Welcoming beginners and OGS rating system (A compendium)

The rating system is one of the most debated topic and It’s easy to lose himself in these many topics.
On the opposite side there are some very recurrent question coming again and again from the users themselves, be in the forum or in the chat.

The main point is that:
1 The starting provisional rank is 6k as of today. Meaning that they have to play a large quantity of games to get their beginner rating. These games will be a full crushing experience
2 Even if they try to get some more balanced games before that, it will be refused by the system (“your level is too high”)

In the idea on a debate on how to make beginners more welcomed on OGS, especially when considering the process to get integrated in the ranking system, i regroup here the main topics which could be of interest.

Introducing:

Main topics

Older but still relevant topic (entry provisional rank at 12k instead of 6k)

Beginners (and access to ranking)

Ranking system explained for reference

https://forums.online-go.com/t/2021-rating-and-rank-adjustments/33389​

If you know some more crucial topics to link, i will greatly edit this post.

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So any future discussion should be integrated and replied here?

If so, I was always wondering why not consider handicap stones to be part of the rating system? Let players declare their initial rankings, and instead of assigning rating, assign handicap stones associated with the initial 6k?

This was how it was done historically, where there were no clear “kyu ranking” below dan ranking. Amateur will be assigned certain “handicap stones to certain dan rank” as temporary ranks.

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i have always associated OGS with a no handicap culture. that can change, but just how i (and others?) see it at the moment.

otherwise i think this is a great topic to push and that beginners are discouraged/discriminated against with the system as is.

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Hear, hear.

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As a suggestion, I found this topic in the list to be one of the more useful, but the relevant part happens halfway down, so I’d suggest linking this reply specifically:

Also, when linking a specific reply, maybe specify that you meant it in case someone gets confused out of not being used to the forums yet? (I mean like writing, before the link, “From about reply 45, this thread:” or something like that)

What’s up with brand new accounts on OGS? : baduk (reddit.com)

An ongoing Reddit thread on this issue (until the next one).

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Thanks. That’s a bit of old thread (12k entrance instead of 6k) but still relevant and shows how old is this annoying system.

Your starting rating is 6kyu/ 1500 points true, but it shows as 11.9kyu/ 1150 points until you play some games, when it adjusts, but your actual rating and the humble rating only become the same once your deviation becomes small enough.

Essentially there’s a true rating and a displayed rating but I believe the humble/displayed rating can also be used in matchmaking, which was its intention to allow players to play much lower rated players quicker, which I have a feeling works fine to be honest.

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Humble rating? Maybe it’s working like that altough that’s not what beginners reported.

That reddit thread makes quite clear how an absurd solution is given to a self generated problem. I mean you don’t propose a match with a 6k to a beginner when the goal is to avoid a 6k sandbagger to get that match. Absurd.

Just one more voice.

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That Reddit post, if we’re talking about the one just linked, is somebody complaining that they have to play [?] ranked players.

No matter where you put a singular entry point somebody will have to play these [?] ranked players in order to rank them in the global pool, and likely somebody will complain that they don’t want to play these players.

I think the solution is just don’t play them if you don’t want to, but if you want to help the odd player get a rank sometime then do play them and thanks :slight_smile:

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It has been demonstrated that we don’t need a unique entrance point for the adjustement to work.

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— partly for me becuase I’d like to be able to find these again at some point :slight_smile:

Generally reading this post in regards to what’s wanted for a rating system to do on OGS is quite interesting.

Re:

I don’t think it’s been demonstrated sufficiently if I’m honest.

It was discussed here

and @Vsotvep did some simulations

but I wouldn’t call that sufficient to say how a system of millions of players might behave when only simulating the ratings of about 5, even if one “player” doing something like rating reseating etc might simulate many different players.

I mean it’s probably true that the individual ratings adjustments might not care at what rank people enter at, if we focus on that point, but think of the system of a whole - what problem would you want to address and what does adding many entry points solve?

For instance if we have one set of 12kyu players that dislike playing [?] ranked players, imagine we had entry points of 1d, 5k, 10k, 15k, 20k and 25k for example, we will now likely have 6 different sets of people that will make Reddit posts saying that they don’t like playing with new players that have chosen their ranks at these entry points.

That doesn’t solve the recent Reddit post problem I don’t think for instance.

