First 10 Moves in FFA

Again, you're twisting my words. You're excluding the 3PC --> 2PC remarks.

I totally get you and hear you on the tactics and strategies that the strongest players have developed. I acknowledged this in my OP.

I understand that implicit teaming is going to happen. Another person already made the point about games that go on forever unless two players at some point work against another.

4PC is a game about points. Those with the most points win.

You ask why it is difficult to accept? Because watching one player be eliminated, followed by having to defend against the same two players coming my direction -- this isn't fun or entertaining or interesting or fair (it might be FFA, but it feels a whole lot like two players are teaming and ganging-up and I've got no chance). There's a link at the bottom of the page, it says "FAIR PLAY" -- Go read it. I've already quoted those rules.

Why would you sacrifice a 3-pt Knight, or 5-point Rook or Bishop ... for a pawn ... to support your opposite, or another player. When you could possibly take a hanging 9-point queen left by your opposite? There might be some reason for this. Or, more often, most of the time, it is because two players don't care about playing FFA. In which case, teaming is less implicit, and it becomes explicit that you've got no chance at a fair game because two players are ignoring each other and colluding.

What are the 20 other problems? Please list them. Please be specific and articulate the problems that implementing new rules for better FFA games would create.

FYI: The 4PC admins and developers regularly introduce new "rules" and change things, like that BYG setup stuff from a little while back. They keep changing things and upsetting the apple cart.

I don't see the big deal with upsetting the apple cart. The 4PC admins and developers already do it on a regular basis. Why do you find this hard or difficult to accept?

Why so serious?

What you wrote wasn't incoherent. Long. Repetitive. Boring. Lacking insight or thoughtfulness. But not incoherent. Stating the obvious and repeating things until your fingertips turn blue ... fun times.

Another person said "here we go again!" -- It seems like this is a repeating issue that keeps coming up. Maybe there's a solution?

This issue is going to come up again, and again, and again. And all of the petty, psychologically stunted people who need a quick-fix who keep repeating the reasons for not fixing the issue that keeps coming up again and again and again are going to continue repeating themselves until blue in the face or fingertips blue ... again and again and again.

I was not trying to "provoke" reactions. I am well aware, and went into posting this with the knowledge that it would upset the apple cart, and there would be reactions like yours, and a lot of repeated BS.

I just gotta say ... this whole analysis is thoughtful and helpful. Much better than the other people who attempt to make excuses and justify the norm with the same repetitive nonsense.

What you said brings some perspective and clarity.

I've proposed other things like ...

"Cuthroat FFA" -- You have to go check a box to remove restrictions that prevent teaming in FFA.

Babies will cry about that, too, even though relocating the rattle to the other hand isn't taking it away and just moving it.

Chess.com Management, 4PC admins and developers -- they'll all whine and complain about how difficult it would be to add another check box and some additional rules ... and then they'll go change the interface and add new variants. (This is intentional sarcastic irony, BTW, just so nobody starts crying about how I'm intentionally being rude and calling out how obvious it is to implement solutions to common problems and issues that keep coming up.)

Any solution that seeks to prevent players from playing the best objective moves is a bad one.

OMG

Discussed zillions of times already.

a) yes there are 2 different visions of the game, Caleb is right.

b) many solutions to what (some) see a the problem have been proposed. As Spacebar has said here plenty of times, many proposed solutions simply won't work from IT point of view because impossible to implement without human intervention (unimaginable). It is simply impossible to formulate rules that would distinguish between the assisted mate and a purely accidental mate by someone who would profit from another player check for instance, with absolutely NO cooperation between them, etc. And the ONLY way to combat the real teaming is to make it economically disadvantageous. Like proposed in https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/ideas-to-prevent-teaming-in-ffa for instance.

c) What usually shocks people most, that's assisted checkmates during the very beginning of the game where someone dies just because of ONE mistake, or sometimes simply because the opp' does nothing, or, worse, takes part in the mortal fiesta.

Hence also this proposal, that SJCVChess formulated above. 

Well, that wouldn't shock me totally, but I think it is not effective enough: the beginning of the teaming will simply move to move 6/7 in order to mate on move 11.

