This is my favorite statement in the whole world.
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This is a wonderful change. I’m still a beginner myself (23k -> 14k), and have never played on other servers, but as I started as 30k too (and had my first ever go game here), and I noticed that beginners with equal lower ranks (like 30-26k) have huge spread of playing ability. E.g. a 29k player can be much stronger than another 29k one while still struggling to raise his rank. This change should help with this problem a lot.
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I’m really excited with this update, as OGS is the first Go server I have used to play, I really depend on this to know my real rank, I hope it works as you guys intended =D
I heartily approve of this new initiative.
An additional means of preventing ranks from clumping, drifiting, and deflating is bots of fixed strength. If there were bots to anchor the rankings in increments of 5 from 30k to about 5k, it would go a long way to keeping the whole thing where it is.
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I’m not sure it’s advisable to prevent timed out players from joining tournaments. For those of us who only play correspondence title tournaments (which is what the vast majority of ogs games used to be), it can take many months to complete a game. It would be quite unfortunate if someone were forced to resign from a game just so they could have a ‘completed game’ and join an upcoming tournament.
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@apoplexy: You can just start a new correspondence game creating an open challenge. It has to take more than two days only, so you can do it fast (1d + 6h Fischer increment, for example). You don’t have to wait for months, I’m sure. 
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One question about the new rating approximation in the profile — should it update when your rating changes? My rating went from -114 to -31 after playing some more games, but approximation stays constant at 771. Is this normal?
Yep that’s expected, the approximation won’t be updating throughout the week. It’s simply the value that you would have received on Friday. When we make the official switch we’ll of course take into account all of this weeks activity too, so if you’re rating went up during this time you can expect that your rating be higher than the approximate rating currently shown.
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My OGS rank is the only rank I’ve ever had. I’ve been meaning to try and get a KGS rank because the OGS system is clearly so weird… I’ll still give that a go to see how you guys did 
This is a good step. I’m interested to see how the root cause (ELO being zero sum and people not manually adjusting their ranks - possibly because like me, they have gotten a lot stronger but have no other source of a rank to guess what might be appropriate) pans out in the new, non-zero-sum world.
I quite liked the OGS 20k-30k bear pit, it was character building. But it was probably a problem for a lot of people. Good luck with this…
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Would these players still be able to continue competing in the correspondence tournaments and ladders that they are already in?
Another related issue that I noticed is that there are a lot of absent players in some of the bigger ladders (such as the sitewide ladders). These absent players don’t appear to be active on the site anymore, but they still take up a ladder spot and simply time out without playing any moves whenever a challenge is sent to them. Of course, this issue doesn’t affect the rating system since these games are annulled, but it leads to a bunch ladder spots filled by dead weight and gives people a quick and easy way to climb up a ladder without playing any actual games.
By the way, I think the rating system changes are a great idea. I hope these work toward compensating for the wide range of skill entering at the bottom.
You will still be able to compete in whatever you are competing in.
A change coming up in the very near future will auto-remove players from a ladder who time out a ladder game
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@matburt can you tell more about how ladder timeouts would work? Hopefully there is a way for the person to easily recover from a simple/accidental 3 day absence? I wouldn’t want it to be that you have to start completely from the bottom in that case.
No, the thought right now is that if you timeout in the ladder you will need to start at the bottom. The way the original OGS worked is if you did not log in to the site for 5 days regardless of game timeout you would be kicked from the ladder so this relaxes that behavior a little bit.
So, couldn’t someone just play a quick correspondence game against one of the bots, dragging it out over two days to reset their timeout flag?
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Why does it matter if it’s against a bot? All we’re concerned about is that the user’s account is active.
As long as you finish a correspondence game and it doesn’t result in a timeout
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I agree that playing a bot would be fine. I was just pointing out that it wouldn’t be a huge inconvenience to reset one’s timeout flag.
It’s not really meant to be overly punitive. On one hand it’s there to protect you from suffering in a major way due to a mass of timeouts and on the other hand it’s meant to show that you need to be able to finish games in order to participate on a broader scale and to continue to gain rating points.
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I’ve also noticed several players who “rage quit” and leave for the game to time out rather than resign, and this feels like it could also be tackled at the same time.
Could I suggest that if one times out a correspondence game on two days in the same week, you get a flag, and if one repeatedly fimes out of live games while the game is closed but they’re still on site, they’re also flagged?
I’m worried that people who are flagged are likely to make a new account rather than dare socialize to get someone to help clear the flag. How about instead simply letting the opponent the chance to review the flagged player’s profile and then accept or decline the match?
the “online circle” in the game should really have 3 levels, green for in game, grey for offline or online but idle, and another color to mark that they’re active on-site, but not in that actual game. (perfect for prioritizing correspondence games)
I’d also like to suggest following the kgs ranking modifers, [10k] for people who play games mostly against weaker opponents, 10k* for provisional players, those who have either lost >90% of their games, and those who have won >90%, and thus don’t have a record varied enough to accurately gauge the player’s strength.
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