There is also the option of playing unranked games, or setting up unranked tournaments. If I join a ranked live tournament, I don’t want to be playing against someone who doesn’t really care about the outcome of the game, because they are only serious when it comes to their correspondence games.
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That doesn’t make any sense. Were not talking about how seriously we play. I think we all play as seriously as our abilities permit. I describe OGS to my non-gosei yet sports knowledgeable(basically, normal) friends as “the Rucker Park of the go world.”
Maybe this issue affects correspondence players more than live players but I think a lot of correspondence players would like to play live, rated games and tournaments and have their performance applied to a rating taking only live games into consideration.
I believe tournament directors would welcome them and be happy to see the pool of potential participants swell.
This site is about having fun with the game. If a small change like this can relieve a lot of players of completely unnecessary stress, why would you oppose it?
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I am not opposed to it per se. And if it happens, I don’t think it will take away from my enjoyment of the site. All I’m saying is that I don’t see the logic behind it. My interpretation, from reading the comments, is that some correspondence players find ranked live games stressful because they think that they play worse in live games than they do in correspondence, and they don’t want the live games to drag down their hard-earned correspondence ranking. They would enjoy live games more if live games had a separate ranking system. And as SunPin clarified, this is not about playing casual vs. serious, but about being stronger or weaker at live vs. correspondence, and finding live games stressful. I will just make a couple of observations about this and then happily obey the will of the majority.
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Even if you feel that you are worse than average at playing live, or maybe better than average at playing correspondence, or both, but you still take all your games seriously, your ranks aren’t going to be more than a stone or two apart. Not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and not (in my mind) worth establishing a separate ranking system.
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Focusing on rank too much is detrimental to enjoyment of go. If you find yourself getting stressed out about your rank going down, take a deep breath and remember it’s just a game. If we take rank as an indicator of skill, and increase in rank as a sign of improvement…well, I think the fastest improvement happens when we don’t focus on win, lose or rank and instead on what we can learn from each game. Then before you know it you’ll gain four stones.
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I kind of like the idea of your rank being the aggregate of all the types of ranked games you play. It shows your overall, comprehensive skill as a go player, both your strengths and your weaknesses. I think that’s a valuable thing to have and I would like to still be able to go by that even if we have the option to break down our rank.
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Sorry, I didn’t know some people don’t play for fun.
The problem with changing something if it will remain the same is that it uses up resources for little output. You said it yourself that this server is run by two people.
Why would you assume that you have to play not very exciting games to make up for your lost rank? Are you assuming that you will drastically increase in skill as you get used to live/correspondence? If so, then it would make sense to just play a few unranked games. That’s what they’re there for. Even if your opponent isn’t trying their best because it’s unranked you get used to the type of game. It also doesn’t make sense that you would assume getting your rank back would be annoying but at the same time you say nothing about getting your rank again from the bottom because they are separate.
Ah no. I have been playing a lot of both live and correspondence games since I started playing go. Here on OGS I have only played a few live games right in the beginning but that doesn’t mean I would need to get used to live games. The thing is, it is much easier for me to take a live game serious than a correspondence game. Also my opponents don’ t have that problem, apparently. They even think more than they would during shorter time settings. I recently had the opportunity to play an opponent with different time settings. He is three stones weaker than me on KGS, three stones stronger in correspondence (DGS) and perhaps one stone weaker than me in a live tournament.
A problem with there being two different ranking systems is that each system is only half as reliable as what a single system would be. This makes things difficult for new members, who have to play more games just to get a firm rank. Given that OGS ranks are noticeably more difficult than they are on other servers, we get more new members with incorrect ranks.
Also, I think that people worrying about ranks would be even more worried if there were 2 ranks to keep. And may I make a point for elegance?
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I think on the surface we aren’t necessarily opposed to two ranks… it’s just that it’s a non trivial amount of work to break the two out. We would also want to make sure that we covered any potential issues with it. I think it’s really only recently that people have started to trust our ranking system (after our big correction a few months back) so I think we’d like to take a little more time and make sure our existing ranking are running smooth.
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Multiple accounts …
To me that sounds like a solution for anyone who wants to address the issue right now, and for those who are happy the way things are at the moment they can just keep on using one account.
It also means development resources can be focused on other issues and features while the issue is addressed.