What COULD be implemented instead (and has been proposed already, among other by me, some years ago) is to discriminate the value of the mate if it happens "too early" (for instance, 5 pts only instead of 20) or to split for instance the 20 points of the mate AND to reduce this 20 pts amount if the result of 2 checks by 2 different players, i.e. when a player A checks B and C checks as well and kills B, C doesn't get 20 points but only 7 or 6, and A gets 3 or 4. In this case as well, it wouldn't be necessarily good to take.

(The obvious drawback is that it could make games even longer...).

Just from how the same response comment is for some reason divided up that it spanned two pages, I don't know how seriously I can take this anymore. 

Your words are your words. When your ideas make no sense, of course I'm going to question what you meant by them. 

If you supposedly acknowledge every repetitive point to the point of claiming it being repetitive to you yourself too, and still cannot see the other side of the argument, that's lacking insight and awareness. If you forego objectivity and insist upon the same strawman, that's up to you.

If you somehow have genuinely found that two players keep collaborating without preference of self interest and for the sole purpose of eliminating others to ruin their games, you can report. The admin team is full of unbelievably strong players with great intuition for the game who can tell while not even being in the game what definitely concurs as an actual offense of the rule. Just because they don't do what you want them to do doesn't mean they suck at their job.

If you genuinely feel even then that the admin team is somehow incapable of dealing with this, you can post games in the discussion thread instead of just proclaiming violation of moral game play, and let the audience decide for themselves. And I really hope you have better proof than one of your recent FFA games that I saw in the archives. Your opposite was mated by two queens by about move 8 after pushing their queen pawn for 8 moves ignorantly, and you just resigned. Provided for some decent comedy at 4 AM when I first answered this though, so maybe I did take this more seriously than it deserved.

+1 Regardless of whether teaming is good or bad, people loosing in the first couple of moves is bad for player retention

Oh. Good to know. 

The problem is that opposites is engrained into the FFA game now, It's not even considered cheating any more, and even I have started to use it when the occasion permits. Opposites is not played 100 % of the time, sometimes the board warrants individual play in every sense of the word, or your opposite has played so bad he's beyond saving, among other reasons.

You should re-read what Spacebar has written, or maybe Spacebar needs to step away from the keyboard.

Just a quick heads-up, in case you're unaware:

1. Have you read through the javascript libraries that Chess.com loads client-side? If not, you should.
2. Formulating rules based on known information is not an NP-domain problem. It's linear time. Anyone who insists that handling specific conditions with known information is "too difficult" is yanking your chain.
3. Re-interpreting the "too difficult" remark ... whether or not someone is yanking your chain, you should realize that developers like to trot-out the "impossible" scenario when they don't want to do something, or want to razzle-dazzle you with big-word BS.

Next time someone tells you that conditional rules for games with known information (like whether or not you're allowed to castle, or en passant) ... next time a developer says this to you, call BS. Question their credentials to be a software developer.

• Is mate? By who?
  • Is < 10-ply? If True ...
    • Check flight squares (subroutine)
      • For each flight square (adjacent to mated king) ...
        • IIF not protected by color issuing mate ...
          • raise game termination flag: ILLEGAL_MATE_TEAMS_IN_FFA
          • for each flight square not protected by color issuing mate, player score -1
    • For each player remaining ...
      • var = SUM(piece points from checkmated player)
      • IIF var > THRESHOLD
        • raise game termination flag: ILLEGAL_MATE_TEAMS_IN_FFA
        • player score -1

That's the logic I proposed in my initial post. There's probably a bit more to it, but this is what I would sketch on a whiteboard in a team meeting. Digging down into the actual implementation details is the developer's job. It's never as simple as the above. Though, with applications as large and advanced as Chess.com, it is usually as simple as finding the right spot to inject the above logic as a module for rules, just like any of the other check-boxes you can select to modify the rules.

But, like I said ... babies gonna cry. Don't, however, accept lame-duck excuses for laziness or ineptitude.

Nope, that's much more complicated than that. And fighting what you consider illegal would lead to a) the impoverishing the rich variability of the game as many perfectly legit moves would become "illegal" as side effect, b) "accidental" illegality where players fo something inadvertently, with absolutely no will to cooperate, c) longer games.

