Is it okay to specify ranges?

I play rated, but when I do, I specify that my opponents must be below 1450 to play. Is this okay or classified as cheating? Thank you!
Note: I only play classical rated, and I am rated at about 1150.

Yeah thats fine

It's not cheating, that's what the feature is for!

In theory the ratings of your opponents shouldn't make any difference to where your own rating ends up. The change to your rating after a win or a loss depends on the size of the ratings gap between the two players. That means losing 19 out of 20 to people 400 points above you would have much the same effect on your rating as winning 10 out 20 against people who have the same rating as you, or winning 19 out 20 against people who are 400 less than you.

What will be different is how challenging and how enjoyable the games are for both players, but not what effect that series of games has on your rating.

In fact real-life chess tournaments usually are divided into sections that are rating restricted, so players of wildly different rating rarely play each other there.

Is this really true? I would instinctively say that if you gain a 1900 rating by beating 1600s you are not a 1900. Because the skill level required to beat your "fellow" 1900s is different.

In fact, the Lichess policy on awarding LM titles states that your rating has to be based on games with players around your level (plus or minus 300 points). This implies that a rating based on beating inferior players is regarded as false.

well it happens that to get a 1900 rating beating 1600s, you must be really consistent at beating 1600s.

the LM opponent rating requirement only applies after you get the required rating, and that's there because you could cheat the system by, say, beating twenty 1500s in a row. when i got LM the opponent rating restriction wasn't there, so i actually did that and told thibault something like "hey that shouldnt be a thing" within my application :p

In response to #4:

As with so many things in life, "it depends". To achieve a rating of 1900 playing other 1600s, a player would have to score 85% over a fairly large number of games.

That is quite difficult to do if the player is not somewhere around 1900 strength.

On the other hand, it is true that past a certain rating difference, the relationship between rating difference and expected score defined by traditional ELO begins to break down.

Specifically, the higher rated players tend to score better than predicted by the model once the rating difference gets much more than 400-500.

That means that under the traditional ELO model, if your playing strength is 1900, and you only play people 1500 or under, you would probably end up with a higher rating than if you played people of a similar strength and rating.

Jeff Sonas did an examination of this (the deviation between empirical results and those predicted by ELO) a while back for Chessbase: http://en.chessbase.com/post/the-elo-rating-system-correcting-the-expectancy-tables.

While that is ELO and not Glicko2, as far as I'm aware there are no differences between ELO and Glicko2 in how E (the expected score) behaves as a function of rating difference that would avoid this problem at extreme rating differences.

Having said that, it's been a long time since I've actually looked at Glicko2, so I may be way off-base :)

TL;DR: Yes, if a player plays only substantially weaker opposition, then that player's rating will likely be higher than if the player played opposition of a similar strength. However, that "substantially weaker" seems to be rather more than 300 points (in fact, in the Sonas work above, it seems that when the rating difference is 300 points or less, the higher rated player actually scores worse than expected by the model).

There is an argument to be made that it's cheating (at least a little) by always playing people much weaker than oneself (as set out in #7).

But as with the others, I see no problem at all in LBMF1 not wanting to play people too much stronger than themselves - it's likely that neither side would enjoy the game if there's too much of a mismatch.

I can only say that when I win back a Top 50 player trophy by beating 1700 and 1800s......I certainly feel like a fake :p Best to beat the Top 50 guys to prove your right to be there :)

If it is available as a feature on lichess, it isn't cheating.