Are you willing to wait longer for matches with narrower rating ranges for pairings?

I would hope this year but don't hold me to that. 

Thanks, we'll be looking forward to it!

I repeat mysellf with saying that uneven games are the biggest problem of this server and the major reason for so many resigns on first move. I suggest two options to avoid people wanting to resign so first:

1) Allowing players to set as option the minimum number of points allowed to lose for a game. Setting 4 as the highest value you can set. Also adding a maximum loss of points allowed so that you can chose to skip matches where you are playing too strong opponents with also here 4 as the highest possible value to set. I would most likely set both minimum and maximum number of points to loose as 2 points to avoid too uneven games.

2) To have options for how much higher and how much lower your partner can be. Default is 600 and allowing people to change that to at most 300 in difference would be my suggestion, i.e. you can choose to not allow players more than 300 above you to partner with you and players more than 300 below you to partner with you. I would probably keep the default of 600 points but as I see very many that instantly resigns when they get partnered to players more than 400 points lower than them I would like to see such change.

I agree that looking at the +- points per game (and perhaps disallowing +0 and/or -0) is more useful than looking at rating differences -- even though it may be a bit harder to program.

First, to increase the number of people playing bughouse, I highly suggest creating a way to analyze bughouse games where you can see both games at once in review mode and show the time for each player and the pieces each player has available to drop at every point of the game. At a minimum, show the pieces each player has available to drop for a single game, so we can review a game on one board properly. Perhaps start videos where top bughouse players review games and strategy. There is a tremendous amount of depth and strategy to decide the best move, based on gaining positional advantage, sacrificing for the other board or for a future state, thinking about how the opponent can attack, etc. This could be done for crazyhouse to start because it is easier to analyze one board with these rules.

For your original question, I find that bughouse is better to play with a wider margin of rating variance. This is because bughouse ratings are not perfect because so fewer people play bughouse so the ratings are not accurate, therefore it is not important to get exact matches. Also the nature of bughouse depends on how both games go, and mistakes are often not fatal because the nature of the game is complicated across both boards, and sometimes it's very difficult to judge a mistake from a sacrifice to help the overall state of both boards. Therefore, lopsided ratings can allow for fun interesting games more often than regular chess. Finally, I like to play longer bughouse games of 5 minutes vs 3 minutes, so a wider rating margin will allow me to not be forced into the 3 minute queue in order to get a game. Regular chess players get a wide choice of time controls, but bughouse players do not due to a low queue.

i think it would be a very nice idea to be able to see all the teams (2 partnered players) online (even if they are not playing or seeking) so that a team can challenge directly another team and maybe get matches going instead of just random games

I tried bughouse 3 minute and had no problems getting a game.  Thank you for the suggestion.  But why do I never ever see these in the match finder (I often am looking at the match finder as I wait for my crazy house games to find matches).

Bughouse doesn't show in the match finder as it requires matching four different seeks which might have different ratings; there wouldn't be one seek you could accept.

agree

Yes, that would be a good feature.

Yes, greater visibility of open seeks (both partnered and individual) would be nice.  Showing it in the current match finder is probably not ideal; I think an alternative display specifically designed for bughouse would be better.

Also more visibility into the current rating range of your seek and how it's widened while you wait would be nice, along with a button to manually widen it to try to accept some seeks currently available.

I'm happy to wait longer for a better match up. It's better than having to abort all the time.

How much longer?

To pick some random numbers that may or may not be realistic, would you rather wait 30 seconds for a pairing involving you, another 1900 player, and a couple 1500s, or wait 10-15 minutes for a pairing where everyone is >1800?