Preference to conceal ratings

[ddugovic]

I prefer a user preference to conceal all ratings to help players who deal with rating anxiety. One time I accidentally wrote a userscript which did this (while trying to implement something like NoJoke's 3000 rating) and tried it for a month, which was relaxing.

https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/obfuscate-new-users-rating
https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/disable-feature-where-lichess-tells-you-your-percentile-ranking

[jasontalyor7]

I would go even further. I think that ratings, by default, should be totally invisible to everyone except people they are actually playing. A few seconds could be added to the game ?pre-timer? (before a game is allowed to start) to allow each player to adjust their difficulty level allotment, since if you know you are playing a better player you will want to do certain openings and if it is a worse player perhaps some fun trap openings for kicks and giggles. Anyway, the public ratings is probably why everyone uses fake names here, and it's not good since then it leads to things like people having multiple accounts, complaining about stupid things like lag splitting (to equalize hyperbullet games), etc. This sort of totally unnecessary worry about what their public ratings are also indirectly caused the problem I complained about here:

#8664 (comment)

[ddugovic]

This was implemented sometime later the same year.