I have been cancelling games against [?] players. It’s just too frustrating to get locked into a long game against a player that is either clueless or malicious.
I think allowing new players to start at 25k would be a better solution; or letting them choose a rank.
Even if little off point, ‘overinflated’ and ‘underranked’ are technically almost the same thing. I’d rather discuss your idea rather than focusing on ‘manipulating’ ranks which is yet to be proven as a real problem.
The new ranking system succeeded in removing the necessity for continuous meddling with players ranks. The seeding of ranking for newly joined players might be an incremental improvement - I don’t see why would it not be possible with Glicko. @anoek could probably reach out to the author of the algorithm to asses if custom seeding has potential to inflate the rank as a whole.
Given that there is no penalty for losing against an unrated (?) player, there is no reason a new dan to the server cannot play 2 rated games against a 4 kyu and then maybe beat a 1 kyu for their third match and likely already be a low dan by this point… you would probably need to pre-arrange the games in chat first but surely there are a lot of 4 kyus who wouldn’t mind playing a dan player