Notice: We will be removing the ability to manually change your rank

The 5 dan player needs to be non-provisional. You can’t just generate a sock-puppet account, manually set the rank to 5 dan, and then beat it.

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You are correct. We would lose too much with my proposal.

Why does OGS need this? Are deliberate fake ranks a widespread problem?

If not, I’ll throw my voice in with @KillerDucky and others. The community should take care of its black sheep. @anoek stated that you can already set and lock a player’s rank if they cause trouble. This is really all that is needed!

@sousys, the use of automation to babysit everyone is a staple feature of surveillance culture. To follow-up individual reports with investigation and appropriate action by trusted community moderators is the exact opposite.

I have changed my rank from 4k to 2k in the past to recover from long losing streaks. I don’t feel bad about it because the purpose of the rank system is matching players of equal strength. If the feature is disabled, I will have no choice but to fight my way back up. My games will contribute to the rank inflation and be less meaningful as a learning experience for me.

It’s too bad that I notice this thread only now and that even four days ago, the decision to make this change was apparently already set in stone. Still, let me post my opinion here to remind myself and anyone else who reads this three months from now to re-open the discussion and look back at the net effect, positive or negative, of this measure :smile:

If you fought your way down and fought your way up, wouldn’t that have zero effect on rank inflation/deflation?

And if someone moved his rank up a couple of notches every couple of months (to keep it at a fixed level), wouldn’t that HAVE an effect on rank inflation/deflation?

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Lots of discussion here from the community, which is nice to see.

Mods still have the ability to change ranks, @animiral so if you’ve been away from the server for a few weeks, and have ranked up elsewhere, or if you’ve had a weird losing streak where you’ve lost a few stones in rank, then a mod will be happy to fix things up for you. I’ve done this for players who have lost teaching games because of timeout, for example.

We do get a lot of abuse of this feature, from out-and-out trolls who decide that being a 6 dan would be fun for the day, to regulars who decide that they want to rank back down to 20 k and fight up because it’ll “help them with the basics”. It’s not good for the community, and the burden of dealing with it is only going to grow as the server gets busier. It’s the other mods, rather than @anoek and @matburt who’ve pushed this, because we’re just tired of chasing around and fixing people’s ranks when they’re playing silly buggers.

Since @TheDidymen is so keen on precise figures, it’s more than once per day, but fewer than ten. I do agree though, that making people solve tsumego seems unfriendly. I’m hoping that if we take away the ability to change ranks whenever you feel the urge, the community can keep on spotting the sandbaggers and fake dans, as they already do, and we’ll muddle through together.

–Bob

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Thinking about deflation/inflation, I just realized doesn’t the current system actually promote rank deflation?
So… I’m not really good at theory crafting so correct me if I’m wrong, but fact is, every get stronger each day. The increase is small but is there. It’s really really hard to actually get worse playing. If I play with someone and have a 40-60% win/loss ratio, it’s logical to assume that I’m one stone weaker than him. But that doesn’t mean I’m 4k and he’s 3k.

Over time both of us will get better and better (as does everyone else) and he just keep on being 1 stone stronger than me, but we could be i.e. 1 dan and 2 dan by then. We could be several stones stronger after a year but if we keep playing normally on OGS we will still be 4k and 3k.

Is there a system that compensate for the fact that everyone get stronger over time?

ELO, which OGS ranks are based on, does this explicitly. There’s a slight upward drift in the maths, so that if two people of equal strength play each other over and over, each winning 50% of their games, they’ll rank up slowly.

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What if you have a graduated provisional status? The first five games should have a huge effect on one’s rating (to get a broad approximation of the player’s true rank). The next however many games (the exact number perhaps depending on one’s set rank) should have a smaller effect, but still more than the change in rating for non-provisional players.

By stratifying provisional status, you could choose to let “2nd level” provisional rank players into tournaments and prohibit “1st level” provisional rank players from those same tournaments.

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Ah about “I have changed my rank to 4k to 2k in the past to recover from long losing streaks” :smiley: this is bad for improvement ~ just sayin ~

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Ah, actually tygem started out with allowing players to set there rank to 5d at highest they just recently changed it to starting at 3d I have mixed feelings about this as well because on current OGS I don’t think its a good idea to change the starting rank to 3d but maybe later down the line it will be there just isn’t enough dan players to do something like this I think :0

i believe chess.com and starcraft 2 both do something similar to this and it seems to solve the problem reasonably well. the first few games don’t matter that much until your rating stabilizes.

it would also be interesting to use retroactive adjustments for games played against those with a provisional status, e.g. if a 1dan player comes in and 30k and destroys a 15k player, but they later stabilize where they should (at 1 dan), then the ranking loss for the 15k player is adjusted to not be so severe. this raises the question of what it would mean to have a “stable” ranking, and it could be bothersome to players constantly on tilt or who experiment quite a bit, however these seem like rather smaller problems to the community than the problem currently at hand.

