Sou, desu ne! Sorry to represent OGS poorly. I’m still a DDK newb, and likely not worthy of the opportunity. But it is an amazing game!
We were all new once.
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There is quite a lot of sandbagger on OGS.
Especially what I like to call the “unranked sandbagger”. They basically play a few ranked game, get whatever ranking…and then only make custom game unranked offer from there.
The result is than you see a game offer than display, for exemple, “2k” … unranked game …but if you look at the history the guy have play only unranked for month is not years with like 90%+ win rate. But people don’t know what and accept the challenge thinking they play a reasonable ~2k player. Realistically, probably 2d or somethings.
While the don’t get punished because it’s in unranked so “not sandbagging” by OGS rule…Let be honest the only reason they do that and avoid ranking is so they can bully weaker player and get easy win for their own little self-esteem, what I think is discussing attitude and poor sportsmanship. But heh, welcome to online server, where toxicity is everywhere -_-
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Tho the reason why they are not punished is that there is nothing we can do about it. Because the rating system is fully automatic, moderators are unable to change their ranks manually, there simply isnt any way for us to do anything about it.
We simply do not have the tools for making rank fixes for players who do not play ranked games (we can make ranked games as unranked by annulling them in case they’ve lowered their rank artificially by intentionally losing ranked games, but we can’t make unranked games as ranked)
Another big reason why many people choose to play unranked is that they feel anxious about games being ranked, and want to enjoy go without feeling any stress due games affecting their rank. For many people that kind of stress makes them play worse than they would otherwise, so they only play unranked in order to focus on the game more and have fun.
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mods can’t, developers can
if [8k] don’t play any ranked game for a year, their rank should be displayed as [8k?]
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That’s how KGS does it and there are huge drawbacks of the system. It’s far from a perfect solution.
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KGS is different. When you don’t play often on KGS, your rank becomes erratic like mine:
What stone_defender was suggesting was not to change anything to OGS’ rating system, just change the display so that opponents know that the “sandbagger’s” rank is unreliable.
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Yes, I am aware that OGS and KGS’ rank systems are not identical.
However:
This is exactly what is done on KGS, adding a “?” after the rank display to signal that the rank is unreliable.
And my point is that this is not a solution, it’s just a different choice with different drawbacks. And I’m really glad that OGS did not copy this particular quirk of KGS.
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There is some discussion on an open PR to this effect
Could you tell us a couple of the drawbacks? I thought a [?] for folks who don’t play ranked seemed reasonable.
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The main drawback to using the question mark in this way is that it equates experienced players with raw beginners. The issue is already confused by the fact that people new to the server also get a question mark, although they could be dans.
Better information can be obtained, without changing the OGS system, simply by spending a few seconds looking at the player’s profile.
What is comical in this discussion is that the number of people who use this dodge to sandbag is minuscule compared to the number of people who sandbag by others means, and the latter get the added sadistic pleasure of wrecking people’s ranks.
I don’t understand the argument.
It seems your point is that it would be confusing for those that equate “[?]” with “beginner”. An easy way to solve this confusion is to… stop equating two things that have nothing to do with each other.
“[?]” doesn’t mean “beginner”, neither today nor with this proposed change. “[?]” means “rank unknown”, as illustrated by the question mark.
Similarly “[8k?]” would mean “probably 8k”.
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I haven’t done that. If you think I have, then you did not read my second sentence.
Edit: fixed typo
If I misunderstood then I have no idea what point you were trying to make. I can’t really make sense of your comment.
Would you mind trying to re-explain your argument in a clearer way?
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Your argument seems to be that people with an uncertain rank could either be weak or strong.
To which I suppose all I can say is, yes they could. That’s why they need to play more ranked games so we can be more certain about their strength.
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If you had read my second sentence, you would see that I did not equate the question mark with beginners. I explicitly said “they could be dans,” so it is insulting to lecture me as if I don’t know the distinction. The problem is that many players, especially DDKs, do equate the two (resulting in many mistaken sandbagger reports).
If you are going to start handing out question marks to everyone with some uncertainty in their rank, then you will need to give them to an enormous number of players, which would drain the question mark of any value it might have.
Ranks already have an attached uncertainty, which anyone can see in a player’s Ratings table. There would need to be a standard for this new question mark, and the only one that makes sense, I think, would be any account with an uncertainty of more than one standard deviation. Even then it would be problematic—deservedly so—because the games in question are unranked and don’t enter into the calculation in the first place. Furthermore, the assertion that someone has improved enough to become a sandbagger is just an assumption. Some do, and some don’t. What is the standard and how would it be applied? Most players top out in rank; they could play 5,000 more games and not improve at all.
As I said, simply taking a few seconds to consult the opponent’s profile is sufficient if someone is concerned about all this. In truth, this issue is trivial compared to the real sandbagging problem.
Nobody is proposing “handing out question marks to everyone with some uncertainty in their rank”.
The proposal is to increase uncertainty when a player has not played a ranked game in a long time.
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Per my response above, which you ignore, the idea that that is a problem is an assumption, and the proposed solution would stigmatize people who are not sandbaggers because they have not improved at all.
I always check my potential opponants profiles. I have to admit that it sometimes closes the window of opportunity, especially in open live game invitations, but it gives a good general impression of the player’s character.
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The question mark isn’t a stigma. It literally just means “we do not know the rank of this player with high confidence”. See also:
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I think I lost track of proposals.
What benjito has said is how I thought it is supposed to work anyhow, but it turns out that we don’t do this, and for some good reasons. Personally, I’d rather work on getting that potentially elegant solution (increasing uncertainty with time) to work, instead of the most recent proposal being discussed:
This isn’t “increasing the rating uncertainty” this is putting code that says if time since last game > 1year then rank = rank + "?"
The manifold problems with this include:
- Why 1 year?
- How do we tell the difference between this “?” and the one that already says “OGS is very uncertain about the person’s rank”.
(And it’s definitely be worth underlying that the current “?” does not mean beginner, it means “we are very uncertain about their rank”. It seems obvious that this is what a “?” means)
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