What’s the point of putting rank restriction settings into your match preferences when these unstable new accounts can still get a match with you?
He had bad etiquette, wouldn’t accept score and left when he didnt get his way, played silly moves all the way till the end of the game and basically gave me, a stable ranked player a bad experience.
Also please warn/ban gsqkenr who is obviously resigning for no reason to give free wins to this player here https://online-go.com/game/11083360 and https://online-go.com/game/11083343, inflating his rank artificially and making him be playable to ppl of my rank range who don’t want to face players of this sort of calibre and etiquette.
If we are going to have new people ranked at 12k with high uncertainty, then we need to be able to limit the uncertainty that we accept in automatches, so as not to match 12ks with newbies.
Otherwise experienced DDKs, and even SDKs open to DDK matches, going to have these bad matches.
The case of Merton is particularly wierd - and demonstrates just how bad this can be - because he played another 12k newbie as his first match so his rank actually went up!
It seems obvious that if you are using uncertainty to flag newbies, then it ought to be a parameter in automatch…
I don’t see the 12k first match? It was privatised so how did you watch it?
The guy who really inflated his rank is gsqkenr is a 5k who gave 2 free wins to the guy making the system believe he is 4k and above. Not that it really matters. Even 12k players would get annoyed by these sort of players.
Main issue is still the filtering in the automatch settings.
Ah - I misread the status of gsqkenr - I thought he was a newbie because of the short time on his account - but actually he played over 150 games in those 4 days!
Well - whatever those details, it does highlight how bad the situation currently is. I’ve been saying this for some time
Personally I’m of the opinion that we should have two separate ranks: one for 19x19 and the other for 9x9 / 13x13. That’d probably help to mitigate this sort of thing.
I’ve always been against new players starting at 13k, though. If you ask me, the OGS rank interface should be very simple: when you make an account, it should ask you for your rank in a drop-down menu. The first option of the menu would just be called “Beginner” for new players who don’t know their rank, and would probably map to 23k or so. Then whether you’d actually want an uncertainty period after that is up for debate.
It’s important to treat players like adults… if they know their rank then just let them input it.
I do understand the reason for the 13k with high uncertainty starting rank. The problem is the implementation is incomplete: if you follow the rationale for doing that way, you have to use the uncertainty in all elements where it matters - like automatch
We had that option available for a long time, the ability to choose your own rank when you first start. Needless to say it got removed, was it because people were abusing it to much?(they were) I don’t know if that was the main reason why it was removed though.
It’d need some care with implementation - it couldn’t be as simple as “everyone can chose the uncertainty of the rank of their opponent”, or indeed as you say new players would get locked out.
Rather, it would need to be something like “above a certain rank, you are allowed to elect not to match high uncertainty players”
But this is also broken, because it would force new players to OGS to play TPKs to establish their rank.
Let’s face it, it’s broken. Nice idea, doesn’t work.
We should just ask people what their approximate ability is and set their rank accordingly. IMHO.
Of course, this can lead to finding people like me who when asked “What do you estimate your approximate ability to be?” would respond “Huh?” I would ask “Have you played GO within the last year?” Input “Yes” or “No.” If “No,” start out with 20K. If “Yes,” start out with 15K. This might be simpler to program and thereby save the site time and money, as well as avoiding glitches that more “sophisticated” systems tend to encounter. The more complex something is, the greater the chances of error.
Having someone wind up as 15K when they’re obviously better is a risk, but that will iron itself out and potentially give players a chance to tangle with someone who’s sharp and dangerous, and thereby help hone that player’s skill and knowledge.
Perfect? No. Adequate and serviceable? Yes.
Even if you haven’t played for a year, you’d still have a rank from another server. Or are you saying that these people would have never played online before? Even then, they might have a federation rank.
The system that you describe was in place when I first joined OGS.
That makes me think that the system didn’t work. Otherwise it would probably still be in place.
Ideally, it would be play On-Line OR Face-to-Face. And if someone came from another GO server then that rank could be claimable (providing they use the same basic system, and it would be up to the player to back it up with quality of play). But without verification it would definitely be an honor system.
And, again, if it didn’t work once then it is doubtful it would work again.
Littlegolem also allowed setting your initial rating until a couple of years ago. At that point this feature was removed. Looks like a pattern, so most likely there is a good reason.
Deliberate pumping of rank is something that admins can deal with. I don’t think the ranking system has been proven to be temperable. I’m yet to see an example of a player, who managed to sustain a skewed rank for longer time while remaining active. To my understanding this would require a sustained and active pumping involving multiple players, which again can be easily dealt with by our beloved overlords admins.
My point is - unless we can think off some brilliant solution, this is a case for admins. Assuming we cannot find a proper solution, if you think about ‘total time wasted’ actually setting up this thread and involving multiple people to comment on, used up incomparably more time than that single game ever would.
I can’t speak for the devs, but my understanding is that this system is both more accurate over time and much more self managing. When we were setting our own ranks, mods were flooded with requests for rank changes.
No system is perfect, but I’d say easily 95% of new players would be at their correct rank within 5 rated games and probably 99% within 10.
Does it suck a bit to be one of those 5 or 10? Maybe.
But ever ranking system has an uncertainty period and trolls so bad games are inevitable in online play. Personally from my experience we get very few.
I have to agree with you there. As long as the system works well it should probably not be messed with unless a genuine improvement can be done. We don’t want to implement something that causes more problems than it solves. And we definitely don’t want to add to the Admin’s workload. They work hard enough as is.
Maybe a little off point here, but i dislike the curent system a lot. Every new player has too weak rank for having a ranked game with me, even the dan level players.
Also this makes it really hard to recommend OGS as a go server to anyone outside beginner/ddk -range, many stronger players hate the idea of being forced to play 5 ddk-games before gaining some reasonable rank.
My own experience is that I routinely get tough, appropriate competition by staying within a ±3 of my rank. Thought the rating lists of “…wins vs stronger opponents/…wins vs weaker opponents” is flawed, the overall rank has been a good guide. Of course, I don’t look at my rank as a measure of my skill, I look on the actual games as a measure of my skill. The rank is, ultimately, just a great filter when finding games.
