Vote for March's Golden Variants (2025)!

honestly vc is better than all of the other options (yes, even phantom rooks)

The voting was definitely rigged. The rankings were like a rollercoaster.

Honestly this whole place is rigged. CGA variant creators get special treatment. Like this rigged voting system, or pestilence's conquest getting tested and accepted ahead of 50 other variants previously submitted...

Well, these speculations are why I have practically stoped variant creation.

CGA variants do not get special treatment. It just so happens that we submit so infrequently that a single acceptance is enough to spark controversies such as this. I feel like this statement is targeted toward me specifically, so I'll speak for myself here. The Pestilence's Conquest is my first submission in over 2 years, my second submission as a CGA, and my third ever submission throughout my time on variants.

There were, of course, periods in the past with a ton of CGA submissions, but the majority of them were declined for complex issues that were solved in later revisions. In fact, the last time a member of the CGA team (including NCV Testers) submitted a variant was a month ago, and it was declined (Yakuhana by Dan-kyu).

Meanwhile, someone like icp, who probably has more submissions than the entire team combined (I counted 36), will of course have many more declined (and accepted) variants than any one of us. That's just how the statistics works out. You, Coool, have submitted upwards of 30 variants.

Having reviewed hundreds, even thousands of other variants myself, it is not unlikely I or other CGAs would know better than the average variant creator. After all, it is my job to make fair and accurate decisions on custom variants, and the CGA position is one I earned after almost five years of involvement in the variants community, and over three of reviewing submissions and working with other renowned creators.

The CGAs are trained to analyze submissions in ways you creators might not have thought about, and we have documented procedures to make sure submissions are up to standards. The bar naturally has risen over the years, so of course CGAs are going to update themselves to meet those standards.

What I don't get is how my variant getting accepted in 12 days, or whatever it was, suddenly means that the entire CGA team rigs verdicts. I don't usually say this often, but this is a ??? moment for me. It is incredibly frustrating when we volunteer (we aren't paid, by the way!) to do this work for you all to make this place friendly and fair, and in return we get accused of doing something that goes completely against our mission.

I'm not complaining—in fact, it's a very good thing—that we have so many more submissions today when compared to, say, a year ago. But just think about it: if there are this many submissions, we simply can't keep up. We are going to get rid of the ones we 100% know are bad and accept the ones we 100% know are good to reduce the workload for us. As I've said before, if you want efficiency, you will have to sacrifice quality, and vice versa. Maybe other variants would receive a quicker and more accurate verdict if there weren't so many submissions every week. Please remember that the CGA team is composed of fellow enthusiasts just like you, fellow humans that have school, work, and other daily obligations to attend to.

I've already said before that if you have questions or concerns about the process, talk to us. Complaining about what you think is "rigged" in public is only adding fuel to a fire that wouldn't exist if you had put it out the previous night.

As for the "rigging" of the voting, that's something you'll have to take up with GS, since I'm not all that familiar with the new Golden Variant system.

If it will make everyone here feel better, I can inquire with admins about using the server's polling feature for next month, but I'm not sure who you're accusing exactly of rigging it...?

Guys I totally made 69 alts just for funsies and rigged the voting because I’m 6th in EM

(Just kidding please don’t ban me)

Well, EM was fourth place a while ago, when I voted, cross derby was first, then phantom rooks, then vc, then em, then the lake...
and then, the results almost flipped upside down
and it just seems to be a "coincidence" that EM was made by a CGA.

Which automatically means a CGA rigged the vote?...when we could have very easily just manually picked the variants ourselves

Will I need to claim the memebership?

As long as you finish top 3, the membership will be given within ~ a week after the end of the arena; you don't need to do anything more

Last time I got no.3 though…

Which arena are you referring to?

Plat

We didn't offer prizes for that arena though? The last time the Custom Variants club has offered prizes for an arena in the last few years was in Festive Fortune

Ook

Winners have been updated on comment #2

f you want to gift your prize, it can be given to the 4th place finisher, so let me know ASAP if you wish to do that! Otherwise, you don't need to do anything and the memberships will be automatically added as Chess.com Staff distribute them in the next 1-3ish weeks, pending background checks as necessary.

I'm a kid 😎