5. I don't even want that. It's part of the charm.
Developers don't be lazy!
Sort:
1. When we figure that out, we'll let you know 
2. We're too busy figuring out some weird bug where people are disconnecting all the time 
.
But for real, like the admins, some of the developers are volunteer. I know for me, I don't have as much time to put into developing 4PC as I'd like. As for other devs, I can't speak for them, but again, they have a lot of things on their plate. I personally know they work very hard to keep 4PC up and running.
Don't worry, we will probably get to many of those variations in time. Variations was one of the reasons I volunteered to help with 4 PC in the first place. I would love to see new ones added, especially bug/crazy house. It just can't happen right now. Have patience, my friend.
3. That's not as easy as it may sound.
4. Also not as easy as it sounds.
5. I think this would be cool too, but, obviously, there are people ^^ who disagree. If there is enough community support for it, it may happen eventually, but, again, patience.
In short, we all love 4 PC (especially including the devs) and want it to continue to grow and have new features added. Our work may just go unnoticed.
2. But I wanna try it out sooooo badly!!
3. There is only spanish, russian...only a few people use...as long as you cover majority it should be fine...
4. 4 player chess is already possible if we go through web but the screen doesn't modify to small screen size....just needs a little tweaking
**New one: I'm sure like me, there are many who want like 3 different types of seeks but are tired of changing settings. We should be allowed to presave like radio stations 3 custom game seeks we can then fire!
4. Well, you can still play on cellphone or tablet by going on the website, but as @skhandelwal said, the screen doesn't modify to screen size. Also, when I play 4PC on my tablet only by then it adjusts.
@ew10528
On phone you can tick the site for computer to get normal size and then zoom in. Works the same.
Sep 11, 2019
0
#7
1) there used to be way more disconnects (we used to get many more complaints, so we are quite sure about that. Also by my personal experience it's better than it used to be). That said it's still less than stellar, for sure.
2) bughouse requires a second board etc, it's would mean a huge amount of work, and it's not gonna happen unless some volunteer developer steps in with the drive to do it. "it's not even that hard to do it code wise" are you a developer?
3) maybe, but low priority. That said it only takes a few clicks to copy paste something to google translate (i do this quite often)
4) try not setting a rating range for your solo seek. When I last tried it didn't take too long, and many 1600 ffa jumped right in (because they would like to play but don't have a solo rating, eg are 1200, or even less, if they played say 1 game and lost, which is common)
5) to my knowledge no 4player engine exists. this is a huge task. Meanwhie, I think it's a blessing we don't have to deal with cheaters using engines.
Sep 12, 2019
0
#8
fyi FYI, I rebuilt 4pc pretty much from scratch, starting nearly 2 years ago. "My" 4pc was released in August 2018 (see the changelog) and I continued to add boatloads of features up until my last big release a few months ago. I did this out of my own initiative, with some compensation, but for the most part it has been voluntary work. I spent an insane amount of time working on 4pc the last 18 months, but I am no longer motivated to do big stuff (such as bughouse). Also, I think tt's time to make way for new people and new ideas. I think I've had enough, if not too much, influence on 4pc .
As for 4pc on mobile, it would be great, but I'm just not at all an expert, I don't even use a mobile. If there are devs out there that have ideas on how to improve 4pc for mobile, please step forward.
I can not belive that you are not paid for all of this! 4pc should be a priority to chess.com!!! People, I play chess whole my life and love it, but ever since I discovered 4pc ...let's just say it's a lot contagious! This variant of chess had a huuuuge potential! i thought there were a huge number of people working on this project ( well paid ). voluntary work - for all this!?! Are they even aware of all the possibilities 4pc offers?
Developers, don´t be lazy and develop a 4 players crazyhouse 
How can you make a hundred exotic variants but not the craziest most exciting yet. I´d understand if there was only "classic".
Sep 13, 2019
0
#12
Crazyhouse is indeed the most requested variant that is still missing, and it's do-able, but it's quite a bit of work for sure, but not out of reach like bughouse. At the moment I don't have the energy to do it though, sorry. Also keep in mind that when adding crazyhouse, it's not the basics that are hard. It's all the oddities and irregularities that you will run into (legal move issues, unforseen weird constellations that need to be discovered and solved. For example, tt took about 6 months until I/we had discovered all the implications of en passant. You can capture two pieces in one move, and so on and so forth, things that you just don't anticipate, and require special coding attention to make them work correcly instead of causing bugs)
As for 'a hundred exotic variants', I protest! Most of these variants I threw in because they were very either standard, high demand, or easy to make. 960, King of the Hill and N-Check are standard variants, nothing exotic there, at least not in the mind of a spacebar The most work by far was actually en passant - which isn't even a variant. 960 was also quite a chore, because of castling. Capture the King was easy and it had been requested/discussed many many times in the forum. Anonymous was the most demanded feature. Dimplomacy was a late addon, inspired by @Vaohlmann, and not much work. DeadWall was also inspired by a forum Thread, and also easy. Antichess was inspired by BabYagun, and it's actually a standard variant of chess, but I think it's not available on chess.com?
