Suggestion: Secret menu

Hello, Variants Admins and players!

My idea was to have a “secret menu” for variants. Let me explain.

At a restaurant, sometimes they’ll give you a menu, but you can also order other things that aren’t on the written menu but which the kitchen will still make if you know to ask for it. What I was thinking is that you could do the same for variants. You would have all of the “standard variants” which people can easily select. But in addition to that, you’d have a list of other variants that have names, such that you can’t select it from the menu but if you go into the analysis board and type the name, you can still play it. And if you have one of these secret menu games, it would actually have a title in the Lobby rather than just saying “Custom Sideways” or something like that.

This secret menu would contain previous WoF entries, plus any other variants that players have expressed interest in (maybe 10 or 20 players) even though the CGAs declined it.

What are your thoughts? Is this a good idea? Is it a doable idea?

Thanks for your time.

This is a pretty cool idea. Maybe with some small tweaks it could be better, but overall, pretty nice. I for one would like to see this in variants.

It's not actually secret, it's just a name for it. This "secret" list would be in editor/analysis or whatever to call it, and you can access it to find a whole bunch of variants. If this was in the main variants list, it would become a whole clogged place and it would become confusing to find stuff.

That would be the point. It should be clogged with a lot of variants. It'll maybe be sorted out into categories, but the point is to have a place where you can find a whole bunch of variants.

But if it isn't publicly and easily available, no one will play, which is a big issue in Variants.

My thought was that along with this list, we'd also make a new club, called "Variants Secret Menu." People could join for two reasons: 1) to get their variants into the secret menu, and 2) to view the list of secret menu items and be able to play them.

This would have the benefit of, as was said above, not clogging up the main list of variants in the actual server. But at the same time, this would let custom variants get names that would show up in the lobby, and would make these variants much easier to play.

I'm ok with it

Great idea, but it would probably negatively impact variants as a whole even further, considering the fact that a lot of them are dead, some dying, and there are only like two that are still played by a decent number of people. Making "secret" variants would only hide more. I guess this would help decrease the number of variants and make others more popular. An idea I had was to hide Chaturaji so that people would stop playing it and notice the existence of other variants xD

@TheCheesePhoenix, that’s a good take that it could help to increase the popularity of certain variants. I wonder if the sheer number that we currently have would simply be a turnoff to new players who have never done variants before. The variants that are publicly listed would be the more popular, easier-to-learn ones, while the secret menu would be for the more advanced variants players.

good idea

I imagine this idea would be kind of hard to implement though, right? @spacebar is this kind of thing even feasible?

that's a great Idea