Variants Q&A

Hello! I'm one of the people working on Variants and I'm posting on behalf of the team.

Variants has had a lot of changes over the last few years and in the spirit of transparency we wanted to do a sort of official Q&A. The current team will do its best to answer any questions that you have about the Variants project.

We are going to collect questions here over the next week and work to get them answered by Friday, December 1st. Post your own questions and upvote questions you want answered!

I know it's been a bumpy ride, but the passion of the community is a huge reason I enjoy working on this project and I hope that we can use this to get aligned and get back to enjoying the awesomeness of Variants.

Another two i've seen commonly suggested is Dabbaba+Ferz (Jaguar), and its inverse Alfil+Wazir (Star)

When will the 4-player chess glitches be fixed? When i choose 1/7 FFA no restrictions it gives me a random lobby with rescritions

The option of creating custom fairy pieces or modifing pieces that already exist will be added?

Why was New Standard chosen over better starting positions such as the BY setup? Was the BY setup considered before making such a drastic change? Will there be a change in starting positions, or is New Standard permanent now?

When will we have a stable server, like we used to pre-merge? Was merging 2PC and 4PC variants truly the best direction for 4 Player Chess? How has 4 PC benefited from this merge?

Has games played per player daily improved? Are people playing 4PC more or less than they used to on a daily basis? If people are playing less games per day, what are your plans to increase player interest in the game? Changing the Standard position and FFA points system have been the biggest detriments to the game, will these issue ever be addressed?

Due to the starting position Teams took a huge hit, are there any plans to improve Teams activity? How much is Teams being played now compared to pre-merge? What are Chess.com's plans to increase Teams activity?

Nearly every 4PC streamer is no longer passionate or excited about streaming. Does Chess.com have any plans to address the lack of 4 Player Chess streamer activity? The starting position drove ALL streamers away, when will this issue be addressed?

Many people agree including Omatamix that the BY Setup is a superior starting position, and should be the Main and ONLY Standard, while the Old and New options removed.

The standard position is much better in my opinion and if you want a different position they have a feature for you to change it. But I definitely want a stable server and people are definitely playing less 4-pc.

will we ever have more than 40 games in archive like before (if this was answered already somewhere else sorry i just didnt see that) and if so when

Thank you for doing this!

On 4pc...

I first want to partially echo what Los said: is New Standard set in stone? I'll also add, If not, what circumstances would cause another change in the starting position?

I might as well ask the same thing for the current FFA rating system. Is the current system set in stone? If not, again, what are the circumstances that would cause a change?

It could be argued there are some flaws in FFA gameplay; for a way over-simplified example, results do not always match up with good play (players get fourth despite playing "well"). Is this generally (optimizing FFA strategic gameplay) seen as an issue or goal by you all?

On variants & 4pc generally...

We as the community talk a lot about spreading 4pc/variants, getting outsiders interested in what we have. I think this is what the variant community series is trying to accomplish. I am curious about the other side, however. What is being done/planned to increase retention?

Generally, what can we look forward to in 2024?

Thanks!

Caleb

Well, it ate up server power and we have a much more intuitive Setup Chess now, so I doubt it

In ffa FPC double checks give +1 but they are an infinite source of points whereas all other means are finite. This allows for long games where a player with a queen in the endgame (and is down a significant number of points) can play a long game collecting double checks until he has enough points for victory. Is this feature intentional to give the player with the last queen the victory? If not, some method of ending the game or capping the amount of double check points would be appreciated. Here is an example of such situation... in the game, green is technically winning, but has to acquire about 20 or so double checks before he can win. If yellow played on with no pieces green could secure a 1st place finish.

https://www.chess.com/variants/4-player-chess/game/58362417/1/1

I think double and triple checks for points should be removed

Would it be possible to include Glinski's hexagonal chess as a variant on Chess.com?

Would Chess.com be able to implement daily time controls for variants like Gothic Chess, Seirawan Chess, and so on?

Why has Chaturaji not had more attention than most other variants?

KotH is one of the most dead variants on the site, but STILL is the first selected variant for the "Community Series" over others like 4pc, spellchess, Duck Chess, and Chaturaji.

Will there be any plans to make Chaturaji more popular as there does seem to be quite a few people who still play it.

