It's been almost a year since the first update, and a lot has changed since then! When these posts when first being made, Custom Variants was definitely in a different place compared to today, and it's all thanks to everybody here, whether you joined us in 2018, after the merge of 4PC and Variants, or just recently!
These updates were first started back in July of last year, mostly because there was some concern over the reviewing of variants. Many of these issues have now been addressed, but regardless, think of this as a transparency report of sorts!
If you don't want to read this entire thing or want to skip to a part you're interested in, follow the bolded text on the titles of the sections.
Without further ado, let's get into the topics of this update:
Agenda
What are the major changes since November (when the last post was made)?
What's with some of the bugs on variants.world?
What are NCV Testers for? What's the current CGA + NCV Tester team?
Will there be NCV Tester applications in the future, and can NCV Testers become CGAs?
What's the current breakdown of the testing situation?
Will more variant creation guides be written?
Will any variants be removed?
What's going on in the world of variants and custom variants now?
What are the major changes since November (when the last post was made)?
First off, we started doing Golden Variant arenas again in February! Like you may have heard, Golden Variant arenas were originally sporadically made in order to popularize variants that otherwise may not have gotten as much attention. They were indefinitely paused, before the CGA team brought them back, now with a monthly schedule, and voting process!
Golden Variant arenas have been pretty popular on the weekends (alongside our weekday Wheel of Fortune arenas), and have easily become one of the most popular arenas on the server, and we're still working on improving activity on the server as a whole! One variant that certainly stands out is Minihouse, which has become one of the most popular variants on the server!
Now onto basically the biggest change that has happened since: the introduction of Variants World! Variants World, also known as variants.world for its URL, is the new variants submission platform that we have been using since December, which I gave everyone a sneak peak at in the November update. Over the last 7ish months, around 300 posts have been made and all variants that were archived by @CGA(cgabot) have been migrated over to the platform as well!
With its simplistic interface, Variants World has been very helpful in organizing variants and helping the CGAs review, sort, and filter them faster! Votes can be counted in one place, alongside notes and classifications.
In addition to these two major changes, we also released an application for NCV Testers, which just closed today, but we'll get to that later!
What's with some of the bugs on variants.world?
Some of you may have noticed that "NCV | Resources Chess" was labelled as post 242, while the post right after it was erroneously labelled as post 285. My current understanding of the situation is that it's being worked on, but as far as I know, this isn't a major issue.
A more pressing bug that will be addressed is that the image generation program mysteriously renders dead pieces as Red or White. This has definitely caused a fair bit of confusion, but clicking into the testing game always helps as you can then see the actual position.
This bug has not affected CGA testing, and no decision is ever made simply by looking at an image of the variant (not even with autodecline). After all, we will always look at the actual position when the board is inaccurately shown.
The Variants World developers are actively working on fixing these bugs and also implementing new features and quality-of-life changes onto the platform, so look out for those!
What are NCV Testers for? What's the current CGA + NCV Tester team?
As a preface for those not aware, CGA is short for Custom Games Admin, and NCV Tester is short for New Custom Variant Tester. Both can vote on variant submissions, although CGAs have a few extra responsibilities: creating Wheel of Fortune and Golden Variant arenas, writing accept/decline messages on reviewed variants, leading the NCV Testers, etc.
In September of last year, we released the first NCV Tester application in more than 2 years as we were down to just 4 CGAs, which was not sustainable at all.
Given the CGA team needed to stay up at night in their timezone in order to test with another CGA across the globe, this was the best course of action, since in addition to getting more testers for efficient voting, more perspectives could be explored.
Unfortunately, we only got one suitable candidate out of the applicants at the time, @Unknown_2015, and we made another post 2 months ago, which just closed today! In this application, we toned down the questions so that they were more like an application rather than a strict test, and we found many more suitable candidates.
In addition, we welcomed back former CGA @TheChessDude991, after his departure 3 years ago from the team!
(All applicants who were selected have been messaged already on chess.com by @qilp.)
