I see a lot of games where people restrict the minimum rank to one higher than their own. I find that kind of annoying. I think it’s in the spirit of the game to accept games from weaker players as well. Is there any possibility of enforcing some kind of minimum distance in each direction? Or am I missing something?
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It would be a little unfair to force people to play a game with someone they don’t want to play with. Which if im correct that’s pretty much what you would be doing.
EX: Player only wanted to play with people higher than 10k but this system will require them to play matches with people weaker than that. Aside from them canceling the game if someone lower than 10k accepts it of course.
The fundamental problem with your proposal is that it is impossible to force people to be “nice”. In other words, there is no technical solution for a social problem. For example, the moderators may be able to ban trolls by IP address, but that can be circumvented with a proxy service.
In the particular case of your suggestion, players could fake their rank to get them the restrictions that they want to set.
The other, no lesser, problem is that the standard of behavior which you intend to force on everyone is not universal. Many players will not accept your reason why they should not be able to set their filter any way they want. They will simply be annoyed and not enjoy OGS as much.
On the other hand, I do not think that the proposal is “unfair” because it is simply a weighing of priorities - benefit the offering player with more options or benefit the seeking player with more offers to choose from, including stronger opponents. Both are equally valid in that aspect.
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Except the offering player already has the ability to choose the minimum and maximum rank of the players who can accept their game offer. So it doesn’t benefit them at all.
EDIT: Ah, I seemed to have misread your last paragraph. Still I don;t agree with it, there are already players who don’t use restrictions. All your doing is making one group unhappy to make another group happy it really doesn’t solve anything.
There could be some rank flair or something on a player’s profile that marks players playing heavily (say 80 % of their games?) with higher/lower ranked players.
On general principles or because you can’t accept those challenges? If the later, that could be rectified by implementing a filter that would hide any challenges with restrictions you can’t satisfy. Nothing can be done about general principles, I fear.
I’m a correspondence player and almost all my OGS games come from tournaments and ladders so I do not suffer much from this problem, but I see how that can be annoying when searching for a live game.
DGS had implemented something like this. They even reward you with a badge indicating you play a certain percent of games against weaker players. Now there are complains about people abusing this feature and joining 7x7 tournament only to get the said badge.
It’s so easy to become annoyed with people for one reason or another 
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i think if the min/max were more prominently displayed, then there would likely
be a social solution to a social problem.
i personally am a little guilty of leaving more room in the ‘max’ than in the ‘min’
but if someone 4 stones weaker than me listed my rank as the minimum, i would certainly
try to find a less selfish player.
otoh if it doesn’t bother the stronger player, then thats fine too
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I agree that it wouldn’t solve the problem, although it would fold it into an already existing problem (people cancelling games in order to be selective).
[quote=“Animiral, post:3, topic:5892”]The other, no lesser, problem is that the standard of behavior which you
intend to force on everyone is not universal. Many players will not
accept your reason why they should not be able to set their filter any
way they want. They will simply be annoyed and not enjoy OGS as much.
[/quote]
That’s the answer I was looking for, and I think that basically settles it.
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I’m guilty of setting the restriction to be from (my rank) to a (high rank), but try to make up for it by offering teaching games to new players.
if this is a problem, then yuri’s solution sounds pretty nice.
I think that “shaming” solutions like on kgs do not have the intended effect. It is much, much harder to get games as a weak players on kgs because people do not want to play with weaker players and there are few weak players there.
A setting like this communicates that it is a consensus on the respective site that games with weaker players are a charity offering.
I also dislike people who think that they only profit from playing against strong players and refrain from giving as much as they get, but I also think that the whole concern is rather silly. If I am 9kyu and play only against 11kyu players, it doesn’t take that long to get to 8kyu and then play against grateful 10kyu players and so on. The rating system actually takes care of most of the problem.
Also, I think that it is not true that it is bad to play against weaker players. My experience is that playing against players who are a couple of stones stronger teaches me new moves and challenges my fighting skill while playing against similarly weaker players gives me an opportunity to try out new strategies and tesujis. If I learn the first time about a loose ladder I won’t be able to try it out against a dan player. If I learn about “typical kyu mistakes and how to punish them”, I better play against weak players to try out the sequences (and probably failing and mixing up things at the first try).
Another issue is that often it just seems that stronger players avoid your games. Due to the distribution of ranks here, it will be true for everyone except for beginners that they play more games against weaker players on average if they treat all ranks equally.
I would dislike to see my freedom of settings restricted by such concerns. For example, once I put out 10 correspondence games challenges, one for each rank in a certain range. If one of those against a stronger player remained, you would label me “selfish” for no reason at all.
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