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The Forgotten Feature - Variants on Chess.com
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The Forgotten Feature - Variants on Chess.com

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ChessMasterGS
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Editors: 

  • @JkCheeseChess (chess.com/variants Custom Games Admin)
  • @Max_Wolfe (chess.com/variants Admin)

Notes:

  • All information in this article will be cited unless considered as common knowledge. If I wasn't clear enough in any part, please comment below so that I can make changes and clarify things. 
  • You may need to join https://www.chess.com/club/4-player-chess to see forum threads linked here.
  • Any claims on popularity of variants were verified by Google Trends and/or private information on player base growth.
  • Please read to the end and read carefully. I would wager that a fast reader could finish this in about 10-15 minutes, but to fully understand this issue, slower is better.
  • Light mode is recommended

Introduction

When you think of chess variants, chess.com has always been a clear pioneer.

Boasting new possibilities in gameplay with variants such as the standard position-based King of the Hill, 3-check, Chess960, and more on their main chess.com/play server, in addition to USCF (United States Chess Federation)-recognized variant bughouse.

Their chess.com/variants server has introduced hundreds of new possible ways to play chess, with 4 Player Chess solidified as one of the most popular, in addition to creative options such as custom board editors, fairy (non-orthodox) pieces, and about 20 gamerules not commonly seen outside of the website. 

Before going into what went wrong... how was it like at the start?

With all of these unique features to the website today, Chess.com has certainly made an effort to popularize them in the past, but how would this compare to the present? As I am aware that not everyone viewing this article will have a deep understanding of the history, I'll give a brief overview. 

As I will mainly focus on chess.com/variants, let's go back to 2016 and 2017, when 4 Player Chess, the predecessor and eventually merger-with of chess.com/variants started.

 In 2016, a website called HelloChess (archived at this link), created by a university student named John Flickinger (@battlemind24) was brought to the attention of the CEO of chess.com, Erik Allebest (@erik). After seeing the website, he was at that time very interested in the prospect of adding 4 Player Chess, and potentially* other variants not commonly seen to this website.

*This is speculation, not facts

In the beginning, without the creation of a dedicated admin team, staff (both future and then-present) members moderated the 4 Player Chess club, and even tried out the game (notably @DanielRensch, who even wrote a short guide on some of the early strategies) for themselves, working alongside the beta player-base.

(Below are some examples, you may go here if you wish to click through some of the forum threads and see more, the bigger numbers are the older pages)

Although sometimes they were prone to having public debates in the threads, it showed to have a positive impact on the game, as every opinion mattered when it came to making crucial changes. Having an informed team where decisions were made by staff members who played the game only helped to benefit the community. 

Despite sometimes having controversy, you could always expect someone with direct contact with the higher-ups of chess.com to respond, see below:

(Note: If you are confused on why premium memberships were mentioned, Teams 4 Player Chess used to require you to have one to invite your own teammates. This was changed so that it was free after a year of 4 Player Chess's release in early 2018.)

2019, the Golden Year |  2020, the Creator Year

Now fully released and with a dedicated volunteer admin team, 4 Player Chess, although not as popular as the main site, was starting to look like it was in a pretty good shape. 

It was around this time that the inaugural (first) Teams Championship was organized (with many others following in the next few years), with an official announcement of the finals eventually being made on @News. If that wasn't enough, the broadcast of the event was featured on Chess.com's Twitch channel and was later posted to YouTube. 

Commentators for the broadcast included chess streamers Botez sister Alexandra (@AlexandraBotez), Jon Ludvig Hammer (@gmjlh), and Wouter Bik (@Bikfoot), which although was a questionable choice as they were not top players, still massively contributed to the popularity of the event, and provided great commentary.

An extra piece of history for you, the famous "double checkmate", game link here. It is only considered checkmate when the checked player's turn comes, so Red and Yellow won this game, despite Blue "also checkmating" Red.

This was only the start, however. In 2020, a wave of top chess creators such as Levy Rozman (@GothamChess), Hikaru Nakamura (@Hikaru) and Eric Rosen (@IMRosen), and many others (often titled in standard) started playing 4 Player Chess. 

Not only this, but 4 Player variants were also starting to catch on at this time, including the historically based variant Chaturaji. (See ancient history of the game here: on Wikipedia, and the chess.com gamerules by going to the chess.com/variants page.)