The current official testing team, their ranks, and club roles are as follows:
Will there be NCV Tester applications in the future, and can NCV Testers become CGAs?
Yes. Throughout the course of Custom Variants, the team has seen many shifts, and NCV Testers are always valuable and get us out of tough places when people are missing. I don't think that any application will open in the near future as we're seeing a pretty big team at the moment, but we'll see how things go!
To answer the other half of the question, NCV Testers are the top candidates for CGA selection, although there is no guarantee NCV Testers will become CGAs.
What's the current breakdown of the testing situation?
Here's some good ol' bullet points:
We have 8 active testers: 4 CGAs and 4 NCV Testers
There are currently 22 variants still UR (Under Review).
The oldest post still UR is https://variants.world/posts/20, made on August 29 of 2023. The variant was affected by a bug, which still remains unsolved, meaning it cannot be reviewed at this time.
The next oldest post still UR is https://variants.world/posts/140, made in March of this year. It was self-declined but has since been reopened.
The oldest post still UR unaffected by any special circumstances is https://variants.world/posts/181, made on April 17 of this year.
In the last 7 days, we have reviewed and made a verdict on 19 variants (!).
All variants have at least been analyzed and/or skimmed by a tester.
This is very good progress! We're no longer in a crisis like before, and our goal is to reach a point where all variants at a given time can be reviewed.
Will more variant creation guides be written?
Yes! I always welcome suggestions in my DMs as well, so if there's popular demand for a certain guide to be written, I can see what I can do. In addition, I am planning on making a directory, or a resource page of sorts for guides, especially as the number of them far exceeds what can be pinned to the top of the forum page.
In short, it was the removal of around 50% of all existing (NCV) variants, for a multitude of reasons. There was a retesting of many candidates slated for removal, using a standard similar the one we use to test variants normally today.
At this moment, through statistics on weekly activity, Golden Variant participation, etc., we are monitoring the variants we currently have the lists in the various categories; we are not currently planning on conducting any "purge" of the variants.
What's going on in the world of variants and custom variants now?
I can't say much is happening at this very moment for custom variants, but as you can probably tell, the testing team is definitely going to work on a "clean-up" process for the variants still Under Review. Stay tuned though, we might start planning some more large scale events
On the other hand, there's a really good event going on in the 4 Player Chess club right now: the 4PC Festival, which aims to test candidates for standard 4 Player Chess' starting position. There's tons of membership awards, and the arenas feature some of the most popular and best 4 Player Chess players and streamers. So, if you're looking for a challenge, competition, or just something fun to try out, the 4PC Festival is something that should be on your radar!
That's all for now! Thank you for reading all the way to the end!
Previous updates:
Hello Custom Variants community!
It's been almost a year since the first update, and a lot has changed since then! When these posts when first being made, Custom Variants was definitely in a different place compared to today, and it's all thanks to everybody here, whether you joined us in 2018, after the merge of 4PC and Variants, or just recently!
These updates were first started back in July of last year, mostly because there was some concern over the reviewing of variants. Many of these issues have now been addressed, but regardless, think of this as a transparency report of sorts!
If you don't want to read this entire thing or want to skip to a part you're interested in, follow the bolded text on the titles of the sections.
Without further ado, let's get into the topics of this update:
Agenda
What are the major changes since November (when the last post was made)?
First off, we started doing Golden Variant arenas again in February! Like you may have heard, Golden Variant arenas were originally sporadically made in order to popularize variants that otherwise may not have gotten as much attention. They were indefinitely paused, before the CGA team brought them back, now with a monthly schedule, and voting process!
You can see the most recent voting announcement (for July) here: https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/vote-for-julys-golden-variants
You can also see which variants have been featured so far:
https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/2024-golden-variant-schedule
Golden Variant arenas have been pretty popular on the weekends (alongside our weekday Wheel of Fortune arenas), and have easily become one of the most popular arenas on the server, and we're still working on improving activity on the server as a whole! One variant that certainly stands out is Minihouse, which has become one of the most popular variants on the server!
