It would be neat if the site would make a "Death" bot that closes your account if you lose...
I think the point of the site is to make money off of facilitating people's ability to play chess on line. Throwing out losers would be counterproductive.
"Throwing out losers" would be crazy. I don't think anyone's saying that?
If a user is informed and wants to play some adaptive "Death" bot with consequences, then it's just an option they'd be exercising.
Obviously users can close their accounts whenever they want and losers can throw themselves out if they choose.
Perhaps the site could offer users the opportunity to play "Death" to help them decide whether to go or stay at the point of closing an account.
I think it could be fun to see even more bots with consequences. Perhaps bots that would drain someone's blitz / rapid / etc rating down to 100 if they lose!
Rating is not some video game style collectible; it is an estimate of one's skill that is used to pair opponents of roughly equal strength against each other. Randomly lowering peoples rating would only serve to mess up the match making system. There is a reason why sandbagging is prohibited on this site.
What's "random" about an informed choice for users to be able to play bots that would do this? I think of all matches Vs bots very much as a video game. That's exactly what it is and I accept it that way.
Against other (roughly equally) low rated humans, I've had and seen crucial mouse slips happen that couldn't OTB. They could have ruined a couple of my games if I hadn't still won anyway - but they would definitely affect accuracy, blunders, etc.
Also, Chess.com's rating isn't FIDE / ELO / anything that carries serious weight and if you think otherwise you can refer yourself to Daniel Naroditsky's "unfiltered" interview with Dina Belenkaya on YT if you want to hear more (see chapter "do you take online rating seriously?").
Then there are all the other, even more crazy things that happen here, like people playing random moves - which is their right - but I'm not sure they're really people. Many players on here don't take chess seriously. Clubs and OTB tournaments are the right place for that.
In my experience of playing 200+ rated blitz players here over the past month or so (since switching from playing bots almost exclusively), I see life is very messy here and not something you can seriously justify to me in a way that I'd accept is checkmate.
Sandbagging... We see people on YouTube create accounts explicitly for the purpose of speedrunning to some arbitrary chess.com rating. IMs and GMs do it. They know what they're doing and so do those of us who watch. They're not going to see their accounts closed for abuse because double standards exist and these people "have the cards".
In low ratings games I see many games abandoned / resigned even after a handful of moves. For sure there are even low rating accounts being run by people who literally give out a dodgy phone number just after losing an important piece. The game still had a good 20+ moves left to play out and on post-analysis, that game remained pretty even.
If the community rules were applied more strictly I wouldn't bother to argue your point, but I've only been playing maybe a month or so and my experiences show me that there's all kinds of people here. My experience says your assertions are off.
In principle, the reason why streamers are allowed to do "speedruns", while the masses ae not, is because Chess.com officially approves the latter, and refunds any rating points lost. Naroditsky's speedruns, for instance, arguably have educational value. Now, it is true that this is an explicitly elitist policy, that allows for streamers like Hikaru, to humiliate random players for the sake of "content", but at the very least this system refunds rating points and gives players the opportunity to play famous streamers. On the other hand, the system that you're suggesting, viz., that anyone will be able to automatically sandbag their rating to 100, will result in the same problems, without any of the checks and balances. I don't know what the lower rated pool is like—it is certainly possible that there are hordes of 600 rated players beating up on people rated 300, to sate their own fragile egos. But your system would only make this a thousand times worse, as aspiring streamers and content creators "speedrun" through the lower rating levels. Your suggestion would only make sandbagging much easier, and much more prevalent on the site, which would decrease the user experience for everyone.
edited moderator AndrewSmith
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