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

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[quote=“Animiral, post:60, topic:1632”]
So yes, you can learn new things from better players.
[/quote]Sure, this is why we should also play stronger players, not only weaker players. Has nothing to do with the topic, IMHO.

[quote=“Animiral, post:60, topic:1632”]
The ranking system is not perfect.
[/quote]So what? Nothing is perfect, and the ranking system is evolving. But it can only evolve in a “healthy” way if people don’t interfere by deliberately changing their rank whenever they like to.
(Yes, I’m also “guilty” of changing my rank by (IIRC) one or two after the latest site-wide rank change, but I chose a compromise: the shift made me five stones stronger so I decided for only two stones stronger which corresponded to my actual EGF rank. I have no intention to “adjust” it regularly ;-))

[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]Why is a “losing streak” an unjust reason?

[quote=“Animiral, post:60, topic:1632”]
Surely everybody knows their own rank best?
[/quote]Uhm …WHAT? That’s definitely wrong.

[quote=“Animiral, post:60, topic:1632”]
Why should OGS take on the role of the babysitter and prevent people from lying to themselves, if they wish?
[/quote]Because there are too many babies here?

:smiley: < jk >

But to be serious: IMHO this needs to be to protect the ranking system from being distorted, and also to prevent people from lying to others, because by maladjusting their rank they are not only lying to themselves, but to the ranking system and to the other players.

Cordially, Tom

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Animiral said:
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.

And on the less admirable side, Animiral, you seem to ignore responses that are inconvenient to your argument.

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I think it comes down to this:

We can play stronger players without their consent through the ladder and the tournament systems.

Usually, the stronger players will win but somehow the weaker one will not be so weak after all.

This bothers players of all ranks but it really shouldn’t.

When I started the ladder, I was upset that it was simultaneously ladder position and writing at stake. It matters not. If you win a ladder game, you go up however significantly you wanted. If you lose, I think you lose one notch.

In tournaments, it is a similar situation. If you pay attention to what kind of tournament you are entering and the settings of it, you should be okay.

Earlier this year, I played a shodan very well. Halfway through the game, the motherfucker changes his rank and becomes provisional so his certain loss to me would have no effect on his precious rank. His justification was that he was having trouble in his life.

And I don’t care. I can trump pretty much everybody here in the “hard life” category and I don’t talk about. You can probably get a peek by looking at my KGS profile but friends don’t let friends go to KGS.

As other players have mentioned, this is about honesty. If you get beat down and you’re on happy about it, become a better player. Study life-and-death problems, review the basics and ask yourself a fundamental question: am I having fun?

If your games are within 10 points, win or lose, I would say you’re having fun. If your games are 20 points or greater, win or lose, I would say you’re getting diminishing returns on your entertainment.

Do you know what the game is about? It’s about gaining territory and making life.

Go is hard. If you’re violence is your thing, maybe you want checkers. If violence with arbitrary complexity is your thing, maybe you want chess.

I’m looking forward to the rank change bug going away.

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If they are trully 2K who felt to 4K and deserve a better rank they should be able to defeat some 2K guys. All he has to do is challenge those and fight his way back. If he isn’t able to go back there, he is probably lack of practice or something like that.
I did like your “plain” idea but you talk like you, being 4K, only are able to fight 4K people, when actually you can still do it with higher ranks and learn from those who are better than you. To look up to someone, you got to be under him, not at the same height as he is.

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@Animiral The problem with your theory is that it implies that you should only be playing 9p players to achieve “real” improvement. But you’ll never be able to grasp the higher level concepts if you don’t already have a solid foundation of knowledge. And how can you be said to have a solid foundation of knowledge if you have forgotten the things that got you to your highest rank?

Becoming better at go includes the experience of failure - understanding why things didn’t work out when you tried non-professional moves. If you skip the part of understanding (in this case, by ignoring your own weaknesses via manual rank change), then all you have is technique without knowledge.

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Animaral dude :smiley: i am just giving you my advice from experience im an 8d tygem i wouldnt tell you this just to make you get worse you can continue doing it your way i just think it isnt as helpful my teacher told me never to move my rank around and just let the system decide and he was a 7d and thanks to him im now 8d i use to always try to make my rank higher then it was and when i did later it became a weakness for me so im just speaking from experience and giving you my opinion but I wish you luck anyway :)!

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Right Jamada he has to go step by step if he was just to play stronger players without a strong foundation he won’t learn anything from them you are spot on :D!

