| | I really hate having to "maintain" my rank on KGS. I play rated games as a way to track my progress, but KGS ranks are a constant moving target, so unless one plays there regularly there is no way to really track one's progress.
First, when you don't play there often enough, you get the dreaded "?" attached to your rank, which makes it nearly impossible to get a match with someone, because everyone is so afraid of losing a game to a sandbagger and dropping their rank.
Second, even if you don't play any games, your rank continues to drift upwards on its own (until it reaches the dreaded question mark phase again). Heck, if I really wanted a good rank, all I have to do is quit playing. I understand the logic behind the design - even if you're not playing here, you're probably still playing elsewhere and improving (as compared to your previously matched opponents). But somehow, the actual implementation seems a little faulty.
I like the rating graphs of turn-based servers such as DGS or LittleGolem, where I can actually compare how well I'm doing with when I first started a number of years ago. I can see, for example, the spikes in the graph for the time when I was unemployed for 3 months (I gained 3 stones). These graphs are always the same and my rank doesn't change if I don't play. But these ranks are also about 3 months delayed since it takes so long to finish most games there.
But I'm also tiring of playing so many simultaneous games at once. Its not easy to do. I lose track of my strategies in each game and make too many mistakes, or I don't think long enough about certain board positions in any one game and end up playing slow motion blitz games.
I've never really enjoyed playing real-time games online. I think various anxieties starting with the time pressure of the clock, being afraid of clicking a wrong button somewhere and not being able to get back to where I was (and I'm not talking about misclicks and undos here), and other pressures of people wanting to chat with me, and popup windows everywhere, and me missing out on whole conversations because I'm a slow typest and poor speller. But I'm getting used to a few of those things now, having run several online tournaments and having things fall apart on me right in the middle (whew, the pressure!).
So anyway, I've decided I want to try and better maintain my KGS rank. I think I can be playing at least one game a week there. That shouldn't be too hard. I usually spend hours staring at the computer anyway, freting about starting a game thinking that at any moment might get interrupted, so I just don't start. When actually, I could have played a couple of games already. I was thinking about joining the AGA shodan challenge this year. Maybe I can make it to 5kyu by next Congress. Also if I want to play in various online tournaments, I would need a stable KGS rank.
So let's see how it goes. One game a week.
I've already got 4 games in for these past 2 weekends. First, I had to catch up my lagging 12k? rank (because I'm never afraid to lose ranked games when playing my friends, or beginners). So I sandbagged a couple of automatches (even though I won, they were horrible games. I made way too many mistakes), and also played a couple of friends who saw me online. But now the rank drift has set in again and I'm up to 5k? even though the highest ranked player I've played so far was only 8k and I was only 6k? after that game (and since no loses yet, I still have the dreaded question mark).
I guess being automatched with another 5kyu once or twice will be a good thing. I'll probably lose, and will probably have a game I can learn from. And I need a few legitimate losses to lose the dreaded question mark.
I hate having to "maintain" my rank.
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| | Posted 10/30/2007 3:11 PM - 160 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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