Custom promotion settings were also inspired by forum discussion ("9th rank promotion for FFA"), and was easy to add.
Custom Teammates? It was just missing.
Blindfold? standard chess feature 
That leaves only Ghostboard as a truly exotic variant
My favourite feature is of course the custom starting position - giving players the opportunity to create their own variants.
Sep 13, 2019
0
#13
Thank you Mr. icy-nutsy, and thank you Mr. Neo.
I am getting paid, but let me explain.
I'm just a player who happened to fall in love with this game, and who got upset that nothing was being done to improve the 4pc software (back in late '17), and decided to take matters into my own hands.
I had no idea I would end up coding 4pc like a mad monkey for 18 months straight, I somehow just got hooked and kept going on and on, for my own sake and for the sake of everyone who loves this game.
Meanwhile, I have put chesscom in an awkward spot by delivering something they never ordered. They had no intentions of doing much at all regarding to 4pc, they were focused on other projects that are economically viable, which is very understandable, but it was of course disappointing to me, and well I had already set off on 4pc and was not about to stop.
At some point quite early on, I basically told Erik, let me go ahead, and when and if what I’m building (4pc rewrite / archive/ analysis etc, basically what got released in August ’18) actually works and is stable, then you decide what I deserve. As you know, I didn’t stop there however and kept rolling full steam for almost another entire year. As of this year, I am getting and will continue to get monthly compensation for all that I have done, and I am very grateful for that, it goes a long way. I'm actually very happy with how things are going.
I am told that 4pc does not generate a lot of premium memberships, and to be honest I don't know what does really, in fact I'm rather ignorant on the whole business/monetary aspect - it's not a spacebar’s forté.
My last big update has received a lot of criticism - bottom line it appears to be "too complicated". For me personally it was however the most awesome thing that I could imagine - breaking away for the "1|15D dictatorship" - so I can finally play bullet XD.
But I think I am slowly starting to grasp what they mean.
It's painful for me to read some of the feedback, such as here https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/i-think-4pc-went-south.
A player wrote: "I also thought that everything was a mess: Several variants... For me the web design was a mess, completely chaotic; and I didn't care to spend enough time to see how it worked. The rest of chess.com is very intuitive but I don't think the same about the 4player website."
The truth is I just don't understand what it is that rubs players the wrong way, what concretely is so messy, chaotic, and un-intuitive. I need help here. The way I see it, no one is forced to play anything they don't like. I wanted to offer any kind of game, while at the same time not forcing anything, hence the new Play Tab / "everyone gets to see what everyone wants to play" / games formed by popular demand / Everyone gets to see which games are popular.
People complain about FFA being so teamy, but for some reason they keep playing FFA rather than starting Solo games (or they set Solo 1600+ which excludes 95% of players, including many many 1600+ FFA players that don't have a Solo rating. Last I tried, I had no problems getting unrestricted Solo games started, as a bunch of strong FFA players that don't have an established Solo rating leaped to the opportunity to join a Solo game.)
People say Capture the King makes for better Teams games, but I don't ever see them playing those games, rather they come write about it in the forum.
Somehow it seems they expect everything to be served to them on a silver plate without putting in any effort of their own. This I did not anticipate.
Perhaps what’s needed is some kind of different organization, or more marketing type features like a big orange button saying “Variant of the week - 1|0 Capture the King’, or whatever. Most players (of which I am not one) seem to prefer to be encouraged or even forced to play this or that, rather than having to decide for themselves.
Or maybe the leaderboards should be organized differently, with standard rapid being placed more prominently.
I will make an effort to help Solo. So far all I/we can think of is adding it as a main option (eg not in the custom section) for higher rated players (1450+ or so. I don’t think it makes sense for <1400s, because they basically play a Solo style regardless . Something like that. Ideas are always welcome.
I ask you all to bring forward your constructive feedback.
@neo
> This variant of chess had a huuuuge potential!
I hope what you mean is that it still HAS potential, especially now with all I’ve done - given the right steps are taken moving forward from where we are now.
4pc pretty much went viral when it first came out, but the app couldn’t handle more than about 500 players. At times there were 800 players and it became impossible to play because players would lose on time, as it would take 20-30 seconds (!) for the server to process a move. It basically throttled it’s own success, and players were forced to leave.