Although mostly unrelated, a separate admin team for testing and accepting community-made variants was created in 2020 (which still exists to this day), called the Custom Games Admins, or CGAs; in addition, they got a new official club.

With the onset of 2021 however, these videos abruptly stopped from many content creators, and searching for videos on YouTube on related topics usually does not yield many results from 2021-2023. In spite of this, it's still widely accepted that this year was one the best in getting new players to try out the game, and to spread awareness about 4 Player Chess and variants in general.

(Content on variants would briefly resurface for a few months in 2023 due to Duck Chess (and other variants) videos being created by popular streamer @IMRosen, although this success has now subsided as well)


"The Merge" - 2021 onwards

While it's hard to tell from a casual observer's perspective, 4 Player Chess, although not getting more popular in the public's eyes, was definitely hyping up in its own community during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread lockdown. 

With 3 Solo (FFA, but only the winner gets overall points), 1 Speed (Bullet FFA), and additionally 3 Teams Championships finished after 2021, it was looking pretty good. 

Now, onto the important part of this article. You might want to start reading slower now.

Although this is the perceived success, it is important to know that as said before, 4 Player Chess was somewhat stagnating at this point. In addition, staff had taken their eyes off of the project and mainly left it to be worked on by their now singular developer (@spacebar) and the volunteer admin team. 

In addition, the world championships were no longer featured on chess.com's own Twitch channel, instead sidelining it to @fourplayerchess (a 4 Player Chess admin)'s channel, where not many people outside of the community were aware of it.

In the background, chess.com/variants was being built in the background of this all (at this time, 4 Player Chess used chess.com/4-player-chess, although this link still works as a redirect). Launched around 2020, and with a similar programming style to 4 Player Chess, it started by focusing on variants like Atomic and Fog of War, which although were 2 Player variants, were not seen on chess.com/live (the predecessor to chess.com/play), likely due to how it would require more difficult programming. 

At first, it garnered a small group of players, mostly venturing from lichess.org (they had many variants as early as 2018, although similarly to chess.com, they were not as well known) to explore chess.com's versions of these variants. 

As the server added new features, it started exploring historic variants such as Chaturanga, Gothic Chess, created as an alternative to Capablanca Chess, and Courier Chess. In addition, Chaturaji was starting to form a new community separate from the one on the 4 Player Chess server, which would eventually combine. 

All of this was leading up to something bigger, however. 

In November of 2021, @spacebar posted a forum thread announcing the move (or today better known by players as simply "The Merge") of 4 Player Chess to Variants. This meant that chess.com/variants would be serving as the central hub for essentially all variants on chess.com. 

(You can still find variants such as 3-check on chess.com/play today, but there is a separate version on chess.com/variants, as with every other variant on chess.com/play, with the exception of Bughouse). 

Although this seemed like a great idea in the long run, especially with a more modernized design coming, to match the rest of the website, it was immediately met with backlash over some of the other changes being made in the upcoming update in 2022.

What went wrong, Part 1

The most controversial changes at that time seemed simple, but it was far from that. 

The change of starting position in standard 4 Player Chess.

The starting position change was widely seen as unwarranted, mainly because no experts were consulted, and the openings were seen as very forced. Even today, it is unclear who proposed this change (admins by large claim that they also opposed the change), or why it happened despite community backlash.

Defenders of the change were quick to quote this forum thread from 2019, in which the new position was first proposed. (See below)

In 2020, about 7 months later, @Tony, creator of @TeamTerminator1 / @TeamTerminator2 (see more information about them here - their estimated rating is 3000+, far above even the world champions) posted a table detailing the evaluations that his engine gave for the current setups.

Old Standard was found to apparently be the "least balanced", and the now New Standard was evaluated as the 6th most balanced, albeit every player having the same perspective, which helps it to make a bit more sense logically. 

Many dissenters in 2022 pointed out that the new setup was boring in opening theory and had many Fools' mates if played incorrectly (remember, beginner-friendliness matters!). 

Despite there admittedly being more balance, it is important to remember that an engine's evaluation does not constitute how human play will work out. In top teams games, Red/Yellow and Blue/Green generally have the same chances of winning. 

As high level FFA and Solo is generally played like Teams (see why here), there must be a balance between engine evaluation and realistic gameplay. Many have asserted that Green is at an abysmal disadvantage in the New Standard, given how easily they can be mated if Blue does not help out, which can happen often in FFA, as there is no obligation to do so.

Below are some examples of criticism of the change (click in if you want more information), including from top variants streamers and leaderboard players. 

