Vote for August's Golden Variants!

Post from July: https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/vote-for-julys-golden-variants

Not sure on what some of the terms in this post mean? Have any other questions? See any typos? Feel free to ask and comment below!

Scroll down to the bold text if you want to know how to vote without reading my entire message

Hello Custom Variants Community!

Now that we're in August, almost 23 weeks have passed since we restarted Golden Variants in February, and Golden Variant still remains one of the most popular arenas on the server today.

As our testing team has increased to 10 members, we've been working hard on reviewing every variant that has been submitted. NCVs are extremely tricky to make, especially when considering the requirement of balance and the ever-increasing need for uniqueness of variants!

One outstanding variant that has been featured in the Golden Variant arenas is Minihouse (by @MrKheese), featured in Week 9 & 15, and now boasts 500+ games daily with 300+ active players! We recently added it to the "Featured" section in 2P variants, marking the first time we've promoted a variant from the "Extra" category. Who knows? Maybe more will be added, or maybe Minihouse will become a "Most Popular" variant someday!

Happy voting!

Want to see the variants featured in previous Golden Variant arenas? See the schedule here:

https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/2024-golden-variant-schedule

The format for this month's selection is as follows:

• The first week (8/2) will be a 168-hour (1 week) arena of Every End, the most recently accepted NCV.
• The second week (8/9) will be a 168-hour arena of Sparks of Hope, the 2nd most recently accepted NCV.
• The third week (8/16) will be a 72-hour arena of the winner of the 4P Teams vote. 
• The fourth week (8/23) will be a 72-hour arena of the winner of the 2P vote.
• The fifth week (8/30) will be a 168-hour arena of the winner of the Platinum Variant vote. 

The 2P vote and 4P Teams vote will be made up of preselected options by the CGAs.

Wait, what's Platinum Variant?

Platinum Variant is an honor given to a variant about every 3 months for successfully being voted for or featured in a Golden Variant arena, and then reselected for the Platinum Variant.

As it's been a while since we did the last Platinum Variant, it wouldn't really make sense to have a vote between 21 variants, which would be way too cramped; so, using arena play statistics, the CGA team has picked out the 5 best options:

• Ambush (by FM @coolthing) 
• Blind Box (by @Kumiyno and @Lingox)
• Behind the Mirror (by @samuelysfung)
• Thermopylae (by @noahfavelo)
• Warui-shogi (by @Dan-kyu_system)

Obviously, it wouldn't be too fair to do Minihouse again, but these variants have proven themselves to be widely popular as well! A change made this time going forward is that the Platinum Variant arena will be weeklong instead of just 72 hours

In this poll, you can vote for 2 options, instead of just 1. Each vote will count equally.

Vote here!

2P Vote: https://strawpoll.com/w4nWWrYpYnA

4P Teams (Self-Partner) Vote: https://strawpoll.com/PKgle31XJZp

 Platinum Variant Vote: https://strawpoll.com/jVyG283GGZ7

The voting ends in 6 days, so make sure to get your responses in!

The exact time can be viewed by going into any of the polls.

Why is Minihouse shown in featured and extra?

Intentional marketing strategy

Wow, putting this in featured actually increased the amount of players playing it! Maybe, put it at the second place of featured?

Also, I think Minihouse shouldn't be in GV or PV arenas, and the Minihouse Arenas should be like the Chaturaji Arenas.

Minihouse hasn't been in Golden nor Platinum Variant for 2 months now, so I think the first part is already kind of fulfilled lol

I think Every End, Simplicity, Warui Shogi, Ambush and all future NCVs (if applicable) should all be in the next platinum variant vote

Bro there was only 1 game of Simplicity in its week-long arena.

Going to be transparent here; yeah that's something that really needs to be addressed. 4P activity has just been going down in general as new players like to play 2P more and come to variants because of 2P (Duck Chess and Spell Chess compared to 2021's 4PC and Chaturaji).

Blind Box is the only 4P Teams variant on this list, and that actually surprised me, but perhaps it was because it was SP and therefore took less people to fill up. I hope that there will be UI updates and events that can help popularize 4P variants to the point where we don't need to explicitly advertise them for games to fill up, but it's just a tricky situation.

There's no data suggesting this is the case atm. If there was, then it could likely be attributed to the holiday season and studying for finals in school, amongst other factors. The most popular variants in the extra tab routinely have 50-100 games a day.

I think the 4PC server and the variants server should be seperate again, the variants server is only the chess variants (spell chess, atomic, 2P extra variants etc.) This would probably increase the popularity on the 4P FFA variants.

1. For the same reason why we have multiple 4PC standard setups, simply separating the server and making such a drastic change will likely chase more players away. This is something that the majority of players agree on, even if it's not the answer they want to hear.
2. 5 years of development work will have been partially wasted. Chess.com will very likely keep this in mind. 
3. Separating the servers would break variants.world and disrupt variant creation as a whole. For example, what gamerules do we port over to Variants and which to 4PC? If every gamerule were put on each server, then the distinction between are minimal and only serve as a limitation. 
   (A fictional example: Minecraft has two major editions: Java Edition and Bedrock Edition. What if Java Edition got the Nether Update and Bedrock didn't, but Bedrock got the Caves and Cliffs updates and Java didn't? That's just a major mess-up where two things that could work together perfectly fine as one are forced into two separate things for no reason.)

I'm saying this from the perspective of a player. I'm just a volunteer here, as are all of the NCV Testers and the CGAs. But this change would not be beneficial and there is good reason to believe that is the case.

Oh i know, there should be two buttons, one that says 4p and one that says variants. they both link to the same server, however, variants links to https://www.chess.com/variants/4-player-chess and the other links to the main page

on the play tab

think he meant to say this:

(Personally, I have the buttons set to 4PC and Variants, and I doubt many players will actually realize that those are buttons, not decorative icons)

Congrats to:

• The X of Tricks
• The Eyes of Horus
• Ambush

for being selected! Thank you all for voting again

Behind the mirror sounds cool

no i mean on the https://prnt.sc/wzPswRiCY-qE