What exactly are the differences between Gold and Platinum membership types with regards to the Opening Explorer? On the page listing the differences between the memberships types both are listed as 'Unlimited'.

Is the only difference the ability to explore all chess.com games?

There is no difference. Having a Gold or a Platinum membership gives you the exact same access to the Games Explorer. It is only free memberships that have limited access.

But...

"Gold Members have unlimited use of the Game Explorer with the main Chess.com games database and full access to their own games in Explorer. However, to explore the games of other members on Chess.com, you must be a Platinum Member."

so not quite the same access?

Would also add that before as a platinum member previously before the downtime I could do a search of all chess.com games with a certain move sequence, now it seems I can only search the games of one member at a time.  Am I doing something wrong or was that functionality too difficult to maintain?

MM78 - we're still working on the search functions.

One difference between Gold and Platinum is that with Platinum you can explore other members' games, whereas with Gold you can only explore your own.

Erik, I messaged you about this to (but you can just reply here if you catch this first) but I was wondering if we're going to get access again to all member games (at once) rather than just having to search by member-name.

Narz, can you explain what type of searches you'd like to do? Unfortunately we need to limit the # of results we return because just paginating through 3 million games is too expensive on our DB.

I'd like to be able to search all user games but I can understand your dillema. How about all the games of players with an average rating >1600? Or even > 2000. I would very much appreciate that capability and the > 2000 games only search ought to cut out about 98% of all games (60,000 to scan thru instead of 3,000,000). What do you think?

Can you provide the link you are referring to when you're talking about searching games? I still don't see the usefulness of searching for all games of members rated > 2000. Are you just going to paginate through 60k games and randomly choose one that you want to play through? There must be other search criteria or parameters that you'd be looking for when wanting to play through a particular game.

I want to be able to play thru based on opening moves like one can do with the Master games.  There used to be this feature, even with Gold but it got discontinued.  I was under the impression that it was still available to Platinum players. 

This is the link I'm talking about : http://www.chess.com/explorer/

THe options (under database) are Master Games, My Games & Other Player Games.  There used to be an option for "all chess.com games" but I can understand that that would be too big a strain on the system.  Still, I think limiting it down to >2000 player games and having it just available to premimum and/or platinum players would've pose too much of a strain.

I find the feature useful & entertaining, being able to follow along games from various openings.

jay, did I answer your question(s)?

Basically, I want to be able to look thru high-level chess.com games by opening the way it is possible to do with "Master games" (and used to be with all chess.com games, again I understand why this feature was discontinued).

Yeah, I understand...we'll have to work on a solution for this. What if we simply imported high level chess.com games into our master games database? Would that work for you?

That's be cool Jay, it'd be somewhat neater to have it seperate though, just to be able to see the difference between the older games & the more modern high-level chess.com games.

Let me know what you decide on & that's for being receptive.

Bump!  Any new thoughts Jay?

Its on our list of todos. We'll most likely just start importing chess.com games into the master database. The thinking is that a "master game" is a master game regardless of where its played, and the opening explorer is there to show all the reasonable variations in certain lines and whats played the most. It doesnt make a lot of usability sense to separate chess.com games +2000 from master games over the board. It will be a while before we get to this though. Lots of stuff to do first. :)

Ok Jay, if you would, please post here or drop me a line when it gets done!

Thanks!