Despite all of this criticism, the changes were applied without considering any feedback, and without any response from chess.com staff excluding the sole developer.

Sub-topic - Community Opinions 2022-2023

There was some brief hope for supporters of Old Standard, however . One example of this is by going back to the 2022 Solo Championship. Clearly, the admins + director of the event (@fourplayerchess) were aware of the situation with the starting position, and decided to do what they could with the rules and hold a vote on whether or not to make the world championship that year Old Standard or New Standard. 

In a resounding victory for Old Standard players (although stats aren't available for this, it can be assumed based on the discussion forum for the championship that it was a very large majority), the legacy position for 4 Player Chess was adopted for the championship. 

This was not without criticism, and valid criticism at that, however. Long-time player Michael Tieber (@empty_K3) was a player who frequently reached the playoffs or even finals of the previous Solo championships, and he pointed out that eventually everybody would have to move on from the past. (Of course, assuming New Standard was there to stay)

(Note: @fourplayerchess's real name is Luke Romanko)

And he was perhaps right. In April of 2023, the landscape was changing. As new players after the merge that joined got used to the game and obtained somewhat high ratings, they were predominately playing New Standard. In addition, older players adjusted and also mainly played the default option.

A vote once again was held, but this time, anticipating the surge in newer players voting, 2/3 of the vote was required to change the championship's starting position to New Standard.

(Note: Rated/Unrated was being discussed because of server issues in the previous championship. For more information, see "What went wrong, Part 3" in this article below)

Well, this is where the real controversy started. Only 63% (3.3....% short of the required population) voted for New Standard. Even among those who supported Old Standard last year, there were many who had moved on and argued against the decision, stating that such a slim margin should not affect the final result.

Although ultimately @fourplayerchess did not overturn the vote, presumably after (surprisingly) discussions with staff** following the 2023 Solo Championship, decided to rename it the "Original Solo" championship and create a new championship called the "Standard FFA" championship. Both championships had the same prize fund of $1000 each, and helped to create a compromise.

**(This is speculation, albeit one with more evidence to potentially back it up than others)

With all this, today, the change is widely accepted as is, as another change (or reversion) of such magnitude would only chase away more players, especially those that joined after 2022. Even amongst veteran players, the Old Standard is rarely played by players today (with the exception of in @Radon's 4 Player Chess League, which was originally created as a community-led project after the merge, predominately uses the Old Standard).

@spacebar has at least been able to honor the veteran community's wishes by making Old Standard available as an alternate setup (which can also be played rated) along with a 3rd option that has been under review; however, the effects of the change are still felt in present time.

What went wrong, Part 2

Although this is a smaller issue, it is still one that is relevant, mainly to custom position/variant creators and players. (See another one of my explanations of this issue here.)

After the merge, players noticed that the default piece design changed. Below is an example.

These were the new (called "Neo") Amazon (Queen + Knight), Chancellor (Rook + Knight), Archbishop (Bishop + Knight), and General (King + Knight) piece textures from left to right. 

It was a common consensus that this was extremely beginner-unfriendly from many veteran players, including myself, given how their shapes don't resemble the piece's movement in any significant manner.

These were the designs from before the merge (now called "Standard", ironically). Notice how despite being more simplistic, these designs actually show how the pieces move. For example, the General now clearly depicts a Knight with a king crown, showing exactly how the piece moves without prior knowledge required. 

Despite this controversy, @spacebar's reply on Discord to a complaint I made, even agreeing to the points in it, perhaps shows*** that even the developers do not have a say in this matter. 

***This is speculation, not fact

Response:

A bit disappointing, no?

What went wrong, Part 3

The things I just talked about were only one part of the problem. Although the starting position for 4 Player Chess was changed, it was clearly not the main cause of players leaving. 

A mere 2 months into "The Merge", forum posts started popping up, complaining of server issues, constant crashes, and lag (on the server's end). 

One of the first reports can be seen here, made by veteran player @Indipendenza in April.

This post is one of the first times that a staff member has acknowledged a post outside of @spacebar. However, it's also important to note that @BabYagun as of that post was now the head of the Variants department at chess.com, so such a response, or even a self-report announcement should've been made a long time ago to at least show effort.

Although there are many other examples that could be given, we can start to see how 2017 and 2022 compare - slow responses, sloppy planning, and overall lack of knowledge of any issue in 2022, the complete opposite of before.