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Does being 4k vs 2k really make that big of a difference in terms of who you are able to play on this site?

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@yebellz It doesn’t really affect who you can play, though it does make a difference in how ratings get adjusted.

Before OGS changed their rating system, changing your rank manually might have been beneficial in the sense that it would help counter the previously deflated ranks. But now it’s just the unnecessary introduction of additional rating points into the system - inflation. If you honestly wish for less rank inflation, you should actually just play your way back up normally.

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Hello all,

@saxmaam and @trohde:
OGS already grants its users certain freedoms to the detriment of the ranking system: we can choose our opponents, time settings and rules, when to play and even handicap and stone color. Why stop short of allowing rank reset?
A losing streak is always a statistical possibility. The ELO system does not care about the style and finesse of your moves, that you gave lots of handicap against a 10k who was really much stronger, or that you misclicked and your opponent refused undo. I believe that a loss of rank can be unjust, especially when the number on display no longer matches the player’s skill level (which, by the way, I think it never does, but that’s for another discussion).
Yes, if I play 10 games and end up at the same rating as before, my influence on overall OGS ratings would be close to zero (I believe there is a small point bonus just for playing). By ‘rank inflation’, I was referring to the situation of a player finding themselves underranked at some point, as many OGSers used to be - and in my opinion still are, especially when compared to other ranking systems. ‘Skill inflation’ is probably more correct :smile:

@SunPin, I don’t want checkers, no thanks :frowning:
Doesn’t the rank reset kick you from ladders and tournaments? I thought that’s how it works here.
If it’s about honesty, what is so honest about going into a game as 4k when I have the self-confidence to say that I am really stronger than that? Even if I am, as @legas said, ‘lying to myself’, it would still not be honest.
At any rate, I also believe that ‘power levels are bullsh*t’, meaning that there is no guarantee that a 6k can’t outread a 3d in a particular fight. The numbers are not so meaningful.
‘Fun’ in a Go game, to me, means that I can respect the opponent’s moves. It’s very frustrating to lose by missing a huge self-atari in the endgame. Not fun. On the other hand, if I can see the strength of the opponent’s moves and how they spell out the reason for my loss, I am entertained and satisfied.

@legas, I don’t often get to choose my opponents because I’d rather choose my time settings (live game) and wait for challengers :smile:

@Jamada, I agree that you need to be able to understand the reason for a loss if you want to learn from it.
Sill, I think of this ‘foundation of knowledge’ as a thing that is misinformed and must be refined rather than added to.
It means that Go skill can only be skewed (e.g. placing more emphasis on the corner territory than it really deserves) and cannot be forgotten (you don’t ‘forget’ to have an opinion about the corner).
I agree that failure is good for learning. An underranked player can expect less failure and therefore less opportunity for improvement (and fun, see above).
Unfortunately, the ELO algorithm punishes failure in the interest of placing a number on your skill.

@Mikasa and others,
This dogma of ‘let the system figure it out’ is really getting on my nerves. It’s a statistical algorithm, not magic! Is it right to suppress a user’s rank choice, which they feel is right, and subject them to the whims of this algorithm, which suffers from incomplete information, statistical outliers and player’s ranks never being accurate in the first place?
Isn’t a rating algorithm more appropriately placed in the role of an observer rather than a dictator? The point, to me, is that a player can look up the numbers and ask, ‘how strong do you think that I am now?’ - and the system will give its best-effort answer. When you start to think how you can prevent all manipulation, the cause is already lost, because sandbaggers will always have a way.

Finally, the reason why I don’t respond to every paragraph and why I don’t use the ‘quote - riposte’ posting format is that I don’t like it when forum discussions explode into huge walls of text that nobody wants to read. Sadly, this has just happened :frowning:

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This is not unfortunate. If you were sentenced to six years for violating the law but you decided you get only six months and you can make it happen that way, how do you think the rest of society views you? Antipathy would be putting it mildly.

Or you can go the other way to a more positive situation. Your boss decides that you are good enough to deserve a 5% raise. You disagree. You want, and successfully give yourself, a 25% raise. Your boss and your coworkers are now angry and confused.

OGS can be considered a society of go players. The developers are trying to create a fair and just system for this society. We decide if we agree with the rules of this society by staying with it or leaving. Voting is a rare thing here. This particular thread started as a declaration. We turned it into a debate. The debate goes on, presumably, because the developers would like to see if they missed a point in moving towards removing manual rank change.