P.S @Fourplayerchess, If you read this, I really miss your streams!

MANY things to say.

1° I would really like to have full clarity about the governance. WHO takes the decisions about 4p chess (sorry, I don't care about anything else...) and HOW? As of today, the situation is not transparent. What is the precise interaction between Chess.com paid staff and volunteer admins? How the decisions are taken? To whom new ideas may be submitted?

2° Is Chess.com interested at all in developing and expanding 4p chess?

3° Would it be possible to reconsider the decision to have together 4p and 2p chess variants in the same space (that I personally think to be catastrophic)? It's definitely 2 different universes and only a very narrow minority uses both.

4° The ergonomics of the current Variants site, its structure, is all but user-friendly, and it's a HUGE barrier for retaining the players.

5° From the marketing point of view, the newcomers retention is I am sure very low because new people come (from classical 2p chess) by curiosity, find themselves in something very specific or exotic (Fairy pieces... 960... Antichess... Fog... WFT... King Safety... Selfpartnering... Whatever!) or a very specific timeframe like hyper, and then think that THIS IS THE 4P CHESS. And most of such people will disconnect and never come back. I have always been advocating a very clear reception scheme: newcomers should only be able to join standard FFA in Rapid, nothing else. And only after 50 or even 100 games in this format they will be given access to the full and rich universe that we have now. You don’t give a Ferrari to someone who doesn’t have his licence yet! Newcomers have to be shown short videos, given very clear explanation about what the 4p universe is about, i.e. HELPED pedagogically rather than put in the ocean directly hoping that some would survive. <in addition, that would solve 95% of the current issues due to ALTs as most cheaters won't bother to play 100 games first>.

6° 1 year ago, after having seen 6 months of catastrophic issues due to the merge (that hasn’t been managed professionally, far from that), I wrote a detailed and long note about which changes should be implemented IMHO, sent to BabYagun. No reaction at all. Maybe most of my ideas were BS, happens, but at least it deserved a reaction I believe. Taking into account my 21000+ games here in 5 years and my prof. experience, I definitely could propose something that deserved response.

7° As many have mentioned above, the SERVER has not been fixed in full yet... It’s a real problem. YES it's much better than in June 2022 for instance, but still.

8° Same with several bugs and glitches that remain and do not look to be fixed any soon. Just one example: in WFT the number of lives the king still has is very often inaccurate. Imagine how many games players lost thinking that their king has 2 lives whereas it was just 1?!

9° The starting position...

10° The rating system... I've made many many proposals about that, wouldn't like to re-list them here. But just one item: I strongly believe that the games where the difference between the highest rated and the lowest rated is above some amount (I would say 200 points, but it could be a percentage as well) should be severely discriminated, for instance by 10. Such games are not relevant and should not influence the ratings a lot. Typically a game with a 2800, 2200, 1800 and 1500 can't be but a total BS. So the variations post-game shouldn't exceed 1 point for the highest rated. a) that would reduce A LOT the farming, b) that would allow high rated players to join games "for fun" that currently they can't because otherwise they are likely to lose 50 points. That would help lower rated players to learn faster (whereas today they simply can't play with serious players). I believe in addition that the total variation in points after juste one game should be limited, for instance: maximum 5 points. (There are many games won or lost simply by chance, and anyway the level of someone didn't change a lot in just one game, so to see a +30 or -45 doesn't make sense at all, by any means). The ratings should be less volatile and more stable, otherwise they are not playing their role actually. Also we all know that a clear phenomenon of inflation affects 4p chess ratings (contrary to 2p ratings), per construction, and I also proposed ways to address this obvious problem. (5 years ago 2000 was very high rating, today players even at 2300 often play total BS, attack in front, play against the balance the 2nd stage, throw games... And today serious players begin only from 2600 approx.).

I have a question , why not organize 3 FFA 4PC world championships for each setup, Standard, old setup and BY setup, otherwise what is the point of having 3 different setups???

The other setups should be removed. Just gets bad players on the leaderboard

Are you trying to suggest that players are somehow getting higher ratings using different setups?

Yay, I noticed about 4+/20 of the players on the top of FFA use different setups. Now I checked it a while ago so it may have changed. However, using a different setup is making players get high up. I think it should have its own leaderboard.

Don't spread conspiracy theories lol