In his post and subsequent comments, @Indipendenza outlines the following:

  • It's clearly server-side, because the majority of the time, every player disconnects
  • It is making speed chess (and note, anything with a base time of 1 minute or lower) impossible to play as the server usually crashes for longer than that time, and fails to provide time compensation upon the server reopening. 

Now, even after this response, one could imagine that this issue would be swiftly fixed and the community would be reassured that such an incident was recorded by chess.com...

That's not what happened.

Here are further reports from the next few months, all complaining of a similar or the same issue. 

In each of these forums, there is a minimal amount of participation from the developer nor staff. At this point, many sat wondering whether or not to quit the game, or to hope that one day a miracle would come and all of the issues would be solved.

Going back to the 2022 Solo Championship again, the below was only one of the events that players were left to deal with. 

At this point in time, it was hard to pin blame on one source, given that Variants was essentially a minimized indie project. Clearly nobody had any authority over the changes, and nothing was being done to really fix the issues.

And that's when I started...

Finding the Answer

Although most of this article has thus far been about the community at large, and their response, let's now take a venture into what I have been doing the past year. 

On October 30 of 2022, I wrote an email to Chess.com Support asking for assistance on solving the server issues - perhaps they could alert other developers to pitch in and help out, or they could ask the higher-ups at the company to start paying more attention to Variants.

My email was as following: 

Hi chess.com,
Ever since 4 Player Chess and Variants merged in March of this year, the Variants server has been having numerous problems with stability (recently, the server has been disconnecting players every 3 minutes, something completely unacceptable) and the starting position of 4 Player Chess was changed without the consultation of anybody in the community nor the veteran players.

This has become a very problematic issue, as in the most recent 4 Player Chess championship (which is an OFFICIAL event by chess.com) a few months back, the server crashed before the start of a qualifier and there was almost no communication. In addition, the event format was undecided until weeks after it was announced because of the starting position debate.

These issues need to be solved, and no chess.com staff member has given any clarity on them nor have attempted to solve them. This looks from the outside as a complete neglect of one of the most popular and unique parts of the site, and does not sit well with many players, who feel as if they are being ignored.


It's self-explanatory that chess.com needs to take more responsibility of this problem.

3 days later, I received a reply, seen below. (I bolded the parts that I want you to focus on)

Hello! My name is Joshua, and I'm a Support Manager with Chess.com.

I am so sorry for the delay. We have had an unusually high number of tickets, which has led to a bit of a backlog.
I am so sorry you are experiencing such hardship in 4chess! This is not what we want happening to the people on chess.com.
The server crash during the 4 Player Chess championship was certainly a low point for us, but we take nothing for granted. We have been working to make 4 chess better ever day.
Before playing again, I would first like to try to clear your browser cache? We should periodically clear the cache to allow the browser to function more efficiently. It's basically like a "tune-up" for your browser and is necessary every once in a while happy.png
First, let's try making sure that all of your extensions are currently disabled on your browser:
1 # Type in Chrome://extensions into your address bar.
2 # Uncheck any extensions that are currently checked and say enabled.

Once you've done that, I'd like to have you please try a cache clear to make sure that you're starting with a fresh slate.
3 # In the browser bar, enter: Chrome://settings/clearBrowserData
4 # Select the items you want to clear (ensure that both Cookies and Cache are checked to be cleared).
5 # Click Clear browsing data.

After you've done both of those, I'd like you to try playing a couple other games and let me know how your experience is happy.png Please let me know if this does not solve your problem. We do NOT want this happening to your members!
I will be looking for your reply! happy.png
Have a great day!
Cheers!

From this response, I was shocked by what was being said. The post contradicts itself from the start - if there is effort being put into the server, why after 8 months is it still crashing and ruining player experience? How is browser cache relevant to this at all, if the problem is on the server and not on individuals? I got what I came for, anyway. 

Clearly, there was a huge misinterpretation in the staff group about the scale of the issue. Either that, or there is a cover-up happening. Perhaps I am getting too ahead of myself here.

Despite my extreme doubts that anything would ever change, fortunately, many of the server issues were fixed recently around the time of March/April, near the one year anniversary of the merge (It is impossible to know for sure as there was no public announcement); and they assigned a teammate, after many years, to @spacebar, @goondrious.