I don’t think it is bad for improvement. Stronger players make stronger moves. The better the quality of your games, the more you can learn from them. Therefore playing against stronger opponents is better for improvement.
Perhaps there are exceptions though, such as when I get discouraged from being repeatedly steamrolled by much stronger opponents who I’ve never had a chance against. :smile:

It’s difficult to critique yourself and it’s very difficult to critique better players, but it’s relatively easy to critique weaker players. If you’re on a cold streak, it might be because you’ve started making the same mistakes as weaker players. In other words, playing against those weaker players may be the best thing to do to get back into form.

On the contrary, a weak opponent can not punish your mistakes and will probably offer easily exploited and common weaknesses, like this one: http://www.josekipedia.com/#path:pdqfqhqcqdpcoc

The only thing you will learn is how to overplay at leisure.

After you get beat down for having some bad habit (like impatience, too many cut points etc.), the solution is to unlearn the bad habits by playing someone who can fight back, not to go back to a level where everyone routinely gets away with it.

There’s a difference between someone who’s sandbagging and someone who has been struggling. A sandbagger can casually pick up bad habits, but someone who just went down a couple ranks will be trying to figure out why they haven’t been winning. You can’t work on learning new things from better players when you can’t even remember the fundamentals that got you to your rank in the first place.

I mean Animaral that if you are having trouble staying 2k it means and for some reason you have fallen to 4k it means you haven’t gained the capabilities to play on the same level as a 2k while you can improve by playing 2k you improve faster when you play players of your own rank because you are learning the things you are suppose to be learning but if you play stronger players you are skipping things to learn :smile: so I think it is bad for impovement ~

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Setting your rank to 2k doesn’t mean that your strength is 2k.

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I don’t see the point of setting yourself to a higher rank. You are just lying to yourself. And even if you do it to make other people think you’re good, they won’t even know who you are.
In my opinion it won’t change a lot, it doesn’t matter if they rank theirself higher than they should, good players will prove themselves on the board anyway

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@Jamada and @Mikasa, you two seem to have this idea, which I think is not quite true, that there is some skill that makes a player into a 2k, which builds on or adds to another skill that all 3k players have.

On the other hand, my sensei told me that the strongest Go players are those who have the best undestanding of the basics.

I imagine Go skill like this: Imagine an infinite plain with a ‘pro zone’ in the middle. :smile: Now, all the non-professional players stand some distance away from this zone, some closer than others. If you stand away from the ‘pro zone’, the distance is what you are lacking to get there. You can’t learn anything by turning around and asking the farther away players to teach you how they got this far because Go skill is not like a pyramid that you build up base-to-top, but rather like a place where you’d like to go but you don’t know the way. You need to look to the people who are already ahead and see how they do it.

So yes, you can learn new things from better players. Those new things are the fundamentals, and what got you to your rank so far is a misunderstanding of those fundamentals.

@saxmaam and @legas: The ranking system is not perfect. If a user is convinced that they are really 2k, dropped to 4k for unjust reasons (losing streak), why shouldn’t they be able to set it back up? Surely everybody knows their own rank best? Why should OGS take on the role of the babysitter and prevent people from lying to themselves, if they wish?

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Animaral, I don’t agree with you much, but I like that you have the gumption to discuss and defend your point of view.

And it will be much less perfect when people are free to set the wrong rank for themselves.

[quote=“Animiral, post:60, topic:1632”]
If a user is convinced that they are really 2k, dropped to 4k for unjust reasons (losing streak), why shouldn’t they be able to set it back up?[/quote]

What makes a losing streak unjust? Isn’t it just an interval of time in which a person played with less skill? Why should he not resume playing with more skill and let the ranking system adjust his rank back up as he demonstrates more skill?

[quote=“Animiral, post:60, topic:1632”]
Surely everybody knows their own rank best? [/quote]
I say surely not. Have you any evidence to support this idea?

Because OGS wants a credible, stable, consistent ranking system?

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