I personally disagree with probably more than half of the comments. The ranks should NOT overlap. You are going to have a ton of people asking which one they should choose for no good reason. It is just a starting point.
I never once thought that the button was referring to the opponent’s strength. I thought it was a starting rank.
I LOVE the ideas of these buttons. I think the (Name nK-nK) is the one that makes immediate sense at a glance.
What do you define as advanced? There is a strong misunderstanding in the community about relative Go skill. The amount of people that are surprised that 9k-7k is better than half of the community is crazy. Advanced is 1D+ is silly. Only the top 1% is advanced? This just doesn’t make sense.
Looking at this photo I think it would land Advanced in the 6k+ range. But i don’t have the exact data.
In my opinion, I think the OGS developers are very good at coding and design and math. But I think there is a lack of UX and UI design skill compared to those who focus solely on that. I think asking the community for opinions or voting is fine since they are the user base, but I would never make conclusions based on this. I think doing research outside of the Go community is best for design.
No matter what choice is made, there will be backlash in the community. If choices are backed up with research and data over opinion it will be a lot easier to shut them down. (Like the graph shown above)
I have been putting no small effort into researching how to make Go more approachable and I cannot tell you how difficult it is to deal with the hardcore community accepting change. Don’t ignore the player base, but don’t only look at them but rather include the amount of people that never come back in the design ideas.
Go players are good at Go. Not at game design or web design.
Since I introduced 1d+ to the mocks… I was mainly trying to show abutting rank ranges, not comment on where the line should be. I don’t care where the line is, 1d just seemed to be close to what other mockups were showing. I would be fine with moving it down if the data supports it.
Where are you getting this number from? I’m looking at some rank histograms, and it seems the percentage of dans in any given server/organization looks much higher than 1%
We could go in some linguistic debates, and i 'm sure that advanced could be said on a 13k over a 20k because he knows a few josekis or close boundaries or whatever.
But globally i think 2k is not a so bad choice myself as before it players have an Intermediate view in the sense of not so exhaustive and clear as upon that level. My own opinion. I think it’s a good starting point in which players have reach some completeness to hope to beat dan players at (few) times and be a bit competitive toward the strongest players. 6k is very far from it.
When the available choices are New, Basic (~20k), Intermediate (~10k) and Advanced (~2k), I’d expect that some 6k players will select Intermediate and some will select Advanced. And either choice would be just fine.
When single kyu numbers are written, its not clear where border is. But its not a problem, new user would think: “I will start as 10k and rank up until 6k” or “I will start as 2k and drop rank until 6k”
When ranges are written and they don’t overlap, its clear where border is. New user don’t need to think about anything. So its improvement compared to writing single kyu numbers.
When ranges are written and they overlap its again not clear where border is. But there also additional problem to unclearness - user will think: “there is contradiction! What that even means??”
I colored the OGS histogram more or less with those “belt colors” and placed Advanced/Intermediate/Basic labels as I’d consider appropriate (also including the player distribution):
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The peak of a smoothened version of that histogram would be between 8k and 9k, so I think those ranks should for sure be near the center of the Intermediate category.
To distribute the histogram evenly and more or less symmetrically, I’d say the Intermediate category would range from about 4k to about 13k.
To get a fair and nice-looking distribution for the Advanced and Basic categories, I’d place the “center” of the Advanced category at about 2d and the “center” of the Basic category at about 18k.
This feels right to me. I honestly feel that strong SDK players belong in the Advanced category.
However, from people’s comments I understand that there is some imposter syndrome: many strong SDK players wouldn’t dare to label themselves as Advanced when the category indicator states dan level (or even 1k).
To overcome their hesitance, I’d label the advanced category as ~2k instead of ~2d, hoping to persuade more strong SDK players to pick the Advanced category.
6k may be more Intermediate category than Advanced, but I don’t think it’s wrong if a 6k player picks Advanced instead.
For the Intermediate category, 8k or 9k may be a more accurate category indicator, but accuracy is not the goal here. So I think ~10k would be a better indicator, again for psychological reasons: persuading more strong DDK players to pick Intermediate instead of Basic.
The same goes for the label of the Basic category: ~18k may be a more accurate category indicator, but ~20k probably suits the goal better: persuading more strong TPK players to pick Basic instead of New.
