Schachus wrote:
In fact, there might be players(me for example), who explicitly dont want a reset, as long as they are just slow and steady improving, because the rating is the testimony for said improvement(you dont just imagine it, your results really get better). I got one reset from 8k to 5k because it was appearent I improved and the old rating was not appropriate for me anymore. And since then I only increased my rank by 1 (more or less following the rating), thus I can see my rating evolve from the reset to 1600 to its current stage(1802) documenting my improvement.
So you happen to chose a conservative / pessimistic self promotion policy. If everybody would do that (avoiding the reset policy), it leads to overall deflation, the system needs an positive epsilon parameter that increases everybody's rating by a small amount for every tournament game.
Other players happen to chose a more liberal / optimistic self-promotion policy. If everybody would do that (exploiting the reset policy), it leads to overall inflation, the system needs a negative epsilon parameter that decreases everybody's rating by a small amount for every tournament game.
In practise, some players are conservative and some players are liberal with self promotions. I suppose this is normal and it has always been like this, even long before the EGD existed. And it's fine, as long as they balance each other out. As far as I can tell, this is mostly the case: The EGD works fairly well with a small positive epsilon value (so perhaps resets should be applied a bit more often).
Instead of using an epsilon parameter to balance long term inflation / deflation, I find that tweaking the reset policy works just as well or even better. And I find that a more liberal reset policy works better than a conservative one (like the EGD reset policy), which means that the average European tournament player is not overly conservative or overly liberal when it comes to self-promotions.
Schachus wrote:
With your system, the rating got reset to 4k and to 3k (and would have gotten reset to 2k, if not for the fact, that the tournament where I registered experimentally as a 2k for some reason didnt make its way into EGD). So the only thing I see in your version of the rating, is that It improved from 1800 reset to 1840 over last 2(or3?) tournaments, the tournaments before are rendered irellevant to the ratng cause of the reset.
How relevant should historical data be? The fact is that
Artem Kachanovskyi is currently 1p (I suppose we can agree on that). Does it matter how he got there? It's the system's job to estimate everybody's
current level as best as it can. Ideally all the ratings should behave like a random walk around the "real" skill level of each player at each moment. I don't see rating points as something that one earns (like money or XP points in a video game). You try to improve and if you do, the system should reflect what's happened in the real world as quickly and as accurately as possible. To do that, it needs all the help it can get.
The rating system is basically a measurement device, calibrated to a certain scale. For go, that scale is the go rank scale, which is based on handicap. The EGD has insufficient data on handicap games (other than declared ranks, which are implicitly referring to handicap games), so it uses declared ranks from newcomers, expected winrates, resets and epsilon as a fallback.
With your 2k experiment: I think the system should listen to the experimental self-promotion, but if your results don't support it, the system should quickly gravitate back to a rating that matches your results (preferrably with minimal effect on your opponent's ratings from your experiment). Note that if you'd later promote to 2k again, the system won't reset your rating, because it does not exceed your highest declared rank anymore (both the EGD and revised policies work that way). So a "failed" experiment would mean that later, you'd have to fight to a 2k rating the hard way.
