Has anybody else felt this?
Just look at my graph, I tried for so long just to reach 1500 but never could . Finally broke it and now I'm nearly 1600 but it doesn't feel right .
That's because you aren't 'nearly 1600'. Well, you are and you aren't. Looking at your rating, it's 1591±61. You can mouseover your rating to show your Glicko-2 rating range. Basically Glicko-2 ratings are given as ranges; we just centralise them (to 1591 in your case).
Ratings are not a fixed thing. In general, you shouldn't really compare ratings that are like 50-100 points of each other in any Elo-like system because the line is very blurred.
Ratings are only relevant within the pool of players. Your rating xxxx here shouldn't be compared to anything else directly.
You've been on lichess since the beginning of August. It's not likely that significant ratings inflation has happened in such a short period of time. In any case, to really prove that it had happened would need statistics on a large group of players, not just the feelings of a few people.
As for your personal rating, it looks like it's actually risen pretty steadily from about 1200 when you started up to around 1550 now.
You might not feel much better now than you were, but you probably actually are! It can come down to just making a mistake or two less per game than you used to, which can happen just from the sharpness that comes with playing more often.
The "nearly 1600" is within the expected random fluctuations around your underlying trend of improvement. Like people said, your rating at any given time is really just the best guess about where you are, and the only thing that can be said with a lot of confidence is that you're very likely within 60 of that number.
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On the other hand... it would be interesting to know if there are any studies on possible ratings inflation here!
Given how fast the site has been expanding, it's certainly possible there could have been either inflation or *deflation*. The way this would happen is this...
When people first join, the system estimates their rating at 1500, but also knows not to take it to seriously. Anyone who plays one of the newbies in their first few games will have their ratings adjusted based on the result, but only by a small amount compared to what the change would have been if their rating had been known with more confidence.
Nevertheless, if the true average rating of all the new people coming in is
actually less than 1500. everyone who played them would get a little more nudge up than was really warranted, and the set of ratings overall would become a bit inflated.
Likewise if the true average rating of newbies was *over* 1500 instead of under, deflation would happen.
I don't know any reason to suppose the people joining now are much different in their makeup than the existing pool of players, but they easily could be. That sort of thing is common in the lifecycle of any product or website.
As a math guy, I would expect the LICHESS ratings to settle out and any "inflation" will take care of itself as there are more members.
The real value in the rating, within any pool of players, is it is useful in getting matched against players of similar strength - so you get a good game.
I have been watching some "classical games" (i.e. 10-15 minutes per side) here which prompted me to do a search for "lichess rating inflation" after seeing players around 2200 make bad mistakes.
There is definite rating inflation here as a few years ago I remember being rated in the 1900s for classical someone could be in the top 1% of classical players. Now to get that you'd need a few hundred more points.
I used to play on Lichess three years ago when the ratings were deflated, back then a 1200 rating here was equivalent to about 1600 on
chess.com. That's the way I liked it, but then at some point they decided to fix the "problem" and gave everyone like 500 more points, somehow between now and then it has inflated even more because as I said used to be you could be in the top 1% with a rating in the 1900s. I reckon if you want to know what your Lichess rating would have been on here three years ago take your rating now and subtract 700 points from it.
Just another thing to notice is that the people rated in the 2100-2200s here show the conduct of people rated much lower in their behavior, like the following game I just watched where a guy rated 2108 was utterly lost already by move 19, but for some reason kept on playing for 10 more moves like a noobie.. (Note that his opponent was not in time trouble and this was a "classical game") Then like a pouting beginner he just left the game without resigning. This is not how I would expect people rated 2100 and above, whose ratings are supposed to designate very experienced expert players to act, yet they do and I've seen examples of this several times as I watch the classical games.
Link to the player that is suspicious.
I've been on
chess.com - had trouble keeping a 2000 rating there - rated around 2300 correspondence on this site. That seems high to me. Maybe it's appropriate for the pool of players on this site. Can't directly compare ratings.