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Well i am mainly concerned by the entrance (welcoming) of beginners.
So i don’t have big opinion for other levels as there could be much more debates (and OT anyway)

One answer to them is play unrated. Well that’s what i advise when they come to ask here what to do. But that’s a mere solution as this is not the usual way, even beginners expect a rating system to work in their interest.
Should i remind that even if they restrict their ranks, rated games with other beginners will be denied as being too far from the entrance point?? How incredible.

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I’m also interested in beginners, but my opinion is that the current system isn’t that bad

It feels like experienced players believe that the new player experience is bad, and maybe since I don’t read reddit that much maybe there’s more beginners there saying that they don’t like the rating system or something (or maybe they don’t like the scoring or other separate issues). I don’t think the system isn’t working however.

It feels like you just have a warped view of how you think things are, as opposed to how they actually are?

^^ here’s a new player, beginner, they lost their first game to a 12kyu, they could match with a 22kyu on their second game and 25kyu on their third for example, and then they started winning games after that too. It wasn’t that bad of an experience from talking to that user.

Similarly

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Not an old thread, it’s been posted today.

The issue here is having a single entry point, which means that if you happen to be at this rank you get faced with the entire pool of [?] players. You will likely either roll over your opponent or get rolled over, in any case not a pleasant experience for those involved, and the main solution proposed is to get better so you can escape the trap that is your current rank.

Of course if people were able to set their rank (or at least had several options), this would improve this issue by (i) splitting the pool of [?] players, and (ii) ensuring that most [?] players you face are not too far off your own level (there will of course be exceptions with people purposefully or not choosing the wrong entry point, but still better than all of them being forced to pick wrong).

A new entry for the compedium, interesting because i missed anoek position on this matter.

Well i am happy to see that quick correct rating by glicko, i hope it happens more often now. I still would favor a special entry point for beginners so that they dont walk through a discouraging experience. 3 games is still too much crushes for someone discovering.

You need a strong mindset and interest to stay playing when what you need is simply have fun and enjoy some fair games. Once in real life i crushed on even a chess player on even then he finally accepted 4 stones and then 9. He never came back.

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I mean that was one of the reddit solutions…

I don’t think that’s a solution even, it’s just saying that you might avoid this when you move upward.

There are threads of discussions about avoiding [?] players

and I agree with the sentiment of

Whether we should have a button that allows you to turn off match ups against [?] ranked players I don’t know. It might be better for the people that just get their games cancelled, and for the people cancelling the games. However what if a large fraction of people around the entry point turn this setting on and new players just can’t really get games because no established players want to play them?

The thing is though, there’s not guarantee at all that anyone knows how to set their own rank correctly.

Realistically people will either choose some rank they have on another sever, maybe they’ll pick 5d from a fox rating, or 10kyu from a pandanet rating which probably won’t correspond well to OGS ranks, or, and I imagine more likely, they’ll tend to underpick their actual rating - The logic being that you don’t know exactly what your rating is on this server compared to another, and if you underestimate you’ll get some easier games and rank up, while if you overestimate it might not be a whole lot of fun on the journey down.

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I can understand this perspective of course, but even if you had the ideal first five games, whatever that looks like, we’d still have large dropoff. I think Go and these types of abstract games in general probably just aren’t for everyone as much as we’d like it to be. People try it and then they move on and maybe they find other types of board games, multiplayer ones, or dice ones, or card based ones that they like better, or they find some other hobbies :slight_smile:

I think actually finding an equal matchup between two new players, complete beginners, would be very difficult in reality. If you had two new people turn up at a go club, I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to be evenly match, one might beat the other 100% of the time. One new player might be say immediately at the OGS 25kyu level, because surrounding and capturing and things make sense, while another might be more at the 30+kyu OGS level.

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And when you want to sandbag some “?” players for fun, they’re nowhere to be seen. What be cool to have restriction by deviation or at least some script to notify me when there’s “?” offer so we can make a team of beginner hunters.

That’s what I always recommend. Lots of problems with pointless invasions, bad manners, scoring mistakes can be solved by just getting good. Except for cheating.

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Sure, i got that too. And most clubs have a limited amount of players to chose to play with.

But that’s not a reason to not have a system trying to bring the most fair possible matching and instead to bring a systematic deny of it.

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