Ranking system is BROKEN

[shinuito]

@GreenAsJade

The problem we face is that our 25ks are not actually true 25ks an awful lot of the time.

I agree this is another relevant point (and assuming say that the system just treats all below 25kyu players as 25kyu).

I believe the reason we don’t go below 25kyu officially is because handicap stops working below a certain point.

As in it stops being a relevant factor and hence a useful predictor of who is going to or should win a game, far below 25kyu.

That’s at least what I recall reading:

@anoek

This hump of the purple line, the 30-25k players, is black winning an unexpected amount when they are given handicap stones. One possibility for this that I explored a fair amount is that perhaps this is indicating that our rank could be improved down in this range to smooth that out to something more expected, however I was unable to find any fit that didn’t result in similar amounts of chaos. I think this is because there are other dominating factors beyond just the number of stones that are given, namely white doesn’t necessarily know how to approach handicap games yet, seeing that many stones probably psyches them out a bit, and blunders still matter more than a few extra stones most likely. So, basically I think the main purpose of the rank (being able to use it to calculate how many handicap stones you should give) begins to fall apart at this range.

Now since then we have the more fine grained handicap on 9x9.

One could imagine that if ranks beyond 25kyu were introduced, one could just make an exception like two 25kyu+ players don’t give or receive handicap on 19x19, but still follow the new 9x9 handicap for those games.

It’s not a very clean system, but it could work better if aligning handicap to rank is the main impediment.

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I linked the discussion thread earlier but this was the announcement thread where allowing players to play without rank restriction was announced, for completeness and because searching can be a pain on discourse:

Draws, handicap & komi changes, and ranking limits lifted

Hello OGS! Thanks to the hard work by @dexonsmith we have some long sought updates: 1) Draws and Ing komi value updates The first is that draws are now officially supported as a game result. This primarily affects New Zealand rules as most rules have fractional komi to specifically avoid draws, but New Zealand rules explicitly allow for them, however if you are using non standard whole number komi on any rule set it will also result in a Draw as this is intuitive. Because of this change, the …