The lag was caused by the old 4pc 'engine', eg the part that checks legal moves and checkmates etc, which was extremely slow (inefficient code). During the first half of 2018, I wrote an entirely new engine from scratch, which ended up being 10x faster, while at the same time being 6x fewer lines of code (about 1000 lines). Not to mention it was bug free, unlike the old one. It's also what enabled me to add legal move indicators, variants, etc etc without much effort, and it's grown to around 2k lines in the process. This would have been an impossible task with the old engine. But my initial focus was not adding variants, rather I wanted a 4pc app that is able to handle a few thousand players rather than a few hundred. The variants are just a bonus I threw in at the end.
There is still an achilles heel of 4pc, and that is the connection technology, which, as you all know, isn't great. I was able to improve things somewhat (by cleaning up, part of the last big update), but I never got around to (not will be) replacing it with better, more state of the art technology.
> I thought there were a huge number of people working on this project
Nope. Just me, myself, and I. I did get help with feedback and testing from all of our admins, I would not have made it without them, and I am very grateful for all they have done. I also want to thank you, the players, for coming to the test server, and participating in the forum. I want to give special thanks also to @Martin0. He’s not that active anymore, but when I first started out 18 months ago he was all I had, and I wouldn’t have made it through to the first (Aug '18) release without him.
>Are they even aware of all the possibilities 4pc offers?
Nope, it doesn’t look like it.
But it’s not all lost, to the contrary, I’m optimistic it's only just going to get started again, and they will come back at some point. It’s just that they are currently all focused on puzzle rush and puzzle battle and whatnot.
Perhaps it’s also not quite ready yet - aka “too complicated”, and needs some cleaning up and refurbishing before it’s ready to be "sold" to the broad public.
For me, the most rewarding thing is seeing players enjoying what I built. And of course I'd love to get to watch Danny, Hammer and friends playing 4pc bullet, or blitz, or labyrinth, or highway to hill, or whatever ever they find is fun.
Sep 13, 2019
0
#14
The UI will be simplified. Performance/stability will be improved.
Don't expect Android/iOs apps any time soon. But a simplified UI should work better in mobile browsers.
Translation to more languages may be added.
New variants like Crazyhouse won't be added to 4PC any time soon. Existing variants like Solo and AntiChess may be polished and tuned.
There is no plan to develop an engine, but we may improve bots.
In short: We are going to make 4PC more user friendly and faster. We are not going to add new variants.
A simple thing I would like is to rearrange the leaderboard. Champions and Point Chase, are to me the most unnecessary leaderboards, and they rely mostly on playing a lot. Given that Solo and Teams are the "official" world championships at this point, I think these two should be the first 2 leaderboards. For myself I prefer teams, so would of course like this order: Teams, Solo, FFA, Point Chase, Champions, but switching Teams and Solo would not really make me angry . Also perhaps change "Champions" to "Combined". Right now this combined format is basically whoever gets to play enough variants to get up there in those categories. I believe for it to be representative of a combined leaderboard, Teams, Solo and FFA Standard setups should count double to that of variants at the very least. Perhaps even triple for the world championship time control, since that is where I think the top players really want to fight it out.
One example I will make is that neither the top-ranked standard Solo or Teams player are in the combined leaderboard top 20. I understand the point about combined...but I still think if you are the best in either of these you should at least be top 20 in this leaderboard if it is to have any merit. Right now I believe it's an activity (playing all variants) leaderboard for the most part.
Sep 15, 2019
0
#16
> Also perhaps change "Champions" to "Combined".
Reasonable.
> Champions and Point Chase, are to me the most unnecessary leaderboards, and they rely mostly on playing a lot.
Those who play a lot show their loyalty, make the waiting time shorter ("Play" tab queue) and (if not using ad blockers) support 4PC by viewing/clicking ads.
Sep 15, 2019
0
#17
@icystun
I actually suggested counting variants 50% in the leaderboard thread. got almost no feedback :/
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Just kidding hehe....
1. I know they put in hard work but disconnection never used to exist and it does now...so why isn't it reverting back to the perfect days? Every game, there are at least 4 disconnections I've to refresh...
2. There are some really cool 4 player chess variants but they aren't being implemented...why not if everyone wants it?!! Like 4 player bughouse meaning 2 simultaneous 4 players game go and bughouse rules apply...its not even that hard to implement coding vise...and I'm sure everyone would kill to play this variant!!!
3. Language translator. We can't afford to translate while people type in foreign language...why can't we embed an auto translator on the website?
4. Cell phone 4 player chess including waiting list. Meaning, solo takes an entire day to get a match, I would like to be on the go and let my cell phone notify me when there is a match on solo so I can run back to my computer or start it on the cell phone.
5. 4 player chess Analysis bot
These are some to just get started...