Opinion Wanted, Here's Mine

"The biggest shocker to me was that even the option to play with the standard set up (whatever “Old Standard” jargon it’s called now) is on a whole different main lobby which no one is going to know about or play. It’s completely absurd to put the variant omatamix and standard set up on different lobbies and expect that to be the solution. In testing the omatamix set up with the standard position still in play, all queues were on the same lobby. Are we trying to kill the standard set up as quickly as possible? Apparently so.  " : 100%. I was not even aware before reading that about this other lobby.

Doesn't Old Standard show up in the main lobby? It does for me...

I believe it’s on /play-variants now

wdym

that is the story of 4pc...even before the merge.

It's still fun...just not as much. That's why I still play...just not as much.

As another new 4pc player, I'd also like to highlight this point. I'd never seen/realised there was an old standard, and I play a lot of variants, and actually only discovered the set ups existence in the qualifiers. I know now its there in plain sight, but its basically hidden. 

I'm in favor of the change in the starting position, it's more balanced for B&G, and I also think that FFA should be Solo; you play for the win, or you lose.

Maybe the faulty server with endless dsc contributed to the disappearance of many great players. After the change, it was impossible to complete a game without someone dsc, and even in the last W4pcc Final, I lost two games in a raw in the endgame with a good position for that.

When there are no high-rated players to play with, more and more of us play less or are forced to play in lower-level games, which is not our first preference. I almost reached 2900 before the change, and now, I'm straggling to climb to 2700...

I think it is important that 4pc fans become members (prices are more than fair) and support our favorite website; maybe that will help us all enjoy an adequate server. 

Are you suggesting the solution is that we shell out more money to a site that isn't listening to its community in order to fix the issues the community are complaining about?

So its been awhile for me as I took a break from 4pc due to being busy and thus havent been around for 6 months but have been directed to these posts to figure out what went on.

I dont believe this is actual going to solve anything because 4pc players are a tiny tiny portion of chess.com revenue. Each 4pc player could by 12 memberships each and it would be a rounding error. So while you could do it to support chess.com, there is no cause and effect.

As said above also usually the way things work is you provide a good service and then people pay, not the other way around (pay in hopes to get a good service).

Based on what I have read it sounds like these server issues have persisted for months after the merge which is very disappointing. Im not sure if 3-4 weeks has changed anything substantially but I would guess not.

The lack of strong players to face is also a snowballing effect since this makes other strong players not interested in playing, and then the high level players dont have strong people to learn from.