But why all the secrecy, I asked? Shouldn't they be telling others about this and apologizing for the past mistakes? Why did chess.com spend 2 million dollars on the main servers and only give a damn about variants now? (Note: They spent 2 mil since the servers were overloading, but if hundreds of millions of players’ worth of server crashing can be solved using just 2 million then a few thousand players should proportionately be absolutely nothing financially speaking, at least when looking at this in a simple sense.)

More recently (June 2023), I was on Chess.com Discord server, and came across this announcement:

The Annual State of Chess.com. With a Q/A section. I had to get my final answer. 

So naturally, I asked about this issue (Note: it should say "crashing daily a few months ago").

I didn't know what I expected when I got my answer, but you can see for yourself below, the clip of @DanielRensch. 

Let's break it down and look at the transcript, and some of my thoughts on them (in italics):

Will chess.com ever publicly address the variants server crashing a few months? I didn’t know we weren’t publicly addressing that,

There have been 0 public announcements on the variants server crashing. There wasn't even an announcement when the issues were fixed and the community was sidelined for an entire year.

haha. I love when I get accused of a conspiracy theory that’s not real, it’s my favorite type of conspiracy to be accused of! If you want to ask me: “Hey Dan, what’s your favorite conspiracy to be accused of?”… the one’s that’s not real, that’s my favorite type.

I am amazed at how quickly he strays from the topic, even going as far as to insinuate that I am a conspiracy theorist.

Um, so uh, I didn’t know we were covering that up, apparently our variants server crashed. I’m sorry, it seems like a lot of things crash, and I, we’re doing our best here.

Shouldn't anything crashing, especially for a year straight, be of immediate importance?

I, uh, I don’t know, I honestly don’t know why it crashed. I know it crashed on Tuesday, we talked about that, and there are other times, um but yeah, there you go.

Why are you contradicting yourself by providing examples of the variants server crashing?

(This is the end of the clip)

Now, while I will acknowledge that Danny was tired after 4 hours of talking, and that he may have been ordered to stay quiet about the situation, I'm just disappointed with how that ended. Instead of being clear and apologetic, we got an accusation that the problems never existed. Disappointing, but at least that's what I took the risk of learning when I asked the question. 

Present-day, and what we as a community must do to move forward.

Knowing all of this, let's take a look at what I explained in this article, and some of the conclusions I have come to. 

1. Staff support is the key to a healthy community.

When we looked at the early history of 4 Player Chess on chess.com, we saw developers and staff always interacting with players. Perhaps in the future, staff could be more supportive of the admins, and take responsibility when things happen so scapegoating or prolonged issues don't last.

By making public announcements, staff can clear up misconceptions, and it shows that they are actively working on an issue, instead of letting their community die out or lose faith. 

2. We need to spread awareness about these issues so that they don't happen again.

We already observed how I as one person was able to get an answer out of both Support and @DanielRensch, and it didn't require any manipulation of the system or asking someone with more connections than myself. If in the future something like this ever comes up again, or if this issue gets worse in the next few months (which I sincerely hope it doesn't), if we as a community all rally together, and go outside of just a small boundary, then we can spread awareness faster than one person alone.

3. Content creators and official news can greatly increase the popularity of a game.

Before this article ends, I want to show one last thing - a Google Trends graph for 4 Player Chess (chess variants is too broad of a term, and this serves as a great example regardless).

(This is the USA version, although it may vary across countries, they are all similar to this.)

In the graph, we can see when and make assumptions on how 4 Player Chess has spiked in popularity. 

  • Near 2018 and 2019, we can see a spike. This is likely due to chess.com advertising the game early on, and as said before, the broadcast of the 2019 Teams Championship hosted by popular streamers.
  • Across 2020, we can see multiple spikes. This is likely due to the 4 Player Chess trend on YouTube and Twitch at that time, which as said before included the most popular chess content creators. In addition, the Queen's Gambit show on Netflix likely led to an overall increase in popularity for chess as a whole.
  • In 2023, we can see the biggest spike when Duck Chess was released. The popularity was likely so prevalent since chess.com/variants now encompassed both 4 Player Chess and other variants that it spilled over to other parts of the variants server. 

Although I've criticized chess.com a fair bit in this article, my hope is that in the future that chess.com can collaborate with the community; for it's only with transparency that progress can be made. 

...and if you haven't tried out variants yet, give it a go! Even if you're not interested in playing them seriously, you can still have a lot of fun with everything.

Play Chess Variants Online - Chess.com

Thank you to anyone who read this article to the end! If you could additionally repost this elsewhere so that more people can know about it, that would be great tongue.png

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