Welcoming beginners and OGS rating system (A compendium)

I’m not sure I would say anyone is systematically denying it.

You can’t know how good a player is until they play a game, they can’t play a game until you pair them with someone, and you can’t know if it was “fair” unless they either get an established rating (by playing more games), or they play the same person over and over and see if they were equally likely to win or lose.

Let’s park the idea of multiple entry points for the moment, because I’m not sure that actually solves any problems, and doesn’t make more and even similar problems.

If everyone comes in at a single entry point the people at that rating are always going to be the ones with an issue on average I would believe. You don’t want the [?] would be 1d’s playing people too low, and you don’t want the [?] would be 25kyu’s playing people too high, so it makes sense to me that the starting point should be somewhere in the middle. if 1d is about 1900 and 25kyu is about 600 say, then the “middle” is about 1250. Now we agree that 1500/6kyu seems a bit too high, but these new players can play as though they entered a good bit lower, since they’re supposed to be treated as 11.9kyu/ 1150.

So this seems to make sense to me, it’s somewhere in the middle, sure we could shift it up or down a bit, but I don’t think it would make a big difference to how it “feels”.

Still this entry point issue is not unique to Go, I’ve seen it in rts games on pc too, with an elo system that ends up being very volatile around the entry point, and I’ve seen it in other modified elo systems in other abstract games on other servers where there’s ranges of ratings, where, if you’re in there it’ll be hard to get an even/fair game, but much easier once you get out of that range.

Even with Fox server having multiple entry points there’s still big issues I would argue, since if you’re 3dan, the highest entry point say, you don’t know whether you’ll be playing a real 3dan that ranked up and stays at that level, or a pro player or some sandbagger or someone that’s doing a ranking up to 8/9dan challenge with a new account :slight_smile: So I’m pretty sure even the 3dan range would be very volatile and hard to get even games at on Fox, unless you’re very picky (reject new players or players on win streaks, which I’ve seen people do), but that’s not that different to what’s being discussed here.

Anyway the good thing with glicko2 + humble rank, (aside from other concerns), is that it can adjust fast. You can be at 6kyu/11.9kyu and play against 25kyus after only a couple (two!) of games, and you could equally be provisionally seen as 2kyu after a few games which was kind of one of the points being made here

I’m not sure I see that as a bad thing?

1 Like