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

The thing is that a loss of rank isn’t a punishment, but a reflection of one’s relative skill level. It is as close to an objective measure of skill that any website will be able to achieve, especially considering that go ranks are based on relative skill level to begin with. If you lose games to people of a certain rank consistently over some period of time, then you should probably find yourself ranked lower than them; if not, then we’d end up with a similar situation as what’s happened with modern professional ranks - they become honorary for past achievements and cease to be reflective of one’s current skill level.

In any case, if losing a rank was punishment then that would make the majority of people who play on OGS masochists - so common is the loss of a rank that we’d all have to enjoy punishment to keep on playing for any extended period of time.

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well, wouldn’t that be another kind of sandbagging, if you have gained alot of strenght but have to play the rank you used to be? at stronger positions this might not be too relevant, but at start this can be of huge effect (and isn’t it newbies that are most effected by sandbaggers?)… idk… but at least strong players will not be demotivated into stopping to play completely due to it at least…

I think that it’s a good idea to remove the ability to freely adjust one’s ranking. Note that @pathogenix already stated above that the moderators would still retain the ability to manually adjust rankings, which they would be willing to use in appropriate circumstances:

Based on what the moderators have said, it seems that the current issue is that there are more cases of people abusing the rank adjustment feature than using it appropriately. I trust that they have made a reasonable judgment toward making the site more manageable and reducing overall issues. It’s probably easier to occasionally help a few people manually adjust their rank in the infrequent cases where it is reasonable, rather than deal with the continual stream of issues caused by players freely changing their rank to abuse the system.

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It was a good discussion, Animiral. I think I understand your points, I just don’t agree with them.

Is rank change feature detrimental to the community? I think it definitely was, based on (1) the messed-up rank situation prior to the mass adjustment, and (2) the frustrations of playing people who deliberately set their ranks wrong.

What is the proper role of ELO system? I think it is to estimate as well as possible the ratings of players, especially in relation to each other (so it is not so important to nail the absolute rating as it is to rate stronger players higher than weaker players, and to get the spacing between ranks more or less correct). Estimators do better when not dealing with a lot of spurious wrong data.

So that means I don’t particularly buy the justice system idea. I think the ranking system is just trying to make the best estimate possible.

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If you get beat down and you’re on happy about it, become a better player.

I think if you get beat down and you’re unhappy about it, you will become a better player :wink:

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