ELO is not magic. It is our justice system. If you want a relative system, there is KGS. They won’t let you change your rank. Tygem will let you change your rank if you pay them. Do any other go servers matter?

When I came over from KGS, I was getting into the world of the SDK. Then I started getting severely smacked around here. Knocked down to the twenty Kyus. I would go back over to KGS and destroy SDK players. What was happening here?

KGS filled my ass with smoke about my skill level. For the first time, I considered life-and-death problems and reading books to be mandatory if I going to enjoy OGS. The relative ranking system wasted the first five years of my go study (and, as Jimmy Buffett puts it: “there is a woman to blame” for at least two of those years.)

There is nothing like an OGS beat down to think “Go Grinder… Those problems are fucking hard but I think I’d better give it a shot.”

You’re taking the opposite approach. I’m guessing that you, like everybody else here, came in with your KGS rank. You worked hard for it and, god dammit, you’re going to keep it come hell or high water.

It is much more liberating to accept the idea that you don’t know as much as you thought you did and you’re going to have to pay out some blood, sweat and tears to get what you want.

If what you want is easy then maybe it is not worth having.

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Text is quite unfortunately the sad, sad consequence of discussion. :stuck_out_tongue:

Again, this only really applies if you’re sandbagging. If you’re not looking for the weaknesses that pushed your rank down, then obviously you’re not going to improve. But if you lose a few ranks and become determined to figure out why you lost those ranks, then it is more likely that you actually fix what you have to.

If all you do is reset your rank in the belief that you are better than how you are playing, then it’s possible that you’ll improve in some areas of your game, but the weaknesses that you chose to ignore will eventually inhibit your ability to grow. It’s counter-productive to put off what you could work towards fixing now in the assumption that it will fix itself later.

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If one assumes that a losing streak is an aberration and adjusts one’s rating to erase the decline, shouldn’t one also assume that any winning streak is also an aberration and erase those gains as well?

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Well, each to there own… I think rank locking is a good thing it will stop people from choosing ranks they not really are I was once told that “even if you lose your rank if you really are that rank you will get it back” so animaral if you really are 2k and you fall to 4k why do you have to change it back to 2k? if you really are 2k you should be capable of getting it back :slight_smile: so why would you need to change it why would you even have to complain about falling if your strong enough to be 2k than you will do just fine right?

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Punctuation is your friend, dear mikasa!

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:ghost:

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oops… to m,uch zombie-talk lately :

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From your responses, I get the feeling that I have sadly failed to make myself properly understood here.

I was not trying to debate the question of whether or not it is possible for a player to reach their true ranking by playing more games (I guess it is).
Neither was I ‘complaining’ about falling to or from some specific rank, or anything to do with me in particular (except that I would like to have rank reset available in the future).
Those are not the topic of discussion at all.

The topic which I was trying to adress is whether or not this rank changing feature is detrimental to the community.
The main points that I’ve been writing about, like the proper role of the ELO system as observer or dictator and de-ranking as punishment for failure, have not been discussed by any of you in my opinion. :frowning:

@SunPin, in your post you assert that ELO is in fact our ‘justice system’ and that we are ‘sentenced’ to play at a specific rank with no choice (even if it should not accurately reflect our true strength from an objective point of view?). I vehemently disagree and I am keen to learn why you think it should be that way!

All I can take away from this thread so far is that there is a broad consensus to support the removal of the rank change feature. Which is good I guess, because @pathogenix already wrote that it is indeed a widely abused feature that our moderators cannot handle on a case-by-case basis. As for myself, I will miss that feature and I hope the devs will consider reintroducing it one day. :smile:

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k, I’m just gonna say that I’m abit against the concept people cannot change their rank manually, however, I do want it to be controlled somehow, like not allowed to change it more often than X or maybe only allowed to change it if you haven’t played any games for 6 months on the site or something like that… and also, naturally certain high (and low) values shouldn’t be accessible…

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Mix up your own metaphors, @Admiral.

The best way to continue to allow would be to charge money but only those with money can access better opponents.

Allowing once per month or once per any interval would make OGS unique among those servers. Nobody else allows rank changes.

The only fair way is for nobody to be able to change the rank except through playing.

I’m not sure about the “and after six months or more.” Is anybody going to drop their rank after lost time? I would say you’d have to take it from me or I’m going up.

The formula should be that you get one shot to pick your rank and you have to come within one stone against someone within one stone of your rank to lose your provisional status.

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