@mghrn55 : thank you for your respectful and detailed reply to my post.
mghrn55 :
"1 - the player in question, my2sons, has had a rating variance (highest to lowest) under 100 (87 to be exact) for the last 90 days. That is not exactly stuff with which to raise a red flag or accusations of sandbagging."
moonbus: the rating of the player in question shows a five-year variance ranging from 1697 to 2100, or 400 points. I looked over his games before agreeing to take part in the proposed challenge and realized, based on the quality of his play (irrespective of rating), that I would be up against a player seriously under-rated at the time of the challenge, against whom I would probably struggle to merely draw. I advised my captain of this; she decided to go ahead with the challenge anyway on the strength of the other pairings. In answer to startreader's question, "does it matter?" — yes, it does, in the case of a player whose rating has not 'evened out' over the course of many games. Any clan captain would be well-advised to take this into account when considering a challenge involving this particular player.
mghrn55 :
"2 - clan chess is team chess. The ultimate goal is to win clan challenges. get the challenges into the books so that we can set more challenges with the same clan. As I had stated in my post, this is necessitated because site admin had to put in a limit of 3 challenges in progress between 2 clans at anytime. That is because of the shenanigans of the 4 colluding clans in 2016."
moonbus: Not to split hairs here, but clan chess is not team chess. This is not merely a semantic quibble. Team chess, whether professionally internationally organized, or here at RHP, is more narrowly regulated than clan chess at RHP. Teams are all the same size and play to a fixed schedule. FIDE and USCF rules explicitly state that every player shall play to the best of his ability at all times. In team chess, any player who resigned a won game would get a severe reprimand from the tournament director, and any team which did so systematically would be disqualified.
There was much discussion last year whether the clan captains wanted to see clan chess regulated to a similar degree; the consensus was that they did not. I accept that and have decided to stay on for a while to see whether the modifications made to the clan system are to my liking. I am willing to give them a chance.
mghrn55 :
3 - "I did not speak for my2sons in my post, but myself only. That being I will not resign clearly won games. I have resigned games that I was losing and chose not to fight on when the challenge was decided. I also offer draws on close games in decided challenges."
moonbus: I am pleased to hear that. In the case of my two games, it was not so. My opponent resigned in clearly superior positions.
mghrn55 :
"I had proposed in site ideas, that along with a separate player rating for clan games, I had also suggested a change to the rating formula that would shrink the rating change after completed clan games. That would have addressed the complaints of rating manipulations."
moonbus: quite a number of proposals were made to redress some grievances. I would have supported yours and said so then; I say it again now. Unfortunately, the modifications actually made address only the symptom, not the causes, of the grievances; for example, the arbitrary move limit. This has already resulted in some 2017-challenge games being discounted because they either timed out or went to checkmate under the move limit, and the clan challenge result was tipped the other way because of it. For those clans involved, the cure was no better than the disease.
mghrn55 :
"In summing up, Metallica (and other clans) players do not resign clan games to manipulate their ratings. But rather to collect the challenge wins for their clan. There are still those out there who continue to insist that rating manipulation was the big problem out there. When the real problem was the challenge manipulation, i.e. collusion, which was the problem that had to be, and was addressed."
moonbus:
You're reversing symptom and cause. The reason why certain clans started colluding was that they were aggrieved at what was perceived to be systematic rating manipulation. While I did not agree with their methods, it occurred to me that their grievance was not entirely baseless. Not being privy to any other player's intentions, I am willing to accept on your so-say that no Metallica player resigns won games in order to artificially drop his rating; nonetheless the
effect is the same, whatever the motive.
Yours cordially,
moonbus