Variants admin here!
I completely agree with the above points, it would be great to have a stable server again.
Hopefully some resources can be shifted to allow the server to become functional again. One would think that with the huge Duck chess popularity that it would have been higher on the list of priorities.
Thanks for your time 
I completely agree.
As (previously) an avid 4pc player, I can say from firsthand experience that the merge was absolute garbage, precisely 2 people liked it.
For a while, I put up with it, expecting it to get better. I even spent time defending chesscom from the most active haters of the merge!
However, it has been almost a year since the merge. I can't bring myself to defend chesscom's choices any longer, the merge has absolutely destroyed both variants (previously 1000 players+ online at any given time) and 4pc (previously 500+ players online at any given time) into a single laggy/buggy server with a third of the players.
I have almost completely given up on 4pc/variants and moved to lichess. It is a huge tragedy and I wish that we could have the old server and times of joy back.
Thanks a lot, Usernamee
If there are 5000 variant and 4PC users, does that mean active users every day or within the last three months or what?
So if there are 3-4 developers working on it, I assume you mean Chess.com developers. Is that right?
Are those developers devoted full time to variants and 4 PC? Or do they at least spend time regularly working on the problems of 4 PC and other variants?
So you are saying that Chess.com should devote a proportionate share of its resources to 4PC and other variants as it does to the rest of the site?
5000 people on the server at once, per hour or so (at maximum capacity, usually it's around 2500 - 3500). If we're talking total user count, I don't know the exact value, but it's probably around 20000 players or so? Might be an over- or underestimate
Chess.com devs, yes. They are stationed mainly to 4pc and variants, yes. @spacebar, @goondrious, @qilp, @BabYagun just to name a few. But I don't exactly know if they also work with other parts of the site.
I talked to @Martin_Stahl and he says that the staff/devs have full authority to talk to other staff about their needs and resources, so we've started conversing about this. I'm not saying that Chess.com should devote that many resources, obviously, since we are a clear minority compared to the millions of people that spend their time on the Play server. We are just hoping that we get enough help to have a stable and functioning server. I believe the main problem right now are the leaderboards, which are causing significant issues with the server.
Hope this helps!
Ever heard of variants? Or 4 player chess?
Maybe you just don't care about them at all, which is a respectable choice. But there are at least 5000 people, maybe more, that consistently play on this server. A couple years ago, both the 4pc server and variants server were separate. Our playerbases were much larger. Our servers were doing great. They were stable, and we even had leaderboards.
Fast forward to about 11 months ago. Variants and 4pc merged together into one server, and we haven't been able to fix the problems ever since.
Constant server disconnects, players lagging out, server restarts, server shut downs, along with some unwanted changes (but we've learned to live with that) caused the playerbase to nearly get cut in half. That's right. We lost over 5000 people to the merge. And we don't even have a leaderboard anymore, since whenever we try and get it to work, the server begins to act weird and eventually break for 10 hours in a row before it comes back and then breaks again.
We have 3-4 active developers who are doing their best to fix the issues. I am very happy that they are here and have massive respect for them. Thank you guys for helping us out. But I don't think we have enough people.
If chess.com as a whole is able to spend this much money, time, and effort to almost completely fix their massive server and database that is required to run a site with more than 100M users, I don't think it should be too hard to fix a server that only has, at most, 5000 people using it at a time?
And yet we've had these problems ever since the merge happened, almost a full year ago: much larger than the 2 weeks of chess.com sitewide server problems.
What I'm requesting here is for more developers, staff, and moderators to get on this issue that is ruining the game we love. I mean, (not to sound harsh) why even have a variants server if you're not going to take care of it properly?
So hopefully you can see where I'm going with this. Any and all help is appreciated.
And seriously, thanks for all that you guys do for this site.