I made an onion histogram. I like the colors.
Note weird notch at 9k, huh.
9k-6k, I would say
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(columns)
10k - 7k . . . … are highest on users who play at least once a year
. . . 8k - 6k . . . .are highest on deviation<160 , deviation<100 and who play at least every half year
. . . . .7k - 5k . . are highest on users who play at least every month/week/day
. . . . . . .6k - 4k are highest on users with at least 2000 games
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The Central Limit Theorem does us a great disservice by biasing us to think that the underlying distribution is normal because samples always are “normalish”. It isn’t so. I believe Go rankings are more properly described by some kind of “fat tailed” power law, and am currently tinkering with OGS historical data to see if I can find it. The histogram shows OGS users, which is a biased sample of the universe of potential Go players (most of whom can only place stones randomly on a board).
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Looks like a slightly tilted bell curve to me 
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I wonder if stable players should be counted at deviation less than 70. After update it seems if you play more or less regularly you’ll have like 65 deviation at all times.
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I barely ever get to play and my.deviation is still 64… Seems like a reasonable theory
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I made a graph with stable players, and multiple histograms through time, normalized. As you can see, as time goes on, peak of players goes down but region with players at 21k gets fatter. Probably more new players joined in 2020.
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So I continued my graph building for earlier months. It looks pretty good, a little too good, if you ask me. I wonder if there’s some kind of mistake somewhere. Look how perfectly noob region is swelling up over the years. Could it actually happen naturally?
Additionally I’ll make top post wiki so editability doesn’t expire.
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A suggestion: could you make this into an animated GIF, so we can see the hump sloshing over time?
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there was a discussion in other topic, your diagram may be so perfect because there is something strange with OGS itself
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Ah yes, ratings were re-calculated retroactively on january, i guess it makes historical comparison pointless 
Yup totally. in 2017 ogs switched from elo-based rating system to glicko2, this caused the loss of all previous rating data :<
Ranks from that era are still saved on game chats, if you have the time you can look thru old chats and plot the ranks from those ^^
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This shouldn’t be the case. It does appear there could have been some kind of error, but part of the reason ratings changes take so long is because
What this actually looks like, is anoek having the server re-run every single ranked game through the new algorithm so that it’s as if the current rating system had been used for all time.
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Oh am i mistaken? Is the old elo-based rating data still existing somewhere? I would love to see the old ranks from that time ^^
I think we are confused on what is meant by “data”
I think anoek keeps the old rating system alive for a short time, just in case the new one goes tits up and he needs to roll back…
what I meant by keeping the “data” is that every single ranked game gets re-analyzed, so while you can’t compare the new rank to the old rank through history, the new historical ranks should still operate appropriately, as it’s as if we have had it the whole time…
for some reason, the historical ranks in this case do seem to be off for some reason
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I still don’t think I agree that recalculating every game makes any sense.
I don’t see why one couldn’t figure out a mapping and then just apply that mapping to the current ratings.
It can’t be much less chaotic than it already is. No-one really knows how to compare x-kyu before to y-kyu now anyway.
Not to mention that it makes it look like players who were new to go and the server started off at 10kyu and went up from there, when they were actually 20-25kyu for quite a while.
There’s probably nothing that can be done about it now, but I don’t think it was a good idea. (And it might need to be recalculated again if they want to fix blitz games)
The old rankings were wrong so every game made every ranking slightly more wrong. Mapping only works on the global scale. It might be true that most ranks went up by 3 (or whatever it was) but that doesn’t mean you can just put every rank up by three and call it a day.
By running it from the start, assuming your new code is correct, you remove the wrong data points rather than trying to mask over them.
Ahh i see what you mean, then yeah xD
I was talking about pre 2017 rating system update. What i meant ‘missing’ is exactly what you said, the data we have now is re-analysed and based to results long after the games took place.
Good example case of what i mean by data gone missing and the “problem*” it causes here, T:3183 R:1 (ennuiaboo vs KoBa), you can see from the chat both oh us being 14k, and from the level of our moves that indeed we were both was far into ddk-land based on our skills ^___^
Now when adapting to the current rating system our ranks are shown as 1d and 7k in that case, which clearly is just false and doesnt make any sense xD
If you take a closer look of my that user rating graph and game history you’ll see how weird it is.
By looking at the graph and game history, it now seems like they were always (played for 2 months in 2014 and few times in 15-16) high sdk / low-dan player - apparently even reaching 2d at some point "friendly" "game"
But according to the game chats, the user never reached higher than 10k. Then after coming back in 2018 they were visibly confused about their new 1d rank and lost some games before quitting ogs again kalhartt vs. ennuiaboo
When looking these old games, there is no data of what has been our ratings back then, how much difference there was between the players elo’s, or who was the higher rated player when that game took place. Ranks have been saved in chatlogs, but that is the only place where you can see how were the players ranked when the game took place.
*i think the only problem this causes is the inaccuracy of making any kinda statistics about players ranks from pre 2017 era.
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Be careful about those. When I was looking through those, they were a bit off too. I think something is up with them too.
I think looking at historical change is still interesting.
I like the idea of recalculating the ranks from the start, cute idea. But throwing away old ranks was a mistake. So sad.
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Some older ranks can be seen on GoKibitz, for an obviously very small number of players.
For instance, I can see my OGS rank from October 2018 on by referencing those SGFs.
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