ICC News Item #1162

NEWS 1162 (20-Mar-99)
Initial ratings

As mentioned in news 1160, everybody now starts with some
initial rating in each rating category before they have played
any games.  This is intended to help make provisional ratings
more accurate, and to help new members to find opponents of
appropriate caliber.  Your initial rating is normally based on
the rating that you gave when you registered.  But you can ask
any administrator to change your initial rating to whatever you
think it should be, within reason.  If no administrator is
available ("who *" lists them), leave a message for fishbait,
e.g. "message fishbait Please set my loser's rating to 1800".
We want you to be happy with your initial rating, and for it
to reflect your guess of what your rating will be.  If you've
already played a few games but your rating is still way off
from where it should be, feel free to ask us to adjust it.
After all, if you are underrated by hundreds of points, it's
not really fair to your opponents.

By popular demand, in a few days we'll change it so that the
"finger" command does not display a line for rating categories
in which the player has no games played.  So if you never play
Loser's chess or whatever, don't worry that it now looks as if
you have a rating for Loser's chess; in a few days it will
effectively disappear.  The hidden rating will still be visible
via "assess" or some other command.

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