Using myself as an example, please see the attached image. I can't make heads or tails of lightning bolt, clock, and turtle icons.

I think it is totally confused because you live in Antartica and you are one of he few, so ranks are based on a small sample size.




Actually, I think it is just different ratings based on blitz, live and turn-based games. About the only good thing I have found so far on OGS is that it does separate ranks based on time settings.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

I always choose Antarctica when I can because national rivalries are a bit... passionate in my part of the world.



Thank you. I tried the Help and F.A.Q. sections of the site but was unable to gin up the required keywords.

My "overall" rating is higher than any of the other ratings. Doesn't make any sense to me.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Me too. It's a common thing and confusing. I read the explanation a while ago, but can't remember it.

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Occupy Babel!

As the 4 ranks are calculated independently (overall vs overall, blitz vs blitz), then decreases/increases are not necessarily the same.

A simple example:
- You played and won 1 blitz game, 1 live game and 1 correspondence game.
- Your blitz, live and correspondence rating increased by the same amount (for simplicity, assume that these victories were against opponents with an overall rank exactly equal to their other ranks).
- However, your overall rank just increased by 3 victories and is higher than all the others.

It makes little sense that it could be additive. If so, someone who is 2d in each categories could potentially be 6d overall. A weighted average makes more sense.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

It's not totally additive: as I said, the ratings are calculated independently.
If your overall rating starts deviating much from your time-specific rating, then losses will drag it down more than wins will improve it (since you will be playing players weaker than your overall rating would suggest).

I don't like the 4 ratings "experiment", which apparently turned permanent, but I think the math behind it is solid.

Explanation by extreme example of the main effect:
.................
Suppose that everyone else has the same rank in all categories except for two people, Alice and Bob.

Alice is 4kyu at blitz and 8kyu at correspondence because she is too lazy to read and plays correspondence like a blitz game. Bob is 1 dan at correspondence and 4kyu at blitz because he plays through all possible variations with the analysis tool before playing and hates deciding quickly.

Now, Bob is playing mostly correspondence games, so his overall rank is about 1 dan like his correspondence rank.
Every hundredth game he plays a blitz game against Alice who plays no other games.

This will not impact Bob's overall rank a lot because he plays lots of other games. But Alice, who has the same blitz rank as Bob will win half her games, so her overall rank will become 1 dan after some time, despite the fact that her blitz rank is 4k only. (The rank points for Alice come from the many people Bob plays, so a lot of people will have a slightly worse overall rank because of this despite not playing Alice themselves.)
..................

This is not an artifact of showing the ranks for different time settings, but it occurs on all servers that allow different time settings. If you play blitz/correspondence games against people who suck at blitz/correspondence, your rank will be overvalued (duh). If you try out time settings that you are not good at, your rank will plummet disproportionally.

PS: It is also true that your overall rank will more quickly adjust to a change in your skills, because all games contribute to correct your rating, but this is strictly temporary until you have reached a stable rank in all categories.

If you lose, your overall rank will also be decreased for all time categories.

So, this effect only gives a difference if you are clearly underrated. Your overall rank will approach your correct rank more quickly, but then it will also start more quickly to give you diminishing returns on your victories. So, it will not overshoot your correct rank because of this effect.

The OGS rank display has officially gone off the deep end. This is indefensible from a UI perspective.

I think it shows the rank at the start of the game.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

You're probably right, and it's a useless approach. If my opponent's rank changes throughout the match, then the listed rank is only accurate for the first few stones. It would be better to show the real-time rank. And if my opponent's rank does not change throughout the match, showing the real-time rank would still be accurate. There is no downside to the approach they didn't take.

It gets worse. After the game is finished, it then shows up in your history with your current rank. Not the rank you had at the beginning. Not at the end. But always both players' rank at the time you look at the list.

This is literally the least useful thing they could have chosen for a game history.

I also don't really buy the explanation of the overall rank drift. I do not, ever, play ranked non correspondence games on OGS. And yet, my overall rating is higher than any of my three others. It differs from my correspondence rank by a handful of points.

[edit: I realise this all sounds very negative. I should hasten to add that my overall OGS experience has been very positive! It's where I play Go online! There's a list of long-standing UI glitches like this that bother me (like the one where you can't see how much time you have left on the weekend, if the game pauses the clock for the weekend), and I assume they will get fixed at some point. In the meantime though, if you don't accept merge requests in 2017 then developers will feel free to gripe until you fix things ]

[edit 2: After my last game ended, my overall rank (1686.9) came to within a few decimal points of my correspondence rank (1685.3), which is still the only kind of game I have ever played. Close, but... weird eh.]

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Confucius in the Analects says "even playing go is better than eating chips in front of tv all day." -- kivi

joellercoaster, play on the beta.online-go.com some and if any of those UI glitches remain, please report them.

-roy7

Will do. I need to start a new account for beta, right?

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Confucius in the Analects says "even playing go is better than eating chips in front of tv all day." -- kivi

Yeah, the beta site has it's own accounts just for testing.