Rating issue

Hello, I’ve got a problem there playing games on my phone OGS app. I hope admins can somehow solve it or at least explain the issue.

First problem happened when my rating dropped down after losing few games (a lot, actually, it wasn’t like in one day, but somehow in places with bad connection) because of disconnection (I wasn’t timed out and the games just began, so not like I was losing or something). So the first question is why the rating gets down for such reason in the beginning of game when you are not even timed out?

The second problem happens now, when I try to get good rating… Because of the first problem I decided to play games by correspondence. I win most of games, but my rating doesn’t grow…
It grows when I finish the game by score calculation or opponent resignation, but when it comes to time outs (frequently when my opponents realize they lose they stop playing) my rating doesn’t grow. I really tired of wasting weeks and months to win a game and don’t get rating points in the end.

Could you fix or at least explain me the reason why it’s like that and how to avoid such issue…

The rating system doesn’t really care how you lost in live games: if you lost, then you lost.

Loss of live games by disconnection should be extremely rare: we ask all players to make sure they have a decent connection, because it is not fair on you opponent when you just suddenly disappear.

I could only see one loss by timeout/disconnection by you in you last 50 games. So the idea that “your rating dropped a lot due to disconnection” seems to be wrong.

In correspondence, if your opponent times out of lots of games at once, the rating engine needs to avoid messing up everyone’s rating due to something that was nothing to do with skill and speed of thinking and only due to some outside life incident.

In these cases (“mass timeout”) the server will annull the timed out games unless the opponent (you in this case) was clearly winning. It does not annull games where your opponent timed out if you were “clearly winning”.

If you were not clearly winning, and your opponent timed out of correspondence, you didn’t win because they didn’t have enough time to think (as in live games), you won becauise real life took them away from go and you weren’t really winning. Do you really want the rank in this case?

^^^ this is the current OGS thinking on the topic as I understand it.

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Looking at your profile, it seems you have gained 1.5 ranks in the last 3 months, this is fairly impressive for a strong kyu player such as yourself. Also at a cursory glance, you more or less seem to be beating lower ranked players and losing to stronger players, so perhaps you are perceiving a slow rate of change for your rating because it is accurately reflecting your current strength, and thus doesn’t need to change much?

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What’s the threshold for a “mass timeout”? Is it simply timing out in two correspondence games in a row, or is it some higher number?

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My understanding is that a game is considered for annulment due to “mass timeout” if it is a timeout and so was the one before it.

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