Earth to Erik

Yes, people, yet another thread commenting on the recent... um... problems with Live Chess.

Reactions fall roughly into two categories. First, there’s the Erik-Can-Do-No-Wrong crowd: “Be patient! Stop whining! He’s doing his best!” Then there are the malcontents, the complainers, the Cassandras announcing the death of Chess.com. In this latter group, one particularly pathetic individual recently shared his intention to cancel his membership because some chat feature is gone and he’s feeling lonely—a sad case, really.

I’d like to weigh in somewhere between these two extremes. Chess.com is a superb accomplishment of which Erik can be rightly proud. And of course he’s doing his best to clean up this mess. That said, on any given day some company or administration is upgrading its systems without the kinds of problems currently affecting our favorite chess site, and doing so because someone—in-house pro or outside consultant—anticipated most of the glitches and dealt with them BEFORE going on line.

In his video posted on Saturday Erik urged us all to keep a sense of perspective: “It’s just one day!” Not quite. The problems persist and they are legion: frequent disconnects, screwed-up timers, games that don’t change ratings...

Erik, here’s a modest proposal: As you look ahead to Live Chess 3.0, keep in mind the ongoing fiasco of upgrading to 2.0. I’m sure, as you have announced, that 3.0 will be spectacular, state-of-the-art, groundbreaking. But before putting it out there, can you take whatever steps are necessary to ensure... that it works? 

Microsoft is one screwup after another and people LOVE to use microsoft products.  If you are here solely for the chat feature thats fine, but there are literally a illion sites yoy can go to if you need to chat.  If you are here for chess, then be patient things will get worked out. 

the OP has a great point and he IS a paying member. 

we've been promised this wonderful live chess 2.0 for months and months.  seems to me a bit of a let down.  he deserves to be able to comment.  that seems simple.  he wasn't a jerk about it.  he's frustrated, you can tell.  he should be, on some level.

and the microsoft comaprison is awesome.  becasue microsoft sucks we should all just grin an bear it that chess.com sucks?  how does that make any sense?  let's list all the products we can think of that sucked in version 2.0 after months of promises, just to help us justify this even more.

also awesome that the OP IS a paying memeber and he makes some valid points and the other three are NOT paying memebers.  seems fitting to me.

the best part so far--once again, saidh steps in shit. 

as long as they fix it.... i am for it,great idea of putting in the computers !!! a very good feature especially when you want to take on a much higher rated opponent and some are afraid of losing points,also you can play a few games to warm up....and stay on site, great idea looking forward to having that option again.....keep up the good work.

i'm not giving anyone flak for not complaining.  i'm just saying the OP makes some good points.  and non-paying memebers are annoyed by it.  seems silly to me.

don't be annoyed by complaining if it's true.  what else can he do?  he can't fix the problems he can only give his suggestions.

great post eriel! i will reply more in depth after lunch! :D

I will add my .02 as a non-premium member in general about chess.com/live chess  not about the specific upgrade problems.

Chess.com has great features for many to improve their game, but for me there is nothing that I would use that justifies the cost of paying $100 a year. I enjoy playing games, both turn based and live, and also some of the chess related forums. I do pay to play on ICC--however on my recent renewal I only did 1 year in case this site improves its live chess.

I only play "fiv" on ICC where they randomly pair me in a 5 minute game. What I sign on always get a game within a minute of someone around my rating.

Live Chess here (even version 2) had some serious lag at least when I used it. Also with my rating (anywhere from 1700-1800) it was hard to get many games with people of the same strength. Clearly I would pay to have a fast/nice interface with constant strong opponents and if chess.com gets there i will upgrade my membership (and drop ICC)

Ditto

i'll address the points in order:

- i make plenty of mistakes. :) i have no illusions about that.

- other companies make plenty of mistakes. google, which has 10,000 employees had gmail offline for hours and hours a few weeks back. we have 1 database guy. :) and, funny enough, the reason we were offline for as long as we were was because we followed advice from consultants :(

- chess.com is amazing. i'll admit it. i love the site - i'm addicted to my own creation. there is so much more to this site (and to chess) than live chess...

BUT (and that is a big but :) )

i make no excuses for how bad live chess has been. why? well, i've blogged a lot about it, but basically we tried to do something new with new technologies and it didn't work. disconnects. lag. problems. for some it was workable (though sluggish), but for at least 50% of people it was just unplayable. terrible. frankly, embarrassing. as i've analogized before, it's like climbing a mountain and being 75% up the mountain only to find yourself looking off a cliff with no way to the peak. live chess 1 was terminally ill. uncurable.

so now we started over entirely a few months ago. totally new code. from scratch. and the goal was to get something SIMPLE that was STABLE and did ONE thing: play chess quickly and with stability.

we tried to do as much load testing as possible on live chess 2 before launch, but simulated users are not always like real users (who would have guessed that a chess.com member with 3,200 friends could crash live chess when we load his insane list of friends??). and so live chess 2 has been a rocky release. there is no other way around it. even google, microsoft vista, itunes, twitter... all growing pains when launching new products (and they have orders of magnitude more developers than we do).

every hour we are learning new things about live chess 2 and how to make it better. it's been 3 days since launch and there are 1400+ people playing on the server (which is much more than our record of 1100 on LC1). there are many many many many many many things left to do on live chess - we know that. but we are starting out SIMPLE and then will add new features when they are stable. private chat, multi-play games, tournaments, etc. all will be there.

but for now, recognize that this is a brand new live chess. it's going to be bumpy for a bit. we know about the bugs, and we're very sorry. but this time instead of being dismayed by the bugs, we're encouraged, because live chess 2 (and coming 3) is MUCH better and will quickly become 10x as good as LC1 was.

anyway, thanks for the message! i hope this explains things more clearly.

Yes,the strenght of the oppenents on live chess isn't very good...

Even me,at 1700 level can't find a decent oppenent most times i'm on live chess...

Thanks, that really clears things up!