get to specify it?
I would like to suggest that there also be a cap on how high a rank you can set. Say a maximum rank of 2-3 dan and players of that strenght will have to play their way up to higher dan ranks. there is alot of grumbling about fake high-dans which is sort of frustrating for most.
Yes, for example, I know of one “6 dan” who actually is ~5k; their reason for this, as they told me in private chat, is that they don’t “take OGS serious” 
they even state “ Kgs 5k Ogs 6d” in their L19 info, sheesh. I find such behaviour quite annoying.
Greetings, Tom
I strongly disagree and find your comment to be extraordinarily silly. And i want to say that i would bet my celery that you stand alone in your little whine-club.
Dont speak for the general population. speak for yourself
[quote=“LinuxGooo, post:5, topic:1632, full:true”]One time per year a good update !!! Thats enough…
[/quote]
I respectfully disagree.
I disagree here, LinuxGooo. This change is, in my opinion, the absolute right thing to do.
You should also know that we will continue our updates in the pace of the past months, which means several updates per year. Stagnation would be the death of every upcoming Go server.
I certainly hope this “no updates” rule wouldn’t include bug fixes. That would be very silly.
As for this planned change, I think it is a good idea. Not so long ago, I played an SDK strength player who would win a few games, set his rank to 20k, win a few more games, set his rank to 20k, and so on. That kind of thing damages the integrity of the ranking system, and tends to pull everyone’s ratings down. If you remember the problems we used to have with everyone being between 30 and 25kyu, you’ll understand why preventing such misbehaviour is a good idea.
You’re a linux user. Do linux’s frequent software updates annoy you in the same way? They don’t bother me at all.
Yes yes… poor users. wasting our time with improvements. BAD developers! BAD! Stop trying to make things better! For free! In your spare time… How dare you!? Dont you know upgrades are deadly!?
Everything in balance is the principle of Go. I agree that one major update per year is more than enough, but frequent small updates are good for the health and freshness of all software. All living things grow constantly, staying put only implies death.
If the user has a hard time acquainting with the change, then the problem lies in the unfriendly design, not the pace of update.
Young things grow (change) faster than old things.
I have mixed feelings about this, mainly because if you force a 7d to start off at 3d, they’ve got to “steal” 400 points from other dans on the system to crawl up to what their rank should be, so it introduces some rank deflation in the dan ranks
Of course letting a 5k start off at 6d artificially inflates the rank system too, which is equally as bad (perhaps even worse).
Taking suggestions on how to best solve this… what comes to mind immediately is to give dan players a higher number of provisional games when they set their rank, and introduce a ‘flag this player’ feature to enable folks to get a moderator to look at the player and potentially adjust their rank back down. This, coupled with something to protect against people creating new dan accounts whenever they get adjusted, is the best that comes to mind at the moment, though I don’t particularly like the high provisional game part of this suggestion because it limits their ability to participate in tournaments and ladders until they get their rank sorted out, which might take awhile.
Awhile back we were talking about the possibility of requiring new dans to solve some ~5k-1k tsumego or something of the sort, which I kind of like as well (though that requires us to have a good collection of those problems, which we don’t yet)… so that might be another option to introduce, but it’ll probably have to wait until we have a collection before we can introduce that feature if it’s something deemed to be a good idea.
Oh please do report any and all of these users to us, we can set their rank to 5k and lock it in to prevent them from changing it back
Usually the major update cycle is one per year, but bug fixes and patches come every so often. For example, I think Google Chrome’s build updates every six weeks to tweak things better 
So those patches will NOT completely overhaul the system, but offer tiny changes for the better. This is also reflected in the version number: OGS 4.0 is an complete re-design from OGS 3.0, but OGS 4.1 I won’t call it “diverts” too much from 4.0.
So let’s calm down and embrace every patches of change from the devs
Possibly limit ranking that player can set for himself, but have a checkbox requesting chat with admin to set a higher ranking?
Wouldn’t that require more effort on customer support? It would be bad if a new user asked and doesn’t get immediate respond.
And what if the user can’t speak English?
Yes, it would take more customer support and I don’t know if that would be too burdonsome for the site. Possibly a volunteer could help with this. But the new user could still play with the provisional rank until a moderator/admin responded to his request.
That’s an interesting idea, maybe have it so the existing site dans (who have more than say 10 games on OGS) can see a list of newly registered dans on the site and review them to give them the thumbs up or thumbs down… once say 3 existing dans give you the thumbs up we clear your provisional status and let you in as a real dan?