This. The only way is to change the rules of the game so that teaming no longer is the best strategy. By rules I mean natural rules like promotion rank, starting position, how many points for checkmate, etc. Not artificial rules like  'you're not allowed to mate in the first ten moves'. A better idea would be, to replace the Q with a N and make 11th rank promotion, that will make it hard to mate anyone in the first 10 moves.
People have thought about this and came to the conclusion that what would help the most is reducing the king value, from 20 to 10 or 5. 9th or 10th rank promotion would also help. and capture the king rule would also help. this is why we listed 4PC MAX. We assume that teaming with oppo is not a profitable strategy in this game.

Welp, it sounds like this variant is only appropriate in FFA form in a casual setting.

So many variants, so many check boxes, so little time.

BYG anyone? How about original, or 1|15D?

Things don't change. Except when someone has a brilliant idea that they should. In the mean time, carry-on with kicking people who suggest unpopular changes. "here we go again!" -- The  same issue, the same observation, the same complaint, it keeps cropping up because you haven't dealt with it.

Then tell people that despite all of the changes that are made on such a regular basis, change (especially for the sake of it) is not good. Other changes are made to improve the game. But changes that would improve play experience and player retention are put-down like dead dogs; bitterly questioned and railed against by bandwagonistas.

Navigating so many changes, updates, variants, etc... I guess I'll go check-out 4PC MAX? Whatever the hell that is in this stack of crap. Crap. Crap. Crap.

Doesn't work. Look at this game:

[Variant "FFA"]
[RuleVariants "DeadKingWalking EnPassant PromoteTo=D"]
[CurrentMove "22"]
[TimeControl "4 min"]

1. f2-f4 .. b7-c7 .. h13-h11 .. m10-l10
2. f4-f5 .. b9-d9 .. Nj14-i12 .. Bn9-m10
3. f5-f6 .. Na5-c6 .. h11-h10 .. Nn10-l9
4. f6-f7 .. b4-d4 .. h10-h9 .. O-O
5. f7-f8=D .. Ba6-b7 .. h9-h8 .. m8-k8
6. Qf8xf13+ .. d9-e9#

Who was in the wrong here? All red did was take an inadequately protected pawn, and all blue did was take a free checkmate. Are you really trying to penalize players for that? 

Or even this game:

[Variant "FFA"]
[RuleVariants "DeadKingWalking EnPassant PromoteTo=D"]
[CurrentMove "13"]
[TimeControl "4 min"]

1. h2-h3 .. Na5-c6 .. i13-i12 .. m6-k6
2. f2-f3 .. Na10-c9 .. Ne14-f12 .. k6-j6
3. Bi1-g3 .. b5-c5 .. d13-d12 .. j6-i6
4. Bg3xm9+#

All red did was attack an undefended pawn (j6) and then take a checkmate when the opportunity arose.

Its not exactly to simplify the game, but that your winning chances are much higher with a side opponent eliminated (your opposite is far from you and doesn't have easy to access diagonals, one flank is available for promoting pawns uninhibited). Once this became widely understood then at a certain level you have players full on teaming (i.e. you know that they also understand this, so you can trust them to work with you).

The problem with OP point of view is either they dont understand why this is optimal, or they feel it goes against the essence of the game. But in this second case it just reveals that they dont want free for all, but for the game to proceed in a way they would like it to look like (i.e. "free to play the way I want you to"). 

As mentioned earlier you can tweak the format to lessen the impact of this. If checkmates are worth less then there is less need to outright checkmate a flank. Solo scoring means that avoiding 4th is not a problem, so you are less willing to give up material for your opposite. But the geometry of the board is why you see this cooperation and outright teaming. I guess an additional factor is that you dont need 4 players to maintain the power balance between all the players, 3 is sufficient. This is why in the 3 player stage you dont see this same kind of behaviour to eliminate players.

The problem is that the meaning people derive from the phrase "free for all" is often exactly "teaming is not allowed"

In other words, the meaning that we want people to derive is different than the meaning that they do derive.

Couple this with people rarely changing there minds, and we get our current situation.

teaming is part of the game bro

people do whats best for them