Please do not get rid of /live UI

I know you've been warning about this change for a year. Please allow for a toggle. To be fair, on your next major UI overhaul, you can remove /live, and move the /live replacement to the toggle.

There are updates the site wants to do that requires retiring the old code.

@digispin, thanks for the feedback. It would be really valuable for us to understand what specifically about the /live experience you prefer, so that we can make sure those needs are met in /play or elsewhere. Can you share a few words on what you like about /live?

The live ui has a slightly larger board, as well as open challenges and custom challenges being more accessible. The tabs at the bottom allow for easy access to leaderboards, watching games, and your archive. The tabs at the top allow for viewing tournaments and analyzing in live. You can request commands in chat. In tournaments live will automatically update chat that was chatted before you viewed the tournament. The separate toggles for variant and time control are helpful and the play button looks with it being smaller rectangular and orange which contrasts the chess.com green well, and live just feels so much more familiar.

In Live, during a tourney, I can click on a number of games to watch. They're all open, and I can switch from one to another. In Play, I can only be watching one game. If I'm playing, I can't watch another game that's in play.

Thanks! It is possible to watch multiple games in Play. You can do this by:
- When viewing a list of games (like on the Watch tab under 'Games'), hold down the Alt key and left-click on any game you want to view.

- When you have multiple games open, you can go to the 'Open' tab to view a list of all games you're currently watching, and select which one you want to see on the board.
- I actually like to pop that tab out (you can do this by clicking on the little pop-out arrow next to 'Open', or by pressing the period (.) key on the keyboard. This way you can move the game-list on your screen.

The new flow may take some getting used to, and we may have to make more improvements to make it as intuitive as the same experience was in live. Give it a try, and let us know how it goes!

Thank you! There's a lot of feedback in there, but to address one thing first: if you enjoy having a larger board, you could try theater mode, which keeps the control panel available but gives you a much bigger chessboard. I believe this mode (a compromise between standard and Focus Mode) is actually exclusive to Play. 

Standard:

Theater mode:

Thanks!
Are the functionalities written down somewhere, so that we can make best use of the interface?

Where is theatre mode?

Thanx again.
While I have you on the phone, I have a couple of feedbacks:

• In Play, when I've joined a tournament, there's no audible notification that a game has begun—or ended. If I don't get a little "ding", saying that it's my move, I may lose ten seconds or so before I realize it.
  "Live" has a bell sound, warning players that the tourney would begin in a minute. That's useful, and I'd like to see it restored.
• Speaking of audible notifications: In the Bughouse interface, the button for hearing partner's "tells" ("Trades are good, I have mate…") is off at the beginning of a session. (It's so small, and tucked away in the bottom-right corner, that I didn't even know it was available until a partner told me I must not be listening.) At the beginning of my first game, I need to spend a couple of seconds clicking it "on". Those seconds can make a difference in Bughouse.
  I would like to see that functionality switched, so that it's on by default. Or at least allow players a Setting, whereby they can select "Default on".

This would have been very helpful to know last time I tried using /play for a simul 😅

Just wish there were guides on things like this and things like joining tournaments in /play because both have become harder than it was in /live… I don’t really have any problem with features (in fact the new challenges windows are great) but using the features can be hard, especially with newer members of the site.

Can anyone explain what's the reason they are gonna stop /live ? I just love playing in /live than /play for some obvious reasons.

I am absolutely in love with /live interface. Although both of them look almost similar, there are couple of little things that really fascinate me a lot. First thing is, when you highlight the squares with right click, oh man! that dark red square looks so beautiful. Second of all, if you enable 'show legal moves' in live, the dots shown are little more darker and bigger , which makes the interface very beautiful to me. In nutshell, I would say, the /live interface looks more vibrant than /play interface. I know my reasons might sound silly to some , but I just love those things about /live. So, I kindly request you to keep it along with /play.

They want to do some updates that they want to do that require retiring the old code.

Martin_Stahl posted this on post 3.

Okay. I didn't see that. Thanks for the information 🙂

To see the list of games that are currently in progress, first click on Games, then on the Watch tab:

From there, you can also search for a specific user or limit your view to a certain game type.

There are a few buttons that appear near the top right of the chessboard; you can activate theater mode by clicking on this one that looks like a rectangle:

The thing about play is it has all the features hidden away and require an effort to find

To get a larger board in Play; use Theatre Mode.  
Where is the Mode choice made located?  How do I find it?