Life In 19x19

Over the last six or eight months I've seen several players' KGS rating adjust by half a stone or more. Some of them are quite strong, so they should be more stable, in theory.

Is this a figment of my imagination, or has your rating moved up or down independent of your strength?

Note, I am not at all ratings obsessed, nor am I angry or happy, nor am I condemning or complimenting KGS in any way. I'm just intrigued if anybody might be seeing ratings drift?

Thanks.

You really shouldn't be so obsessed with ratings. Ratings are just there to pair you up with a player of similar strength or to set a proper handicap. KGS does a great job of this, probably better than any other server. My rank is sinking, and in fact, my graph looks similar to yours, but that's mostly due to the fact that KGS doesn't offer my preferred time system. Also, too many escapers lead to unstable ratings. Hope this helps!

This is what a friend told me in a private chat just a few days ago:

KGS made the ranks stronger again, everyone under 1d went down a rank

[..] I think they are trying to match ogs more

And I LOLed

daal wrote:You really shouldn't be so obsessed with ratings. Ratings are just there to pair you up with a player of similar strength or to set a proper handicap. KGS does a great job of this, probably better than any other server. My rank is sinking, and in fact, my graph looks similar to yours, but that's mostly due to the fact that KGS doesn't offer my preferred time system. Also, too many escapers lead to unstable ratings. Hope this helps!

This seemed funnier when I wrote it yesterday. Apologies if I throttled your thread. I guess I was in a silly mood. In any case, I hadn't thought about the possibility that someting other than my win record was causing my rank to decline, but now that you mention it, it does seem plausible, though rather difficult to verify.

I also think there has been an overall downwards trend. At least for the last month I am pretty sure of it, since I stopped playing with a previously active account and it went down about 0.2 ranks.

I noticed that they decreased a little as well, don't think it is anything to do with Dragon though

The people who manage go servers do adjust ratings from time to time. There was a big adjustment on KGS a few years ago. Furthermore, overall ratings can be affected by changes in the population playing. For example, if US or European (also Asian) pros play rated games on the same terms as all other players they will probably push down the ratings of the other players. This happened on IGS 20 years ago when no one could enter with rank above 4d without permission of the administration of the server. Consequently many pros who wanted to be anonymous had to start at 4d, thereby deflating ratings of everyone below them. Ratings or ranks are of little meaning intrinsically. Just be glad you can play at all

Maybe the anchors got changed.

gowan wrote:Ratings or ranks are of little meaning intrinsically. Just be glad you can play at all

Hope I don't make shodan.

Weird rating behaviour lately. First up and then down, and plenty that is. Just saying....

I skipped a day and my rating spiked halfway to the next level up. Fortunately I have my game skills to quickly return me to reality.

In hindsight I found the interesting rating behaviour quite invigorating. Having to thrash one's way from 1k to danhood against an endless sea of intervening players is, I guess, a gory interpretation of "putting your money where your mouth is".