In addition to these two major changes, we also released an application for NCV Testers, which just closed today, but we'll get to that later!
What's with some of the bugs on variants.world?
Some of you may have noticed that "NCV | Resources Chess" was labelled as post 242, while the post right after it was erroneously labelled as post 285. My current understanding of the situation is that it's being worked on, but as far as I know, this isn't a major issue.
This bug has not affected CGA testing, and no decision is ever made simply by looking at an image of the variant (not even with autodecline). After all, we will always look at the actual position when the board is inaccurately shown.
The Variants World developers are actively working on fixing these bugs and also implementing new features and quality-of-life changes onto the platform, so look out for those!
What are NCV Testers for? What's the current CGA + NCV Tester team?
As a preface for those not aware, CGA is short for Custom Games Admin, and NCV Tester is short for New Custom Variant Tester. Both can vote on variant submissions, although CGAs have a few extra responsibilities: creating Wheel of Fortune and Golden Variant arenas, writing accept/decline messages on reviewed variants, leading the NCV Testers, etc.
Given the CGA team needed to stay up at night in their timezone in order to test with another CGA across the globe, this was the best course of action, since in addition to getting more testers for efficient voting, more perspectives could be explored.
Unfortunately, we only got one suitable candidate out of the applicants at the time, @Unknown_2015, and we made another post 2 months ago, which just closed today! In this application, we toned down the questions so that they were more like an application rather than a strict test, and we found many more suitable candidates.
In addition, we welcomed back former CGA @TheChessDude991, after his departure 3 years ago from the team!
(All applicants who were selected have been messaged already on chess.com by @qilp.)
The current official testing team, their ranks, and club roles are as follows:
(Super Admin) Head CGA: @qilp
(Admins) CGAs: @bsrti, @NoWellOkay, @JkCheeseChess, @ChessMasterGS, @TheChessDude991
(Coordinators) NCV Testers: @Unknown_2015, @jackityjackjack, @Dan-kyu_System, @BN1208
(Italics indicate members currently on vacation)
Will there be NCV Tester applications in the future, and can NCV Testers become CGAs?
Yes. Throughout the course of Custom Variants, the team has seen many shifts, and NCV Testers are always valuable and get us out of tough places when people are missing. I don't think that any application will open in the near future as we're seeing a pretty big team at the moment, but we'll see how things go!
To answer the other half of the question, NCV Testers are the top candidates for CGA selection, although there is no guarantee NCV Testers will become CGAs.
What's the current breakdown of the testing situation?
Here's some good ol' bullet points:
Will more variant creation guides be written?
Yes! I always welcome suggestions in my DMs as well, so if there's popular demand for a certain guide to be written, I can see what I can do. In addition, I am planning on making a directory, or a resource page of sorts for guides, especially as the number of them far exceeds what can be pinned to the top of the forum page.
Will any variants be removed?
There have been some small rumors floating around that another "purge" of variants is happening, similarly to one that happened in 2021-2022. See more information here: https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/the-changes-to-the-variants-custom-games-after-the-merge
In short, it was the removal of around 50% of all existing (NCV) variants, for a multitude of reasons. There was a retesting of many candidates slated for removal, using a standard similar the one we use to test variants normally today.
At this moment, through statistics on weekly activity, Golden Variant participation, etc., we are monitoring the variants we currently have the lists in the various categories; we are not currently planning on conducting any "purge" of the variants.
What's going on in the world of variants and custom variants now?
I can't say much is happening at this very moment for custom variants, but as you can probably tell, the testing team is definitely going to work on a "clean-up" process for the variants still Under Review. Stay tuned though, we might start planning some more large scale events
On the other hand, there's a really good event going on in the 4 Player Chess club right now: the 4PC Festival, which aims to test candidates for standard 4 Player Chess' starting position. There's tons of membership awards, and the arenas feature some of the most popular and best 4 Player Chess players and streamers. So, if you're looking for a challenge, competition, or just something fun to try out, the 4PC Festival is something that should be on your radar!
That's all for now! Thank you for reading all the way to the end!